Medieval afterlives in popular culture 9780230337343, 0230337341

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 10
Copyright......Page 11
Contents......Page 12
Introduction: Now and Then......Page 14
1. The YouTube Prioress: Anti-Semitism and Twenty-First Century Participatory Culture......Page 26
2. Animated Conversations in Nottingham: Disney’s Robin Hood (1973)......Page 42
3. Virginia Woolf ’s Middle Ages......Page 56
4. Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo and the Left-Modernist Reclamation of Medieval Popular Culture......Page 70
5. Acephalic History: A Bataillian Reading of Monty Python and the Holy Grail......Page 84
6. Medievalism and Periodization in Frozen River and The Second Shepherds’ Play: Environment, Class, Miracle......Page 98
7. Time Travel, Pulp Fictions, and Changing Attitudes toward the Middle Ages: Why You Can’t Get Renaissance on Somebody’s Ass......Page 112
8. H. P. Lovecraft’s “Unnamable” Middle Ages......Page 126
9. Confession, Contrition, and the Rhetoric of Tears: Medievalism and Reality Television......Page 142
10. Robin Hood, Frenched......Page 158
11. Brief Encounters: Arthur’s Epic Journey in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2005)......Page 172
12. “My other world”: Historical Ref lections and Refractions in Modern Arthurian Fantasy......Page 186
13. Queer Origins, Deformed Lines: Seeding the Future in Torchwood’s “Children of Earth”......Page 200
14. The Medieval Entertainment Channel: The Shrek Quartet......Page 216
Bibliography......Page 232
List of Contributors......Page 246
Index......Page 250

Citation preview

T H E N E W M I D D L E AG E S BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics by Gregory B. Stone Presence and Presentation:Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition edited by Sherry J. Mou The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France by Constant J. Mews Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault by Philipp W. Rosemann For Her Good Estate:The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh by Frances A. Underhill Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Dockray-Miller Listening to Heloise:The Voice of a TwelfthCentury Woman edited by Bonnie Wheeler

Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers edited by Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho Engaging Words:The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages by Laurel Amtower Robes and Honor:The Medieval World of Investiture edited by Stewart Gordon Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: Ocular Desires by Suzannah Biernoff Listen, Daughter:The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages edited by Constant J. Mews Science, the Singular, and the Question of Theology by Richard A. Lee, Jr.

The Postcolonial Middle Ages edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees

Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse by Robert S. Sturges

Malory’s Morte D’Arthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition by Catherine Batt

The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren

The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam

Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick

Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age by Paul Edward Dutton

Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Effros Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire by Anne McClanan Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Snyder Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays edited by David A. Boruchoff Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by Richard E. Zeikowitz Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 by Linda E. Mitchell Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc by Maud Burnett McInerney The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture by Angela Jane Weisl

Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills Queering Medieval Genres by Tison Pugh Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism by L. Michael Harrington The Middle Ages at Work edited by Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel Chaucer’s Jobs by David R. Carlson Medievalism and Orientalism:Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity by John M. Ganim Queer Love in the Middle Ages by Anna Klosowska Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric by Denise K. Filios Necessary Conjunctions:The Social Self in Medieval England by David Gary Shaw Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams,Volumes 1 and 2 edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy

Capetian Women edited by Kathleen D. Nolan

False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature by Elizabeth Allen

Joan of Arc and Spirituality edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler

Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages by Michael Uebel

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays edited by Lawrence Besserman

Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk edited by Bonnie Wheeler

Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers

Medieval Fabrications: Dress,Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings edited by E. Jane Burns

Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England by Frank Grady

Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?: The Case for St. Florent of Saumur by George Beech

Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth- to Twelfth-Century Painting by Jennifer L. Ball

Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages by Erin L. Jordan

The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350–1500 by Kellie Robertson

Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

The Dogaressa of Venice, 1250–1500:Wife and Icon by Holly S. Hurlburt Logic,Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille:Words in the Absence of Things by Eileen C. Sweeney

Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus by Gretchen Mieszkowski The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature by Jeremy J. Citrome Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales by Lee Patterson

The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement by Patricia Ranft

Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing by Lara Farina

On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 by Paula M. Rieder

Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature by Sachi Shimomura

Writers of the Reign of Henry II:Twelve Essays edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones

On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages by Valerie Allen

Lonesome Words:The Vocal Poetics of the Old English Lament and the African-American Blues Song by M. G. McGeachy

Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity edited by Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman

Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries by Anne Bagnell Yardley

Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema edited by Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh

The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer by Robert R. Edwards

Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages by Noah D. Guynn

England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th–15th Century: Cultural, Literary, and Political Exchanges edited by María Bullón-Fernández The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process by Albrecht Classen

Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality by Louise M. Sylvester Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages by Jeremy Goldberg

Claustrophilia:The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature by Cary Howie

Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown

Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature by Heather Blurton

Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature by Tison Pugh

The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture by Christina M. Fitzgerald

Sex, Scandal, and Sermon in Fourteenth-Century Spain: Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor by Louise M. Haywood

Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood by Holly A. Crocker The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women by Jane Chance Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature by Scott Lightsey American Chaucers by Candace Barrington Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature by Michelle M. Hamilton

The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages edited by Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner Battlefronts Real and Imagined:War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period edited by Don J. Wyatt Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature by Emily C. Francomano Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna by Nuria Silleras-Fernandez

Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies edited by Celia Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz

In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past edited by Simon R. Doubleday and David Coleman, foreword by Giles Tremlett

The King and the Whore: King Roderick and La Cava by Elizabeth Drayson

Chaucerian Aesthetics by Peggy A. Knapp

Langland’s Early Modern Identities by Sarah A. Kelen

Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama by Theodore K. Lerud

Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages edited by Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey

Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition,Translation, and Discussion by Sarah L. Higley

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics by Susan Signe Morrison

Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance by Seeta Chaganti The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade edited by Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey The Poems of Oswald von Wolkenstein: An English Translation of the Complete Works (1376/77–1445) by Albrecht Classen Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing: Reading the Book of Life edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Liz Herbert McAvoy Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature: Singular Fortunes by J. Allan Mitchell Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature by Kathleen E. Kennedy The Post-Historical Middle Ages edited by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition by Geoffrey W. Gust Queens in Stone and Silver:The Creation of a Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France by Kathleen Nolan Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art edited by Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape by Alfred K. Siewers Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages by Miriam Shadis

Julian of Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception edited by Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer by Mary Catherine Davidson The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation of Their Complete Correspondence and Related Writings translated and edited by Mary Martin McLaughlin with Bonnie Wheeler Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe edited by Theresa Earenfight Visual Power and Fame in René d’Anjou, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Black Prince by Sun Hee Kim Gertz Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media by Brantley L. Bryant Margaret Paston’s Piety by Joel T. Rosenthal Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis by Theresa Tinkle Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature by Roger A. Ladd Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music edited by C. Stephen Jaeger Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Objects in Global Perspective:Translations of the Sacred edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Jennifer Jahner Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond edited by Carmen Caballero-Navas and Esperanza Alfonso Outlawry in Medieval Literature by Timothy S. Jones Women and Disability in Medieval Literature by Tory Vandeventer Pearman The Lesbian Premodern edited by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, and Diane Watt

Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent,Virtually Present by Miriamne Ara Krummel Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance by Sharon Aronson-Lehavi Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent by Shennan Hutton Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England: Collected Essays edited by Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, and Tatjana Silec Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature: Power, Anxiety, Subversion by Mary Hayes Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany by Jerold C. Frakes Fairies in Medieval Romance by James Wade Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the Cloud-author: Seeing from the Center by Linda Tarte Holley The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy edited by Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman by M. C. Bodden Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds by Lesley Kordecki Contextualizing the Muslim Other in Medieval Christian Discourse edited by Jerold C. Frakes Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Interarts Theory by Claire Barbetti

The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture: Ninth–Twelfth Century AD by Nizar F. Hermes Reading Memory and Identity in the Texts of Medieval European Holy Women edited by Margaret Cotter-Lynch and Brad Herzog Market Power: Lordship, Society, and Economy in Medieval Catalonia (1276–1313) by Gregory B. Milton Marriage, Property, and Women’s Narratives by Sally A. Livingston The Medieval Python:The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones edited by R.F.Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance by Michaela Paasche Grudin and Robert Grudin Studies in the Medieval Atlantic edited by Benjamin Hudson Chaucer’s Feminine Subjects: Figures of Desire in The Canterbury Tales by John A. Pitcher Writing Medieval Women’s Lives edited by Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone The Mediterranean World of Alfonso II and Peter II of Aragon (1162–1213) by Ernest E. Jenkins Women in the Military Orders of the Crusades by Myra Miranda Bom Icons of Irishness from the Middle Ages to the Modern World by Maggie M. Williams The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600 edited by Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrell

Shame and Guilt in Chaucer by Anne McTaggart

The Carolingian Debate over Sacred Space by Samuel W. Collins

Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah:The Texts, Commentaries, and Diagrams of the Sefer Yetsirah by Marla Segol

The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past edited by Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein

Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts edited by Carolynn Van Dyke

Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture edited by Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline

The Genre of Medieval Patience Literature: Development, Duplication, and Gender by Robin Waugh

Heloise and the Paraclete: A TwelfthCentury Quest (forthcoming) by Mary Martin McLaughlin

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MEDIEVAL AFTERLIVES IN POPULAR CULTURE Edited by Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline

MEDIEVAL AFTERLIVES IN POPULAR CULTURE

Copyright © Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline, 2012. All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–33734–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ashton, Gail, 1957– Medieval afterlives in popular culture / by Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline. p. cm.—(New Middle Ages series) ISBN 978–0–230–33734–3 1. Civilization, Medieval—Influence. 2. Middle Ages in motion pictures. 3. History in popular culture. 4. Medievalism in literature. I. Kline, Daniel T. II. Title. CB351.A86 2012 940.1—dc23

2012028993

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Introduction: Now and Then Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline

1

1. The YouTube Prioress: Anti-Semitism and Twenty-First Century Participatory Culture Candace Barrington

13

2. Animated Conversations in Nottingham: Disney’s Robin Hood (1973) Andrew Lynch

29

3. Virginia Woolf ’s Middle Ages Steve Ellis

43

4. Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo and the Left-Modernist Reclamation of Medieval Popular Culture Louise D’Arcens

57

5. Acephalic History: A Bataillian Reading of Monty Python and the Holy Grail Daniel T. Kline

71

6. Medievalism and Periodization in Frozen River and The Second Shepherds’ Play: Environment, Class, Miracle Robert S. Sturges

85

7. Time Travel, Pulp Fictions, and Changing Attitudes toward the Middle Ages: Why You Can’t Get Renaissance on Somebody’s Ass Steve Guthrie 8. H. P. Lovecraft’s “Unnamable” Middle Ages Brantley L. Bryant

99 113

xii

CONTENTS

9. Confession, Contrition, and the Rhetoric of Tears: Medievalism and Reality Television Angela Jane Weisl 10. Robin Hood, Frenched Richard Utz

129 145

11. Brief Encounters: Arthur’s Epic Journey in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2005) Leslie Coote

159

12. “My other world”: Historical Ref lections and Refractions in Modern Arthurian Fantasy Philippa Semper

173

13. Queer Origins, Deformed Lines: Seeding the Future in Torchwood’s “Children of Earth” Gail Ashton

187

14. The Medieval Entertainment Channel: The Shrek Quartet Kathleen Coyne Kelly

203

Bibliography

219

List of Contributors

233

Index

237

INTRODUCTION: NOW AND THEN Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline

O

n March 10, 2012 Robert Hardman’s “How I See It” column for The Daily Mail purported to explore the resurgent division between the UK and Argentina over sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. As ever, the clue was in the title, “The Empire Strikes Back,” itself a striking glimpse of the intersection of popular culture and nation-state politics stirred by British tabloid press. Hardman’s inf lammatory rhetoric decried those who, in his view, pander to suggestions that Britain is “behaving like the old imperial power it no longer is.” His hit list included a former Commonwealth president, the Argentinian government, and several celebrities: the US actor and director Sean Penn; a “misquoted” Roger Waters of the band Pink Floyd; and Morrissey, formerly front man of The Smiths who, while performing onstage in Argentina, allegedly declared that the Falkland islands belong “to you”—a statement, Hardman opined, designed to feed an Argentinian sense of outrage as “the plucky victim of British imperialism rather than the beaten bully boy of 1982.”1 Elsewhere, on the same day, reports of the failure to retake two hostages held for over a year in Nigeria—one British, the other Italian—sparked a f lurry of jingoistic posturing and recrimination. Middle England’s favorite tabloid, The Daily Mail, calling its piece “The Backlash Over Hostage Shambles,” refuted a charge of colonialism instigated by Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s leading newspapers, which claimed that “Britain had been motivated by ‘nostalgia for its imperial glory’.” Mail journalists James Chapman and Ian Drury similarly invoked notions of a stoical Britain as the final frontier in the face of European shilly- shallying, writing “Italy—which has a policy of negotiating with terrorists holding hostages, unlike Britain—is understood to have made no offer to provide troops to help a potential rescue mission.”2 In contrast, The Guardian broadsheet headlined “Italians Furious over Nigerian Hostage

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Raid Deaths” even as it told how Italian diplomat Antonio Puri Purini claimed that “the events had been an ‘unacceptable slap in the face’ for his countrymen.”3 The defensive parochialism and amplified nationalistic rhetoric of these anecdotes may well be distasteful, but I cite them here as examples of a contemporary phenomenon that is strangely medieval in its discourse and anxieties. I have no wish to propose any version of “England” or “Englishness” as the centerpiece of a volume like this, which is global in reach and enterprise and is composed largely of US and former Commonwealth scholars. The hybridities of our contributors’ births, ethnicities, working lives, and residences tangle in the diverse threads of an international network of scholars and consumers of the medieval. So, too, these essays and their medieval-modern texts “travel”—from Britain, to France, America, Italy, Disneyland, and back again—just as medievalisms (plural intentional)—the fake medieval heritage sites of Australia, British Pythonesque humor, Robin Hood, Merlin, or Torchwood—throws a (green?) girdle about the world. Nevertheless, past and present inevitably collide and collude in medievalism—and an English/European “medieval” remains not only an integral, living history but still sometimes “looms disproportionately large in the shared critical imaginary. . .of North American,” and, I would add, many other medievalists.4 For England, that history comprises a lost Commonwealth Empire now composed of independent, competing players on the international stage, a present so-called special relationship with the US, and an even more conf licted past-present one with Europe. Suffice to say there that the conjoined-twin impulses of colonization and resistance have never seemed less like a medieval alterity than what may, or may not, turn out to be the historical now from where we began to write this Introduction: that is, on the eve of 2012 after the furor of Britain’s veto in the Eurozone and the brinkmanship of a FrancoGerman axis of power seemingly set on creating the “new” super-state of Europe. Equally crucial is a context in which a fragmented, hybrid UK, with internally devolved powers for Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and with Scotland poised for a referendum on complete separation from England, becomes reminiscent of the geographical and temporal f lux of the Middle Ages. Contemporary explorations of how and why medievalisms as a discipline is increasingly pivotal to medieval studies as a whole, and indeed beyond, both begin and end at the diverse intersections of cultures— including popular culture, histories, and politics. All over the world, leaders and insurgents alike talk of “crusades,” our kids dismiss entire

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swathes of culture, history, and ideologies with their “that’s so medieval” (See Guthrie, this volume), while the medieval period generally seems to have “become a reference point for political controversy and cultural unease in the post 9/11 West.”5 Despite our contemporary social atomization and seemingly defective collective cultural memory, we still inhabit parts of Eco’s (1986) tattered, melancholy dreams of the “new” Middle Ages with its “pretexts”(s),6 its sites of “ironical visitations,” 7 its conf licted “national identities,”8 and, of course, that “expectation of the Millennium”9 that has already been and gone. The place in which “all the problems of the western world emerged”10 is surely but a perverse mirror image of ourselves, and its nostalgias neither compensatory nor consolation for the problems and anxieties of the present. The writing of this volume began in the middle of the worst global recession since the 1980s and possibly even the 1930s. This is a time of economic instability where Greece seems poised to default on its £90 billion debt to the Eurozone, Portugal and Ireland have been bailed out, Spain and Italy teeter on the brink, and ordinary people everywhere struggle to find work, afford homes, welfare, medical care, even food and fuel. It is a time of famine, of natural and man-made disasters— Fukushima, Hurricane Katrina, Iceland’s volcanic ash-cloud—and war, including civil war, rebellion, or the threat of conf lict: Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, the Syrian uprising with its government reprisals, anxiety over Iran’s nuclear capabilities, the Palestinian-Israeli situation, the continuing aftermath of Iraq and the so-called war on terror, despite the demise of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. At home, the US presidential campaign kicks off in 2012 with the Democrats hoping for a repeat of their 2008 electoral victory when Obama became the first black American president and brought with him a global surge of hope, sadly long since evaporated according to many. In the same year, in the UK, anachronisms and ironies abound. Britain celebrates the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and also commemorates a long-past Commonwealth Day on March 12 with a fifty-four-nation summit and observance at an iconic Westminster Abbey. Prince William and his wife, the former Kate Middleton, are internationally feted even as ex-Commonwealth nations, such as Australia and Jamaica, seem poised to reject the British Queen as a putative Head of State. London hosts the 2012 Olympic Games amid the scandal of escalating costs, cronyism, and a ticket production and allocation debacle. And recrimination and dissent continue to dog an Anglo-American alliance over Afghanistan—an increasingly unpopular intervention, with ambiguous plans for a phased withdrawal, and losses on both sides.

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Now and Again If the world we’ve just described seems neither comforting nor even, perhaps, familiar, then we could always turn and look to the past. And so we do. Contemporary culture has an enormous and continued fascination with the highly pleasurable myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood, with heroes, quests, magic, and identities; with nostalgic pasts, dreamscapes, utopian imaginings, dislocated worlds, fantastic tales of desire and loss; and with notions of good and evil contained in the host of texts and associated cultural paraphernalia that are all rooted in, and transforming of, medieval genres. Popular culture extends and appropriates plots and protagonists of earlier texts, as well as the structures and conventions of medieval genres such as romance with its prolific afterlives in sci-fi, fantasy, and Arthurian-style quest-oriented adventures, to rework, revise, and revitalize them along the way. Its output is both huge and varied. We see it in television with Star Trek, the BBC television series Doctor Who and its spin-off series Torchwood, BBC TV’s 13-part series Merlin (2008) which pulled in huge audiences, as did the cult program Robin Hood (2006), and with BBC TV’s reproductions of Chaucer: The Animated Tales (1998) or the modern retellings of six of The Canterbury Tales in 2004. We see its persistence in film, in Star Wars, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, the Harry Potter film series, Anthony Fuqua’s King Arthur (2005) and other Arthurian films too numerous to mention, and, of course, in a host of Disney animations and monsters such as Shrek. We also see it in texts as diverse as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Spamalot, TV series like Pillars of the Earth (2010) or Camelot (2011)—both from Starz—plus the award-winning Game of Thrones (2012) (now on its third season), and a wealth of children’s and Young Adults’ literature. Other cultural productions range from Dungeons and Dragons, LARP (Live Action Role Players), cult collectors’ item figurines, models and character dolls, the World of Warcraft, MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), as well as the Excalibur Casino in Las Vegas or The Canterbury Tales Experience in Canterbury, UK, and Bryant’s “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog” spot. Even The DaVinci Code owes much to medieval genres. We are all familiar with the more overt signs of the medieval in medievalisms, its tropes and images, its figures—knights, shepherds, crones, monsters, alluring women—and its emblems, the castles, tears, magical objects. So, too, as medievalists, we recognize its discontinuous histories, conf licted contemporary contexts—such as those described earlier—and know that Dinshaw’s famous enterprise of “getting medieval” (1999) is

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much more than a passing reference to the popular culture that spawned it. Rather, it calls upon us all to reconfigure a dead-and-gone premodern Middle Ages that is always far more than the sum of its contested parts: as much the retributive, barbaric, dis-eased alterity that simultaneously horrifies and compels its contemporary spectators, as it is the imaginary playground of those bricoleurs, artists, compilers, performers, animators, and audiences who write it today. We continually create a Middle Ages that we cannot ever retrieve or fully know but which remains more than a mere palimpsest in the present. Eco’s Middle Ages and his ten reconfigurations of the past (1986) in the here and now is still ours, even as its contemporary “children” speak their own nostalgias, fantasies, identities, and bear their own losses. This collection is not interested in the apparent or reductive distinction between “high” medievalism and “low” neomedievalism arrived at via popular culture’s intermediaries and intersections and described by Amy Kaufman as a “dream of someone else’s medievalism.”11 (See also Kelly in this volume). Nor is this the place to continue any debate over periodization or medieval alterity’s constitutive break with modernity, though that mark haunts us still. Most of our contributors share our preference for the more productive “middle grounds” or friction points of theorists like Kathleen Biddick, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and Patricia Clare Ingham and for engagement with contested and contingent “becomings.” If we had to choose a keyword for our dreams and theories of medievalisms, it would be “provisional.” And the plural we cite throughout this piece intersects those notions precisely because it inhabits all these interstices at once even as it stakes a claim for its own ground, its own difficult processes. Similarly, our volume is not simply about popular, or even populist, dreams of the medieval, though its texts, especially those fantasy or sci-fi assemblages, might sometimes look that way. We are, perhaps, increasingly uneasy with our constructions of the medieval, and with good reason. So much depends upon context and so much, too, on perspective. A middle-aged academic’s Middle Ages is not the same as a graduate student’s, let alone those sometimes compelled to take our courses. None of those is congruous either with those other consumers: the more (dis)interested writers (see Ellis and Bryant) and nonmedievalists who weave different collages, times, and places to give us the History Channel, BBC4 documentaries, reality TV shows (see Weisl), comics, entertainment programs (see Utz), drama, fantasy, or sci-fi (see Ashton, D’Arcens), film and TV (see Coote, Guthrie, Semper, Sturges), Spamalot or Python (see Kline), Disneyfications (Kelly, Lynch), YouTube (Barrington), or the Medieval Times extravaganza.

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Openings This book is concerned with our ideological, technical, and emotional investments in reclaiming the medieval for contemporary popular culture. Its essays explore a range of contemporary print, film/TV, and digital texts in relation to their medieval counterparts. We look to illuminate both medieval and contemporary popular culture in surprising and productive ways, to interrogate the various directions through which medievalisms reinterprets and reconceptualizes the medieval and is compelled to reconstitute a past that is at once familiar and profoundly different. So, too, we want to get “a sense of the elusive, ongoing and mutually interdependent complexities of medieval civilizations in relation to our own time,”12 and to have fun in the process. From where do such texts spring? How are they shaped, commodified, and transmitted? What can they tell us about the ways in which we construct different medievals, and what is at stake in their revitalization? From whose perspective do we see them, and whose agency do we foreground or recognize? Who pieces these medievals together? Who speaks to them, for them, and how? How and why do the texts of medievalisms become popular? What kinds of cultural issues and anxieties come into play when we write them and consume them? How do we begin to speak about, teach, and theorize their pleasures? The essays of Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture approach these and other questions from a variety of angles; fittingly, we think, these pieces are scattered throughout the volume so that they can rub up against each other and create strange frissons and echoes. In “The YouTube Prioress: Anti-Semitism and Twenty-First Century Participatory Culture,” Candace Barrington surveys YouTube productions of Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale to ascertain how they deal with the tale’s pervasive anti-Semitism. She finds that these videos, often created as part of high school teaching assignments and utilizing digital idioms derived from other YouTube videos, “reproduce anti-Semitism but distance themselves from it; they reproduce it but include a disclaimer; they erase it; they transfer it onto another group; or, they minimize it by justifying the Jews’ anger” (20). In “Animated Conversations in Nottingham: Disney’s Robin Hood (1973),” Andrew Lynch explores the idioms and cultural codices of film to show that the “strength of the film remains the vital diversity of its signifying systems and their relaxed exploitation of the unstable and modular Robin Hood tradition, precluding any simple ideological message. This volatile combination of traditional story and symbol, fantasy animation and human voice supports a surprising complexity of potential meanings in its depiction of a community pulling through in hard times” (41). Utilizing particularly Woolf ’s ref lections on reading Dante, Steve Ellis’s “Virginia Woolf ’s Middle Ages” shows that “Whatever Woolf ’s desire for

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a more inclusive model of community represented by a pre-print culture, there is a powerful counter-strategy of private reading running parallel to this in her work of the late-1930s and early-1940s, and one which, . . .in relation to Dante, offers a more convincing resolution of the problems of the relation between community and the individual” (46). Drawing upon the legacy of Antonio Gramsci, Louise D’Arcens’ “Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo and the Left-Modernist Reclamation of Medieval Popular Culture” argues that “Mistero Buffo is among the most fully developed examples of a postmedieval humorous text that models itself explicitly on medieval comic precedents, in this case the mystery play cycles of the European Middle Ages” (59). Daniel T. Kline’s exploration of humor in “Acephalic History: A Bataillian Reading of Monty Python and the Holy Grail” demonstrates that the film’s “decapitated historian serves as Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s central image, and the condition of headlessness, or what Georges Bataille calls the acéphale, governs the socio-political logic of the film and describes the internal relationships of the Pythons themselves” (72). Robert Sturges’s “Medievalism and Periodization in Frozen River and The Second Shepherds’ Play: Environment, Class, Miracle” shows how “Frozen River’s remarkable commonalities with The Second Shepherds’ Play suggest a (post)modern world more thoroughly imbued with the medieval than is possible in any film that invokes the Middle Ages more directly” (88). Steve Guthrie’s “Time Travel, Pulp Fictions, and Changing Attitudes Toward the Middle Ages: Why You Can’t Get Renaissance on Somebody’s Ass” examines the time travel narrative of the novel and film Timeline to show that “Crichton insists that the difference between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries is not one of progress, but this does not seem to ref lect a dystopian view of the present; it seems rather to indicate simply an abandonment of the Renaissance as our point of origin” (103). Brantley L. Bryant’s “H. P. Lovecraft’s Unnamable Middle Ages” mines the author’s letters and work, especially the short story “The Rats in the Walls,” to demonstrate that the “Middle Ages are well hidden in Lovecraft’s writing, rarely taking center-stage or serving as a direct and unproblematic source for his fiction or philosophy, yet . . . the medieval appears at vital points in Lovecraft’s work” (114). In “Confession, Contrition, and the Rhetoric of Tears: Medievalism and Reality Television,” Angela Jane Weisl explains that in reality television series, “weeping becomes a readable symbol that conveys specific meanings on the contestants and elicits specific reactions from its audience; it therefore becomes formulaic in ways that draw heavily on medieval antecedents” (130). Richard Utz’s “Robin Hood, Frenched” examines the 1960s French television series Thierry la Fronde to illustrate that “despite its insertion

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of numerous historical figures like Edward, the Black Prince, or Charles of Navarre, [Thierry la Fronde] proposes a complete simulacrum of the medieval, one whose representation of the fourteenth century owes many of its features to an earlier, already ideologically and fictionally distorted depiction of Robin Hood’s alleged twelfth century, but bears only the most tenuous relation to any medieval reality” (150). Leslie Coote’s “Brief Encounters: Arthur’s Epic Journey in Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2005)” examines an entirely different history to argue that Fuqua’s “Arthur, like Aeneas, embarks on a journey of exile— although in Arthur’s case this is ‘internal’ exile—during which a series of brief encounters will enable self-realization and self-discovery, leading to the formation of a new identity and a new social role, in a new nation of which he himself will be the founder” (160). Analyzing Kevin Crossley-Holland’s modern trilogy of Arthurian novels, Philippa Semper’s “‘My other world’: Historical Ref lections and Refractions in Modern Arthurian Fantasy” reveals that the novels offer “an alternative to the history/fantasy conundrum in two ways: by creating a protagonist Arthur, similar enough to the legendary king to mirror his life but sufficiently different to avoid the traps of origin and truth claims; and by placing that protagonist in a minutely observed late twelfth, earlythirteenth century environment, accurate enough to earn the trilogy the desired label of historical fiction rather than historical fantasy” (175). Gail Ashton’s “Queer Origins, Deformed Lines: Seeding the Future in Torchwood’s ‘Children of Earth’” explores the BBC television series Torchwood’s “Children of Earth” and finds a queer reconfiguration of childhood and family in the characters’ relationships across time, speaking “to the same kinds of issues about nations, hybridities, and temporal boundaries that exercise postcolonial medievalists” (188). Finally, examining all four of the Shrek movies, Kathleen Coyne Kelly’s “The Medieval Entertainment Channel: The Shrek Quartet” reads the films “as an allegory for neo/medievalism itself ” (204) and argues that “queer time [is] at work in the Shrek films in the way that a fractured medievalism makes time for humans, animals, and non-human characters to shift identities, put on and take off disguises, and/or undergo metamorphosis, processes which call into question the boundaries constituting human subjectivity” (205). Now and Tomorrow Undoubtedly, the very persistence of medievalisms in popular culture, to riff on Weisl’s famous phrase (2003), brings about its own complexities and paradoxes. Reinvigoration keeps its texts alive even as it sometimes

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detracts from academic or literary standing. The texts produced by and within medievalisms are often either mass-circulated or fringe independent productions; a significant number appear not just in print but as visual, aural, or digital media. Some have accompanying websites and fanzines, or gain further life by being released on DVD or as clips on YouTube or social media platforms. As with many contemporary texts, almost all have a strong online presence while a number of them parody and play against other texts and ideologies, both contemporary and versions of the medieval. As a result, many of these medieval or neo-medieval afterlives enjoy cult status. So, too, they are hugely popular in terms of student uptake; indeed, some of our students more immediately recognize the contemporary afterlife than the medieval “original.” The ramifications of this are several. These are different kinds of texts from those that have traditionally received academic or pedagogical acclaim. The kinds of things we read and teach as part of the emerging discipline of medievalisms are not always literary or print texts; even when they are, they may not always behave as print, reach the same audiences, or prompt the same reading practices. They may be more open-ended, f luid, even unstable, and their circulation is often more diffuse. Equally, new or current audiences come at medieval texts differently, recognizing and appreciating attributes that the academy has often ignored or even despised. Repeated mass or electronic exposure lends texts both a more self-referential and a fragmentary quality so that structures and emblems work to become “more, not less meaningful or connotative,” while their multiple sources or inf luences, even their aesthetics, mean that they are frequently “still a work in progress.”13 The strands and interconnections of these texts demand wider frames of reference than those we are used to, insisting that we accommodate our methodologies to take account of a nexus of other texts, other consumers, commentators, appropriations. As fast as we gather the images, sound-clips, and fragmented narratives of medievalisms—many of them by their very nature already ephemeral— they shape-shift, maybe melt away into cyberspace or come adrift from their mainstay to arrive at platforms and audiences often better suited to, or better able to grasp, their complexities than conventional academic forums. Similarly, cult appeal taps into a pleasurable, even forbidden, thrill around their consumption that is often light years away from the texts we tend to set for study, and so broadens the gap between popular and intellectual approval. As such, we may well need to reconstruct our critical vocabulary and the academic apparatus we employ to discuss theories, forms, techniques, and effects. We may need to reexamine the features of these texts, consider how they work and why, how some of them become cult and what happens

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when they do, engage the technologies that produce and circulate them, and rethink notions of audience and textuality (See Ashton, Barrington, Kelly, Sturges). It may even be that a secondary or intermediary source, an edited volume like this one, or a conventional print monograph, is not the most appropriate form in which to introduce them or to stimulate discussion. And, of course, at least until relatively recently, medievalisms has itself occupied a conf licted, “Cinderella” place in medieval studies. In his essay “Coming to Terms with Medievalism,” part of a “Medievalism” special edition of the European Journal of English Studies, Utz considers precisely that relationship. He suggests that rather than occupying a role as the nonacademic sibling of medieval studies, medievalisms is a resurgent discipline in its own right, one supple enough to dismantle inter-disciplinary boundaries and the elephant-in-the-room of periodization.14 So, too, it speaks to a range of pleasures, creativities, and, yes, academic rigors or theories, to marry the joys and intellectual challenges that provoke most of us to study literature in the first instance, as evidenced by a range of seminal volumes: Umberto Eco, Travels In Hyperreality (1986); Angela J. Weisl, The Persistence of Medievalism (2003); and Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (1998). Other works of note testify to the developing and inf luential profile of medievalisms as a discipline: Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia (2005); David Marshall, Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture (2007), which examines how medieval ideas and motifs are “translated” into new media; Karl Fugelso, Memory and Medievalism (2007), centers on how we recall and recycle medieval texts today; Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (2007); Stephen Knight’s acclaimed Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (2009); Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers, Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages (2009); Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh, Race, Class and Gender and “Medieval” Cinema (2009); Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illusions: The Middle Ages on Film (2009); Carol Robinson and Pamela Clements’s wideranging and provocative Neo-Medievalism in the Media: Essays on Film, TV, and Electronic Games (2012); and Brantley L. Bryant’s fabulous Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog (2010) plus his poem collecting stories of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. Journals like the foundational Studies in Medievalism, The Year’s Work in Medievalism, or postmedieval with its special edition, “The Medievalism of Nostalgia” for instance,15 are similarly pivotal, while a host of conferences and online communities of scholars converge to give a snapshot of the centrality and significance of this exciting and increasingly innovative brand of medieval studies. MEMO (Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization), edited by Carol Robinson and Pamela Clements, commemorates its tenth

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anniversary in May 2012. Its mission statement is simple but crucial: to offer a platform for those interested in film, TV, and electronic media that sets out to “portray or rewrite the Middle Ages.” Elsewhere, Richard Utz leads a team of distinguished scholars on the electronic “Medievally Speaking,” the web-arm of Studies in Medievalism, which “encourages critical engagement with all investigations and creative reinventions of the continuing process of creating the middle ages.” Incidentally, it also contains one of the best discussions of definitions of medievalisms around.16 As we write, the International Society for the Study of Medievalism’s 27th International Conference, hosted by Kent State University in October 2012, calls for papers on the theme of “Medievalism(s) & Diversity,” while a glance at the program for the 47th International Congress of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, May 2012, reveals much about the plurality and diversity of our interests: medieval sculpture, music, manuscripts—digitized or otherwise—several sessions on Dante and Tolkien, one on C. S. Lewis, and a workshop on “Digital Medieval Studies for Dummies.” At the same time, there are roundtables on comics, the journal postmedieval, and others variously titled “Are You From Camelot?—Arthurian film and TV,” “Coming to Terms with Medievalism,” “Neomedievalism and the Corporate” (session and roundtable sponsored by MEMO), and BABEL’s “Fuck Me: On Never Letting Go.” Equally, panel discussions on digital images and “Arthur on Stage” sit alongside sessions on “Growing Up With the Middle Ages” (children’s TV), “Imagining the Crusades in the 19th Century,” “Modern Arthuriads,” Malory, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Morte Darthur, and “The Medievalism of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels.” The essays in this volume are but one slight thread in this rich and gorgeous web. We are privileged to have worked with their authors. We hope you enjoy them as much as we have been rewarded by reading and engaging with them. Notes 1. The Daily Mail, March 10, 2012, 48. 2. “Inside the Kidnappers’ Lair,” The Daily Mail, March 10, 2012, 6. 3. Rajeev Syal, Richard Norton-Taylor, and Tom Kington, “Italians Furious over Nigerian Hostage Raid Deaths,” The Guardian, March 10, 2012, 7. 4. See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., introduction to The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 8. 5. Daniel T. Kline, ed., introduction to The Medieval British Literature Handbook (London: Continuum, 2009), 2. 6. Umberto Eco, “Dreaming the Middle Ages,” Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. Willliam Weaver (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986), 68.

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Eco, “Dreaming,” 69. Eco, “Dreaming,” 70. Eco, “Dreaming,” 72. Eco, “Living the New Middle Ages,” Travels, 64. Amy Kaufman, “Medieval Unmoored,” Studies in Medievalism 19 (2012): 4. Kline, The Medieval British Literature Handbook, 2. Gail Ashton, Medieval English Romance in Context (London: Continuum, 2010), 132. 14. Richard Utz, “Coming to Terms With Medievalism,” European Journal of English Studies, 15.2 (2011): 101–13. 15. Helen Dell, Andrew Lynch, and Louise D’Arcens, eds., “The Medievalism of Nostalgia,” postmedieval 2.2 (2011). 16. See http://medievallyspeaking.blogspot.com.

CHAPTER 1 THE YOUTUBE PRIORESS: ANTI-SEMITISM AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PARTICIPATORY CULTURE Candace Barrington

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or most twenty-first century American parents and schoolteachers, Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales does not easily fit their notions of suitable literature for children, and the fit does not become much easier for their notions of what teens should read. Besides Chaucer’s undeniably alien English verse, the content of the tales poses a problem for presenting them to young readers. Many of his tales are forthrightly indecorous, featuring adultery, thievery, violence, sex, and—to the horror of parents and the delight of the younger set—farting. More problematic, however, are the tales presenting values incongruent with many contemporary values. How should young readers be introduced to such characters as Griselda or Constance, who suffer greatly rather than disobey their husbands? And how do we explain Virginia, who is beheaded by her father to prevent her rape by an unscrupulous judge? The Prioress’s Tale, in particular, poses problems for adults responsible for introducing their charges to canonical literature. Infused with antiSemitism endemic to late-medieval England, the tale is told by one of the three women on Chaucer’s fictional pilgrimage. Set in an unknown Asian city, it features a young boy overwhelmed by the beauty of Marian devotion. He walks each day through the city’s Jewish ghetto to reach the Christian school, where he learns to read and sing. Particularly drawn to the Alma redemptoris mater, he learns it by rote, without knowing what the Latin means, until an older schoolmate explains it as a prayer to the

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Virgin Mary. Thereon, he sings it twice daily, on his way to school and on his way home, both times through the ghetto. The Jews, induced by Satan to interpret the boy’s song as an insult to their faith, hire a murderer, who slits the boy’s throat and throws him into a cesspit. After a night of anxious worry, his widowed mother sets out to find her son. She frantically looks everywhere, even asking the Jews for their help. Finally, helped by Jesus’s inward guidance, she calls out for her son while standing near the pit. As a sign of God’s grace, the boy begins singing the Alma redemptoris. Christians gather to see the miracle, and their Provost orders the Jews to be arrested, tortured, drawn, quartered, and hung. Meanwhile, the Christians cannot bury the child because he continues to sing. When queried by the Abbot, the boy explains that the virgin mother has placed a grain on his tongue to allow him to sing in her honor even in death; she has promised to fetch him once the grain is taken away. Thus informed, the Abbot removes the grain, and the child’s spirit leaves his body. Amazed by the miracle, monks entomb the body in clear marble. As this précis shows, the tale’s anti-Semitism begins with identifying the Jews as the tale’s villains and detailing their punishment. It is compounded when the Prioress laces her tale with outbursts against the Hebrew race, associating them with Satan and evil practices. In short, the tale depends upon, and perpetuates, the worst stereotypes of Jews. Before World War II, The Prioress’s Tale was not an unusual presence in Chaucerian collections targeting younger audiences. For instance, James T. Fields and Edwin P. Whipple edited an anthology for Riverside Press in 1878, The Family Library of British Poetry, from Chaucer to the Present Time, which includes a selection titled “The Boy Martyr.”1 According to the editors, when introduced to the “grand sentiments and ideas” found in poems such as this, boys and girls develop “a passion for what is true and beautiful and good,” thereby receiving a grounding in “formal ethics” and “what morality merely teaches.”2 For the next fifty years, the tale of the little martyr continues to appear in similar editions, which skimp on neither the villainy of the Jews nor the gruesomeness of the murder.3 These versions assume their readers are Christian and sometimes accentuate the anti-Semitism. In his retelling, Harvey Darton expands Chaucer’s opening stanza with an explanatory aside that shifts from the past tense into the present, explaining to readers that the Jews “were always quarreling with the Christians of the city, whom they hated, for Jews and Christians are very bitter enemies, wherever they are.”4 Such sentiments and the tale itself, however, disappear from children’s collection for the next seventy years with the increased sensitivity to antiSemitism brought about by the Jewish Holocaust. Chaucerians were less able to ignore the tale and its anti-Semitism. By turns, scholars have confronted, explained away, or looked beyond

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the tale’s anti-Semitism. Perhaps Seth Lerer’s summation of the situation best encapsulates the current state of scholars’ attitudes towards the tale. After first classifying the tale as one that explores, “in a systematic way, the problems of intention and expression, performance and audience response,” he explains that “we will never brush away the medieval antiSemitism that controls it nor fully reconcile the General Prologue portrait of the sentimental, yet eroticized, Prioress with her clearly heartfelt storytelling. But we may recognize that Chaucer presses these grotesqueries and ambiguities into the service of another statement about literary activity.”5 Although the tale provides an interpretative knot for most scholars, they continue to teach it in its complexity, frequently asking college students to grapple with its disturbing depiction of ChristianJewish relationships by understanding it within the tale’s late-medieval historical context.6 In between the tale’s total absence in children’s collections and scholars’ active engagement with its moral and cultural complexity, there is the high school classroom, where the tale has recently returned. To find evidence of this return, we are not limited to scouring secondary-school literature anthologies. Instead, we can find this evidence in the assignments that students post to YouTube with its near-ubiquitous ability to transform passive audiences into digital bards.7 This evidence has the additional benefit of allowing us to see how the youngest of Chaucer’s nonprofessional readers process the tale’s anti-Semitism. With the arrival of YouTube and the ability of anyone with a digital camera and an Internet connection to publish digital narratives, we can now find dozens of examples of amateur productions interpreting the tale. Generally, these student productions seem to respond to two sorts of assignments. One asks students to dramatize The Prioress’s Tale, retaining the narrative’s general thrust. The second sort asks students to adapt the tale, using parallel characters and situations from their lives.8 These productions reveal students using gestures and tropes native to YouTube culture, transforming The Prioress’s Tale so that its anti-Semitism resembles social phenomena more congruent with student experience. The Prioress’s Tale and Secondary Education Whatever the status of The Prioress’s Tale, selections from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are standard elements in high school English curricula at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. High school teachers continue to teach The Canterbury Tales for many reasons. Sometimes, the tales are placed in the curriculum because proponents of the back-to-basics movement believe that time-honored literature can convey factual and moral truths, as well as inspire young

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imaginations.9 Sometimes, they appear because teachers remember loving the Tales or because they have discovered that reading medieval literature helps students defamiliarize their own assumptions.10 Sometimes, the reasons are more mundane: they continue to appear in standard literature anthologies, or schools assume that universities expect students to have read them.11 Whatever their reasons, whenever high school teachers include The Canterbury Tales in their curriculum, they fight two battles. The first battle pits teachers against those offended by the bawdy content of many Chaucerian tales. Although teachers might address these concerns by limiting the class to the General Prologue and a tale or two, students can download the complete tales in present-day English from the Internet.12 Even if parents or teachers want to shield students from elements perceived to be inappropriate for adolescents, they would find the task nearly impossible. Next, teachers must deal with the problem of relevance. Although the tales contain many elements that appear in Young Adult Literature—sex, sexism, racism, death, and religious intolerance (some of the same elements that bother parents)—getting to these elements requires students to work through tales that seem to have little do with their lives in twenty-first-century America. Faced with these seemingly irreconcilable problems and short on resources, teachers struggle to teach the Tales effectively. One solution is to let the students turn to the teacher “as the source for the meaning of the literature,” rather than encouraging them to engage with the literature and develop skills for interpreting it.13 Taught this way, students encounter the Tales at a far remove from their experiences: after reading a present-day English version, they take in the teacher’s interpretation (which they frequently supplement with a watered-down redaction found online). Another approach works to make the Tales relevant for adolescent readers. One assignment for creating this relevance—as well as helping students to develop skills for interpreting difficult literature—is to require students to dramatize or to adapt the tale. Dramatizations ask students to retell the tale using the same characters and narrative as the source text. Adaptations ask students to update the tale using events and characters closer to their experience.14 We can see the results of these assignments in thirty-two videos of The Prioress’s Tale archived on YouTube. The Prioress’s Tale on YouTube Posted to YouTube between October 4, 2006 and October 25, 2011, these productions both dramatize and adapt The Prioress’s Tale.15 They range in length from 110 seconds to just under twelve minutes. They either claim to be for a high school English class assignment or to share enough

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features with the others to be assumed as such. Some are associated with an English Advanced Placement (AP) course; others are not. By Googling the names provided in the credits, shown on buildings, silkscreened onto hoodies, or stitched onto school uniforms and jackets, many of the students and their high schools can be identified, thus establishing a wide geographical distribution of the assignment, from California to Georgia, from Michigan to Texas. None use Chaucer’s Middle English—or even reveal any familiarity with the fact that the tale was originally written in Middle English. Written scripts seem to be used in only the ten productions using animation, drawings, stick puppets, or machinima, the appropriation of computer graphics to create a video (2006A, 2009A, 2009B, 2009D, 2009G, 2009H, 2010C, 2010J, 2010L, and 2011B). The rest rely on extemporaneous dialogue and narration. Only a few use such authorized texts as David Wright’s 1964 prose version or Nevill Coghill’s 1951 verse translation.16 Whatever the nature of the assignment, the thirty-two YouTube videos share a cluster of narrative features. First, they all feature at least two characters—a victim and the aggressors—and sometimes a third—someone who seeks the missing victim. In the dramatizations of The Prioress’s Tale, the victim is a Christian boy; in the adaptations, the victims range from goofy high schoolers to a football hero. As it turns out, there is often not much difference between the ways in which these characters are drawn. No matter the framing assignment, students reach for the same ways to characterize the victim: nerdy and/or annoying (2007C, 2009A, 2009F, 2010D, 2010E, 2010G, and 2011A), sweetly pious, innocent, or earnest (2006A, 2008A, 2009E, 2009G and 2010H), or too easily lured by others (2010F and 2010G). Only two productions attempt to paint the victim as heroic, and even here the tone is mocking (2009E and 2010I). In the dramatizations, students seem to have difficulty imagining a young child who would pay attention to and be mesmerized by a religious song sung in Latin, would want to learn that song, and would sing it walking to school. In fact, the Clergeon’s sweet piety seems so inscrutable to these students that it survives in none of the adaptations and in only three of the twenty-two dramatizations. Of these three, two are animations and the third uses a cherubic young boy to depict the child. There is something so alien about the boy’s innocent piety that none of the teens can present it straight faced, even though many of them attend religion-based schools. Others show the boy as constitutionally annoying; he is that kid brother who takes great satisfaction in pestering his older siblings, or he is that nerdy kid oblivious to how his behavior affects others. Predominately, though, the character is shown as being unmotivated; that is, he is easily swayed by the example of other children and follows their lead for

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unknown reasons. No student videos depict an authentic conversion experience, even though some have been schooled in religious traditions that encourage conversion of the young. For the aggressors, the dramatizations represent them as Jews; the adaptations vary greatly, from local bullies to band geeks. Characterization of the Jews generally relies on stereotypes and clichés, revealing varying exposure to the contemporary Jewish culture. They are bearded (2006A and 2009C); they speak with a different accent (2009C and 2010D); they drink wine (2008E); they wear stars of David (2006A, 2007C, and 2009D); they wear prayer shawls, yarmulkes, or sidelocks (2006A, 2008D, 2008E, 2010D, and 2010E); they make references to contemporary Jewish activities and traditions, such as bar mitzvahs and menorahs (2008C, 2010D, and 2010E); or, they use Hebrew or Yiddish (or Hebrew- or Yiddish-sounding) names and phrases (Shalom! [2008C], Abraham, Yanni, and Schnoil [2008D], mazel tov [2010E], and the mistakenly used Islamic phrase, “Praise Allah!” [2008E]). The Jews are dealt with as more an ethnicity with different traditions than a religious group with specific religious beliefs. And they are susceptible to the temptations of Satan. Despite the anachronisms and differences from Chaucer’s tale, the YouTube Jews are in many ways parallel to their medieval originals: different, inscrutable, and easily imagined as Satan’s agents. In the adaptations, the Jews disappear, to be replaced by either offended bullies who attack the victim because they are just the constitutionally cruel who like picking on the weak oddballs, or the (rightly) annoyed who justifiably react to the exasperating behavior of the victim. Many productions include a character who seeks the missing victim. In the dramatizations, this is the widowed mother; in the adaptations, this is usually a friend. The most consistently drawn character, the seeker is universally caring and kind when the victim is dispatched into the alien neighborhood, and panicked and grieving when the victim fails to return home. The seeker is not associated with the aggressors’ punishment or blamed for the victim’s death.17 This consistency suggests that the seeker is a character that the students are able to relate to their experiences. With these three basic characters groups, the videos boil down the narrative to three elements, and some include a fourth: the victim does something in a territory outside his own; the aggressors are upset by that behavior and arrange to stop it; a third party seeks the victim; and (optionally) the aggressors are punished. None attempt to capture visually either the tale’s historical or its geographical alterity. There is nothing either medieval or Asian in the videos. This is true for the ones using animation or puppetry as well as the ones using live actors. Costuming and staging are used, instead, to signal differences between the victim and the

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aggressors, and to distinguish between the two territories. And, because the performances seldom reveal careful attention to a full retelling of the tale, it is clear that many rely on summations found online, a feature betrayed when they pick up the language found in the source summary or replicate interpretive slants not otherwise explainable. An equally inf luential element is YouTube itself, which, since its 2005 launch, has promulgated a creative idiom of gestures and techniques that pervade the student productions of The Prioress’s Tale. This inf luence is not surprising because YouTube immediately appealed to high school and college students, who were at that time largely responsible for the production of most amateur videos.18 The elements most frequently imitated can be tracked using YouTube’s ranking: Most Viewed, Most Favorited [sic], Most Responded, Most Discussed, and Most Active.19 While none of The Prioress’s Tale videos comes close to achieving any of these rankings—and their makers would certainly be perplexed by the spike of views between June and December 2011—what makes a video popular on YouTube has inf luenced the production of these videos. When students imagine what a digital narrative looks and sounds like, they turn to YouTube. Here, they gain not a historicized sense of the Middle Ages but another sense of authenticity more in tune with their experience. Thus, there should be no surprise that the characteristics making YouTube videos most popular are also the YouTube Prioress’s Tales’ more noteworthy characteristics: the use of redaction, a focus on camera techniques, an emphasis on novelty and humor, the personal interest of vlogs (video logs), the freedom allowed by animation, and the format of music videos.20 These characteristics provide the “temporalities, in-jokes, and cultural repertoires” to which the students respond and demonstrate their participation by including in their videos.21 In addition to reminding us that YouTube’s participatory culture shapes the student productions as much as Chaucer’s text does, these characteristically YouTube elements are also where students turn when dealing with anti-Semitism in The Prioress’s Tale. Refracting Anti-Semitism in The Prioress’s Tale through YouTube Whichever form of the assignment, the productions available on YouTube on November 1, 2011 show how students lace their interpretations with distinctive YouTube idioms, especially hi-jinx, slapstick, and vulgarity. Some of the most inexplicable moments or features of the videos can be traced back to popular videos. For example, 2010A begins with twenty seconds of black-and-white video of the Prioress framing her tale; when the tale proper begins, it is narrated by two voices retelling the story in

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verse, while two girls dance in the snow. The incongruity makes more sense after seeing the “Hey Clip,” a video that first appeared in 2006, had over 33,000,000 hits by the end of 2011, and has been imitated endlessly.22 The student video becomes a form of condoned and authorized exhibitionism. For the purpose of this study, however, I am more interested in how the students deal with the tale’s anti-Semitism by mashing together YouTube idioms with one or more of five narrative strategies: they reproduce anti-Semitism, but distance themselves from it; they reproduce it, but include a disclaimer; they erase it; they transfer it onto another group; or, they minimize it by justifying the Jews’ anger. Together, the YouTube idioms and the five refracting strategies show the students working to accommodate the anti-Semitism to their experiences. They reproduce the anti-Semitism but distance themselves from it. One strategy for retaining the tale’s anti-Semitism is to dramatize it using forms of either animation or puppetry, YouTube genres that create a distance between students and the offensive behavior (2006A, 2009B, 2009D, 2009G, 2010C, 2010J, 2010L, and 2011B). Of these, only one production—2011B, which seems to have been produced or highly inf luenced by a homeschooling parent—carefully follows the entire Prioress’s Tale. The rest in this group, though scaled back, retain the Tale’s basic characteristics, so that the victim is a young schoolboy, the aggressors are Jews, and the seeker is the widowed mother. In addition, they identify the two territories as Christian and Jewish. The boy’s offending behavior is to sing a Christian song represented by a sound track that is melodic, harmonious, and in congruence with traditional religious vocal music. Further, they include all three moments associated with the Prioress’s anti-Semitism: her outburst against the Jews, allying the Jews with Satan, and their brutal punishment. One of these productions initially seems to include a disclaimer when the student follows her popsicle-stick production with a “moral” that begins, “Don’t judge or hurt people because of their religious background or beliefs.” Rather than discredit the anti-Semitism, she instead continues, “This moral is shown in the Jewish people being upset that the young boy went around singing O alma redemptoris, and they hired a murderer to kill him. In the end, they were the ones that became punished for not being able to deal with the beliefs of other people” (2009B). Unlike the disclaimers that appear in the next grouping, this “moral” (as well as a section addressing why the message is both satirical and ironic and a section on “The Big Picture”) is clearly part of the assignment that is supposed to be appended to the dramatization. Lengthy and convoluted, this appendage reveals the student’s discomfort with drawing a moral lesson from a tale that mirrors the “prejudices against people for race, religion, and gender” that she has been told exist

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in contemporary American society. This small group of videos that fully reproduce the anti-Semitism distance themselves from it with a widely used format that doesn’t require them to enact it themselves. They reproduce anti-Semitism but include a disclaimer. This group shares most of the characteristics found in the first group, with two significant differences that further distance the actors from anti-Semitic behaviors. First, although live actors are sometimes used, these are supplemented by intertitles or voice-over narration, especially when portraying the offensive elements (2008D, 2008E, 209G, 2009B, 2010C, 2010F, and 2011C). Second, the videos contain a disclaimer, either at the opening, or at the closing, or on the YouTube site (2006A and 2009E). These disclaimers can be rather modest (“Btw, I do not agree with this story, I am not antiSemitic” [2009D]), tentative (“The story just told clearly attacks the Jews. More importantly, however, it promotes Christian values” [2010A]), or global (“The movie in no way depicts the cast’s views towards Judaism, Christianity, Osty, or anything in between” [2008C]).23 Together with the voice-overs and the intertitles, these explicit disclaimers demonstrate that the students are aware of a larger audience whom they neither want to offend nor be judged harshly by. They erase anti-Semitism. Except for 2009F, all the adaptations fall into this group because they do not associate the aggressors with Jews. This does not mean they are free of racism or ethnic bias. For example, two productions imagine the conf licts as between rival gangs clearly identified with the urban poor through their dress and the hip-hop soundtrack. If these productions ref lect the students’ lived experiences, then anti-Semitism is something in textbooks; when they are asked to update medieval anti-Semitism, they do not depict contemporary instances of it. Instead, they turn to other instances of racial, ethnic, or cultural bias, especially forms of adolescent bullying. They transfer the anti-Semitism onto another group. This strategy is deployed by dramatizations and adaptations, both of which retain the Jews as aggressors but def lect the tale’s anti-Semitism by couching the conf lict in terms much closer to their own experiences. Using visual gestures gleaned from other YouTube videos, they transform the kernel of the tale into rivalries fueled by racial animosity or gang territorialism. For instance, the students latch onto the term “ghetto” and transfer the aggressors’ locale from the medieval Jewry of Chaucer’s tale to blighted inner-city neighborhoods populated primarily by street gangs of contemporary America. While the victim’s neighborhood is always filled with single-family homes and spacious lawns, the aggressors hang out in a run-down commercial or industrial district and dress in bling and hip-hop gear (see 2007C, 2009C, 2009F, and 2011D). This transference

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of medieval anti-Semitism to contemporary racism creates the most troubling moments in the two productions showing the Jews punished by hanging. For their visual intertext, the videos evoke imagery of Southern lynchings during the Jim Crow era, an effect exaggerated in 2010D when the camera spends several seconds focusing on the dangling feet. Just as the dramatizations use this strategy to recalibrate the tale’s anti-Semitism as American-style racism, the only adaptation using this strategy highlights anti-Semitism’s underlying racism by sometimes calling the aggressors “Jews,” sometimes “Mexicans.” Others avoid racial conf lict and instead present conf licts taken from popular culture: Jedi Knights vs. Sith in the Star Wars saga (2009E); Thetas vs. Gammas at Truth University (2009H); football heroes vs. bank geeks (2010I); and rival girl gangs (2011D). They minimize the anti-Semitism by justifying the Jews’ anger. This strategy is the most pervasive strategy used and is often conjoined with the previous category of transferring the anti-Semitism. This minimalization is primarily achieved by portraying the victim and his offending behavior as extraordinarily annoying. Sometimes the Jews are annoyed because the song is religious, but frequently they are annoyed because the behavior would irritate anyone (2011A and 2011C). Sometimes this trying behavior is shown using an endlessly repeating musical text that is not sung well: the words “alma redemptoris” (2007B), the children’s song “Jesus loves me” (2008C, 20110C, and 2011F), Fountains of Wayne’s “Stacey’s Mom” (2008B), “Numa, Numa” (2008E), “I am a C-H-R-I-S-T-I-A-N” (2007C), annoying Latin-sounding words (2010E), and other ditties such as “I love Jesus, yes I do” (2008D). In making the song irritating, the students seem to resist two ideas: that the victim’s song could be sung sincerely and devotedly, and that its religious content could invoke such strong reactions from others. The importance of the annoyance as a source of provocation is highlighted by the number of adaptations that include an annoying song, even while they have erased every religious element. In 2009A, the students use random action figures, unscripted overnarration, and intertitles to describe a basic version of the tale, yet the most memorable feature is the repetition of the electro-pop “Around the World,” provoking a destructive rage in the exasperated and innocent bystanders. Others feature the young victim singing “I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves,” a variation of the endless-song genre (2010G), or Green Day’s “American Idiot” played repeatedly on a boom box (2010K). The videos further justify the Jews’ reaction by eliminating the boy’s piety and the miracle. Because they have chosen to depict the child and his song as annoying, they reduce or eliminate the search for the victim, creating even less sympathy for the victim. Sometimes there are no maternal or family figures who care enough

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to go looking for him. The nature of the aggressors’ attack on the victim also works against seeing them as Satan’s agents. Whether these productions minimize or relish the violence, they frequently cut the violence with absurdity: victims are locked in a bathroom (2010G), shot with a Nerf gun (2010H), attacked by stuffed animals (2010K), silenced with duct tape (2011A), or tossed into a dish of Parmesan cheese (2009A). With such an unsympathetic victim and justifiably enraged aggressors, these productions generally eliminate or ameliorate the aggressors’ punishment. If they show the punishment—and several do not—they have logistical problems (how do you show someone being hanged without really endangering them, with so few production resources?). A favorite solution is to substitute stuffed animals (and not, it should be noted, dolls) for the Jews (2007C). Others resort to brief animation (2008C) or video game clip (2010L), a mob attack (2008D), intertitles (2008D, 2008E, and 2009G), or offscreen narration (2009B, 2010C, 2010F, and 2011C). Many simply eliminate the punishment (2007C, 2008A, 2008B, 2009A, 2009C, 2009E, 2009F, 2010B, 2010G, and 201H) or give minimal punishment, such as wedgies (2010I) or being expelled from school (2011A). All elements of this strategy allow an annoying song to be the distinctive feature of the tale, the allowable motivation behind the aggressors’ subsequent attacks, and a way to justify the aggressors’ behavior. The most unusual justification is found in 2008E, which subverts the anti-Semitism by identifying with the Jews. The longest of the YouTube versions at nearly twelve minutes, it devotes eight minutes to the Jews’ growing agitation over the insult. Fortified by a long night of drinking, the Jews arm themselves paramilitary style. In this version, the Jews are no longer some unknowable Other; instead, the actors seem to fully inhabit their sense of injustice and revel in the evolving conspiracy to wipe out the offending child. The murder itself is refracted by inserting a thirty-five-second video game clip. Once the child is dead, the Jews shout “Praise, Allah!” Until this moment, I wondered if the actors were Jewish and were somehow trying to show the Jews as being able to handle any insult. This slip, however, certainly betrays their non-Jewish origins. Together with the terrorist-like garb they wear, the Islamic phrase transforms the Jews into contemporary Islamic terrorists, who harbor deep grievances that are viscerally real but thoroughly opaque to the average American teen. Together these five strategies demonstrate a clear sympathy with anger over being annoyed or mocked. They also reveal students’ racism that is easily tapped into. Overall, however, they demonstrate students’ sense that anti-Semitism is not a part of the culture they participate in.

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The Prioress’s Tale and YouTube’s Participatory Culture As it currently stands, these thirty-two high school student projects—plus one Magdalen College, Oxford dramatization as well as excerpts from a chamber opera—stand as the only video representations of Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale on YouTube, which is becoming the de facto archive of our visual cultural heritage.24 That it has become the place where students upload class assignments (whether at the instruction of teachers or not is unclear), indicates just how mainstream YouTube has become in the past six years, especially when we note that the Prioress made her first appearance by October 2006. YouTube has become more than a repository for the idiosyncratic or self-promotional. Without the curatorial role of cultural institutions to shape our video collections “through the activities of acquisition, appraisal, description, deaccessioning, and all the other processes in which such institutions engage,” students more inf luenced by YouTube culture than by the original Prioress’s Tale have a greater presence than any of the usual authorized voices.25 Because YouTube has become a go-to spot for educational videos (see in particular the Khan Academy—www.khanacademy.org—with its thousands of videos ranging from algebra to quadratic equations), anyone wanting to understand Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale (setting aside momentarily the impossibility of that task, whatever the format), would encounter these videos. By choosing this archive unmediated by expertise, these students have become unwitting participants in Chaucer Studies. Although it is not the purpose of this essay to address the question of whether this diversity of participation in the Chaucer studies is detrimental, it is a question Chaucer studies should consider. For, after seeing what good readers of YouTube culture these students are, it makes me wish their teachers had enough faith in them to show them how to be similarly strong readers of fourteenth-century English culture and to demonstrate how these cultural literacy skills can be transferred back and forth between YouTube and Chaucer. Appendix A Dramatizations 2006A. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIyAeBMhicc&feature= related. 2007B. ht t p://w w w.yout ube.com /watch?v=C _ H X10X W k lw& feature=related. 2007C. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3rtdMCzp8c&feature= related.

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2008A. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCCTsNrCCFE. 2008B. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lutd1ulvlc&feature= related. 2008D. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNRCVqOO9WE& feature=related. 2008E. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETB0h4VLt5g&feature= related and http://www.youtube.com/user/lsangeeel. 2009B. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAcInBq4KxU&feature= related. 2009C. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rozmiX62LI&feature= related. 2009D. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQm9oOuTqL8&feature= related. 2009G. h t t p: //w w w.yo u t u b e . c o m /w a t c h ? v =J r 8 52 B T T_Vg & feature=related. 2010A. h t t p: //w w w.y o u t u b e . c o m /w a t c h ? v =Z 6 _ J F 4 5 c o r I & feature=related. 2010B. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAWPxC_2f3c&feature= related. 2010C. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KztGhGli0O8&feature= related. 2010D. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ze3xDfmTvo&feature= related. 2010E. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FMxkKlXdeg&feature= fvsr. 2010F. ht t p://w w w.yout ube.com /watch? v=h- R H6J BZ N 7w& feature=related. 2010J. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmwtYduvbns&feature= related. 2010L. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHZbmDIN03M&feature= related. 2011A. h t t p://w w w.you t u b e .c o m /w a t ch? v= 8 g F X 2 I DY-x 0 & feature=related. 2011B. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjgklKlrJ44&feature= related. 2011C. h t t p: //w w w.y o u t u b e . c o m /w a t c h ? v = c q I 9 Wo 8 o n - s & feature=related. Adaptations 2008C. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJiPAShIRtM&feature= related.

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2009A. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXaX7tRDBoM&feature =related. 2009E. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GV1H4eTrOI&feature= related. 2009F. h t t p: //w w w.yo u t u b e .c o m /w a t c h ? v = C c t - yW E k f J 8 & feature=related. 2009H. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2Q jnJOfOHg&feature= related. 2010G. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fZEk3jGeMo&feature= related. 2010H. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtamrv3x3aY&feature= related. 2010I. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAQC1ZjKs5Q&feature= related. 2010K. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVBh2eOEhMA&feature= related. 2011D. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3wkj2exFxA&feature= related. Notes 1. James T. Fields and Edwin P. Whipple, eds., The Family Library of British Poetry, from Chaucer to the Present Time (1350–1878) (Boston: Riverside Press, 1878), 9–11. 2. Fields and Whipple, Family Library, vi. 3. Katharine Lee Bates, Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1903); F. J. Harvey Darton, Tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims: Retold from Chaucer and Others (London: Wells, Gardner, Darton, 1904); Eleanor Farjeon, Tales from Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930); Ada Hales, Stories from Chaucer (London: Methuen, 1911); E. C. Oakden and M. Sturt, The Canterbury Pilgrims: Being Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Retold for Children (London: Dent, 1923); Eva March Tappan, The Chaucer Story Book (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1908). 4. Darton, Tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims, 86. 5. Seth Lerer, “Major Works, Major Issues: The Canterbury Tales,” in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 277. 6. Peggy A. Knapp, “Chaucer for Fun and Profit,” in Teaching Chaucer, ed. Gail Ashton and Louise Sylvester (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 17–29; Steven F. Kruger, “A Series of Linked Assignments for the Undergraduate Course on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” in Teaching Chaucer, ed. Gail Ashton and Louise Sylvester (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 30–45.

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7. John Hartley, The Uses of Digital Literacy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 104–9. 8. “Chaucer Pedagogy: Assignment Ideas,” accessed November 13, 2011, http://afdtk.uaa.alaska.edu/assignments.htm#k-12. 9. E. D. Hirsch Jr., The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 2006), 79. 10. Lee Patterson, “The Disenchanted Classroom,” Exemplaria 8.2 (1996): 513–45. 11. John H. Bushman and Kay Parks Haas, Using Young Adult Literature in the English Classroom (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2006), 172–75. 12. For instance, Michael Murphy, ed., “Prioress & Parts of Thopas, Melibee, Monk,” accessed November 13, 2011, http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/ webcore/murphy/canterbury/16prithme.pdf; Sinan Kokbugur, trans., “From ‘The Canterbury Tales’: The Prioress’s Tale (Modern English and Middle English),” accessed November 13, 2011, http://www.librarius. com/canttran/priotrfs.htm; “Kankedort.net—The Electronic Canterbury Tales: An Online Companion and Compendium to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” accessed November 13, 2011, http://www.kankedort.net/ECT _etexts.htm. 13. Bushman and Haas, Using Young Adult Literature in the English Classroom, 170. 14. Patrick Lowenthal, “Digital Storytelling in Education: An Emerging Institutional Technology,” in Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 252–59. 15. For a complete list with the identifiers I use in this essay, see Appendix A. 16. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. Nevill Coghill (London: Penguin, 1951); Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: A Prose Version in Modern English, trans. David Wright (New York: Random House, 1964). 17. After noticing that students in my Chaucer class have begun to ref lect the consequences of “helicopter parenting” by faulting the widow in The Prioress’s Tale for letting her young son walk alone to school through a dangerous neighborhood, I thought I might see elements of that in these productions. It will be interesting to see if that attitude creeps into later productions. 18. Amanda Lotz, The Television Will be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 252. 19. Jean Burgess, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009), 38–39 and fn1. 20. Burgess, YouTube, 48–54. 21. Burgess, YouTube, 101. 22. “Hey Clip,” accessed November 13, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-_CSo1gOd48 and Burgess, 26–27. 23. “Osty” is the name of the student portraying the Christian boy.

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24. “The Prioress’s Tale,” accessed November 13, 2011, http://www.youtube .com/watch?v= oB8T2B9R0hA&feature=related and “The Prioress’s Tale: A Chamber Opera in One Act,” accessed November 13, 2011, http://www.enc.edu/~delvyn.case/prioress/Music.html. 25. Karen F. Gracy, “Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital,” Library Trends 56.1 (2007): 184.

CHAPTER 2 ANIMATED CONVERSATIONS IN NOTTINGHAM: DISNEY’S ROBIN HOOD (1973) Andrew Lynch

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he Walt Disney animated Robin Hood (1973)1 has often been regarded by critics as unimpressive. The inf luential site Rotten Tomatoes rates it at 55 percent, the lowest among the twenty-six Disney animations released before 1987.2 Various reasons have been alleged for this supposed inferiority. The film has been seen as a small-budget effort made without enthusiasm by Disney’s senior staff after his death in 1966, without the master’s magic input: “You had a pride in the film you were making because he was there. . . and of course he wasn’t there anymore. There was a vast difference.”3 It was released in the middle of a period when the company’s attention had supposedly turned from animation to its live action films and theme parks. Only seven Disney animated features were made between 1960 and 1980, although there were three part-animated films, including the smash hit Mary Poppins (1964). Don Bluth, a character animator for Robin Hood, is fairly typical in his opinion: “When Robin Hood was completed I decided it did not look the greatest of films. . . The heart wasn’t in it. It had technique, the characters were well drawn, the Xerox process retained the fine lines so I could see all of the self indulgence of the animators, each one saying ‘Look how great I am,’ but the story itself had no soul.”4 Bluth was frustrated by his perception of cheapening animation standards at the Disney studio. A critical perception of soulless cheapness in Robin Hood has also been attributed to its famously thrifty reuse of existing animation, both from within the film and beyond it, a penchant of the director Wolfgang Reitherman. Selected sequences from features as early as Snow White (1937) up to the

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then recent The Jungle Book (1967) and The Aristocats (1970) were recycled with minor changes. YouTube videos reveal an unusual number of these, even for a Disney film: Maid Marian’s forest dance is Snow White’s, Robin’s costume is Peter Pan’s, and Little John is Baloo resuscitated in Lincoln green, down to the same voice actor, Phil Harris. Other retrospective comments have suggested a distaste for the film amongst its creative team, and their lack of cohesion. Bill Peet, who had earlier worked with Reitherman, considered that his direction was unsubtle and sacrificed quality for economy.5 Ken Anderson is reported to have wept when he saw the animators’ versions of his original character concepts.6 Online criticism of the film adds, without reference, but seemingly in agreement with Bluth, that “there was no real script and seven animators . . . each contributed story sequences for the characters they were working on individually.” 7 It becomes clear that the common reasons advanced for Robin Hood’s supposed failure are not so much based on critical reference to the work itself as conjectures and anecdotes to support the assertion that it is a failure, which in turn reveal questionable assumptions that originality, organic unity, and tighter artistic control would have been essential to its success. I shall argue instead that in the tradition of Robin Hood medievalism, and as a Disney animation, the film’s structure and story (by Larry Clemmons) are appropriate and very productive. Robin Hood is a diverse, temporally layered, and episodic legend without a stable set of characters or a story line. It has no central canonical version to be “retold,” only a set of disparate utterances: “historical” and literary allusions, place names, ballads, chapbooks and plays.8 The legend is nearly always set in medieval times, and now, following Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), usually in the reign of Richard I. Yet, strictly speaking, it is not properly part of the medieval “afterlife” because, unlike the Arthurian legend, it found no major fixed or complete forms in the Middle Ages, and its most commonly known features today actually range in origin from early modern to twentieth-century medievalist exemplars. Every “new” version of Robin Hood is necessarily related to successive earlier treatments, whether in reverence or parody, yet is also required to make up its own narrative rationale through selective variation of the existing repertoire. I propose to offer here a reading of the film mainly in terms of its own aesthetic, thematic, and episodic choices, along with their cultural and ideological ref lexes, in the hope that detailed attention will shed light on its interesting medievalism and also reveal it as a subtle and thoughtful comic achievement in its own terms. Relatively few of the critical accounts of the film mention its vocal acting or songs, and responsibility for voice casting and direction is not

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mentioned in its credits, yet Robin Hood is a film built on voice and music from the very beginning.9 Ironically, its integration of music, songs, script, character voicing, and narrative is vastly superior to that in Disney’s earlier medievalist feature The Sword in the Stone (1963), where Bill Peet wrote the entire script and storyboard and also undertook the preanimation voice direction.10 Typically for both a “Disney Classic” and a medievalist film, the opening shot is the cover of a book, with “Robin Hood” in red lettering enclosed in a f loral-patterned deep green. The image suggests a “classic” version, such as Howard Pyle’s,11 and the first illustrations we see when the book opens are reminiscent of Pyle or his one-time pupil N. C. Wyeth.12 The roughly half-uncial font of the “book of the film” also matches the medievalism of a classic edition, and its style is in that vein: “good king Richard”; “Prince John, his greedy and treacherous brother”; “Robin and his merry men.” But the camera then tracks above a traditional illustration of Robin drawing his bow, and centers on a contrasted image—a rooster with a lute, illuminated in brighter, heraldic colors. The rooster comes to life and speaks his voice-over in a Southern drawl before the credits begin: “You know, there’s been a heap of legends and tall tales . . . about Robin Hood. All different too. Well, we folks of the animal kingdom have our own version. It’s the story of what really happened in Sherwood Forest . . . .” As the rooster saunters along playing and whistling, still tracked by the camera, the classic-looking print text is momentarily lost. An introduction of the dramatis personae and actors follows, then, as the tempo of “Whistle Stop” increases and the orchestration gets more martial, a frantic animal chase scene develops in the text’s lower margin, in a “f lat” processional style reminiscent of medieval grotesque illumination, such as the famous images of hares hunting a hound in the lower margins of British Library MS Royal 10 E IV. Finally, the rooster jumps into the comfortable space of the capital “O” in “Once upon a time” to announce that he is “Alan-a-Dale,” a “minstrel”: “My job is to tell it like it is. Or was. Or whatever.” The faux-historicist offer to tell “what really happened” has been ironically rerouted to the fringes of official culture and is ostentatiously mediated through an uncertain, performative orality which makes no clear distinction between past and present, what “is” or “was” or “whatever.” This Robin Hood invokes the serious mid-Atlantic medievalism of Pyle and Wyeth, only to counter it with a laid-back, yarnspinning “Southern” style, and sets up a consciously anachronistic and wayward “animal” version in the distinctive voice of Roger Miller. Miller was already famous for “King of the Road” (1966) and other Nashville hits that identified him with roguish resourcefulness. Alan-a-Dale’s introduction simply takes for granted the film’s narrative setting in “the animal kingdom,” with no more ado than Chaucer

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makes in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: “For thilke tyme, as I have understonde, / Beestes and briddes koude speke and synge.”13 The story works freely from traditional anthropomorphic stereotypes, and since there are no “human” characters, its talking animals represent the human “kingdom” without restraints of scale or perspective. Unlike in Chaucer, there is no sense of an existential limit to the field of action, no ditch around the farmyard that lets the beast fable expose the vanity of human aspirations. Rather, Robin Hood sets up its own humanoid social conspectus, whose politics are illuminated partly through traditional animal symbolism (including its Disney history), partly through reference to ideas of medieval society, and partly through the translation of medieval Nottingham to “Notting-ham” a small (white), sleepy Southern US settlement. Nottingham is described in the film as both “town” and “village.” Visually it seems no more than a collection of ragged dwellings around the castle, with no substantial burgess’s houses. The mercantile class is absent. Prince John calls them all “peasants.” Apart from the rapacious Sheriff (“Old Bushel-Britches”) and his yokel deputies, all the inhabitants seem to be honest, poor whites, patient in a poverty that is not their own fault: Mrs. Rabbit is a widow with a large family; Otto the dog blacksmith has broken his leg; “Preacher” Friar Tuck is loyal and courageous against despotism; and the organist church mouse and his wife are big-hearted, even in their proverbial condition. These villagers represent the “people” of the film and Robin looks out for them. Little John is his only traditional outlaw associate in the greenwood, since Alan-a-Dale is more narrator and chorus than an actor. Robin and John are jesters and players, and not common bandits, as the tradition often stresses: “Stronge thevys wer tho chylderin non.”14 Their “charity” to the poor stems from a delight in impromptu acting. Robin refers to his first two exploits— robbing Prince John’s cavalcade and the archery contest—as chances to “perform” in disguise. It is known that Walt Disney initially opposed making a Reynard the Fox feature because he was worried that the hero was a “crook,”15 and for the same reason, supposedly, the Robin Hood project bothered its makers. Nevertheless, quite a lot of the Reynard preparation found its way into the Robin Hood story: “Reynard in his many disguises (a blind man, a woman), tricks (stealing rings by kissing the king’s hand, outwitting the Wolf ), and adversaries (an egotistical and greedy Lion), did finally make it to the screen, after a fashion.”16 Given the relation to Reynard, it may not be coincidence that the first action sequence, with Miller’s song “Oo De Lally” as its narrative, seeks to establish Robin and Little John as playful innocents: “Never dreamin’ that a schemin’ sheriff and his posse / Was a-watchin’ them and gatherin’ around.” Unlike in other versions which provide elaborate back-stories

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to explain and excuse the move into outlawry, this Robin is mainly doing it for fun. Walt Disney had earlier been keen to prove that Reynard “was really not that type—started out all right, then we show how he goes wrong—really innocent, but the law has always been after him and he’s had to use his wits.”17 The Robin Hood team managed better mainly by not worrying about it so much. Like the medieval heroes of knight errantry who simply put themselves en aventure, without evident private motivation, Robin does not need too many excuses. So, from the beginning it is the Sheriff who “schem[es],” while to Robin it is “just a bit of a lark.” He is a gifted gentleman amateur rather than a professional, as Brian Bedford’s cultured English voicing of the role emphasizes. (How different if Tommy Steele, the original choice, had played Robin as a cheeky Cockney sparrow!) When Little John’s question “Are we good guys or bad guys?” directly opens the moral issue, Robin’s answer that they merely “borrow a bit from those that can afford it” may seem sophistic, but in effect all we ever see Robin do is to give back their own money to the unjustly taxed poor of the village: Friar Tuck refers to the process as “tax rebates.” In economic terms, the plot might be read as mildly socialist, praising the redistribution of national wealth to the poorer classes; realistically, Prince John could never have amassed the huge amount of gold he loses to Robin merely by over-taxing poor dogs, rabbits, and mice. On these grounds, the film has been seen as evidence of a late blooming of 1960s attitudes in the Disney world, made possible by Walt’s absence.18 But in other ways, the depiction of taxes is more conservative: they are raised on behalf of an “arrogant, greedy, ruthless” centralized government (as Friar Tuck describes Prince John), and they cause economic and social depression by stif ling personal initiative and morale: “Taxes, taxes, taxes. Why, he taxed the heart and soul out of the poor people of Nottingham.” It seems clear that the main thing “good King Richard” will do when he “just straighten[s] everything out” is to cease the taxes, which could never exist under a “good” ruler. To make it quite plain that Prince John, not Robin, is the real “crook,” he is pictured as a chain-gang prisoner at the film’s end, as King Richard smiles on Robin and Marian’s wedding. In this scenario, the sufferings of the honest poor of the story stand for the economic damage done to the private sector by central taxation. Under a proper tax system Nottingham would never get so “down,” but even so, the proper response is not mass government relief, nor “the explicit portrayal of Christianity’s social gospel and radical class politics,”19 but traditional support from family, parish, and neighborhood, with targeted “charity” to the deserving from the more fortunate. Robin assumes a necessary but limited role—“I only wish it could be more”—and that too on a temporary basis. His only long-term scheme

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is to wed Marian, for whom, as the film’s single other fox, he seems the natural choice, especially as she shares his refined accent. While Robin’s exact social origin is not discussed, his gentleman’s voice both clears him from suspicion of robbing professionally and fits a motivation of noblesse oblige. In overall effect then, the film’s economic ideology emphasizes not redistribution of wealth, but a typical Disney respect for the fruits of hard work, resilience in adversity, and private philanthropy. It also happens to fit a well-known medieval relation between wealth and poverty, in which the poor offer the rich a chance to gain merit through alms and they repay them with prayer:20 Disney’s Robin is “bless[ed]” repeatedly by those he benefits—Otto the blacksmith and Mrs. Rabbit. The characterization of Friar Tuck gives religion an unusually prominent role in the Disney animation. Ken Anderson changed his original character concept from pig to badger to avoid being “offensive to the Church.”21 In Robin Hood narratives, Tuck’s character is usually portrayed as a renegade, irregular, often violent, a glutton, and not principally a man of religion. Scott’s “Clerk of Copmanhurst,” even in Howard Pyle’s and Paul Creswick’s more genteel versions of him, is of this kind. More recent films, such as Kevin Reynolds’ Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991), have drawn on the tradition to make the Friar the enemy of a corrupt church and state. In Reynolds’s film, Tuck pushes the Bishop of Hereford to his death from a window, after sarcastically loading him with bags of coin, in a reference to Judas. In the final battle of John Irvin’s Robin Hood (1991), Tuck blesses a Norman soldier before calmly breaking his neck. Both characterizations suggest that reliance on God is not nearly enough. Andy Devine’s Disney Friar is, by contrast, a genuine small-town pastor who shows righteous anger in protecting his f lock from the Sheriff ’s greed—“Git outa my church!”—but mainly leaves things to providence. When the parishioners are too depressed to attend the service, Tuck rings his church bell to “bring those poor people some comfort” and “keep their hopes alive,” a phrase also used of Robin himself when he helps the Rabbit family. This “hope” is specified as a theological virtue when the Friar understands Robin as divinely sent— ”Thank God. My prayers have been answered”—after he and Little John come to break the prisoners from the castle. Along with hope goes charity. In a clear reminiscence of the “widow’s mite” (Mark 12:41–44, Luke 21:1–4), the church mice give their “last farthing” to the poor box and Tuck pronounces, in Christ’s words, “no one can give more than that.” As the pastor of a poor independent Southern congregation, this priest does not have to avoid compromise through membership of a wealthy institutional church, yet through his moral and practical identification

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with the poor, he fulfills the ideal of a medieval Franciscan in a way few, if any, Friar Tucks have ever done. Through Friar Tuck, the film could be said to use religious feeling to pacify its politics, with a traditional message that says: “don’t plan revolution; wait in hope for reform from above.” Friar Tuck vents his righteous anger not on monarchy, but only on Prince John, and even then only through John’s low agent, the Sheriff. On the other hand, at least this Tuck’s role makes viewers understand political oppression in terms of the suffering of the lower classes, not through the personal history of Robin’s own dispossession, as mainly happens in Reynolds’s version, where Kevin Costner’s hero states that he has not come to “join” the outlaws but “to lead you,” while the endlessly repeated cry for “freedom” means only “[f ]ight with Robin Hood” and still results in the restoration of Richard’s (Sean Connery’s) monarchy after all. As Reynolds’s film shows, the narrative problem of Robin’s position somewhere between the Norman Ascendancy of Nottingham and its oppressed masses is a hard one to solve. The Robin Hood tradition has always been structured along class lines. Is Robin to be a lord with a conscience, a loyal or independent “yeoman,” a rebellious man of the people, or something else? How does he relate to the existing forms of authority in church and state? At the time of the Disney version, the most inf luential exemplar was probably Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), starring Errol Flynn. In this version, Robin is a Saxon, the Earl of Locksley, but loyal to the absent King Richard. He is thus neither one of the Normans nor a troublesome insurgent to any one except the corrupt Prince John and his cronies. The film is left relatively free to have fun, which the Disney animation salutes by parodying some of its characterizations and sequences, such as in the scenes of mayhem after the archery contest. By contrast, in the recent Ridley Scott Robin Hood (2010), whose screenplay was completed by Brian Helgeland, Russell Crowe’s hero is highly politicized, as an archer led by chance into impersonation of the dead Sir Robert Loxley. Discovering that he is the son of a political activist, Robin revives his father’s dream of a “charter of rights” that will become Magna Carta. This Robin ties loyalty to monarchy, the usual modern happy ending, and discovers his mistake, since over the course of the narrative he is betrayed by both Richard and John and, in the end, declared outlaw. As a plain man feeling his way in the world of knighthood and gentility, he finds the normal class problem of Robin Hoods— how to make common cause with the people and yet be one of their masters—reversed in his case. In effect, the story becomes an ingenious

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prequel to the usual legend; in medieval terms it is the estoire written after the roman in order to set up and explain its complexities. Yet, as in the John Irvin Robin Hood, the resolution of the story that could bring Robin back out of the greenwood (or keep him from outlawry in the first place) is as utopian as the usual return of King Richard. In Irvin’s film it is a sudden outbreak of goodwill and peace between the Saxon earl Hode and Norman baron Daguerre, promising a permanent end to strife and oppression. In Scott’s film, it is the imaginary prospect of Robin proposing Magna Carta as a general charter of rights for the people. Scott and Helgeland acknowledge historical realities in refusing to make a medieval English monarch provide a broad-based sociopolitical solution, but this only moves the fantasy element in the movie’s politics elsewhere, towards an equally ahistorical consensus model of government. In this long-range context, the politics of the Disney film may not look quite so unthinking and are arguably more subtle in their relation of the hero to the power structure of his world. Unrestrained by historicist or humanist limitations, the cartoon fox Robin Hood avoids entrapment in the kind of overwrought political scenario that dogs Reynolds’s, Irvin’s, and Scott’s live-action versions. The combination of fantasy in the animation and psychological realization of character in the voiceacting gives the film political suggestiveness without requiring too much of a conclusion, or misguidedly attempting to unify what it sensitively treats as an episodic tradition, built on repetition and variation of familiar tropes rather than on organic development. The film’s modular structuring by songs appropriately recognizes the stories’ ballad backgrounds. Instead of dense plotting, Disney’s Robin Hood offers pleasure through its mixing of multiple registers of meaning in the “animal kingdom”: some naturalism (the numerous Rabbit family); the traditional bestiary (lions as monarchs, a rapacious wolf sheriff ); the politically symbolic (Prince John’s goons are mainly large animals exotic to “home,” standing in for the idea of a “Norman”-style tyranny); cultural references (the ferret-like archers are reminiscent of The Wind in the Willows); the proverbial and its playful reverse (poor church mice, a turtle who runs with rabbits); and the grandly impossible (a vixen whose close confidante is a hen). Disney’s Robin never seeks to mobilize the lower classes to make permanent social change. A spontaneous chancer, he organizes little. The people only appear with him en masse at or after events organized by Prince John and the Sheriff themselves: the archery contest, the imprisonment of tax defaulters, and the public execution. Their anger is a spontaneous expression of resentment at particular injustices and purges itself temporarily in carnival and political satire ridiculing the Prince: “The Phony King of England.” The public song and dance after the failure

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to arrest Robin at the archery is the only occasion when we see a large group in the greenwood, and it provides the people’s main expression of group consciousness: “But Sire, it’s a hit; the whole village is singin’ it.” Afterwards, everyone, except Robin and Little John apparently, has a real home to go to; no one else is led to join the band. Robin figures not as a potential people’s liberator but as a folk-hero who keeps up the spirits of an oppressed group through exploits that share with them symbolic victories over the oppressor. When he is seen in that light, the episodic fun of the film carries its strongest political significance and might be thought to be the most perceptive element of its place in the Robin Hood tradition rather than a stylistic failure. As a young, risk-taking type (“You worry too much, old boy”), and always a fox by temperament, Robin can operate as a leader only in circumstances where normal authority figures are corrupt, absent, or impaired: Otto the smith is crippled; Mr. Rabbit is dead. This interim chaotic situation suits Robin’s natural genius for both disguise and display. His risk-taking for fun continues even when much greater responsibilities have arisen for him. For instance, he endangers the rescue of the prisoners by recklessly taking the very last bag of gold from the sleeping prince’s grasp, as if unable to resist the urge. His main activity in the film is not to seize a political opportunity or bring a grand plan to achievement but to “get away” with his tricks, “contemplatin’ nothin’ but escape and finally makin’ it,” as the song says, surviving against the odds. In this he perfectly fits both the wily fox of medieval and later animal tradition (the legacy from Reynard narrative seems especially evident), the episodic and repetitive Robin Hood tradition, and the magically self-repairing cartoon character norm. Just as there is no arrow seen in Robin’s hat before Little John remarks on it, and no hole visible in either his hat or in Little John’s after both have been pierced, the point of the character is not change through time but endless renewal. The Disney studio did well to reject the alternate ending in which he is shown as actually wounded, in favor of his wily resurgence, unscathed, from the river of death. That choice also seems to show Robin’s spiritual inheritance from Disney’s Reynard. In the first script version of the cancelled project, the fox’s last words were “Have no fear. I’ll come back. I’ll always come back!”22 If Robin is one of the boys, his enemies are portraits of adult inadequacy and evil: Prince John, Hiss, and the Sheriff. Peter Ustinov’s Prince John is a vulgar Freudian neurotic, whose anxiety over mother rejection motivates his substitution of gold for love and frequent regressions to the “oral stage.” John fits the political fun of the film perfectly as a ludicrously vain figure satirizing authority, but only because his is not legitimate authority. He is wrong because he is not up to the job and a “sissy”

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whose tyrannical rages cannot frighten for long because Robin’s successes always turn them into infant tantrums, reducing the angry adult to a “baby” worthy of children’s contempt: “Then he calls for Mom and then he sucks his thumb!” Politically, the film’s view of John as “Phony King” is perfectly in the original thirteenth-century image of him created by Roger Wendover and Matthew Paris, “a tyrant rather than a king.”23 Even the crown which is too broad for John’s weak unleonine brow matches the Abbreviatio Chronicorum in British Library, Cotton Claudius MS D.VI, fol. 9v, which shows the crown slipping sideways on John’s head as he sits unworthily in succession to Henry II and Richard the Lionheart.24 Ustinov’s King John also references his over-the-top neurotic Nero in Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis (1951). Yet, such comic impotent rants are also familiar from baff led tyrants in medieval literature and drama, such as the York Play’s Herod, desperate to find the Christ child: “Ye lye, youre note is naught, / The deueles of helle you droune!…Or that same lad be sought / Schalle I never byde in bedde!” 25 They are also found in Robin Hood ballads, where it is usually the Sheriff who threatens and blusters like this: The project it was full performed; The sheriff that letter had; Which when he read he scratched his head, And rav’d like one that’s mad. So we’ll leave him chafing in his grease, Which will do him no good.26

Part of the role of both John and the Sheriff is to be the kind of evil but comic figures who give a collective identity (the ballad’s “we”) to the audience who laughs at them. In the forest celebration scene, the film subtly stages a version of itself in the puppet show that leaves the villagers helpless with laughter at the tyrant’s weakness. Overall, Robin Hood’s shifting combination of cultural registers and referents prevents an impression of over-simplicity in both societal and individual characterization. A good example is Prince John’s sycophantic adviser, Sir Hiss. He is voiced by Terry Thomas in an effete Oxford accent and comically humiliated by frequent distortions of shape, but also given more sinister and traditional serpentine powers, specifically recalling the hypnotic malice of Ka the Python in Disney’s The Jungle Book. Reitherman’s much-criticized reuse of earlier animation here actually builds a more complex character through the quotation, making more credible Hiss’s ability to have hypnotized King Richard into undertaking “that silly Crusade.” Hiss manipulates Prince John’s habitual oscillations

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between narcissistic folie de grandeur and thumb-sucking insecurity, but he gains no benefit from his power. In the overall process, he is recognizable as a common medieval and medievalist narrative type, whose prototype is Satan in Genesis: he is an “evil counselor” who is both a cause and a symptom of royal corruption, and, in this case, with a hint of the wheedling medieval royal “favorite.” In his many sufferings at the hands of Prince John, Hiss also fulfills a traditional comic role in medieval (and Renaissance) theater—the side-kick who bears physically the brunt of a tyrant’s rage when things go badly, only for saying that they are going badly. The Second Devil in the York Play Fall of the Angels27 and the servants of Herod, Pilate and Shakespeare’s Macbeth are congruent examples. The Sheriff is the character that best fits the film’s location of “Nottingham” in a depressed Southern locale and may have first suggested it. His fat arse, bullying swagger, meanness, and bumbling deputies are traditional to a view of the “law” from those oppressed by its activities. (Alan-a-Dale sings “Not in Nottingham” from the jailhouse.) Social humiliation of the proud Sheriff is a staple of Robin Hood tradition, where his repeated failures to capture Robin are a source of much comedy: “Seyr, how haffe yow fared yn grene foreyst? Haffe ye browt Roben hom?” “Dam, the deyell spede hem, bothe bodey and bon; Y haffe hade a foll gret skorne.”28

The Disney Sheriff, as his accent reveals, is no “Norman”-style baron but a man of the people who has turned against his own for the power and perks he receives from the oppressor. He is shown as a very necessary collaborator for John, who has little or no personal contact with the “peasants,” since he brings John’s tyranny down to the grass-roots: squeezing the last farthings out of the poor, frustrating their charity, and translating Friar Tuck’s justifiable anger into “high treason against the crown.” Interestingly, while the Sheriff shares an American accent with Friar Tuck, a notable antagonist, both Otto and Mrs. Rabbit, his main victims, are given attempts at English working-class voices, as if to indicate his lack of solidarity with them. It is very fitting as a poetic irony that through his vicarious power-seeking, the Sheriff finally shares the fate of Prince John and Hiss, chained on the rock-pile in identical convict uniforms and guarded by his numbskull former deputies, while the villagers rejoice elsewhere with Robin. Overall, his activities represent a breaking of the traditional social loyalties of the village, while Robin works to maintain them. Significantly, Robin helps out the poor

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partly just by replacing their gifts to each other that the Sheriff has stolen (Skippy’s birthday farthing, the poor-box contents). As a political model, that activity looks more like individualist reparation than revolution, but it is based on a strong faith in the collective ability, and the obligation, of ordinary people to look after each other. As Kevin Harty remarks, the animal characterization of the film establishes a “moral distance”29 that makes Robin’s outlaw actions more uncomplicated fun, but socialization is in waiting for him through the love plot. When Richard returns, Robin’s energies seem all turned to marriage and family, not politics. This move has been well prepared for. Throughout the film, the interaction of Robin, Marian, and Lady Kluck with the child characters has initiated them (and their audience counterparts) into expectations of heterosexual romance and the propagation of large families—the norm for foxes in any case. The picture of love and marriage that we see is focused through the eyes of young children and is highly traditional in its gender values. As a female fox—we can tell from her long eyelashes and breathy high-pitched voice—Marian takes small part in the action scenes and is largely confined to the love story. Lady Kluck, by contrast, as older and “the Fat One,” is allowed her comic aristeia but debarred from any but vicarious romance. The children are equally gendered. Little Skippy’s hero-worship of Robin shows he is the kind of cool adult a boy wants to be, a big brother rather than a real father-type, whereas Skippy’s older sister is more interested in the “kissing.” Love, as socially realized in marriage, will preclude further “larks” for Robin, but it also seems that marriage and fatherhood will not place him in a more mature version of public life. He simply cedes action to the king. The final sequence shows his “settling down” as a literal departure from the scene, as the score melds Roger Miller’s opening theme of playful fun—“Oo De Lally”—with the soupy close harmonies of “Love goes on and on.” In Roland Barthes’ terms, the love story has been used to “tame” the hero.30 Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren maintain that “the Robin Hood tradition always presents, in many varied forms: resistance to authority.” 31 In the “animal kingdom” version of this animated Robin Hood, it might be said that authority is not resisted per se, but only in the illegitimate form it temporarily takes. According to one sense, Robin is a “Resistance” hero as the saboteur of an unlawful regime, but in both the love plot and the politics of the film, the bottom line seems to be Lady Kluck’s “Oh, patience, my dear. Patience.” Nevertheless, some aspects of the ending may question its perfect happiness. Richard’s voice is very noticeably also that of Peter Ustinov—can a change of brothers make all that much difference to the system? Richard’s final bon mot, that he now

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has an “outlaw for an in-law,” has evidently been stolen from Lady Kluck. Little John and young Skippy both go on the honeymoon, perhaps suggesting that Robin will remain, at heart, one of the “boys.” The strength of the film remains the vital diversity of its signifying systems and their relaxed exploitation of the unstable and modular Robin Hood tradition, precluding any simple ideological message. This volatile combination of traditional story and symbol, fantasy animation and human voice supports a surprising complexity of potential meanings in its depiction of a community pulling through in hard times.32 Notes 1. Robin Hood, dir. Wolfgang Reitherman (Walt Disney International Studios, 1973). DVD. 2. List of Disney Theatrical Animated Features, accessed January 5, 2012, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_theatrical_animated_features. 3. Gerald Duchovnay, “Don Bluth,” in Film Voices: Interview from Postscript, ed. Gerald Duchovnay (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 145. 4. “Don Bluth talks with Brian Sibley,” Animator 26 (1990): 1–2, accessed January 9, 2012, http://www.animatormag.com/archive/issue-26/issue26-page-24/. 5. John Canemaker, Paper Dreams: The Art and Artists of Disney Storyboards (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 184, citing the recorded interview “Bill Peet to Charles Solomon, November 1985.” 6. Allan Robin, Walt Disney and Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 253. 7. “Disney Animation #21—Robin Hood (1973),” The Singing Critic, accessed January 10, 2012, http://thesingingcritic.blogspot.com/2011/12/disneyanimation-21-robin-hood-1973.html. 8. Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren, eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 1. 9. For an excellent recent reading of the film, including the opening sequence, see Kevin J. Harty, “Walt in Sherwood; or, the Sheriff of Disneyland,” The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy Tale and Fantasy Past, ed. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). 10. Canemaker, Paper Dreams, 168 and 184, citing the interview “Bill Peet to Charles Solomon, November 1985.” 11. Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (New York: Scribner, 1883). 12. Paul Creswick, Robin Hood (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1917). 13. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), fragment 7, lines 2880–81. 14. Knight and Ohlgren, eds., Robin Hood, “Robyn and Gandelyn,” lines 6–7.

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15. Harty, “Walt in Sherwood.” 16. John Cawley Jr. “Disney Out-Foxed. The Tale of Reynard at the Disney Studio,” in American Classic Screen Features, ed. John C. Tibbets and James M. Welsh (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 245. 17. Cawley, “Disney Out-Foxed,” 242. 18. Mark I. Pinsky, The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust and Pixie Dust (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 98. 19. Pinsky, The Gospel According to Disney, 98. 20. Anne M. Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 103. 21. The Unofficial Disney Animation Archive, “Notes [on Robin Hood],” accessed January 10, 2012, http://animationarchive.net/Feature%20 Films/Robin%20Hood/Notes/. 22. Cawley, “Disney Out-Foxed”, 246. 23. Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 192. 24. Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris, 192 and 157, figure 88. 25. The Slaughter of the Innocents, in The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle, 2 vols. EETS s.s. 23 (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 2009), vol. 1, lines 268–69, slightly modernized. 26. Knight and Ohlgren, eds., Robin Hood, “Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow,” 546, lines 126–29. See also “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne,” 175, lines 79–82. 27. The York Plays, ed. Beadle, 1:4–7. 28. Knight and Ohlgren, eds., Robin Hood, “Robin Hood and the Potter,” 71, lines 294–97. 29. Harty, “Walt in Sherwood.” 30. Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 301. 31. Knight and Ohlgren, eds., Robin Hood, 1. 32. Thanks to Kevin Harty and Brittany Mann for helpful comments on this essay.

CHAPTER 3 VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MIDDLE AGES Steve Ellis

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his essay concentrates on the last phase of Woolf ’s career, from the mid-1930s to her death, and on the relation between the individual and the community which at that time exercises her deeply, and on how her response to the Middle Ages, and to one of its writers in particular, Dante, relates to this concern. In a prospective history of literature originally entitled Reading at Random, which Woolf worked on in the last months of her life, the opening two unfinished chapters “Anon” and “The Reader” trace the course of British literature from its earliest oral inception to the crucial invention of printing at the Renaissance, regarding this key cultural shift with typical Woolfian ambivalence as marking both significant loss and gain. In the medieval period, Woolf tells us, anonymity was a great possession. It gave the early writing an impersonality, a generality. It gave us the ballads; it gave us the songs. It allowed us to know nothing of the writer: and so to concentrate upon his song. Anon had great privileges. He was not responsible. He was not self conscious . . . He can borrow. He can repeat. He can say what every one feels. No one tries to stamp his own name, to discover his own experience, in his work . . . The anonymous playwright has like the singer this nameless vitality, something drawn from the crowd in the penny seats and not yet dead in ourselves.1

“Anon” is thus the mouthpiece for collective experience, whether expressed in the lyric or the play, his death being dated, in an earlier draft of the essay, to the arrival of Caxton and his press: “that babbling, child like, story telling singer, that gossip at the farm yard door, that innocent

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eyed, naked, alternately lustful, obscene and devout singer, who was now and again a great artist died in 147[8]{7}, And with him died the part of his song that the audience sang.”2 But this also marks the birth (or at least consolidation) of the author and reader, and, with this, a more complex individualism in the production and consumption of text, so that even a communal form like the play henceforth outgrows “the uncovered theatre where the sun beats and the rain pours. That theatre must be replaced by the theatre of the brain. The playwright is replaced by the man who writes a book. The audience is replaced by the reader. Anon is dead.”3 Even so, Anon’s heritage lives on—he is “not yet dead in ourselves. We can still become anonymous.”4 The value of this heritage is emphasized by Woolf throughout her later writing as an antidote to the modern obsession with fame, and more generally to a male ambition, competitiveness, and egotism that in Three Guineas (1938) are diagnosed as the root cause of the imminent European war. It is a legacy that has been primarily in the keeping of women: in A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf “would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,” arguing further that for women, “anonymity runs in their blood . . . They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are.”5 In Woolf ’s final novel Between the Acts (1941), which she was revising while working on Reading at Random, she presents in the figure of Miss La Trobe just such an anonymous female artist working in the communal form of the pageant play, and one who, although named, “wishes it seems to remain anonymous” at the end of the play and receive no praise.6 Miss La Trobe’s name indeed represents her medieval ancestry, suggesting, as it does, a troubadour or “singer,” as does the fact that her pageant begins in “the time of Chaucer,” where the Canterbury pilgrims, “a long line of villagers in shirts made of sacking,” 7 form a backdrop to the ensuing action: All the time the villagers were passing in and out between the trees. They were singing; but only a word or two was audible . . . The wind blew away the connecting words of their chant, and then, as they reached the tree at the end they sang: “To the shrine of the Saint . . . to the tomb . . . lovers . . . believers . . . we come. . .” They grouped themselves together.8

Chaucer’s pilgrims here are not the picturesque, “larger-than-life” figures that we might expect from the Canterbury Tales, but are themselves an anonymous collective, whose lines of communication with a modern audience are partial and precarious in the blowing wind—dead but “not yet dead in ourselves,” perhaps.

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In Three Guineas, Woolf excoriated the modern desire for fame that besets writers, politicians, and others, together with the growing celebrity culture promoted by the modern press, media photography, and the lecture circuit, all of which offered a “limelight” which “paralyses the free action of the human faculties . . . ease and freedom, the power to change and the power to grow, can only be preserved by obscurity.”9 It is easy to see why a period of medieval “obscurity” should be an effective counterattraction for her, where “no one tries to stamp his own name, to discover his own experience,” in Anon’s work. Anon, as we saw above, “was now and again a great artist,” and whether or not Woolf has Chaucer specifically in mind here, her comments on Chaucer elsewhere very much see him as part of this early, “childlike” phase of literature acting as a mouthpiece for his audience.10 By contrast, the obsessive insistence on the pronoun “I” shown by the modern male writer is seen in A Room of One’s Own as casting its phallic, baleful shadow across everything it describes.11 The Renaissance is posited as the birth of this artistic self-consciousness and rivalry, in the person, for example, of Spenser: “He is aware of his art as Chaucer was not, nor Langland, nor Malory. His is no longer a wandering voice, but the voice of a man practising an art, asking for recognition, and bitterly conscious of his relation [to] the world, of the world’s scorn.”12 It is hardly to be wondered at, therefore, that many critics have seen Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts, and the art she represents, as some kind of ideal model of the return of literature to the community, and one that redresses the solitude and self-absorption that characterize both writing and reading. Thus, in Brenda Silver’s words Between the Acts shows Woolf ’s commitment to the “concept of the playhouse and playwright as the center and creator of community,” while Nora Eisenberg interprets Reading at Random as arguing that “with the printed book, Anon is lost, and his audience is transformed from an active, united chorus into relatively passive and isolated readers.”13 But this is to address only one aspect of Woolf ’s historical narrative: however much the arrival of the printed book might give an outlet for authorial vanity, it opened up great opportunities for readers, and far from reading ever being a “passive” activity for Woolf, it remains throughout her writing one of our key human activities, enlarging our freedoms in a way Woolf makes quite plain in “The Reader” itself: “we develop faculties that the play left dormant . . . [the reader] can pause; he can ponder . . . He can gratify many different moods. He can read directly what is on the page, or, drawing aside, can read what is not written. There is a long drawn continuity in the book that the play has not. It gives a different pace to the mind.”14 Whatever Woolf ’s desire for a more inclusive model of community represented by a preprint culture, there is a powerful counterstrategy of private reading

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running parallel to this in her work of the late-1930s and early-1940s, and one which, as I shall argue in relation to Dante, offers a more convincing resolution of the problems of the relation between community and the individual outlined below. Woolf was indeed highly anxious about the submergence of the individual within the group, especially during the wartime conditions in which Between the Acts was completed. As she noted in her diary on July 12, 1940, “I don’t like any of the feelings war breeds: patriotism; communal &c, all sentimental & emotional parodies of our real feelings.”15 In the opposition between “united chorus” and “isolated reader,” to use Eisenberg’s terms, Woolf frequently came down on the latter side, notably during the 1930s, when she saw the emergence of political camps in writing that demanded an orthodox group response. Thus in her lecture/ essay “The Leaning Tower,” published in the autumn of 1940, she attacks poets like Day Lewis and MacNeice for producing not poetry but what she calls “oratory,” the effect of which depends on the fact that “other people should be listening too. We are in a group, in a class-room as we listen,” whereas genuine poetry (Wordsworth is quoted as an example) is something “we listen to … when we are alone. We remember that in solitude.”16 Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts is in fact inscribed with several troubling features that relate her to this climate of the 1930s, not only in what one critic has described as her “führerlike bearing”17 but above all in her pageant’s final address to the audience, where a “megaphonic, anonymous, loud-speaking affirmation”18 hectors the audience as a set of “scraps, orts and fragments” and scorns the possibility of such as they rebuilding “civilization.” The “anonymous bray of the infernal megaphone”19 here offers a version of Anon that is much less savory. In some Notes attached to Reading at Random, the open-air theater where “the sun beat or the rain poured” is seen, together with the medieval lyrics, as part of a cultural complex which “call[s] to our primitive instincts,”20 and, in “Anon” itself, Woolf talks of “the old play that the peasants acted when spring came and to placate the earth, the mummer hung himself with green leaves.”21 Miss La Trobe, like the green man of the folk play, is associated throughout Between the Acts with birds and trees (“stubb[ing] her toe against a root,” “grating her fingers in the bark”).22 These forces are the remnants of a racial childhood that “still exists in us, deep sunk, savage, primitive, remembered,”23 and, by the very end of the novel, when the curtain goes up on Miss La Trobe’s next play, these savage instincts are in the ascendant. We have arrived at the “theatre of war,” where Giles and Isa regress to primal gender roles: Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they

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had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night. Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too. And Isa too against the window. The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke.24

Here, the scenario evokes a whole civilization reverting to barbarism, a dramatization of the wartime “black-out” on many different levels, and one echoed plentifully in Woolf ’s diaries and letters at the time: “I’ve just pulled down the black blinds—rats in caves live as we do.”25 While I do not deny that Miss La Trobe’s pageant does some productive work, so to speak, in its earlier scenes exposing and debunking the patriarchy in a variety of ways, Woolf clearly suggests that collective forms like the theater retain elements of the primitive and ritualistic that can easily be harnessed to authoritarianism. Her long-standing distaste for overtly moralizing or coercive literature would certainly baulk at Miss La Trobe’s “megaphonic” methods at the end of her pageant, and I believe that the turning on the audience at this point gestures to the knights’ accosting the audience in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935), with its celebrated fusion of medieval story and modern police-state: “I suggest that you now disperse quietly to your homes. Please be careful not to loiter in groups at street corners, and do nothing that might provoke any public outbreak.”26 Woolf both read and saw Eliot’s play—”the pale New England morality murder”—soon after it came out. 27 Freedom is rather preserved in an individual reading process that “can pause . . . can ponder . . . can gratify many different moods . . . can read directly what is on the page, or, drawing aside, can read what is not written.” 28 The fact that Woolf wrote a novel containing a play, rather than a play directly, allows us precisely as readers to ref lect on this relationship between genres in a way in which the play alone could not. And I would argue that Woolf ’s most productive relationship with drama comes from her reading, rather than viewing of it, as in the use she makes of Antigone in Three Guineas. This position goes against that of Penny Farfan, who argues that “theatre exemplified more vividly than literature Woolf ’s belief in the power of art to engender change.” 29 What is really at issue, however, is the empowerment that Woolf attaches to the activity of reading. Woolf concludes her essay “How Should One Read a Book?” (1926) with a statement that anticipates the end of Between the Acts quoted above:

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“the reason why we have. . .made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.”30 The idea of reading as a progression out of barbarism signals in fact the limits of Woolf ’s attraction to the preauthorial Middle Ages. In many ways the period remained one of darkness to her, rather than an alleviating “obscurity.” Thus, the winter of 1940 is described in a letter as “medieval” because of its loss of services: “the electricity broke down. We cooked over the fire, remained unwashed, slept in stockings and muff lers.”31 The blackout in 1939 is described in another letter as “medieval gloom,”32 or in her diary as a “reversion to the middle ages,”33 with London “after sunset a medieval city of darkness & brigandage.”34 Perhaps most telling of all is a holiday entry in her diary of 1937: “Bank Holiday in France. Then to Najac—sordidly medieval; bossed; with great beams; and muff led grinning heads; round a medieval fountain. No place for human beings to live in—the middle ages.”35 But one medieval writer Woolf respects enormously, though perhaps at the cost of minimizing precisely his “medievalness,” is, as noted above, Dante. Her interest in his work has received only sporadic attention from critics, but it not only enables us to confirm the importance of the process of reading for Woolf, it also offers a much less problematic resolution of the group/individual dilemma than her supposed elevation of the communal playhouse. Dante indeed has lines that support Woolf ’s position on celebrity, like Oderisi’s famous outcry against the absurd vainglory of artistic reputation from the terrace of Pride in Purgatorio, canto 11 (lines 91ff.). Woolf copied this passage into her diary in February 1935, together with the Temple Classics translation to the effect that “Earthly fame is but a breath of wind,” short-lived and insubstantial compared with immortality proper.36 Her reading of the Purgatorio in late 1934 and 1935, while she was working on The Years (1937), is not only recorded in a series of diary entries but also in some manuscript reading Notes, which consist mostly of transcribed passages from the poem, two of which are particularly significant: lines from Guido del Duca’s speech in canto 14 and Virgil’s commentary on these in canto 15. Here, from the second terrace of Purgatory where Envy is punished, Dante proceeds to develop a vision of sharing and partnership, a communitarian ethos. It is significant that though Woolf ’s notes track this middle section of the Purgatorio largely consecutively, quoting from cantos 15–18 in order, they are punctuated and indeed concluded by the two lines from canto 14 (86–87) that seem a particular springboard to her, first in English (“O human folk, why set the heart there where exclusion of partnership is”) then later in Italian (“O gente umana, perchè poni il core / la v’è mestier di consorto divieto?”).37

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In The Years, some of Virgil’s lines from canto 15 are repeated in the scene at the end of the “1911” section, where Woolf ’s main protagonist Eleanor goes to bed to find some reading laid out for her by her hostess: She opened the book that lay on the counterpane. She hoped it was Ruff’s Tour, or the Diary of a Nobody, but it was Dante, and she was too lazy to change it. She read a few lines, here and there. But her Italian was rusty; the meaning escaped her. There was a meaning however; a hook seemed to scratch the surface of her mind. chè per quanti si dice più lì nostro tanto possiede più di ben ciascuno. What did that mean? She read the English translation. For by so many more there are who say “ours” So much the more of good doth each possess. Brushed lightly by her mind that was watching the moths on the ceiling, and listening to the call of the owl as it looped from tree to tree with its liquid cry, the words did not give out their full meaning, but seemed to hold something furled up in the hard shell of the archaic Italian. I’ll read it one of these days, she thought, shutting the book. 38

The meaning “furled up” here is, as Virgil expounds to Dante, the idea that the love enjoyed by the spirits in Paradise is, unlike material goods (with their “exclusion of partnership”), increased for each one that shares it with the growth of their collective number: Virgil later uses the image of mirrors doubling and f lashing light back at one another to explain a good that grows rather than diminishes through increased participation. In the reading Notes on these lines mentioned above, Woolf writes that “this is the interesting thing: Xtianity [Christianity]: a true psychology. ‘Ours’ not ‘I’.”39 One critic has called Dante’s lines central to The Years in their ideal vision of community towards which the various characters in the novel uncertainly aspire.40 Woolf ’s interest in Dante in her later writing is commensurate with her desire for a culture that emphasizes the social whole rather than individual self-promotion, although as I have suggested there is a deep unease about the community’s total absorption of the individual. Indeed, what The Years and Three Guineas repeatedly stress is the desire to retain the full value of the latter within the former, “the bubble and the stream, the stream and the bubble—myself and the world together,” as North imagines it in the novel.41 This mediation between the two is expressed in the very final words of Three Guineas, where Woolf quotes George Sand, together with Coleridge quoting Rousseau, great names here uniting in

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a commonalty: “to find a form of society according to which each one uniting with the whole shall yet obey himself only and remain as free as before.”42 I believe that Woolf ’s reading of the Purgatorio also fed into this vision of a collective of individuals in the 1930s, particularly in its restoration to Dante the pilgrim as he ascends the mountain of a freedom to “obey himself only” that is simultaneously the entry into the paradisal community. In Virgil’s words: libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio, e fallo fora non fare a suo senno. Per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio. [Your will is healthy, upright, free and whole. And not to heed that sense would be a fault. Lord of yourself, I crown and mitre you.]43

This response to Dante as one contributor to Woolf ’s vision of community in the 1930s shows an interesting shift from her earlier response to him. I have suggested elsewhere that the episode in the Purgatorio just referred to, Dante’s entry into the paradiso terrestre, is evoked at the very end of Mrs. Dalloway where Peter Walsh’s “ecstasy” and “terror” is rekindled at the sight of Clarissa in a manner akin to Dante’s reunion with Beatrice.44 There is also something of Beatrice in the depiction of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, and other critics have noted parallels with the Inferno in Woolf ’s depiction of the city both in Mrs. Dalloway and in The Waves.45 In the latter novel there are also, in Bernard’s valiant final coursing of “the waves” of life to face the enemy, death, explicit echoes of the celebrated last voyage of Ulysses in Inferno 26, as Woolf herself commented in her diary in copying out lines from this canto.46 But one might say that these references to the Inferno, or to some of the high moments of individual endeavor in the poem, or to the Dante-Beatrice story, all follow in the trodden path of Romantic-Victorian responses to Dante. In the 1930s, Woolf ’s emphasis on the poem’s social dimension through attending to the Purgatorio is a much more uncommon reading, though it is tempting to speculate how much she is prompted to it through her friendship with T. S. Eliot, and his own promoting of Dante. In “Ash-Wednesday” (1930), Eliot drew heavily on the Purgatorio, particularly in sections 3 and 4 of his poem, where Dante’s ascent of the mountain underlies the persona’s own arduous struggle with sin and temptation: “Lord, I am not worthy / but speak the word only.”47 Woolf ’s diary entry copying Dante’s lines on fame, noted above, follows the day after she records entertaining Eliot to tea, where she noted “how he suffers!. . .He seemed to have got so little joy or satisfaction out of being Tom . . . suddenly [he] spoke with

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a genuine cry of feeling. About immortality: what it meant to him—I think it was that . . . A religious soul: an unhappy man: a lonely very sensitive man, all wrapt up in fibres of self torture, doubt, conceit.”48 It is precisely this narrative of spiritual self hood that Woolf does not attend to in her comments on the Purgatorio. In the dedicatory tag of The Waste Land to Pound as the “miglior fabbro,” or the encounter with the “dead master” in the Dantesque episode from “Little Gidding,”49 we see Eliot and his peers playing out issues of poetic discipleship, emulation, and so forth. By contrast, Woolf shows no interest in Dante as a poet figure, nor in associated issues like the Virgil-Dante succession that constitutes such an important part of the European tradition for Eliot. Woolf is silent on the “poet as hero” trope that we find in modernist male responses to Dante, and indeed that we find in Dante himself in terms of his own self-fashioning. The undermining of the hero figure, or eliding of the central protagonist, becomes a progressive theme in Woolf ’s later writing as her interest in community takes hold. If her fiction up to Orlando (1928) does frequently center on individual protagonists, the scope widens through The Waves, The Years, and Between the Acts from the small group to the large family to the whole village community; indeed, the absent hero theme is signaled by the figure of Percival in the first of these novels—he is the center of the group’s desires but makes no appearance himself. The modernist appropriation of Dante is largely a male club, and to this club Woolf felt a profound antipathy—she felt excluded from it on grounds of educational opportunity, of course, but also because of the male ethic of rivalry and ambition, the male concern with “fame.” By contrast, Woolf ’s Dante is contiguous with the private and the domestic, as in a diary entry of 1930: “I am reading Dante, & I say, yes, this makes all writing unnecessary. This surpasses ‘writing’ as I say about [Shakespeare]. I read the Inferno for half an hour at the end of my own page: & that is the place of honour; that is to put the page into the furnace—if I have a furnace. Now to mash the potatoes.& L[eonard] has laid my carpet.”50 There is a deliberate sense of bathos here, concluding this account of Woolf ’s engagement with Dante, just as there is in Eleanor’s final response above: “I’ll read it one of these days, she thought, shutting the book.” Jane de Gay has also referred to Woolf ’s “ joking” domestification of Dante elsewhere in her writing.51 Throughout Woolf ’s work, of course, the “great tradition” of male writing is constantly ghosted by the female history of domesticity, exclusion, and educational disadvantage, often expressed in the confining image of the “room”: “women have sat indoors all these millions of years.”52 Nevertheless, both in A Room and in Three Guineas, this tradition of exclusion is retrieved

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as a source of writerly empowerment, both in terms of a heritage of sensitive observation—“people’s feelings were impressed upon her; personal relations were always before her eyes”53 —and a schooling in the obscurity which enables the writer to resist the crippling enticements of fame. Moreover, the domestic is privileged as determining cultural production: in “Anon” medieval lyrics are described as “out of door songs because there was no comfort indoors”;54 in “The Pastons and Chaucer,” the cheer that reading Chaucer provides for John Paston is compensation for domestic deprivation, “the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes.”55 The domestic is a key factor, then, in both the production and reception of texts, but this documenting of the domestic is regarded by Woolf as a female enterprise, both fictionally (as in her early story “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”) and factually, in works like Medieval People by Eileen Power (1924), an associate of Woolf ’s.56 Her retrieval of the contiguity between great art and homely circumstance extends to presenting Dante’s own city, Florence, through the eyes and nostrils of a dog, as in the novel Flush of 1933. This is not to question Woolf ’s admiration for Dante, even if he does have to share her attention with mashing the potatoes, but it does suggest that she admires him in a different way from several of her contemporaries. In the comment from her diary above, the idea of a private relationship with him on the level of writing itself—“this makes all writing unnecessary”—suggests a strangely ahistorical coming together of the two, one which seems devoid of any interest in Dante’s life, or his contemporary circumstances, or indeed the “medieval” altogether. And, as I noted above, the community vision he transmits to Woolf seems perfectly compatible with that of later writers like Rousseau and George Sand. Indeed, perhaps Dante is only important to Woolf insofar as he is seen as not truly “medieval” at all, in a way that Chaucer, who, in “The Pastons and Chaucer” is carefully attended to in a historical context, is. This might seem a curiously personalized, even eccentric relationship with Dante, and indeed what is apparent above all in her reading of him is the privacy and intimacy of that relationship. She never published on him, never cried up his “fame” in the manner of Eliot, especially in his “Dante” essay of 1929. We find evidence of the encounter largely in her diary and notebooks, one that insists on her rights as a reader, and as a writer, to respond as she can, whatever her educational training. At times, as with relationships in real life, it was a struggle: as we saw, she is reading the Inferno in 1930, while five years later her diary laments “at this rate I shall never finish the Purgatorio”;57 and again in an

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entry of June 1935, “I cant read Dante after a morning with my novel— too hard,”58 the novel at this stage being The Pargiters, an early version of The Years. But, on the other side, there are the moments of glory with Dante set in his “place of honour”: “Its true, I get more thrill from Dante, read after an hours Waves, than from almost any reading.”59 Woolf herself is fully alive to the complexities of the relationship: “Isnt it odd? Some days I can’t read Dante at all after revising the P.s [Pargiters]: other days I find it very sublime & helpful.”60 After 1935, her diary is silent as to whether she progressed to the Paradiso, and thus overcame her worry that “I may not have read all Dante before I—but why harp on death?”61 By the Paradiso, however, the absorption of the individual into the community may have become too absolute for Woolf, leaving the Purgatorio to represent Dante’s fullest mediation between individual realization (“Lord of yourself, I crown and mitre you”) and collective belonging. Virgil’s image noted above, of mirrors ref lecting light to one another to explain a good that grows through increased individual participation is evoked, I believe—in a parallel that has hitherto gone unremarked—at the end of the pageant in Between the Acts, where the players confront the members of the audience with a set of mirrors, “f lashing, dazzling, dancing, jumping,” in which they see themselves for the “orts, scraps and fragments” that they are, all bent on their private desires.62 This functions as a kind of shattered—but brutal—obverse of Dante’s Paradise, with one of the verbal fragments that accompanies this episode, “In thy will is our peace,”63 evoking the famous phrase from Paradiso, 3. 85, as Fleishman noted.64 At the end of “The Leaning Tower”—that paean to private reading, where the common reader is assured of his or her rights of response, and where reading is a process which we must, and should, “teach ourselves” rather than have taught to us—Woolf exhorts her audience not to “shy away from the kings because we are commoners.” This, she argues, would be “a fatal crime in the eyes of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Dante, who, if they could speak—and after all they can—would say, ‘Don’t leave me to the wigged and gowned. Read me, read me for yourselves’. They do not mind if we get our accents wrong, or have to read with a crib in front of us.”65 This is a version of Woolf ’s famous “society of outsiders” promoted in Three Guineas, with the reader who is an outsider to the educational establishment linked in a common activity with others via the public library system, but an activity that recognizes the individual reader’s rights. We might say that reading too, like Dante’s love, is a good that grows rather than diminishes through increased participation and that knows no “exclusion of partnership.”

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Notes 1. “‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’: Virginia Woolf ’s Last Essays,” ed. and intro. Brenda R. Silver, Twentieth Century Literature 25 (1979): 397–98. 2. Woolf, “Anon,” 404. 3. Woolf, “Anon,” 398. 4. Woolf, “Anon,” 398. 5. “A Room of One’s Own,” in A Room of One’s Own [and] Three Guineas, ed. and intro. Michèle Barrett (London: Penguin, 1993), 45–46. 6. Between the Acts, ed. Stella McNichol, intro. Gillian Beer (London: Penguin, 1992), 115. 7. Woolf, Between the Acts, 48. 8. Woolf, Between the Acts, 50. 9. Woolf, Three Guineas, 240. 10. On this “simplified” Chaucer, see my “Framing the Father: Chaucer and Virginia Woolf,” New Medieval Literatures 7 (2005): 35–52. 11. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 90. 12. Woolf, “Anon,” 391. 13. Brenda R. Silver, “Virginia Woolf and the Concept of Community: The Elizabethan Playhouse,” Women’s Studies 4 (1976–1977): 295; Nora Eisenberg, “Virginia Woolf ’s Last Words on Words: Between the Acts and ‘Anon’,” in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 261. 14. Woolf, “The Reader,” 429. 15. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5: 1936–1941, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Penguin, 1985), 302. Woolf ’s lack of orthodox punctuation in the diaries is reproduced throughout this essay. 16. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6: 1933–1941, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth, 2011), 272. 17. Michele Pridmore-Brown, “1939–1940: Of Virginia Woolf, Gramophones, and Fascism,” PMLA 113 (1998): 417. 18. Woolf, Between the Acts, 111. 19. Woolf, Between the Acts, 112 20. Woolf, “Anon,” 374. 21. Woolf, “Anon,” 392. 22. Woolf, Between the Acts, 58 and 107. 23. Woolf, “Anon,” 381. 24. Woolf, Between the Acts, 129–30. 25. Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6, 1936– 1941, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth, 1980), 364. 26. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1969), 279–80. 27. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4: 1931–1935, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Penguin, 1983), 323, 356. 28. Woolf, “Anon,” 429. 29. Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 99.

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30. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1994), 399. 31. Woolf, Leave the Letters, 381. 32. Woolf, Leave the Letters, 367. 33. Woolf, Diary, 5:242. 34. Woolf, Diary, 5:236. 35. Woolf, Diary, 5:88. 36. Woolf, Diary, 4:278. 37. Virginia Woolf Manuscripts, Monk’s House Papers MH/B3b. 38. The Years, ed. and intro. Jeri Johnson (London: Penguin, 1998), 155–56. 39. Virginia Woolf Manuscripts, Monk’s House Papers MH/B3b. 40. Avrom Fleishman, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 187. 41. Woolf, The Years, 127. 42. Woolf, Three Guineas, 323. 43. Purgatorio, canto 27, lines 140–2, trans. and ed. Robin Kirkpatrick (London: Penguin, 2007), 258–59. 44. Steve Ellis, Virginia Woolf and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 55. 45. Beverly Ann Schlack, Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf’s Use of Literary Illusion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), 69–72; Jane de Gay, Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 175–79. 46. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Penguin, 1982), 339. 47. Eliot, Complete Poems, 93 48. Woolf, Diary, 4:277 49. Eliot, Complete Poems, 59 and 193–95 50. Woolf, Diary, 3:313. 51. Virginia Woolf’s Novels, 178. 52. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 79. 53. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 61. 54. Woolf, “Anon,” 403. 55. Woolf, Essays, 4:26. 56. Woolf, Diary, 3:30. 57. Woolf, Diary, 4:295. 58. Woolf, Diary, 4:320. 59. Woolf, Diary, 4:5. 60. Woolf, Diary, 4:264. 61. Woolf, Diary, 4:274. 62. Woolf, Between the Acts, 133 and 136. 63. Woolf, Between the Acts, 110. 64. Fleishman, Virginia Woolf, 217. 65. Woolf, Essays, 6:277.

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CHAPTER 4 DARIO FO’S MISTERO BUFFO AND THE LEFT-MODERNIST RECLAMATION OF MEDIEVAL POPULAR CULTURE Louise D’Arcens

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he study of popular culture has long harbored what can be described as a latent medievalist impulse. Among the cluster of competing definitions of the word “popular” over which scholars have wrestled,1 there has been one that has taken a longitudinal approach, perceiving “popular culture” to be the authentic expression and repository of “the people,” il popolo or das Volk, who have been understood as an historical category. According to the practitioners of this approach, the customs and traditions of these “popular classes” have endured across centuries despite not participating in “official culture.” The culture associated with “the people” is deemed popular in the sense that it is produced by them and for their own consumption, expressing their interests and their aesthetics. I am calling this a “medievalist impulse” of popular cultural theory because, as cultural theorists and medievalists have separately argued, its emergence in the nineteenth century is inextricably bound up with the philological, literary, and material recovery of medieval culture. David Hall argues that the perception of an “unofficial” medieval culture had preceded the nineteenth century, but the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were distinctive for their celebratory recovery of the culture of the people, a culture regarded as enduring yet fragile to loss under modernity.2 In the hands of the “medievalist left” of the Victorian period, epitomized by socialist William Morris, this delight in medieval popular culture was founded on a nostalgic belief that the Middle Ages were a

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preindustrial utopia, where workers engaged in unalienated labor, at harmony with the processes of their work and enjoying the fruits it bore. A later, profoundly inf luential reclamation of folk culture, on which I wish to concentrate, reemerged in the 1920s and 1930s in the writings of the political philosopher and foundational figure of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci. It is difficult to overstate the significance of Gramsci’s notion of power to modern and postmodern formulations of the relationship between dominant, official culture and the culture of the oppressed. Among others, C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby claim that “when. . . Gramsci’s work became available in English in the 1970s, Cultural Studies’ focus was redefined.”3 His theory of hegemonic power, which accounted for social inequity in cultural and ideological rather than simply economic terms, was instrumental in shaping twentieth-century left-wing historiography and social theory, and, later, such adjacent fields as subaltern studies and certain versions of feminist studies. This concept, which has entered the general academic vocabulary, is nicely summarized by Daniel Strinati: “Dominant groups in society, including fundamentally but not exclusively the ruling class, maintain their dominance by securing the ‘spontaneous consent’ of subordinate groups, including the working class, through the negotiated construction of a political and ideological consensus which incorporates both dominant and dominated groups.”4 The value system of the dominant group is not imposed by force, but by being naturalized as transparently and self-evidently “right,” so that those disadvantaged or devalued under this system nevertheless identify with it and internalize its norms. This consensus, however, can be resisted through the subordinate group’s assertion of its own values, desires, and customs. Situating Gramscian theory in a lineage of “medievalist” formulations of popular culture could seem at first counterintuitive, not least because Gramsci does not speak comprehensively or at length about the Middle Ages in his work. But in his best-known work, the Prison Notebooks, he does develop an explicitly historical account in which a hegemonic medieval culture, buttressed by the relationship between the Catholic Church and the feudal order, was contested by a resilient folk culture characterized by ribald buffoonery and antiauthoritarianism.5 Furthermore, his recourse to the category of “the people” and his defense of their culture has a strong implicit relationship to the older romantic and leftist move to restore the dignity of long-abiding but suppressed folk cultures. What distinguishes the Gramscian acknowledgement of folk culture from that of the nineteenth century is its reliance on Marxist-Hegelian assumptions of class antagonism within the medieval social field and on a belief in the efficacy of folk resistance under conditions of oppression.

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Gramsci is a particularly important figure to consider in relation to the subject of this essay, Dario Fo, who, as a fellow Italian, did not need to wait till the 1970s to adopt the philosopher’s conceptual framework. It has become a critical commonplace to note the Gramscian frame of Fo’s ideology; but, with the exception of Antonio Scuderi’s work, the particularly medievalist inf lection of the Fo-Gramsci relationship is generally overlooked. The inf luence of Gramsci’s historical thesis on Fo is most clearly expressed in the play The Worker Knows 300 Words, the Boss Knows 1,000—That’s Why He’s the Boss (1969), where Gramsci’s ghost appears, urging workers to recover their proud folk traditions that have been covered up or expropriated by the Church, the aristocracy and, more recently, the bourgeoisie.6 Yet, the text on which I will be focusing, Dario Fo’s 1969 medievalist play cycle Mistero Buffo (“Comic Mysteries”), has been described by Fo scholar Tom Behan as the “purest and most famous exposition” of “Gramsci’s interest in working-class and popular culture.” 7 Mistero Buffo is among the most fully developed examples of a postmedieval humorous text that models itself explicitly on medieval comic precedents, in this case the mystery play cycles of the European Middle Ages. This text warrants inclusion in a book on medievalism in popular culture on two counts: first, it has proven to be enduringly appealing to audiences in the four decades since its first performance, and has been translated into numerous languages and seen by millions of people across the world in performances by Fo and by others; and second, it is “popular” in the sense that Fo presents it as a modern reworking of what he takes to be “medieval popular culture.” In this cycle of virtuoso monologues, Fo, as radical left-wing agitator, satirist, and master of the farce tradition, explicitly develops a profile for himself as the descendent of a popular tradition of subversive medieval performance, serving up truth to power through the agency of an intensely physical comedy. Dario Fo, born in 1926, is one of Italy’s most famous performers and playwrights, satirists, and activists. After first training as an architect, he began, as a young man, to move away from that profession and into the world of performance, working in improvisatory theater. Alongside his involvement in live theater, in the early 1950s he also performed satiric monologues on radio, until his show was cancelled after its treatment of biblical tales offended both religious and secular powers. In 1954, he married the actress Franca Rame, who had come from a theatrical family known for its deep knowledge of Italian performance traditions and who has been Fo’s collaborator for more than five decades. Their performances in the 1950s became increasingly controversial, appealing to audiences but attracting the ire of church and government, to the point that they had trouble securing performance spaces. In the 1960s, Fo,

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who had also been writing film screenplays, moved into television, writing and directing a show featuring ordinary people’s lives, before falling out with the studio, again due to their attempts to control his content. Apart from an acclaimed television performance of Mistero Buffo in 1977 (which nevertheless upset the Vatican), Fo has generally remained in theater, spending the last forty-plus years engaging in topical satiric performances as a kind of theatrical activism. Despite his turbulent relationship with the authorities, Fo received the ultimate official endorsement in 1997, when he became the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Critics of Fo’s Nobel Prize argued that he was a performer rather than a literary writer, but he found many prepared to defend his services to a vibrant and engaged creative culture.8 Since the time of his Nobel Prize, Fo has also had, in 2006, an unsuccessful tilt at being elected mayor of Milan; but it is his performing, writing, and teaching that forms the abiding basis of his authority as an activist. The content of Fo’s plays marks him as a fearless critic of social injustice of all kinds, from police corruption (Accidental Death of an Anarchist [1970]) civil disobedience actions of the working poor (Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! [1974]) and workplace inequities (The Boss’s Funeral [1969–1970]), The Worker Knows 300 Words, the Boss Knows 1,000—That’s Why He’s the Boss [1969]). His satire is specific rather than general, focusing on topical events, creating what he has famously described as a “throwaway theater,” which is not intended for posterity, and in fact functions as “the people’s spoken and dramatized newspaper.”9 From 1968 and throughout the 1970s, he wrote his plays to convey counterinformation to working-class audiences, many of whom had not been theater-goers before they encountered him. He reached these audiences through his use of unconventional performance spaces, such as occupied factories during strike actions, football stadiums, and so on. Fo is unapologetic about the consciousness-raising nature of his plays, many of which were followed by “third acts”—symposia in which the audience’s sense of appalled hilarity was shaped into militant action—but he is a firm believer in humor as a tool of consciousness raising. Unlike drama in the tragic mode which, he argued, can only rouse an impotent indignation in the audience, grotesque satire based on grotesque injustice “was the element which . . . permits . . . the popular actor, the folk player, to scratch people’s consciousness, to leave them with a taste of something burned and bitter” (MB, 7),10 which would in turn compel them to engage in activism. For someone as avowedly and urgently engaged with the present moment as Fo has always been, the epithet most strongly associated with him is, surprisingly, overtly medievalist: he is widely lauded as “the people’s court jester.” The Nobel Academy’s statement about Fo’s award

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situated this persona at the heart of his practice, describing him as one “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.”11 The “jester” epithet alludes to Fo’s much-quoted explanation about why, in 1968, he and Rame formed the Communist Party–affiliated company La Nuova Scena (The New Scene)12 after abandoning the commercial theatrical circuit attended by middle-class and educated audiences: he proclaimed that “[w]e were fed up with being the court jesters to the bourgeoisie, on whom our criticism worked like an alka-selzer, so we decided to become the court jesters of the proletariat,”13 in order to foment political indigestion. This self-fashioning as “jester” in turn developed out of Fo’s researches into the early history of European theater and more specifically into disappearing traditions of Italian oral performance. Fo claims to have developed this antiquarian impulse as a child, as a result of listening to the tales told by the local vendors, craftsmen, and fishermen of Lake Maggiore. He took these tales to be a valuable living repository of folk orality and memorized them.14 This historicism can be seen in preMistero Buffo performances, such as Ci ragiono e canto (I Think and Then I Sing), a 1966 performance organized by Fo emerging out of a collaboration with ethnomusicologists, aimed at retrieving and reanimating the popular song traditions of Italy.15 His research into medieval performance traditions, which involved much primary research, and was particularly inf luenced by Paolo Toschi’s 1955 anthropological study The Origins of Italian Theatre, had begun well over a decade before the appearance of Mistero Buffo.16 This research also led him, perhaps unsurprisingly, to the work of Marxist Annales-school historian Marc Bloch, whom he also names in Mistero Buffo as a communist martyr (MB, 4), as well as to Arnold Hauser’s 1951 Social History of Art,17 which argues for the interaction between artistic production and the social order. Out of these researches, which he documents in his prologues to the plays of Mistero Buffo and later in The Tricks of the Trade (1988, trans. 1991), he resurrects the crucial figure of the giullare, the peripatetic medieval performer who gave one-man performances (giullarate) in town squares, inns, and marketplaces, through which he exposed the pretensions and abuses of the powerful, both religious and secular. The giullare’s preferred performance mode in his mockery of power was farce, delivered either in a range of regional dialects, medieval and modern, or in a rapid-fire subsemantic patois called grammelot, a performance language designed both to communicate across regional linguistic divides and to evade charges of treason or blasphemy brought about by the subversive content of the performance. Despite Fo being aligned by scholars with the Italian mime tradition of the commedia dell’arte, especially the anarchic figure of the zanni,

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he is careful to distinguish the socially dangerous farce of the giullare, who, he claims, was frequently persecuted and who he takes as his model, from the more innocuous clowning of his successors, the commedia dell’arte, which Fo believed to have been co-opted into official culture, performing in the courts of the aristocracy.18 Although earlier in this essay I described Fo as an inheritor of medieval performance culture, his recourse to the giullare is arguably closer to a deliberate, politically-motivated revival of the techniques and social function of what he regards as a lost predecessor. While the giullare turns up in different guises in many Fo plays, Mistero Buffo contains his most sustained meditation on medieval resistance humor. Although he later went on to distinguish between the more seditious giullares and those who were “reactionaries and conservatives,”19 in Mistero Buffo the defiant scatology of the giullare is shown, through the historical slide-show discussions punctuating the productions coupled with Fo’s own reenactment of the giullare’s art, to be part of a larger visual and performance culture of rowdy cacophony and grotesquery, which reaches its apotheosis in the socially-inversive community performances of carnival. The playlist in Mistero Buffo is as follows: • • • • • • • • • • • •

The Zanni’s Grammelot (with the Flagellants’ Laude) The Slaughter of the Innocents The Morality Play of the Blind Man and the Cripple The Marriage at Cana The Birth of the Jongleur (Giullare) The Birth of the Villeyn The Resurrection of Lazarus Boniface VIII Death and the Fool Mary Hears of the Sentence Imposed on her Son The Fool at the Foot of the Cross, Laying a Wager Mary at the Foot of the Cross

In order to support his rendition of the medieval “comic mysteries,” in the opening discussion of each play Fo presents himself as a theatrical archaeologist, trawling through codexes, unearthing manuscripts in archaic dialects and translating them, and reexamining frescos and mosaics for fragmentary evidence of the medieval performance culture that has so gripped him. This scholarly persona has, however, attracted controversy, with critics noting that while he “appeal[ed] to the authority of historical documentation” to lend weight to his revivalist project, he in fact crossed into the terrain of creative medievalism, “fabricat[ing]

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his sources and his facts.”20 This included, according to Joseph Farrell, creating visual images by “an unknown master from the Dark Ages” when he could not unearth sufficient visual evidence.21 In his introduction to the entire cycle, Fo presents the medieval mystery plays as organs of official narrative in need of rewriting either to expose the dynamics of aristocratic and ecclesiastical power, or to dramatize the perspective of the proletarian witnesses to the Christian story. For example, the play “The Birth of the Jongleur,” in which a peasant-giullare tells of how he was stripped of his land, family, and dignity by the local lord, dramatizes, à la Gramsci, the violent collusion between ecclesiastical and aristocratic interests (MB, 50). In the play “The Raising of Lazarus,” the audience witnesses the offstage miracle indirectly, through the amazed “real-time” reports of lower-class onlookers, while in “The Marriage at Cana” a rustic drunkard relates how he not only witnessed Jesus turning water into wine, but is still intoxicated from the Dionysian “bender” that took place as a result, and in which Jesus was a key participant (MB, 37–45). Despite the fact that these are rewritings of the medieval sources, Fo is insistent that these performances are not his own invention; he introduces the entire cycle with the declaration that they are, rather, reenactments of Comic Mysteries from in the Middle Ages, describing them as “grotesque performance[s]. . .invented by the people” (MB, 1). And yet, despite his claims to be reviving original medieval performances, his plays also function as audacious continuations of the counterinformational giullare tradition. This is perhaps best exemplified in the play “The Birth of the Villeyn,” a skit about medieval social rank and the division of labor, in which Fo segues seamlessly from a sketch based on selections from the thirteenth-century poem Nativitas rusticorum et qualiter debent tractari by the poet and giullare Matazone da Caligano, in which the first peasant is created by a donkey’s fart, to a highly topical discussion of the Italian firm Ducati’s policy to restrict the toilet breaks of the assembly-line workers at its Bologna plant. He takes up the mantle of medieval comic anticlericalism in his play “Boniface VIII,” an excoriating satire on pontifical arrogance and greed; the play’s material is assembled from a patchwork of medieval sources named and unnamed, but the script is his own; so he becomes a medieval giullare in action. Despite beginning with quite detailed historical prefaces at times, which link his researches to the ideological thrust of the scene to come, Fo’s mysteries are dominated by vigorous physical and aural (rather than straightforwardly verbal) humor, featuring mime, farce, and clowning— all forms that Fo gathers under the heading of teatro minore or teatro popolare, “the theatre of the people,” performance traditions that he claims have been denigrated by bourgeois “literary” theater.22 Fo’s skit on the Ducati

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toilet policy, for instance, involves an elaborate and hilarious mime of attempting to relieve himself in accordance with company’s impossible regulations, while the play on Boniface VIII derives much of its comedy from the physical enactment of grotesque corpulence, pomp, and narcissism. In the latter play, Fo evokes Boniface’s excesses of dress and vanity (and hence those of the papacy, medieval and modern) without props or costumes of any kind, using gesture and sound alone. In this, he claims, he subscribes to Soviet director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s pronouncement that a skilled performer of the people’s arts could create situation through gesture and hence did not need props.23 There is no doubt that Fo’s historicized praxis is largely the product of his research into premodern performance traditions. But this interest also dovetails with his ideological and political commitments as a radical left-wing activist. In fact, as his reference to Meyerhold indicates, Fo can be seen as part of a larger far left and anarchic modernist trend, notable for its commitment to an image of medieval antiauthoritarian folk culture. The title of Fo’s play conspicuously evokes this broader left-modernist lineage by referring directly to Soviet poet-playwright Vladmir Mayakovsky’s 1918 play Mystery-Bouffe, written in celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution. And Fo’s debt does not end with the title; for the earlier play also draws on the mystery play tradition, adapting the narrative of medieval Noah’s Flood plays to represent the “f lood” of the Revolution that will wash away the bourgeois world order and replace it with a workers’ utopia in the form of an electrified city. Instead of pairing animals, Mayakovsky pairs seven of the “unclean” (workers), with seven “clean” characters who represent bourgeois capitalism. Fo’s allusion to Mayakovsky is intriguing in that by the time Fo wrote Mistero Buffo, Mayakovky’s legacy had become posthumously tainted by his official rehabilitation by Stalin, and Fo by this stage had definitely rejected the Party’s doctrinaire ideology. This might partly account for why Mayakovsky is not named as a source by Fo, despite the fact the Russian appears in the same year as a character in The Worker Knows 300 Words. Perhaps Fo is evoking the pre-Stalin Mayakovsky, whose early enthusiasm for the Bolshevik revolution led him to deploy the utopianism and religious semiotics of the medieval mysteries in the service of the new order. It is this gesture that has led Sharon Abramovich-Lehavi to characterize Mayakovsky’s play as “sac/religious,” because it “simultaneously negate[s] the Bible’s religious power and authority and use[s] that very same power as an energetic force for creating a meaningful experience.”24 Despite Mystery-Bouffe’s instrumentalization of premodern Christian tradition, Robert Russell refers to it as “the seminal work of the Civil War period,” drawing on the inherent power of the mystery play form,

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with its eschatological approach to time, to capture a Bolshevik utopian perspective.25 Fo was, in turn, drawn to Mayakovsky’s commitment to reanimating premodern popular culture, with its subversive potential to expose and comically dispose of the ruling classes and their abuses. The other Soviet writer whose Middle Ages bears a striking resemblance to Fo’s is Mikhail Bakhtin, as developed in his famous Rabelais and his World, originally titled Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Bakhtin’s formulation of subversive premodern folk culture, which has had an enormous inf luence on the field of cultural studies, and in particular on that field’s perception of the social dynamics of “low” and “high culture,” is so familiar now as to obviate extensive discussion; but it is only right that he should be mentioned here, given his commitment to the notion of the carnivalesque as the socially inversive “expression of folk consciousness,”26 and for bequeathing us his very full articulation of the excessive and regenerative power of the Dionysian grotesque body, whose “apertures or convexities, or. . .various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose,” challenge the authority and integrity of the sealed Apollonian body.27 The huge impact of Bakhtin’s book has produced a received and tacitly perpetuated notion of medieval popular culture as deeply corporeal and visceral, stylistically most commonly expressed in the register of scatology, and ideologically antiauthoritarian, due to its status as an expression of a broadly defined “folk” culture. There has been a tendency among critics to describe any and all visions of subversive bodily humor as Bakhtinian; and while the impact of Bakhtin’s notions of carnival and the grotesque body on the Western intellectual scene justifies this as a heuristic gesture, it wrongly imputes a Bakhtinian impetus to texts such as Fo’s, which, in fact developed their theses of premodern popular culture through a Gramscian-Toschian prism, and hence independently of Bahktin. While Antonio Scuderi has recently pointed to the enriching inf luence of Bakhtin on Fo’s refinement of his approach to premodern carnival culture,28 Mistero Buffo is best thought of as accidentally Bakhtinian. I wish to suggest that Bakhtin is less the critical frame through which to understand Fo’s work than a strikingly sympathetic thinker whose formulation of a subversive medieval comic folk culture was, like Fo’s, an historicized expression of his rejection of totalitarian rule. Given the context for Bakhtin’s text, the totalitarianisms he addressed were the monstrous twins of Nazism and Stalinism, while Fo’s evil twins in Mistero Buffo are industrial capitalism and the “soft” hegemonic manipulations of Western consumer culture. As indicated at the beginning of this essay, the leftist writer closer to home, to whom Fo’s version of medieval culture owes arguably its most

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profound debt, was Gramsci. In addition to his historicized conception of Gramscian hegemony, Fo’s formulation of the restless giullare, and of himself as a latter-day jester of the people, owes much to Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual, whose alignment with and emergence out of a specific class or community can potentially produce counterhegemonic information in both serious and satiric form. Fo’s argument that the giullare was “born from the people,” taking his anger from the people “in order to be able to give it back to them . . . in order that the people should gain greater awareness of their own condition” (MB, 1), clearly casts this figure as an activist in the mould of Gramsci’s desired intellectual of the working class. Also in the spirit of Gramsci, Fo inserts the giullare, a secular figure, into a larger company of organic intellectuals and “holy fools” within a vibrant scene of medieval Italian “Christian socialism” avant la lettre. These include heretics and reformist activists such as Joachim de Fiore, Gherardo Segarelli, and Fra Dolcino, as well as Franciscans, all of whom were, Fo stresses, not simply anticlerical radicals but, importantly, charismatic speakers and peripatetic performers—in his words, “extraordinary m[e]n of the theatre” (MB, 71). In doing so, he continues Gramsci’s perception of St. Francis as “a comet in the Catholic firmament,” who restored practical religion to the common people along with his fraternity until the Church “immunized” them by making them into “a simple monastic order at its service.”29 This preoccupation with St Francis as a medieval forerunner of modern dissidents has continued late into Fo’s career, resurfacing thirty years later in his 1999 performance Francis, the Holy Jester. In this giullarata, Fo returns to many of the techniques of Mistero Buffo, using historical prologues, a mixture of dialects, grammelot (which he calls the “passe-partout of communication”), and song in order to reproduce what he claims to be the suppressed “harangues” of Francis, which have only been recovered by recent scholarship.30 Fascinatingly, Fo was not the only Italian Marxist artist engaging creatively with medieval dissident culture in 1960s Italy. Around the time Fo was creating Mistero Buffo, the radical left-wing Italian film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s concern for those systemically excluded from prosperous, bourgeois Italy—what Fabio Vighi calls his defense of “the sacredness of the sub-proletariat”31—led him, like Fo, back through time to an exploration the fringe-dwellers of premodern Italy. In the first of his medievalist films, The Hawks and the Sparrows (Uccellini e Uccellacci), released in 1966, two characters of the modern Italian underclasses are transformed into buffoonish Franciscan friars, who unsuccessfully preach to the hawks not to attack the sparrows. Again, the peripatetic antimaterialism of the Franciscan tradition, as outlined by Gramsci, is suggested as both precursor and parallel to the antibourgeois lives of what Vighi, borrowing

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on the terminology of Giorgio Agamben’s account of stateless persons, characterizes as the picaresque “homo sacer” figures of Pasolini’s modern Italy.32 The Hawks and the Sparrows was followed by Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, which contains his versions of The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights, released just two, three, and five years respectively after Mistero Buffo’s first performance. In the first two of these films, Pasolini selects episodes from these famous late-medieval frame tales which enable him either to celebrate the irrepressible sexual jouissance and the scatological grotesquery of medieval corporeal existence (The Decameron), or, in a more Gramscian vein, to dramatize the struggle between medieval people’s transgressive natural appetites and the ecclesiastical-feudal regimes that seek to subject these bodies to surveillance, repression, and punishment (The Canterbury Tales). The ideological and aesthetic parallels between Fo’s and Pasolini’s returns to the popular culture of the Middle Ages are, surprisingly, underexplored. This critical silence might partly be due to the animus Pasolini nursed toward Fo. This was most virulently expressed in 1973 when Pasolini denounced Fo as “a plague for Italian theatre,” immediately after Fo had been arrested for refusing the police access to one of his performances.33 Less virulent but more revealing of the basis of Pasolini’s hostility is his 1968 “Manifesto for a New Theatre,” which is replete with oblique but damning references to “Gesture or Scream Theatre,” in which the “screaming actor of bourgeois anti-bourgeois theatre” desecrates the word in favor of physical theater.34 His debunking of this theater’s “ideology of the rebirth of a primitive, originary theater, carried out as a propitiatory, or better, orgiastic rite”35 strikes at the heart of Fo’s medievalist revival.36 By this stage Pasolini, a long-term Gramscian, had not only already admitted he could no longer hold faith with Gramsci, but was in the process of formulating his “Abjuration of the Trilogy of Life” that appeared in 1975. In this abjuration, he declared the impossibility of representing a “beloved past” and of presenting an idealized medieval sexual vitality under the auspices of what Pasquale Verdicchio calls “the revolutionary power of sub-proletarian bodies,”37 believing this belonged to a naïve and now-redundant political program.38 This might explain in part his contempt for Fo, whose faith in medieval popular resistance remains undimmed. Indeed the animality of the bodies in Pasolini’s funny but unsettling Canterbury Tales, and their ultimate failure to withstand the violent forces of ecclesiastical oppression, suggest that his faith in the buffonic Middle Ages was waning even as he represented them. Interestingly Pasolini claimed this was an effect of Chaucer’s own ambivalent humor, in which raw vital buffoonery is overwhelmed by “the bourgeois phenomena of irony and self-irony, the sign of a guilty conscience.”39 So Chaucer is for

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Pasolini both the apotheosis and the swansong of medieval folk humor. In many respects, this conforms with what Bruce Holsinger and Ethan Knapp have described as the Marxian view of the later Middle Ages as the cusp of precapitalist and capitalist society.40 Despite their opposing views, it is highly significant that these two artists, very conscious of one another’s works, were engaged in an indirect dialogue about the past, present, and future through their adjacent yet discrepant views of the grotesque comedy of the Middle Ages, and as such they certainly merit more critical comparison than they have so far received. Dario Fo, then, is crucial not only for an examination of the conjunction of comedy and medievalism, but is also valuable as a key figure in the richly comic vision of premodern popular culture fostered within leftist modernism. With the distinctive and highly lauded combination of his reverence for “the popular,” his winking use of scholarly authority, and his bravura grasp of physical performance traditions dating back to the Middle Ages, he has brought to millions of people a (re)vision of the Middle Ages that is not only radical and accessible, but, perhaps most importantly, hugely enjoyable. Notes 1. Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1983), 237. 2. David Hall, “Introduction,” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (New York: Mouton, 1984), 7–10. See also Perry Meisel, The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 10, and R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, ed. Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 3. C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby, Popular Culture: Production and Consumption (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 4. 4. Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 147–48. 5. See John Fulton, “Religion and Politics in Gramsci: An Introduction,” Sociological Analysis 48 (1987): 209–10. 6. Tom Behan, “The Megaphone of the Movement: Dario Fo and the Working Class 1968–70,” Journal of European Studies 30 (2000): 256. 7. Behan, “Megaphone”, 253. 8. See Andrew Gumbel, “Nobel Prize: Dario Fo, the Showman, Wins Nobel literature prize,” The Independent, October 10, 1997, accessed November 17, 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/nobel-prizedario-fo-the-showman-wins-nobel-literature-prize-1234928.html. 9. Domenico Maceri, “Dario Fo: Jester of the Working Class,” World Literature Today 72 (1998): 10; Susan Cowan, “Dario Fo’s Throw-away Theatre,” The Drama Review 19 (1975): 102–13.

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10. Dario Fo, “Mistero Buffo,” trans. Ed Emery, in Plays: 1, intro. Stuart Hood (London: Methuen, 1992). All future citations will reference this edition and will be indicated parenthetically in the text by page number. 11. “Nobelprize.org, The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize,” accessed November 25, 2011, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1997/. 12. Fo generally had an uneasy relationship with the PCI (Italian Communist Party), and Nueva Scena soon attracted criticism from the Party. This led Fo and Rame to form the independent left-wing company La Commune in 1969. 13. Tom Behan, Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre (London: Pluto, 2000), 8. 14. Antonio Scuderi, “Dario Fo and Oral Tradition: Creating a Thematic Context,” Oral Tradition 15 (2000): 27. 15. Pina Piccolo, “Dario Fo’s giullarate: Dialogic Parables in the Service of the Oppressed,” Italica 65 (1988): 132. 16. See Antonio Scuderi, Dario Fo: Framing, Festival, and the Folkloric Imagination (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 5–6. In an interview in 1978, Fo points to an earlier contact with medieval traditions when he mentions that his 1953 satiric play The Finger in the Eye was “based on a story whose origins go back to the goliard tradition.” See Luigi Ballerini et al., “Dario Fo Explains: An Interview,” The Drama Review 22 (1978): 36. 17. Dario Fo, The Tricks of the Trade, trans. Joe Farrell, ed. Stuart Hood (New York: Routledge, 1991), 85. 18. A. Richard Sogliuzzo, “Dario Fo: Puppets for a Proletarian Revolution,” Drama Review 16 (1972): 71–77, Tony Mitchell, Dario Fo: People’s Court Jester (London: Methuen, 1986), 11–12. 19. Fo, Tricks, 85. 20. Antonio Scuderi, “Unmasking the Holy Jester Dario Fo,” Theatre Journal 55 (2003): 279. 21. See Joseph Farrell, Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Harlequins of the Revolution (London: Methuen, 2001), 89. Tony Mitchell also notes that when developing The Obscene Fable (Il fabulazzo osceno), a later addition to Mistero Buffo based on a Provençal tale, Fo was unable to locate source materials and so added his own additions “which convey a popular spirit of bawdry and earthy humour similar to that of Boccaccio, but with more political bite” (Dario Fo, 30). 22. Fo, Tricks, 3–4 and 84. 23. Ballerini et al., “Dario Fo Explains,” 43. 24. Sharon Abramovich-Lehavi, “‘The End’: Mythical Futures in AvantGarde Mystery Plays’,” Theatre Research International, 34 (2009): 118. 25. Robert Russell, “The Arts and the Russian Civil War,” Journal of European Studies 20 (1990): 225. See also James Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals 1917–30 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 48–53. 26. Mikhael Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 7.

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27. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 26. 28. Scuderi, Framing, Festival, and the Folkloric Imagination, 5–6. 29. Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison, ed. Frank Rosengarten, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 318–19. 30. Dario Fo, Francis, The Holy Jester, trans. Mario Pirovano (London: Beautiful Books, 2009), v-x. 31. Fabio Vighi, “Pasolini and Exclusion: Žižek, Agamben, and the Modern Sub-proletariat,” Theory, Culture and Society, 20.5 (2003): 100. 32. Vighi, “Pasolini and Exclusion,” 105–10. 33. Joseph Farrell and Antonio Scuderi, Dario Fo: Stage, Text and Tradition (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 13. 34. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Manifesto for a New Theatre,” trans. Thomas Simpson, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 29.1 (2007): 134. 35. Pasolini, “Manifesto,” 134. 36. Fo, in his turn, would go on several years later to comment on his critics’ rejection of his use of gesture and noise. In this rejoinder, Pasolini, though never explicitly named, is aligned with the “prevailing opinion” of bourgeois culture, perhaps a reference to Pasolini’s endorsement of the intellectual bourgeoisie as his ideal audience in his Manifesto. See Ballerini et al, “Dario Fo Explains,” 39. 37. Pasolini, The Savage Father, trans. Pasquale Verdicchio (New York: Guernica), 54 38. See Naomi Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 196–97. 39. Cited in Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 191. 40. Bruce Holsinger and Ethan Knapp, “The Marxist Premodern,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 463–64.

CHAPTER 5 ACEPHALIC HISTORY: A BATAILLIAN READING OF MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL Daniel T. Kline

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fter being roundly insulted by French types, having a cow catapulted over the rampart walls upon them, and seeing their Trojan Rabbit most disrespectfully heaved back at them, Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are foiled in their attempt to take Guy de Loimbard’s castle. Loimbard’s taunting French “k-niggits” tell Arthur that their lord will not join his quest for the Holy Grail because Guy’s “already got one.”1 In the following scene (scene 10), the film breaks form in the manner of a History Channel special—“Pictures for Schools”—to present a distinguished elderly man, “A Very Famous Historian,” to explain breathlessly that: Defeat at the castle seems to have utterly disheartened King Arthur. . .The ferocity of the French taunting took him completely by surprise and Arthur became convinced that a new strategy was required if the Quest for the Holy Grail were to be brought to a successful conclusion. Arthur, having consulted his closest Knights, decided that they should separate and search for the Grail individually. This is now what they did. No sooner. . .

At the very moment that an academic perspective is brought onto the screen in the form of a professor who parses the situation abstractly for the audience, we hear the thundering approach of hoof beats, and a mounted knight hacks the Historian’s neck in mid-sentence. The pursuit for the killer sets off an investigation that reemerges twice more in the film and leads to the (anti)climactic conclusion, when Arthur and his knights are arrested. Although some have been dissatisfied with obliqueness of the

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ending, it has a rigorous logic to it: Arthur and his Knights are arrested for killing—essentially decapitating—an historian and, in effect, killing history. The Pythons, in the guise of Arthur and his Knights, are detained for their gleeful defiance of conventional temporality and deconstruction of national myths. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is thus structured around not one but two quests: the search for the Grail and the hunt for the Historian’s murderer. The first is governed by the narrative contours of medieval myth, and the second is propelled by the demands of forensic evidence and analysis. The ancient quest searches for a transcendent truth; the modern hunt pursues those who violate social norms. The first leaves us with God and aristocracy; the second with the power of the police state. The Pythons thus do calculated and deliberate violence to the mythic version of Arthurian history sanctioned by the English educational and political establishment.2 At the same time, the ferocious collision between the present and the past at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail demonstrates that the two competing versions of history express different forms of sociality and political community—one anarchic, the other authorized; one very much improvised on the f ly by a group of cultural iconoclasts, the other undergirded by centuries of tradition and the structures of political power. The decapitated historian serves as Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s central image, and the condition of headlessness, or what Georges Bataille calls the acéphale, governs the sociopolitical logic of the film and describes the internal relationships of the Pythons themselves. In this essay, I want to focus on several moments from Monty Python and the Holy Grail as they relate to the transgressive thought of Georges Bataille to highlight the truly subversive—rather than simply satiric, parodic, ironic, or adolescent—nature of what the Pythons do to all things medieval through images of filth and violence. At the end of the essay, I turn to the paradox of too many heads and the question of Bataillan laughter and community. Acephalic Man and the Decapitated Historian The preeminent theorist of the headless condition, acephaly, is Georges Bataille (1897–1962), the singular philosopher of heterology, eroticism, and excess. Raised in Rheims, Bataille studied for the priesthood as a young man, but after a crisis of faith he left the church. He later studied the concept of chivalry in thirteenth-century verse at the École des Chartes and worked at a number of French libraries, including the Bibliothèque Nationale (1922–1944), as a medieval librarian.3 During the 1920’s, Bataille f lirted brief ly with the Dadists and associated with

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the Surrealists, and in 1933, he began attending Alexandre Kojève’s inf luential lectures on Hegel (1933–1939). With Michel Leiris and Roger Callois, Bataille founded the Collège de Sociologie, whose agenda was to question traditional disciplinary approaches to the sacred (1937). Among several other periodicals, he founded a surrealist publication, the Minotaur (1932–1933), and the journal Critique (1946), which published the early work of Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Bataille married twice and had two daughters. Continuing to write but retired from library work, Bataille died in Paris in 1962. This brief biographical note sets the context for one of Bataille’s most enigmatic activities, the group Acéphale (“headless”) and its eponymous journal Acéphale (1936–1939). The shadow side of the Collège de Sociologie, the Acéphale group remains shrouded in secrecy even today, with little known except that the members practiced quasi-religious rituals and planned to sacrifice one of their own.4 Through sacrifice, sexual excess, and other ritually profane practices, Bataille and the members of Acéphale sought a transgressive community whose sacredness was found in the death of God. Acéphale was dedicated to the loss of self through waste and excess, and thus Acéphale was not simply an aesthetic movement. It embodied a political praxis in which the Dionysian elements of sacrifice, violence, and eroticism would be released orgiastically, sparking the radical transformation of culture. Sketched by Andre Masson, the acephalic man, as depicted in the masthead for the journal Acéphale, represents Bataille’s antisystematic thought, as Bataille himself described in The Sacred Conspiracy:5 Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison, he has found beyond himself not God, who is prohibition against crime, but a being who is unaware of prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he is made of innocence and crime; he holds a steel weapon in his left hand, f lames like those of a Sacred Heart in his right. He is not a man. He is not God either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster.6

Humanity is enslaved to its “head”—logic, utility, and hierarchy—but in headlessness, acephaly, humanity finds sovereign self-determination. Bataille laughs with joy at the acephale’s freedom from constraint and in his headless innocence, just as the sudden, jarring attack on the Historian shocks us into comic disbelief in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For Bataille, acephalic man represents humanity unburdened by rationality, society freed from hierarchy, and desire unchained from restraint.

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For Acéphale as for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the center of gravity has shifted from the top to the bottom, from the head and its rationality to the gut and its products. In a Bataillian sense, the central image of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the beheaded historian, thus represents the anarchic freedom of the Pythons in the face of institutional conformity and personifies the violence the Pythons do to conventional notions of history, unmooring their Arthurian counternarrative from the strictures of institutional academic discourse. By violently attacking the Historian, and thus sacrificing “history” itself on the altar of excess—an excess that is simultaneously antiauthoritarian, brilliantly deconstructive, knowingly monstrous, and extremely cheeky—Monty Python and the Holy Grail gives birth to a sacrificial temporality in which anything is possible. This single image—the decapitated Historian—thus represents both the challenge Monty Python and the Holy Grail presents to any view of medieval culture and the fun the film takes (and produces) with “history” itself.7 Educated in the proper English confines of Oxford and Cambridge (except for the American Terry Gilliam), the Pythons strike a blow against post–World War II conformism by killing an image of the academic establishment that is, incidentally, the image of the Oedipal father. Accordingly, this revised historical sensibility ultimately must be domesticated by the police. At the same time, the provocative image of the acéphale most clearly deconstructs Leonardo DaVinci’s famous “Vitruvian Man,” a familiar representation of the Renaissance ideal.8 Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man translates the geometric principles of Vitruvius’s De Architectura, particularly Book 3, Chapter 1, “The Planning of Temples,” in which the human body is found to be the source of proportion and the foundation of symmetry. Whereas Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man encompasses his world within the span of his own arms, Bataille’s acephalic man presents a medieval mystical vision. He clenches his fists around two agents of destruction. A f laming heart consumes the inner being in ecstasy and a sharpened sword pierces the outer body in sacrifice. While the acephalic man is permeated with numinous images of death and desire, the Vitruvian Man is the measure of self-contained harmony, the parts of his body themselves manifesting the ideal of beauty. The Vitruvian Man is an expression of the geometrical ideals expressed in the universal concepts of the perfect square, triangle, and circle; the center of the image, literally, is the human navel. Bataille engaged the question of architecture in his early essay, “Notre Dame de Rheims” (1919), written before his loss of faith, in which he lamented the German destruction of the famous French cathedral in World War I. Because so much of Bataille’s later work was a strident

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critique of all forms of structure and systematization, of which architecture metaphorically is an exemplar, Denis Hollier has argued that the balance of Bataille’s career can be seen as a reaction to his written prayer for the restoration of Notre Dame de Rheims.9 Bataille’s comment in a later essay entitled “Architecture” could have been directly aimed at Leonardo and the humanistic ideal: “[E]ach time that architectural composition is found elsewhere than in monuments, whether this is in physiognomy, costume, music or painting, one is able to infer a taste for authority, whether human or divine. The great compositions of certain painters express the will to constrain the spirit to an official ideal.”10 Bataille’s deconstruction—or, rather, decapitation—of the ideals of systematization, subjectivity, and sufficiency, as found in Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, inheres in the acéphale. Most importantly, while Leonardo’s figure looks out from the page with the sober confidence of intellect and the somber poise of command, the acéphale lacks a head, the source of rationality and site of authority, and instead exposes his guts, the inner workings of the body, where food becomes shit. In a Bataillian sense, the decapitated body, spouting gouts of blood, is linked to the excreting fundament, and as the body of the Historian falls back into the dirt, where his vaunted knowledge no longer matters, blood and mud combine in a fecund, filthy puddle, both alive and dead. Death and life are not separate for Bataille, and neither are they in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for the Old Man in scene 2, Concorde in scene 18, and Bride’s Father in scene 24 are all “not quite dead.” Monty Python and the Holy Grail achieves an acephalic unmasking of a general economy of excess, violence, and laughter, inspired by a carnivalesque version of the Middle Ages.11 Shitty, Bloody, and Funny: Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the General Economy The core of Bataille’s thought is found in his conception of excess and of waste—of which shit is exemplary. Waste products are normally expelled from economic calculation because they do not translate into conventional notions of utility. Traditional conceptions of productivity and usefulness, what Bataille terms “the restricted economy,” are not adequate to liberate the self from the tyranny of hierarchical systems. In fact, the traditional or restricted economy is a primary generator of oppression. In contrast, Bataille examines what he calls “the general economy,” or the total expenditure that is defined by waste and excess. Analyzing culture according to the opposite forces of excretion and appropriation, Bataille argues in “The Use-Value of D. A. F. de Sade” that “political, juridical, and economic institutions” are opposed and fractured by

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the “excremental collective impulses” associated with sexual activity, decomposing corpses, laughing and crying, urination and defecation, as well as all forms of “heedless expenditure.”12 Their commonality is in their wastefulness, their extra-vagance. Bataille’s “general economy” incorporates such prodigal, abject elements as a way of blurring the distinction between sacred/profane, inner/outer, personal/social, and life/ death. Society creates taboos to isolate such unproductive and useless dejecta from what is “truly” productive and useful, and social relations proceed on the basis of these boundaries. For Bataille, in contrast, useless expenditure approaches the sacred through the notion of sacrifice. Culture expels in sacrifice not what is secondary but what is essential, and so what is sacrificed is found to be holy. Bataille calls this the “accused share,” or sacred excess.13 Simultaneously, in these moment of rapturous violation—orgy, sacrifice, ecstatic union—culturally imposed boundaries between individuals are loosened and true community based upon commonality rather than exclusion can be experienced. Included among the many forms of useless expenditure Bataille valorizes are violence and shit, both of which lead to transgressive laughter. The “accursed share” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail includes depictions of filth, social violence, and personal dismemberment, and all are potent Bataillian images, characterizing the film’s comedic success and pointing to the film’s general economy of the medieval. Throughout, Monty Python and the Holy Grail celebrates the execratory. Much in the same way that the decapitated Historian serves as the absent center of the film, so too shit, filth, and excreta function as the “mark of the medieval” for contemporary understanding of the Middle Ages. From the outset, excretory verisimilitude was a goal of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Rather than produce a “Hollywood vision of the Middle Ages with huge sets and large clean f loors and things,” the Pythons, especially Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, liked the “idea of doing a really dirty, funky Middle Ages,”14 and images of grime appear consistently throughout the film in the dirty teeth, mud-spattered dresses, pustulous faces, and squalid living conditions of the characters.15 The opposing yet intimately allied Bataillian functions of incorporation and excretion reached their apotheosis when Michael Palin was called upon to be a groveling peasant “mud eater.” For seven takes, as Cleese and Chapman rode past in the foreground, Palin in the background “dutifully did my bit, and crawled through this filthy, stinking, pig-shitty mud” into which the prop master had put a bit of chocolate. Palin was then to eat the chocolate and so appear to be eating the horrible filth. However, Palin had difficulty distinguishing the chocolate from the mud, and he ended up eating some of both. When Gilliam asked for an eighth take, Palin screamed and

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thrashed in frustration—which Cleese and Chapman met with a spontaneous round of applause.16 This story was one of the most perfectly Bataillian moments in the production, for not only did it exemplify the absolute unity of ingestion and excretion in an abject body, it also led to communal laughter and to gloriously useless, wasteful expenditure, for— and this is key—when the Pythons viewed the day’s “rushes,” Palin’s sacrificial exertions could not even be seen on film. Monty Python and the Holy Grail revels in (and reveals) the messiness of humanity, and rather than banishing excrement to the realm of darkness, the film liberates filth from its position of cultural secrecy. Filth is thus the mark of the medieval in the film and a goal of the production, and it marks the difference between the governor and the governed in scene 2 (“Bring Out Your Dead!”). As Arthur rides into a town devastated by the Black Death, he is identified as king because “He hasn’t got shit all over him.”17 Shit separates aristocrat from peasant, and excrement takes on a politics in Monty Python and the Holy Grail as in Bataille. In the final scene of the film (scene 35), the French foes beat Arthur and Bedevere to the Sacred Castle and symbolically soil Arthur first linguistically and then physically. In a bravura display of “f lyghtyng” or ritualistic name-calling, the Frenchman’s insults include calling them “perfidious English mousedropping hoarders,” “donkey-bottom biters,” “tiny-brained wipers of other people’s bottoms,” and “illegitimate-faced bugger folk.” In response, Arthur intones at the doorway to the Sacred Castle, “In the name of God. . .and the glory of our. . .,” when the “human ordure” cascades down upon him.18 In his previous encounter with the French, Arthur succeeded in remaining physically pure, but now, just prior to his arrest, King Arthur is christened with excrement and thereby symbolically stripped of his authority. Then, as his allies gather for the attack, the police arrest Arthur, Bedevere, and the English forces, and the film is brought to an end as King Arthur and his remaining knights are loaded into police vehicles. At the moment Arthur is unceremoniously baptized in shit, he loses his legitimacy, and the limpidness that separated him from all others collapses in a ridiculous heap. For Bataille, taboo, transgression, and excess in all its forms were pathways by which the self could transcend the boundaries of subjectivity and merge with the sacred. Bataille found this world-shattering violence in a photo given to him by his psychoanalyst, Adrien Borel, in 1925. Depicting the execution of Fou-Tchou Lin by “leng-tch’e,” the technique of “death by a thousand cuts,” in which the mutilated victim is slowly and patiently hacked into pieces, Bataille was transfixed by the expression on the executed man’s face: suspended between horror and ecstasy, outside of pain or pleasure, even beyond life and death, the victim represented

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true transcendence for Bataille—subjectivity and “thought falling away in erotic agony.”19 In the Arthurian mythos, the chivalric hero demonstrates his fidelity to the quest (or to his lady) by physically sustaining the violence inf licted by enemies, obstacles, and the environment, and the hero’s ability to absorb and ultimately overcome physical violence is a mark of his supernatural election and individual legitimacy. Thus, as in Bataille, physical violence is an index to personal authenticity, and the most telling incident of violence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is, of course, Arthur’s encounter with the Black Knight (scene 4). Based upon the chivalric trope of the Knight Errant defending a crossroads or bridge, the scene finds Arthur and Patsy observing two knights fighting furiously until the Black Knight hurls his two-handed sword through the Green Knight’s head. Thinking he’s found another knight for his grail quest, Arthur approaches the Black Knight, who challenges him. During their battle, Arthur severs one arm and then another in a profusion of blood, to which the Black Knight defiantly responds, “I’ve had worse” and then, “just a f lesh wound.” The now armless Black Knight refuses to surrender, so Arthur takes both legs in a fountain of blood. The Black Knight, ever defiant, proposes they call it a draw. As Arthur and Patsy cross the bridge, the Black Knight sits upon his stumps in puddles of his own blood, still cross for a fight.20 In Carol Dover’s words, the episode “explodes the chivalric romance convention of the Arthurian knight whose heroism is hyperbolic and fearless to the death.”21 Monty Python and the Holy Grail not only undercuts the aristocratic mythos with filth, it subverts the chivalric ethos of heroism by exposing the violence upon which knighthood rests. In the best Bataillian fashion, what could be more wasteful and more useless than a headless historian or a limbless knight? In essence, Monty Python and the Holy Grail oscillates between three images of wasteful excess—a headless historian, beshitted peasants, and a limbless knight—and what remains is laughter inspired by absurd violence. Monty Python and the Holy Grail also utilizes violence that exposes the myth of national origins and leads to laughter when Arthur encounters the members of an “anarcho-syndicalist commune” in scene 3, which contrasts two different views of the English sociopolitical system along an axis of filth and purity. On one hand, the scene is a hilarious send up of English preoccupations with class and gender. On the other, the scene deftly poses the myth of English political origins against those who must be marginalized for such a myth to remain viable. When the King and his mount approach a large castle, Arthur confronts a peasant, Dennis, whom he confuses for an old woman. In return, Dennis upbraids Arthur

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concerning his imperious assumptions about peasants and schools him on “outdated imperialistic dogma, which perpetuates the social and economic differences in our society.”22 Pressed as to how he became King, Arthur famously recounts the tale of the Lady of the Lake and Excalibur. Against this legendary account of mythologized legitimacy, Dennis answers with a critique: “Look, strange women lying on their backs in ponds handing over swords. . .that’s no basis for a system of government. Supreme power drives from a mandate from the masses not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.” Arthur’s response is as hilarious as it is revealing, as their dialogue becomes a physical confrontation: Dennis: You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you. Arthur: Shut up! Dennis: I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, people would put me away. Arthur (grabbing him by the collar): Shut up, will you. Shut up! Dennis: Ah! Now. . .we see the violence inherent in the system. . . .Come see the violence inherent in the system. Help, help, I’m being repressed!23

Arthur’s encounter with his own serfs cannot soil him, for the violence of the system keeps the social boundaries between aristocrat and peasant in place, leaving Arthur free to exercise aggression against his own people. Arthur can be soiled only by others, the French knights, who have occupied the Sacred Castle that he cannot. The mythical emblem of divine authority in scene 3, Excalibur, is also a weapon of war and violence, and aristocratic authority and violence go hand-in-hand, as the Arthurian tradition continually demonstrates. As opposed to Arthur’s mythologized authority, the Constitutional Peasants do not serve under an aristocratic lord. Rather, as Dennis says, “we’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune” whose members rotate leadership responsibilities and whose decisions must be democratically approved by the group. Arthur’s suppression of the peasants is a diegetic corollary to the police’s arrest of the Arthurian knights at the end of the film, for just like the peasants’ attempt to institute a headless social community is violently interrupted by Arthur, so too Arthur’s aristocratic pretensions to remain outside the law—his knight’s blithe violence against the Historian—is countered by police power. For Bataille, as for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, violence also functions as a theological guarantor. In his Theory of Religion, Bataille notes that in dualistic theologies, like that underlying the Arthurian tradition,

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the “good is an exclusion of violence and there can be no breaking of the order of separate things, no intimacy, without violence.”24 Sacred violence thus creates intimacy by removing socially imposed boundaries and norms. Yet, simultaneously Bataille writes, “the god of goodness is limited by right to the violence with which he excludes violence, and he is divine, open to intimacy, only insofar as he in fact preserves the old violence within him, which he does not have the rigor to exclude.”25 Scene 32, in which Brother Maynard deploys the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch against the Vicious Bunny of the Cave of Caerbannog, underscores exactly the Bataillian theology of violence underlying the Arthurian mythos. After Arthur ignores Tim the Enchanter’s sage advice and the Vicious Bunny has beheaded Bors and killed Ector and Gawain, King Arthur summons Brother Maynard to deploy the Holy Hand Grenade, once the requisite blessing has been invoked from the Book of Armaments 2: 9–21: “And St Attila raised the hand grenade up on high saying, ‘O Lord bless this Thy hand grenade that with it Thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits in Thy mercy’.” After counting to three, Arthur is commanded to “lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.”26 For Bataille, in such a dualistic theology God necessarily maintains the obligation for violence to himself so that he might use violence to bring peace. The violence that is deemed necessary to bring peace is, of course, figured to be divine necessity. In the case of Arthur and the Constitutional Peasants or the Knights of the Round Table and the police, violence is a tool for maintaining social boundaries, political control, and theological certainties. For Bataille, as in the rituals of the Acéphale group, violence is necessary to liberate the forces of excess, breach socially imposed boundaries, fashion the headless community, and unleash the sovereign individual. Rather than excluding the dirty and excremental, as so many Hollywood movies have done, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one of the dirtiest medieval movies around, gleefully includes, appropriates, and even foregrounds the excretory, the marginal, and the taboo under the guise of a sudden intrusion of violent absurdity: a king has a chamber pot dumped on his head, a villager beats the dust out of a rug with a live cat, a procession of monks bonk themselves in the forehead with planks of wood, an enthusiastic knight cannot but help kill the members of a wedding party, and a delimbed Black Knight spurts blood while claiming he is only scratched. These violent moments of social desecration and individual humiliation tear away the carapace of propriety and unleash a concord of laughter in which communion and community is based not upon collective boundaries but upon their violation.

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The Pythons as / and the Three Headed Giant A group with no head is at the same time a collection of nothing but heads, and if the beheaded Historian typifies the antiauthoritarian, anarchistic impulse of the Pythons, scene 12 epitomizes an opposite problem. What happens when there are too many heads? Attended by his facetiously fawning minstrels, in scene 12 Sir Robin passes medieval street signs that warn of certain death until he comes upon the giant Three-Headed Knight. The three heads command Sir Robin to halt, but after finding he’s a Knight of the Round Table, each head begins to jabber about whether to kill Sir Robin or let him go. The Three-Headed Knight represents both the trope of the monstrous medieval villain as well as the creative tensions between the Pythons themselves. Jones and Gilliam agreed to codirect the movie, but the group began to splinter internally due to Jones’s and Gilliam’s different working styles and cinematic priorities. Ultimately, a compromise was reached in which Gilliam handled the camera while Jones worked with the actors, and the film was completed.27 In a sense, the Giant’s three bickering heads represent the Python’s own creative rivalries as well as the difficulty in negotiating multiple sources of authority. The Three-Headed Giant ( Jones, Chapman, and Palin) argues about how to kill Sir Robin but eventually loses the opportunity: First Head: Oh! quick! Get the sword out. I want to cut his head off. Third Head: Oh, cut your own head off. Second Head: Yes—do us all a favour. First Head: What? Third Head: Yapping on all the time. Second Head: You’re lucky you’re not next to him. Third Head: What do you mean? Second Head: You snore. Third Head: Ooh, lies! Anyway you’ve got bad breath. Second Head: Well only because you don’t brush my teeth . . . Third Head: Oh! Stop bickering and let’s go and have tea and biscuits. First Head: All right! All right! We’ll kill him first and then have tea and biscuits. Second Head: Yes. Third Head: Oh! Not biscuits . . . First Head: All right! All right! Not biscuits—but let’s kill him anyway . . .28

But by the time they agree, Brave Sir Robin “bravely turned his tail and f led.” Each head accuses the others of not doing what is necessary, much in the same way that the cast, especially (it seems) John Cleese, criticized the directors, or Terry Gilliam at night recut sections of the film that Terry Jones had already put together. Yet, the Three-Headed

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Giant agrees to share a traditional repast, much like the time when the cast and crew threatened to fracture early on in filming and Graham Chapman took everyone aside to a pub, bought drinks, and led a rousing all night sing-a-long that brought the cast and crew back into harmony.29 It is plainly tempting to see scene 12 as an internal commentary upon group relations during the difficulties of filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for the Pythons themselves embodied the tensions at the heart of Bataille’s acephalic conception of society. Neither the Pythons nor Bataille’s Acéphale group were able to sustain the condition of headlessness indefinitely, but each sought new and different forms of social and artistic expression. For Bataille, as for the Pythons, the banality of conventional sociality and suffocating moralism stunt the individual at the same time these pieties bespoke the need for rupturous transcendence. Bataille approached transcendence through the Acéphale group and other social experiments, and the Pythons through comedy and a “wink, wink; nudge, nudge.” Notes I would like to thank Bettina Bildhauer for her comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 1. Scene 9, p. 24. All citations to Monty Python and the Holy Grail are from John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The Screenplay (London: Methuen, 2002). The scene number will be indicated parenthetically in the text. I have also preserved the screenplay’s rather erratic punctuation and capitalization. 2. Wlad Godzich reaches a similar conclusion in “The Holy Grail: The End of the Quest,” North Dakota Quarterly 51 (1983): 74–81. See also Christine M. Neufield, “Coconuts in Camelot: Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the Arthurian Literature Course,” Florilegium 19 (2002), 127–47. 3. For the biographical details to follow, I am indebted to Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille (London: Routledge, 1994). 4. Julian Pefanis writes that because no one was willing to perform an execution, the group killed a goat instead. See his Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 49. 5. An image of Bataille’s acephale is available at “Acéphale,” accessed November 17, 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acéphale. 6. Cited in Alastair Brotchie, introduction to Encyclopaedia Acephalica, ed. Robert Level and Isabelle Walberg (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 14. 7. In “Monty Python and the Medieval Other,” Cinema Arthuriana: Essays on Arthurian Film, ed. Kevin J. Harty (New York: Garland, 1991), 83–92, David D. Day argues that the film exploits “anachronism to attack all modern attempts to grasp the alterity of the Middle Ages and its artifacts” (84).

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8. For an image, see “Vitruvian Man,” accessed November 17, 2011, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man. 9. See Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989). 10. Cited in Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, An Essay in Atheistic Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), 123 (emph. Bataille). 11. The classic statement on the carnivalesque is Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). See also Ellen Bishop, “Bakhtin, Carnival and Comedy: The New Grotesque in Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” Film Criticism 15 (1990): 49–64. 12. The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 150. 13. See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. 1: Consumption (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 14. Terry Jones, in Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Bob McCabe, The Pythons: Autobiography by the Pythons (New York: St. Martins, 2003), 239. 15. See Susan Signe Morrison’s Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) for a full treatment of the theme. 16. See the comments in Chapman et al., The Pythons, 252–54. 17. Cleese et al., Screenplay, 5. 18. Cleese et al., Screenplay, 86–87. 19. Paul Hegarty, Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist (London: Sage, 2000), 11. 20. Cleese et al., Screenplay, 12–13. 21. A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 249–50. 22. Cleese et al., Screenplay, 6. 23. Cleese et al., Screenplay, 9 (emph. in original). 24. Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 80–81. 25. Theory of Religion, 80–81. 26. Cleese et al., Screenplay, 76. 27. The difficulties in shooting Monty Python and the Holy Grail are well documented in David Morgan, Monty Python Speaks (New York: Harper, 1999), 144–81 and Chapman et al., The Pythons, 234–71. 28. Cleese et al., Screenplay, 34. 29. See Morgan, Monty Python Speaks, 170–71.

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CHAPTER 6 MEDIEVALISM AND PERIODIZATION IN FROZEN RIVER AND THE SECOND SHEPHERDS’ PLAY: ENVIRONMENT, CLASS, MIRACLE Robert S. Sturges

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ust medievalism directly invoke the Middle Ages? Scholars of medievalist films typically think so. Both classic works like Kevin Harty’s The Reel Middle Ages (whose subtitle demonstrates that the author’s concern is exclusively with the representation of medieval Europe)1 and the sophisticated body of scholarship devoted to medievalist film in more recent years almost invariably define the topic in terms of a medieval setting. David W. Marshall, for example, directly suggests that medievalism must indeed ask “how the Middle Ages are invoked . . . and for what purpose.”2 Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh coin the term “‘medieval’ cinema” to define “modern films depicting the Middle Ages.”3 Bettina Bildhauer has recently contended that what she calls “medieval film” is best understood as a genre, one that consists of films set either “in the European Middle Ages” or, given her interest in the overlap between medievalism and Orientalism, in “the medieval Orient.”4 Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, on the other hand, resist the notion that such films constitute a genre in themselves, and consider two possible ways in which medievalist cinema may draw on different “generic frameworks”: one way is for films such as The Name of the Rose or Monty Python and the Holy Grail to “combine a contemporary genre with a medieval setting,” while the other is to “adapt medieval genres to the medium of film,” as in Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois.5 All their examples, here and throughout their book, are, like Bildhauer’s and like Ramey and Pugh’s, set in

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the Middle Ages either wholly or, in the case of time-travelling movies, partly—and it is the portions of the latter films directly set in the Middle Ages that make them candidates for these scholars’ consideration. Even Nickolas Haydock, who is most explicitly concerned with temporal interplay in psychoanalytic terms, is interested exclusively in films that can be seen as “making the medieval ‘gone’ ( fort!) and then staging its returns (da!) in attempts to master an abiding sense of loss.”6 This return of the Middle Ages on film as a way of coping with the trauma of modernity is, in one way or another, the attraction of medievalism for all the scholars I have just mentioned, as well as many others, and virtually all of them draw only on examples that employ recognizable signifiers of “the medieval”: settings, costumes, myths, historical figures, and other such examples. It is, in some sense, all about castles and armor, convents and tonsures, peasants and pigs.7 Finke and Shichtman, indeed, spend a useful chapter recording a number of such “signs of the medieval.”8 Few scholars have set themselves the task of discerning the medieval in exclusively modern or postmodern film settings, but doing so is the necessary next step if we are to ref lect productively on the manner in which the modern is haunted by, or connected to, the medieval. Finke and Shichtman take note of “medievalism’s representation of modernity’s decisive break with its medieval past” and of the post-Enlightenment creation, by means of the construction of this break, of a desire for these “signs of the medieval.”9 Bildhauer claims that “the Middle Ages are not a dead, passive object that can be used at will, but alive, responsive, and capable of affecting the living.”10 Haydock, too, examines the “imaginary pathways between the past and the present” that medievalist film can construct, their “phantasmagoric filling of gaps opened in the past by modern rationalism.”11 Susan Aronstein takes as her main topic the “politics of nostalgia” that employs the Middle Ages to produce a modern American national identity.12 All these scholars thus interrogate the split between medieval and modern, but, in doing so, also reinforce that very split. Such critiques suggest that only a medieval setting can produce these effects (desire, nostalgia, the phantasmagoric filling of gaps) in a modern film: in this critical discourse, a modern setting cannot produce the effect(s) of medievalism.13 Some film scholars, indeed, have gestured toward the kind of analysis I suggest here. David John Williams suggests that we attend to “other ways in which the medieval seems important to present-day imaginations,”14 though he does not go on to discuss any examples; François Amy de la Bretèque’s otherwise encyclopedic work makes a similar gesture, but also without significant follow-through.15 Recent political historians, however, unlike these film scholars, may follow Kathleen Davis in outlining

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a more radical approach. She suggests that “the problem with the ‘grand narrative’ of the West. . .is a problem of the formation of concepts in conjunction with periodization, a process that retroactively reifies categories and erases their histories”; this suggestion leads her to interrogate “the assumption that ‘the Middle Ages’ actually existed as a meaningful entity.”16 In a related vein, Kathleen Biddick, in her discussion of the nineteenth-century invention of “medieval studies” as an academic discipline defined by medieval alterity, has pointed out that “[t]he repetitious invocation. . .of the ‘hard-edged alterity’ of the Middle Ages is suspect. These images mark a desire rigidly to separate past and present, history and theory, medieval studies and medievalism.”17 From this perspective, the very practice that finds cinematic medievalism exclusively in the recycled signifiers of “the medieval” tends to reify the medieval/ modern split and indeed to naturalize the general concept of periodization: the armor and the tonsure belong to then, and signify its difference from now. If the interrogation of periodization and of the separation between medieval and modern is to be taken seriously, our focus must widen to include the presence of the medieval in the modern and the postmodern, including in film, even when the recognizable signifiers of “the medieval” are absent. Angela Jane Weisl shows how such a project might work in her analysis of “the persistence of medievalism.” She examines not only the deployment of the medieval romance genre in Star Trek and Star Wars, but also the ways in which popular sports narratives reproduce or continue the medieval religious activities of pilgrimage and confession: the sports writers, journalists, and interviewers who chronicled Mark McGwire’s and Wade Boggs’s stories, and McGwire and Boggs themselves, do not necessarily evoke medieval religion intentionally, but Weisl convincingly demonstrates their ongoing implication in medieval religious genres and actions.18 Another recent model—an analysis of an individual film—is provided by William Racicot, who directly confronts the topic of “Medievalism and the Non-Medieval” in his article on the film Groundhog Day.19 In this essay, I wish to contribute to this kind of medievalist work with a comparison of the well-received 2008 independent film Frozen River and what is likely the medieval play best known to English-speaking audiences, the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play. The film, concerning two women—one white, one Mohawk—living near the Canadian border, who resort to smuggling undocumented immigrants as a solution to their money problems, is not set in the Middle Ages. There is no indication in the film, in its promotional materials, or in the filmmakers’ DVD commentary track of any specific familiarity with the medieval play or

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with the Middle Ages generally, nor does the film anywhere invoke the Middle Ages with the usual signifiers: no armor, no tonsure. But for this very reason, Frozen River’s remarkable commonalities with The Second Shepherds’ Play suggest a (post)modern world more thoroughly imbued with the medieval than is possible in any film that invokes the Middle Ages more directly, one in which the post-Enlightenment split that interests Finke and Shichtman (and Biddick) is not taken for granted. The artificial boundaries of periodization have little effect here; instead, the congruity between medieval and modern is so thorough that the filmmakers themselves may not have noticed it. Thus, rather than investigating the ways in which the filmmakers invoke the Middle Ages (if they do), I am more interested in thinking about how an audience aware of these conscious or unconscious similarities—an audience of medievalists, perhaps—may use them to problematize periodization itself. Frozen River intervenes in a number of social debates simultaneously, demonstrating the interconnections among current struggles over class, ethnicity, environmentalism, and gender in its tale of undocumented immigration and various kinds of border crossing. It stages these interventions in terms congruent with, if not derived from, medieval drama, especially the overt class critique that structures The Second Shepherds’ Play and the miraculous nativity that reorients the play from bawdy comedy to sacred theater. Elsewhere, I have argued that The Second Shepherds’ Play, among others attributed to the Wakefield Master, allows a political and economic reading that defers the ultimate co-optation of its social critique by the Christian perspective—which is, nevertheless, unavoidable in the long run. The Wakefield Master’s plays simultaneously recognize the desire for social mobility and direct participation in the money economy among the remnants of the peasant class and demonstrate a conservative anxiety about such mobility, an anxiety that is ultimately assuaged and contained by the Church’s perspective. 20 We may observe these concerns in the four plays that depict peasant economic situations (The Killing of Abel, Noah and His Sons, and the First and Second Shepherds’ Play), but The Second Shepherds’ Play in particular, with its well-known depiction of the pre-Christian shepherds of the Nativity as contemporary English peasants, links class, money, crime, poverty, and the environment in its presentation of these issues. Initially, it thus provides what looks like a modern sociological understanding of poverty and crime; in its final movement, however, it substitutes the inevitable religious panacea for the social problems it has raised. Frozen River uses a similar structure to make the same sociological connections—and, perhaps more surprisingly for a film released in 2008, suggests a comparable solution, though in twenty-first century terms.

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The Second Shepherds’ Play begins, famously, with a complaint about the weather, linking the shepherds’ harsh environment (it is, of course, Christmastime in Yorkshire) to their poverty: Lord, what these weders are cold! An I am yll happyd . . . . In stormes and tempest, Now in the eest, now in the west, Wo is hym has neuer rest . . .!21

The First Shepherd here (like the Second Shepherd in lines 79–91) complains about the Yorkshire winter weather—freezing, stormy—and connects it to his own unhappiness in unceasing labor and poverty, which he attributes to class conf licts: No wonder, as it standys, If we be poore, For the tylthe of oure landys Lyys falow as the f loore, As ye ken. We ar so hamyd, Fortaxed and ramyd, We ar mayde handtamyd Wyth thyse gentlery-men. (lines 18–26)

The First Shepherd demonstrates a clear economic consciousness: the landowners’ decision not to cultivate arable land prepared the way for the land’s enclosure for sheep-herding, transforming peasant farmers into shepherds.22 This is exactly his situation: he considers himself a “sely husband” (line 14) rather than a shepherd, and it is in this economic reality that he finds the reason for his own poverty, also suggesting that peasant members of the audience (“ye,” “we”) have had similar experiences. He blames “gentlerymen”—not, as it turns out, the absentee landowners themselves, but rather their stewards, whom he thinks of as men like himself, but who have risen above their station and become exploiters in turn: For may he gett a paynt slefe Or a broche now-on-dayes, Wo is hym that hym grefe Or onys agane-says! (lines 40–43)

The economics of class relations thus cause the shepherds’ poverty and expose them—as shepherds rather than farmers—to the cruel environment.

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Poverty and misery are the result of social injustice, and their victims can enunciate a coherent social critique. Frozen River outlines a similar set of connections in its opening scenes, though it does so visually rather than verbally, at least at first. The opening shots show the wintry landscape that its characters, like the shepherds, inhabit, especially the St. Lawrence, the “frozen river” of the title, which separates upstate New York from Canada, and which the two women, Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) and Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham), will have to cross repeatedly in order to conduct their immigrant-smuggling operation. Similar shots of the river will be used as transitions throughout the film. The opening shots depicting the harsh weather and the border give way to shots of Ray, which, like the First Shepherd’s speech, establish her poverty and its connection to the environment. She sits in a car in front of her tiny mobile home, smoking and miserably contemplating the open glove compartment that reveals the absence of the car’s registration: her husband Troy, a gambling addict, has absconded with it to use as a stake. Most important for my purposes, Ray is dressed in a cheap, white, f leecy bathrobe which, as the director Courtney Hunt and producer Heather Rae point out in their DVD commentary,23 initially “reads” on camera as snow, and thus links poverty to the environment: Ray seems to be literally overwhelmed by the snowy landscape, her bare feet emphasizing her exposure to it and the dilapidated mobile home and cheap robe simultaneously confirming her poverty. As in The Second Shepherds’ Play, poverty means direct exposure to the elements. Like the shepherds, Ray is also at the mercy of the equivalent of “gentlery-men.” The truly wealthy and powerful are absent from the film as they are from the play, and Ray’s misery is compounded by her frustrating dealings with other working-class people only slightly better off than she: the young manager of the Yankee Dollar store who refuses to hire her full time, the men who come to repossess her television set later in the film, and especially the ironically named Mr. Versailles ( Jay Klaitz), who deals in mobile homes. Ray’s dream home is not the palace of Versailles, but only a new double-wide. After the shots establishing the landscape and Ray’s position within it, Ray has her first encounter with Versailles, who delivers the new mobile home, only to take it away again when Ray cannot produce her balloon payment, her husband having stolen that as well. As in The Second Shepherds’ Play, the environment, poverty, and class relations are thus linked in the opening scene and in the same order, though Ray, unlike the First Shepherd, is at this point unable to articulate a social critique: it is only later in the film that she can finally say “I’m tired of people stealing from me.”

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Crime, in fact, including stealing and smuggling, also forms part of the nexus of social issues addressed in both the play and the film. In The Second Shepherds’ Play, it is Mak who draws the connection between poverty and crime. Mak initially tries to pass himself off as one of the “gentlery-men,” but is quickly unmasked as a notorious sheep-rustler. His criminality, however, is also presented as a sociological problem: having established the economic basis of the peasants’ misery, the play now depicts crime as its consequence. “Now wold God I were in heuen, / For the[r] wepe no barnes . . . .” (lines 280–81); “I ete not an nedyll / Thys moneth and more” (lines 337–38). Mak resorts to sheep-rustling because his children are weeping with hunger; nor does he have enough to eat, himself. Prior to Mak’s entrance, the other shepherds share a meal, suggesting that Mak, rather than being higher on the social scale, in reality is even poorer than them. Hence, theft: Now were tyme for a man That lakkys what he wolde To stalk preuely than Vnto a fold And neemly to wyrk than. (lines 387–91)

Injustice, poverty, exposure, hunger, theft (or injustice, loss, exposure, desire, fulfillment): in the first part of The Second Shepherds’ Play the social and economic logic is inexorable. It is equally inexorable in Frozen River. Like Mak, both Ray and Lila are characterized by lack or loss, and thus desire: Lila lives in a trailer even smaller, colder, and more dilapidated than Ray’s, and her desire for a car runs parallel to Ray’s for a new mobile home (and to Ray’s son Ricky’s desire for a Hot Wheels set). Both women’s relations with their children are also, like Mak’s, characterized by lack and loss: Lila’s husband is dead, and their son has been appropriated by Lila’s mother-in-law, who refuses to acknowledge Lila, while Ray’s two sons, teenager T. J. (Charlie McDermott) and young Ricky ( James Reilly), like Mak’s, are going hungry. The children’s hunger, in fact, is a consistent motif throughout the film: at one point Ray searches for the boys’ lunch money in the chair cushions, at another she and T. J. discuss the meager contents of their refrigerator, and at still another she serves the boys popcorn, the only food in the house, for breakfast; T. J. disgustedly declares “I’m not eating this again for dinner.” Ray’s part-time job literally cannot put food on the table, much less provide the desired double-wide. As in Mak’s case, the various losses, lacks, and desires in her life lead her to crime, in this case through her acceptance of Lila’s hints that Mohawk land extends on

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both sides of the frozen river, and that therefore what counts as smuggling under US law can be characterized as “free trade between nations” from the Mohawk point of view: they can drive across the river and bring undocumented Chinese immigrants into the country through the reservation, though once they leave the reservation they must take care not to be caught by lurking state troopers. Mak’s and Ray’s crimes are both initially successful: Mak procures a lamb to feed his family, and Ray divides the profits from several smuggling runs with Lila, making enough to rescue the television set at the last moment and to take the boys out to dinner, though not enough to make the balloon payment on the new mobile home. These crimes, however, in both cases, also provide the hinge on which the plot makes its turn to the miraculous. In The Second Shepherds’ Play, Mak’s wife Gill conceals the stolen lamb from the other shepherds by pretending it is a newborn baby, a tactic that gives rise to pointed comparisons with the Lamb of God whose nativity is about to take place: both the false child and the newborn Jesus are referred to as “lytyll day-starne” (lines 834 and 1049), Gill’s disingenuous reference to eating the sheepchild (lines 773–76) suggests the Eucharist and so forth. These verbal cues quickly give way to the angel’s literal announcement of the Nativity and the shepherds’ visit to Bethlehem, where they find both the baby Jesus and a miraculous solution to their problems: as the Second Shepherd says, “he lygys full cold. / Lord, well is me!” (lines 1079–80), an indication, in the First Shepherd’s words, of “[w]hat grace we haue fun!” (line 1086). Divine grace thus removes the suffering derived from the environment from the shepherds, and places it onto the Christ-child, a reminder of Christ’s greater sacrifices. He also appears to have taken their poverty onto himself: it is now he who is “poorly arayd” (line 996). What has disappeared is any reference to the unjust socioeconomic conditions that caused the shepherds’ misery, and Mak’s crime, to begin with: as I have suggested elsewhere, in this conclusion, unavoidably, “Christian ideology overwhelms and co-opts social critique.”24 In Frozen River it is Christmastime too: references to the holiday abound, especially in the film’s second half, including repeated visual images of Ray’s Christmas tree. Indeed, Ray particularly wants to be able to provide her children with the new double-wide as a Christmas gift, while T. J., also by illegal means, manages to procure the coveted Hot Wheels set to put under the Christmas tree for Ricky. Ray’s need for money for the double-wide can be satisfied only by further smuggling runs with Lila; on their next one, however, the immigrants are not the Chinese men they have encountered before, but a Pakistani couple that Ray, in a sudden, ironic burst of patriotism,25 hesitates to bring across the

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border for fear of terrorism. Her fears focus on the bag the couple carries: first she puts it in the car with herself and Lila (rather than in the trunk where the immigrants must hide), and then, halfway across the border, gets rid of it all together, leaving it in the middle of the frozen river. On their arrival at the motel where the immigrants are usually dropped off, it becomes clear that the bag contained not explosives, but the couple’s baby, and Ray and Lila must retrieve it. It is at this point that Frozen River becomes a Nativity drama like The Second Shepherds’ Play. The baby, when Ray and Lila find him, appears to be dead: indeed, Lila repeatedly takes the common-sense position that the child has died and cannot be revived, but Ray insists that, while she herself drives, Lila should at least try to warm the body because “we can’t give it back to her cold.” Although Lila thinks “it’s too late,” when they return to the motel, the baby is moving, and the scene of reunion between the Pakistani mother (Gargi Shinde) and child is composed in such a way as to remind the audience of a Christian Madonna and Child—with the difference that the mother in this case wears clothing that clearly identifies her as South Asian. The religious overtones are reinforced by Lila’s reaction to the entire episode. She understands it as a miracle: Lila: Ray: Lila: Ray: Lila:

He was dead. Just cold. He was dead. Whatever. You brought him back to life. That was the Creator, not me.

This dialogue makes room for the miraculous in what is otherwise a secular modern film. Indeed, just as The Second Shepherd’s Play implies the Crucifixion in its allusions to Christ’s sacrifice, Frozen River condenses the Nativity and Resurrection into a single scene. Ray now takes the common-sense position that the baby was not actually dead, while Lila accepts the miracle as fact. It is only after this scene that Lila, whose eyesight has been failing throughout the film, finally starts wearing glasses: in a second miracle, the blind have been made to see. The ending of The Second Shepherds’ Play emphasizes the shepherds’ own self-sacrifice under the new Christian regime. Fooled by Mak’s and Gill’s subterfuge, they return to the cottage with a generous impulse to give the supposed child a gift. After discovering the deceit, though they threaten Gill and Mak with burning and hanging in retaliation, they finally relent and are satisfied with the symbolic punishment of tossing Mak in a canvas (lines 825–28, 855–63, and 901–06). The shepherds’

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charity extends to the true Christ-child as well in the final Nativity scene, as they produce their gifts of cherries, bird, and ball (lines 1024–62). The charming image of the baby Jesus playing with a tennis ball concludes the shepherds’ interaction with him, and a similar image of children at play concludes Frozen River. In the latter case, too, it is produced by the self-sacrificing impulses of those who have suffered injustice. After the episode of the Pakistani baby, Ray needs to make one more smuggling run to pay for the double-wide; it is now she who tempts the reformed, and literally visionary, Lila to take one last chance. This time, however, they get stuck in the melting ice and are spotted; when they take refuge in a Mohawk household, tribal leaders decide that one or the other must be given up to the state troopers. Initially Lila agrees to sacrifice herself for the sake of Ray’s children, and Ray escapes through the woods; but Ray finally decides to return and give herself up, advising Lila to use her smuggling profits for an upgraded single-wide mobile home in which she can care for all the children (including her own son, whom Lila now reclaims from her mother-in-law). This mutual selfsacrifice makes possible the final scene of the reconstituted family, with Lila overseeing the three children playing on a homemade merry-goround as the new mobile home makes its way toward them. T. J., who formerly exhibited racist attitudes toward the Mohawks, now demonstrates the same tender care for Lila’s son that he has always shown toward Ricky. The new multicultural family is thus reconstituted around Ray’s sacrificial absence from it. What are we to make of the similarities between The Second Shepherds’ Play and Frozen River outlined here? One possibility would be to see the film as a deliberately medievalist echo of the play, simply reimagining it in a modern setting. On the other hand, despite these striking similarities, we need not insist on a direct connection: certainly the play and the film each adapts their common themes and structures to its own historical context, so that one can say neither that The Second Shepherds’ Play is exactly “modern” (or “postmodern”) nor that Frozen River is exactly “medieval.” In terms of economic history, for example, the play focuses on the late medieval social disruptions caused by enclosure and the conversion of arable land, while the film takes up the contemporary hot-button issue of undocumented immigrant labor and brief ly raises the specter of terrorism. In religious terms, The Second Shepherds’ Play, with its angel and Virgin Birth, unquestioningly accepts the miraculous, while Frozen River presents Ray’s common-sense perception that the resurrected Pakistani child was “just cold” as well as Lila’s willingness to see him as miraculous. Indeed, the multiculturalism of Frozen River, especially in the nativity and resurrection scenes, marks its distance from

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the homogeneous ethnic and religious world of The Second Shepherds’ Play: Lila, as a Mohawk, is emphatically not Christian, and explicitly rejects Ray’s Christmas celebrations as well as Mohawk conversions to Christianity from “the Longhouse ways.” Ray at first considers the traditional Mohawk religion “messed up” not to have Santa Claus for the children, but after the resurrection scene she grudgingly wishes Lila “Merry Christmas—or whatever.” The Madonna-and-Child image of the Pakistani family simultaneously does and does not “read” as Christian because of the mother’s dress. And Lila attributes the resurrection to a nondenominational Creator, not the Christian God. Both the play and the film are specific to their time and place. However, to question periodization, as Biddick and Davis do, is not to deny historical change, but rather to insist on its continuity, on its constant process of becoming. Umberto Eco famously suggested not only that we are “living in the new Middle Ages,”26 but that the Middle Ages are not in need of renewal because they are continuous with the present: “We are dreaming the Middle Ages, some say. But in fact both Americans and Europeans are inheritors of the Western legacy, and all the problems of the Western world emerged in the Middle Ages.”27 As the structural and thematic comparison drawn above suggests, one might include in this assessment all the problems addressed in Frozen River—certainly the structural links among crime, class struggle, and the human relationship with the environment addressed in The Second Shepherds’ Play, but also modern ethnic conf licts and population movements. Some medievalists, like those cited at the beginning of this essay, have suggested that nostalgia for the Middle Ages, or fantasies about the Middle Ages, “reassure a troubled present”28 or provide “a fantasy frame for making sense of our own world.”29 And Bruce Holsinger, in his analysis of the conservative “neomedievalism” movement, has recently warned us of the potential political dangers of indulging such fantasies, or indeed of assuming too simple an identity between past and present—of committing “a fallacy of historical continuity.”30 Frozen River’s dalliance with the miraculous, perhaps the most powerful of its medievalist effects, certainly risks reproducing The Second Shepherds’ Play’s strategy of satisfying a secular, political, and economic problem with a reassuring religious fantasy: in both cases, the self-sacrifice of the economically oppressed is necessary to produce the happy ending, and in both cases this self-sacrifice is the result of a miraculous religious panacea—of a deus ex machina, in fact. But precisely the fact that Frozen River is not “medievalist” in the usual sense, that it does not use the typical “signs of the medieval,” but rather, deliberately or not, reimagines the same concerns that we find in a medieval play for a multicultural, twenty-first-century setting—and,

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in doing so, refuses a merely Christian solution to its problems—forces us to rethink the historical nature of fantasy and desire themselves. It allows a space for the consideration of questions about the history of desire, pleasure, and politics. For example: to what extent do each of these cultural productions buy into the supernatural (pseudo?-) resolutions of sociological problems, and to what extent do they resist them? How might various audiences appropriate these apparent resolutions in terms of politics as well as pleasure? Are political and libidinal responses to the two artifacts necessarily opposed? How can the relationship between the play and the film help us rethink temporality and periodization—that is, how might the later film guide or subvert a response to or understanding of the earlier play? What does the film suggest about the contemporary presence of the medieval as a source of both pleasure and political consciousness? Frozen River’s appropriation of the Madonna-and-Child image for the Pakistani family suspected of terrorism might provide a locus for the consideration of these issues, again from the perspective of the viewer who perceives the film’s “medievalism effects” to begin with. It is anticipated by another, similar visual image. When Ray and Lila deliver the revived and resurrected child to his parents, Lila is cradling him in her arms, suggesting a second cultural reimagining of the Christian image, another non-Christian one, given that Lila is a Mohawk who rejects Christianity. The film, then, rather than insisting on a univocal reading of the “resurrection,” as The Second Shepherds’ Play must, offers the viewer multiple cultural perspectives (Mohawk, Pakistani) for understanding it, including Ray’s resolutely secular insistence that it is not a resurrection at all—and that even if it is, Lila herself is responsible for it. Medieval Christianity is thus evoked and subverted simultaneously: a pleasurable medieval fantasy of salvation is still available, but it must be politically reevaluated and radically questioned if it is to remain relevant. Frozen River is thus, consciously or not, “living in the Middle Ages,” and by suggesting that the Middle Ages are continuous with the present, it subverts conventional periodization. At the same time, it allows us to recognize that the Middle Ages have been radically altered by that very continuity: even if periodization cannot, from this perspective, be accepted, change must be. Continuity need not imply identity, but rather includes constant change within a continuous historical field. To return to Kathleen Davis’s observations, Frozen River does not form its concepts in conjunction with periodization, nor does it allow the viewer to reify medieval categories or to erase the ongoing work of history. Might we even say that only films that do not acknowledge medieval sources can make such a claim?

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Notes 1. Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: Films About Medieval Europe ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999). 2. David W. Marshall, “Introduction: The Medievalism of Popular Culture,” in Mass Market Medievalism: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture, ed. David W. Marshall ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), 2. 3. Tison Pugh and Lynn T. Ramey, “Introduction: Filming the ‘Other’ Middle Ages,” in Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema, ed. Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1. 4. Bettina Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2011), 15. 5. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 40 and 41. 6. Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 5. 7. Both Bildhauer, Filming, 253–59, and François Amy de la Bretèque, L’Imaginaire médiévale dans le cinéma occidental (Paris: Champion, 2004), 1099–1225, provide filmographies devoted to films exhibiting “signs of the medieval.” 8. Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, 23–52. In the same spirit, Amy de la Bretèque, L’Imaginaire, suggests that this medieval imaginary is defined by the “volume d’images moyenâgeuses contenues dans un film,” 18. 9. Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, 66. 10. Bildhauer, Filming, 7. 11. Haydock, Movie Medievalism, 18, 27. 12. Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1. 13. The large topic of nostalgia in medievalism cannot be broached here; it has recently been addressed in The Medievalism of Nostalgia, ed. Helen Dell, Louise D’Arcens, and Andrew Lynch, special issue of postmedieval 2.2 (2011). For a theoretical statement of the issues, see especially Helen Dell’s contribution: “Nostalgia and Medievalism: Conversations, Contradictions, Impasses,” 115–26. 14. David John Williams, “Looking at the Middle Ages in the Cinema: An Overview,” Film and History 29.1–2 (1999): 9. 15. Amy de la Bretèque, L’Imaginaire, 19. For another such gesture, see Martha Driver and Sid Ray, “Preface: Hollywood Knights,” in The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy (London: McFarland, 2004), 5–18. This collection as a whole does provide more follow-through. 16. Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 134. 17. Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 4. The phrase “hard-edged alterity” is quoted

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18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

from Stephen G. Nichols, “Modernism and the Politics of Medieval Studies,” in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 49. Angela Jane Weisl, The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). On the romance genre of science-fiction, see 143–207; on the relation of modern sports narratives to aspects of medieval religion, see 33–141. William Racicot, “Anything Different Is Good: Incremental Repetition, Courtly Love, and Purgatory in Groundhog Day,” in Mass Market Medievalism, ed. Marshall, 186–97; the discussion of “Medievalism and the Non-Medieval” is on 187–89. See also Tom Henthorne, “Boys to Men: Medievalism and Masculinity in Star Wars and E. T.: The ExtraTerrestrial,” in Driver and Ray, Medieval Hero, 73–89; Carl James Grindley, “The Hagiography of Steel: The Hero’s Weapon and Its Place in Pop Culture,” in Driver and Ray, Medieval Hero, 151–66. Robert S. Sturges, “‘Nerehand nothyng to pay or to take’: Poverty, Labor, and Ideology in Four Towneley Plays,” in Money, Morality, and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Juliann Vitullo and Diane Wolfthal (London: Ashgate Press, 2010), 13–32. The Second Shepherds’ Play, in The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, 2 vols., EETS s.s. 13–14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), vol. 1, 126–57, lines 1–2 and 10–12. Quotations from this edition will be cited by line numbers in the text. See the note on lines 20–21 in the Stevens and Cawley edition, vol. 2, 495. Frozen River (2008), dir. Courtney Hunt (Sony Pictures Classics, 2009), DVD. All references to Frozen River are to this version. Sturges, “Nerehand nothyng,” 28. As Hunt and Rae note in their DVD commentary on this scene. Umberto Eco, “Living in the New Middle Ages,” in his Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986), 73–85. Umberto Eco, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” in Travels in Hyperreality, 64. Aronstein, Hollywood Knights, 9. Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, 13. Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007), 31.

CHAPTER 7 TIME TRAVEL, PULP FICTIONS, AND CHANGING ATTITUDES TOWARD THE MIDDLE AGES: WHY YOU CAN’T GET RENAISSANCE ON SOMEBODY’S ASS Steve Guthrie

There’s a lot of moral ambiguity goin’ on around here. Utah Phillips1

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y point in this essay is that popular usage no longer despises the Middle Ages, and that, ironically, academic medievalists have been slow to see the change because we still have a stake in the Renaissance model of the world that created the superior attitude. Several years ago, I argued that American popular images of the Middle Ages were a kind of temporal Orientalism: in fiction, film, news reporting, advertising, and political cant, the period became a dumping ground for the modern Western world’s repressed evils (barbarism, torture, disease, and general chaos) and daydreams (exotic adventure, romance, honor, the simple life).2 The images were familiar: on one side (the evils), network news references to “medieval” places like Afghanistan, with their warlords and their unpaved towns and religions, or the simple youth dismissal, “that’s so medieval,” of anything built, done, written, or thought before 1980; on the other side (the daydreams), the greening of community and the Disneyfication of King Arthur. Images of violence and dirt far outnumbered images of honor and greenery, however, and clean, clear air was

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rarely called medieval; fictional treatment of the period always dwelled on the smelliness of the place. The temporal Orientalism argument is intuitive to a medievalist, and it is hard to resist as a diagnostic tool: if something is called medieval, it is sure to be something we resist in ourselves, almost always on moral grounds. But it may be time to rethink this diagnosis. “Intuitive to a medievalist” may not be a reliable gauge of anything, and the formula “something we resist in ourselves” is problematic in that it claims full membership privileges in American popular culture. This is where we are suspect as analysts, and an understandable response from many quarters outside academia, or from the ranks of below-living-wage workers inside, would be “What you mean ‘we,’ Kemo Sabe?” Popular usage still associates “medieval” with violent physicality and the absence of centralized, organized authority, but people no longer resist these things in themselves as they may once have done. The Renaissance model of the modern world, with its twin myths of perpetual social progress and the dominant nation-state, is giving way in the popular imagination to a model identified with the Middle Ages: a weak state, corporate feudalism, personal insecurity, and physical trial. An essential element in this vision is the acceptance of unregulated violence as a real possibility and even a creative force. We are told that we can no longer expect the stability of permanent employment, the security of the welfare state, or the promise of upward mobility, but we are told that these losses are opportunities for the strong and resourceful. For the not-so-strong, those unable to do battle in the corporate lists, the advice is to labor uncomplaining, cleave to family and church, and prepare to defend selves. The telling image of this television season is a portable home gym called The Rack, an overturned Zimmer frame on rollers, advertised incessantly on cable channels. Twenty years ago, advertising images of the Middle Ages were of physical obstacles to be overcome by buying the product; now they are the product. In a study of popular attitudes toward the Middle Ages, historical fiction is an obvious place to look, and time travel fiction should be especially revealing, because its point is to bring modern senses and moral responses into contact with the medieval world in ways that mere historical fiction cannot. The recent historical blockbusters, Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth (twelfth century) and World without End (fourteenth century), are endless spinoffs of the social history research of the last fifty years, but the characters inhabiting their worlds are indistinguishable from the characters inhabiting network evening dramas. The medieval characters in time travel also tend to be moderns in scrupulously researched funny clothes, but their interactions with modern characters create a perspective

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that is not possible in historical fiction, where the narrative consciousness is the only interloper, and the modern world can see and hear but has to leave its sense of smell and (at least explicitly) its moral sense at home. The subgenre of the medieval time travel novel is small; I know of four. There is Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, which is still a wonderful antiOrientalist satire, mostly, but too old for this discussion. There is Daphne DuMaurier’s The House on the Strand (1967), a story of drug psychosis and sexual repression in a younger chum from Cambridge, in which the medieval world is a presence but not a bodily one: the traveler is more a figure for the narrative consciousness of historical fiction than a real time traveler; he can see them but they cannot see him, and if he tries to touch anyone, he bounces back to the present. And there is Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book (1992), the most substantial of the recent works, notable for the lesson its traveler learns in the plague of 1348—physical fortitude as a moral virtue—and for Willis’s use of phonetically rendered late Middle English to concretize the experience.3 But the medieval fantasy of the generation is Michael Crichton’s Timeline (1999),4 which was a New York Times bestseller and then a Richard Donner film. (The film is a simplified version of the novel in plot, theme, and characterization.) Timeline is an action adventure romance with overlays of hard science fiction and medieval history. In a narrator’s introduction, cobbled together from scientific and invented sources, Crichton makes a show of exploring the nature of time, the science of time travel (quantum technology), and the machinery of the process (a multidimensional fax machine), but this is window dressing, unlike in most science fiction treatments where time itself is the real subject.5 The novel’s medievalism, documented in four pages of bibliography, is current for the details a filmmaker would need, but there are lapses of basic knowledge and terminology: the fourteenth century is called the high Middle Ages; Middle English is called Old English, as in fact it was, but a hundred years ago; and the novel’s one attempt to record the language is gibberish. Middle French, called Old French, goes unrecorded. In Timeline, the modern world is a technological nightmare whose best hopes are disinterested academic research, and self-regulating capitalism to support it. The medieval world is physically violent and politically chaotic, but these qualities are seen as a creative dynamism; the dislocations of an unstable world are opportunities for the strong and resourceful. The two main themes of the novel are also the two main virtues of the fourteenth century: providing the model for technological capitalism and therefore for the modern world; and offering a home to the chivalric spirit. The first of these is grafted onto the action-adventure plot in order to establish the relevance of the medieval setting. The second, chivalry,

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is essential to the plot but discordant with the setting: the only character in the novel who believes in the chivalric spirit is one of the modern academic time travelers. The two themes together make an odd match, and the tension between them is interesting; I’ll return to this point in a moment. The cast of characters is basic melodrama: there is an evil billionaire-physicist-entrepreneur–amateur historian, Doniger, whose practical interest in the Middle Ages is an entrepreneurial scheme to create authentic medieval theme parks on real medieval sites; and there are his victims, Kate and Chris (grad students), Marek (“one of the new breed of ‘experimental’ historians”),6 and Professor Johnston (archeologist). The railroad track he ties them to is the Dordogne in 1357, on the eve of a French-English battle; the plot is their struggle to survive and the efforts of others to rescue them after the time machine blows up. On one hand, the fourteenth century of Timeline is predictably dangerous, violent, unstable, and smelly: “It was a world of shifting boundaries and shifting allegiances, often changing from one day to the next. It was a world of death, of sweeping plagues, of disease, of constant warfare.” 7 Dirt, physical cruelty, and vermin are tag images of the medieval world, and this says something about the social register of the novel and of its intended audience: if you see a rat or an instrument of torture and think “medieval,” then your experience of the present is limited. From time to time, the moderns do have their prejudices shaken—medievals are surprisingly clean; they wipe their behinds with strips of white linen— but for the most part, the Middle Ages are a place where only the strong survive. On the other hand, “the truth was that the modern world was invented in the Middle Ages”; and here “the modern world” means a market economy and the accumulation of capital to run it.8 Villages were built by entrepreneurs as fortified shopping malls; mills were run efficiently as chartered monopolies; wage soldiers with advanced weapons changed warfare and finished off the warrior-knight.9 The setting is a bit late for Crichton to introduce the Templars, disbanded in 1312 (through Crichton’s lens the order would be the first modern corporation, with property held corporately, not individually, and thus beyond the reach of civil law), but he covers as many bases as possible. This embedded overview of medieval economics helps explain the travelers’ and the novelist’s interest in the period, but it is not directly ref lected in the action adventure plot: the mill blows up without a glance at its balance sheet, and the central battle between baronial armies is over territory, not markets. Within the novel, then, medieval capitalism is not a text for the modern world to learn from. What it is, however, is an authority, a point of origin, a validation for the modern world and a

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development of obvious relevance to the modern world. What it emphatically is not, is a glimmer of the Renaissance; as the novel describes the genealogy of modernity, the line goes directly from the feudal world to us, bypassing the Renaissance completely. And the novel makes the link between medieval and modern worlds without reference to a theory of progress; modern economics sprang more or less full-grown from advances made under, not in spite of, the feudal system. Crichton insists that the difference between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries is not one of progress, but this does not seem to ref lect a dystopian view of the present; it seems, rather, to indicate simply an abandonment of the Renaissance as our point of origin. Significantly, the concept of the nation-state is also missing from the novel. In the medieval setting, British and French armies are under baronial control, but with no mention of any higher allegiance; the political system is headless feudalism; no kings are involved or even mentioned. In the novel’s modern setting, the state is invisible and irrelevant. The situation in both worlds is unstable, and instability is risk but also opportunity; its remedies, implicitly, are personal initiative, the fortified entrepreneurial village, and the efficient mill: private enterprise, decentralized economic feudalism. Among the moderns, Doniger embodies the excesses of the entrepreneurial spirit. But his vice is his cynical disrespect for human life, not his economics, and the book never suggests that the one is a function of the other. The way to solve a problem like Doniger is not to call in the police or the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) or the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) or the State Department, and no one does; as far as the book is concerned, there is no State Department. The solution, after Doniger tries to simplify matters by leaving his travelers to die in the past, is for his two senior officers to decide that he has gone too far, and to ship him to 1348 without hope of return, explaining that, “there have been some discussions, Bob. . .We think someone more moderate should run the company now.”10 By the implicit morality of the novel, this is an appropriate solution. They get medieval on his ass in order to save the baronial power of the corporation; they do not get Renaissance on his ass by calling in a federal agency to work him over. What we are left with is a brief for a self-policing corporate feudalism with the intelligence and good taste to fund academic research and the good business sense to deal decisively with a serious liability. The innocent academics in the novel have no problem with this model. Professor Johnston points out that corporate funding is the way of the modern world; he never argues that governments should fund research (again, for the purposes of the novel, there is no government); and he tries to dodge an interview with a muckraking French journalist because “she’s one of those conspiracy people.

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Capitalism is bad, all corporations are evil.”11 Jenny Adams has argued that, “by the end of the story, the academic characters, the decided heroes of the tale, have triumphed over corporate greed, the inf luence of the market, and the evils of capitalism,”12 but that is an academic rooting for the side; the novel says otherwise. The Professor never repudiates his outburst or rejects his source of funding, and his outlook is echoed by the other characters and the narrative voice. The implication is that with Doniger gone, the system is functional again. So, the ideological platform of the novel is morally regulated corporate feudalism as patron to academic research. The trick is how to achieve moral regulation in a world without a relevant state, and the answer Timeline tries to offer is the chivalric ethic. The cracks in this model begin with the medieval setting: Crichton needs the mid-fourteenth century for its economic developments, and that forces him to accept the autumn of the knightly code (the medieval characters are notably unchivalrous), so he imports the chivalric spirit from the modern world in the person of Marek, the practical authority on medieval warfare, and his foil, grad student Chris. The most predictable stress line this creates is in the novel’s treatment of gender roles. As they learn to survive in physical crisis, the travelers also learn that concessions to late-twentieth-century feminism can only carry a popular novel so far; survival is by rule a gendered occupation. Historian Chris starts the trip with a weak stomach and a lack of enthusiasm (“It’s not my period, either. I’m much more late thirteenth than true fourteenth century”),13 but near the end of the novel, he slays a large, smelly knight (tooth decay) at—yes—the green chapel; the fourteenth century makes a man of him. Kate, the architect of the group, is fit, strong, brave, and gymnastic enough to escape from medieval pursuers in the rafters of a castle, but it is she whom Chris rescues from the smelly knight, and her response, only half mocking, is, “My hero.”14 She is still the stronger and braver, but she learns to act like a proper lady in a romance novel. The real hero is Marek, who has always longed to test himself physically against the real Middle Ages. In the most fantasy-driven thread of the novel, he survives a tournament, defeats trained knights in battle, wins the heart of Lady Claire, and stays behind to live the rest of his life in the fourteenth century (as a knight, of course, not as a peasant). Marek’s sports fantasy is narrated with occasional hints of narrative shame: we are asked to accept that his martial success is possible on the ground that he himself recognizes its implausibility. His signal quality is that he believes in and relentlessly practices the forms of chivalry, defined, incredulously, by grad student Chris, as “honor and truth, and the purity of the body, the defense of women, the sanctity of true love, and all the rest of it”15 —all the rest of it being Marek’s primary interests, hand

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to hand combat and courtly manners. What is strange is that he is the only character in the novel who does believe. It is not that he learns the ethic from the Middle Ages; he learned it from books. It is not even that the medievals learn it from him; they do not. The novel champions Marek but finds no authority for him in the fourteenth century except a vague nostalgia, also a modern import, for an even earlier, less technological age, which the medievals are too busy looking for technological advantages to indulge. So the image of chivalry hovers over the novel but is never anchored there. It reinforces the ethic of physical competition that underlies the novel’s sociopolitical views, and it reminds the audience that a strong dose of “medieval” can be a testosterone booster and a survival tool. The novel also suggests, by the juxtaposition of Marek’s heroism with Doniger’s villainy, that the chivalric ethic could be a moral antidote to modern cynicism and a regulating principle for modern economic life. In MBA-speak, the one offering a friendly buyout is a White Knight, and the robber baron-era myth of the entrepreneur as knight errant still permeates corporate culture, where it is a sports fantasy like Marek’s. But if this is the intention—chivalry as the conscience of the economic system—then it is an act of desperation on Crichton’s part. In the novel’s medieval world, chivalry is on the way out, and in the modern world, it is clearly no match for technological capitalism (the real cure for Doniger is an unfriendly takeover and a one-way trip to the plague years) and no source of research funding. Even as a remedy for Marek’s nostalgia, chivalry is suspect: in the end, he escapes modernity but is left in a world he has already described as essentially modern. In an epilogue, after the remaining travelers are rescued (their work is apparently still financed by Doniger’s corporation under new management, or at least the novel says nothing to the contrary), they discover Marek’s tomb, beside Lady Claire’s, in a ruined chapel in England, and the book ends with the research team posed reverently there. The professor worries that modern Marek could never feel at home in the fourteenth century, but the truth seems to be that medieval Marek could never feel at home in the fourteenth century. In the end, the central theme of chivalry cancels itself out, leaving both worlds exposed to the practical dangers of an ungoverned economic system. A popular novel must resonate with the fears and daydreams of its audience, and these resonances are clear: the Middle Ages are us, a perilous world of unregulated economic forces where the mirage of knightly honor is our best moral hope. The line between white knight and robber baron evaporates in the light of day. From a marketing viewpoint, the ill-fitting theme of chivalry is the popular genre of medieval romance asserting itself, but that is just the

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point: Timeline replicates a current daydream combining entrepreneurial capitalism, chivalric honor, physical prowess, and old-fashioned gender roles. It also replicates a daydream in which the world can be sketched through the actions of elites; the modern setting is academic and management-level corporate; the medievals with speaking parts are people in positions of power fighting to get more power. Everyone else is a bit player, and the reader can either identify with the powerful or watch carefully and look for places to hide. Race in the modern sense of the term is not an issue, and class is not an explicit issue. There is one recent time travel fiction, however, in which race and class are very much the issue: the Gil Junger-Martin Lawrence film comedy, Black Knight.16 The film is a farce, but then Timeline is no tragedy, and in some ways Black Knight digs deeper into the tensions of the modern world. Lawrence plays Jamal Skywalker, a low-wage employee of a crumbling medieval theme park in Los Angeles, a neighborhood business threatened by a newer, fancier competitor. His journey to the past (he falls into the moat while cleaning it and surfaces by a medieval riverbank, and returns the same way) gives him the courage to save the business and, by implication, the neighborhood. Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, in a fascinating article on the film, argue that it uses “the experience of the Middle Ages to relieve [and relive] the trauma of urban modernity”17 and that, although he plays the juxtaposition of settings for laughs, “Junger’s medieval England does not seem as alien to America’s inner cities as it first appears.”18 Finke and Shichtman emphasize the physicality of the kinship: “[E]ven as we live in the body, we necessarily live in the Middle Ages.”19 Finke and Shichtman argue that Lawrence turns the Middle-Ages-asdumping-ground formula on its head, using the skills of a modern ghetto dweller to survive the medieval world and teach it a thing or three: dancing, chivalry (he befriends a disillusioned knight and restores his faith in chivalric values), and justice. “He struggles to reimpose the very sort of centralized, organized, and just governance missing from his inner-city experience.”20 In the end, after returning to the present, he succeeds, restoring the park, bailing out the local woman who owns it, and bringing a sense of hope to the neighborhood. Finke and Shichtman argue that Lawrence succeeds by tapping his capacity for cultural hybridity, and that the film’s conclusion fails by suppressing that hybridity in favor of the capitalist happy ending.21 Here, though, is the rub. This interpretation makes perfect sense, but only from an academic viewpoint lodged in Renaissance myths. Lawrence’s character is a clown and a bridger of culture gaps, but he is also, at one key point, a committed militant, and he does not really

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believe in the principle of centralized authority that Finke and Shichtman take to be the source of justice. He does help restore the rightful queen to the throne, but from his viewpoint he is helping a ragtag group of citizens to seize power from an unjust government by any means necessary, and his rallying cry to the troops invokes Rodney King: “Sometimes we can’t just get along. Sometimes we gotta take up arms. Look, hear what I’m sayin’. Your lives are shitty. I know because I been there.”22 This is a radical moment in the film, and it is a caution to a liberal political moralism. “Centralized” and “organized” do not necessarily go together with “just.” It is not hard to argue that what is wrong with “our” inner cities is that they are ours: they are victims of centralized government, tyrannical, inept, and without the prospect of home rule. And it is not hard to argue that the conclusion of the film, with Jamal saving the theme park for its employees, the neighborhood, and the black woman who owns it, but saving it as a collective enterprise, is also a radical act which does not retreat from hybridity but extends it in a direction that puts food on the table. It is not just a black thing, either. Extend this climate to the country as a whole and you have the present near-universal disillusionment with standard political parties, the presidency, Congress, the courts, and the liberal arts. Among the poor, it is a disillusionment born of long experience. Among the rich and their followers, it tends to be a conviction that the old machinery of the state is outmoded and that the correctives are individual freedom, economic deregulation, and entrepreneurial spirit. This is the popular mood, and it accounts for the undercurrents of popular medievalism. It also contains a basic contradiction between the currents of populism and monopolism that helps account for the violent anxieties of the mood. The project for the coming decades will be to either resolve or accept the contradiction. In hindsight, the emblematic line of Renaissance-centered twentiethcentury America was G. Gordon Liddy’s when asked why he had followed Nixon’s illegal orders: “When the prince commands, the proper response is ‘Fiat voluntas tua.’” The emblematic line of medieval-centered twentyfirst-century America is Marsellus Wallace’s in Pulp Fiction: “I’ma get medieval on your ass.”23 Tarantino’s one-liner, like Junger’s film, brings race and class into the picture in ways crucial to an understanding of the changes in popular mood. Pulp Fiction is almost entirely contained within Tarantino’s mental film archive, and yet the Ving Rhames / Marsellus Wallace line has taken the pulse of the country. Carolyn Dinshaw, in her well-known critique of the pop sexuality in the film, argues that the medieval world, as evoked in Pulp Fiction and in popular usage generally, “is the space of the rejects—really, the abjects—of

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this world.”24 She sees the medieval as representing “things that cannot be eradicated,”25 and she writes of Tarantino’s “fascination with the immoral”;26 the two concepts overlap: the ineradicable is the immoral; these are the things we resist in ourselves on moral grounds. For Dinshaw, Marsellus Wallace’s “get medieval” is a matter of “undertaking brutal private vengeance in a triumphal and unregulated bloodbath.”27 And here, again, is the rub: as if a regulated bloodbath would be preferable. But is that not just what we have had, on a global scale, in the decade since Dinshaw’s book was written? The war on Iraq and Afghanistan has been a well funded bloodbath regulated by the dominant nationstate that protects us. The activities at Abu Ghraib were regulated by the Pentagon’s chain of command. They were dressed up to look “medieval,” and Sgt. Graner and the others may have thought they were getting medieval on some Iraqi bodies, but the episode was well orchestrated by Washington; it was getting Renaissance all the way.28 For many in this country, the revelation that these activities were centralized and organized was shocking. For others with a wider experience of the present, they were business as usual. Wallace’s “get medieval,” his planned revenge for the rape on which his role centers, is brutal but not sexual, and popular uses of the phrase rarely have any direct sexual content, but the phrase associates itself with a pattern of anxious anality that runs throughout the main threads of the film. Dinshaw sees Tarantino as coining the phrase in order to stabilize the sexuality of the film, to keep the modern world safe for an unambiguous white heterosexuality.29 Against this project, she argues for Foucault’s late vision of “a realm of clearly apprehensible acts and legible surfaces,”30 that is, for uninterpreted sexuality—and, by extension, uninterpreted identity in general. Dinshaw offers a subversive definition and strategy as a way to rid “medieval” of its negative moral connotations: “Getting medieval—playing in an abjected space, adopting an abjected role— doubly gets at the impossibility of absolute straightness, whiteness, modernity, of the purely dominant, of essentially being anything.”31 This makes sense, in theory—I agree that the world would be much better without its preemptive social filing systems (and the strategy would eliminate the silliest elements of Timeline, and possibly the whole novel)—and it seems to work, sometimes at least, in the academic world. On the other hand, the Ving Rhames character might reply that he ain’t playin’, or that he is playing by his own rules, or that he is tired of double consciousness and has worked hard to be essentially something. If he did, I might disagree with his analysis or his methods, but my own analysis, however neatly theorized, would suffer if I assumed he was trying to live by my moral values and not doing a very good job of it.

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The problem with academic arguments about popular culture, including my own of several years ago, is that they’re written from within a social class protected by “centralized, organized” authority, and they tend to assume a morality that much of the world has become disenchanted with. This being America, class and race come into it. What is an “abjected space” to academics is home to a lot of folks who do not feel abject and who do not feel like playing, or who feel like playing by their own rules for once. What is unregulated violence to those of us backed by regulated violence may seem like the only option to others. Medievalists have long complained that popular usage demoralizes the period, but it does not any more. Renaissance scholars have renamed their period Early Modern, asserting kinship (compare the effect of renaming it Neoclassic, which it was, or Postmedieval, which it also was), but the modern world is developing a different analysis. The Middle Ages are Us now, and medievalists, like everyone else, will have to learn to live with that. Popular fiction images of the Middle Ages focus on personal trial as a training ground in times of crises, when the central authority of the nation-state is absent or failed and the world has gone local, without the Renaissance beliefs in statecraft and progress to hold it together. In Timeline and Black Knight, the uneasy linking of capitalism and chivalry is the ref lected image of the modern world, and in Timeline in particular, the problem is that chivalric honor is a daydream with its own inner contradictions and with no real foothold as a moral force or political corrective. And, yet, these do not seem like apocalyptic or particularly dystopian works; they seem more like pedigrees, provenances, or blueprints. In them, the Middle Ages are secondarily a source text for the present, but more important, they are an authority for the present. When Marsellus Wallace says, “I’ma get medieval on your ass,” he is offering his own diagnosis of and response to modern America—the whole episode is practically personification allegory—but he is also claiming for his actions a moral authority grounded deep in Western civilization. He is not essentially medieval; he is gonna get medieval: he is going to play in an abjected space, adopt an abjected role, but in the process he is going to create and legitimate a space where a term like “abjected” has no meaning. In popular images, getting medieval is not always dumping this culture’s trash and daydreams on another culture. It is often a way of finding authority for the will to survive and prosper in the present crisis of instability and shifting boundaries. Sometimes, what is authorized is Marsellus’s revenge; sometimes it is archeology; sometimes it is a neighborhood theme park; sometimes it is WalMart; sometimes it is a portable home gym. In most of these projects, physical and psychological struggle are assumed to be at stake, either for the individual or for a local circle or cell or corporate

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entity, in a world in crisis, where central authority is nonexistent, irrelevant, or obstructionist. The world gets medieval on people’s asses because getting Renaissance on them was a bad deal for most of the world. When the Euro-American world was Renaissance-centered, the medieval world was its deprived childhood, without modern science or progress or proper nation-states to give it purpose and direction. But the Renaissance-centered world peaked in this country in the 1960s, with the cold war (dominant nation-states playing chicken in other people’s streets), the moon landing, abundant oil, and the myths of an expanding economy and an upwardly mobile population. Those myths are not compelling any more. Without the Renaissance progress myth and the successful nation state as center (Noam Chomsky has pointed out that the United States is a failed state by its own definition),32 the United States of the early-twenty-first century is looking for a new myth and a new source text, and there are signs that the medieval world is becoming that text. On some level, it may have been an unacknowledged source text all along: the similarities between the popular Middle Ages now and the popular Old West of sixty years ago are obvious. From where I stand, the prospect of a world gone local is appealing in many ways. It would include the values of the new urbanism and the green movement, and it would finally get the message of neighborhood control that the Black Panthers tried to send in the 1960s (and, in a different way, that Black Knight tries to send). Again from my viewpoint, one problem, as the contradictions within Timeline make clear, is that a world gone local is an invitation to baronial monopolism, which hardly needed an invitation to begin with. The capacity for unregulated violence in the present mood is also unappealing, and the promise of regulated violence in response is even less appealing. But these are not future prospects; they are present reality, and we are not well insulated from them; academia is a fairly brittle fortress. So what is a poor medievalist to do? We need to get out more, for one thing, and maybe even consider getting out altogether. We need to remember that our moral and ethical values are not inevitable; they ref lect our position in society. And we need to learn more about what is happening inside our institutions and more about the people it is happening to. That is probably enough for a start. Notes 1. Utah Phillips, “The Violence Within,” in U. Utah Phillips: I’ve Got to Know (AK Press, 2003), CD. 2. Steve Guthrie, “Medievalism and Orientalism,” Medieval Perspectives 19 (2004): 91–113.

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3. Daphne duMaurier, The House on the Strand (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969); Connie Willis, Doomsday Book (New York: Bantam, 1994). 4. Michael Crichton, Timeline (New York: Ballantine, 1999). 5. George Slusser and Danièle Chatelain, “Spacetime Geometries: Time Travel and the Modern Geometrical Narrative,” Science Fiction Studies 22 (1995): 181. 6. Crichton, Timeline, 41. 7. Crichton, Timeline, 174. 8. Crichton, Timeline, 85–86. 9. Crichton, Timeline, 101, 340 and 266. 10. Crichton, Timeline, 482. 11. Crichton, Timeline, 51. 12. Jenny Adams, “Marketing the Medieval: The Quest for Authentic History in Michael Crichton’s Timeline,” Journal of Popular Culture 36 (2003): 705. 13. Crichton, Timeline, 174. 14. Crichton, Timeline, 421. 15. Crichton, Timeline, 390. 16. Black Knight, dir. Gil Junger (20th Century Fox, 2001), DVD. 17. Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, “Inner-City Chivalry in Gil Junger’s Black Knight: A South-Central Yankee in King Leo’s Court,” in Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema, ed. Lynn Ramey and Tison Pugh (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 107. 18. Finke and Shichtman, “Inner-City Chivalry,” 115. 19. Finke and Shichtman, “Inner-City Chivalry,” 111. 20. Finke and Shichtman, “Inner-City Chivalry,” 118. 21. Finke and Shichtman, “Inner-City Chivalry,” 119. 22. Black Knight, minute 69. 23. Pulp Fiction, dir. Quentin Tarantino (Miramax 1994), DVD, minute 107. 24. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 25. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 189. 26. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 190. 27. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 206. 28. Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 To Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). 29. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 187. 30. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 201. 31. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 189. 32. Noam Chomsky, Failed States (New York: Holt, 2007), 1.

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CHAPTER 8 H. P. LOVECRAFT’S “UNNAMABLE” MIDDLE AGES Brantley L. Bryant

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t may seem foolish to go looking for medieval afterlives in the work of US writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), however much Lovecraft’s powerful inf luence over the contemporary imagination would make the task tempting for a medievalist on the hunt for important connections. “I hate the Middle Ages so,” Lovecraft writes to a friend during a discussion of his genealogical research, “that I don’t take much satisfaction in establishing a linkage with them” (SL 4:143).1 Lovecraft’s current popcultural reputation might please the author, then; Lovecraft is commonly seen as a scientific and materialist thinker, fascinated with the “deep time” of prehuman eras or the extraterrestrial inf luence of alien gods, with no linkage whatsoever to the Middle Ages.2 Lovecraft’s apparent lack of interest in the medieval stands out even more sharply when compared to the passionate medievalism of another writer currently exerting powerful inf luence over contemporary culture: J. R. R. Tolkien. A recent article about Lovecraft’s massively growing popularity, for example, contrasts Lovecraft, the “product of the Scientific Revolution,” with Tolkien, the “medievalist.”3 At its bluntest, the usual Lovecraft-Tolkien comparison goes something like this: Lovecraft was an amateur scientist who set his stories mostly in his own day and in the prehistoric past and who wrote about humanity’s losing battle against alien creatures; Tolkien, on the other hand, created a mythic world based on the European Middle Ages and filled it with familiar and defeatable folkloric monsters. There can be a combative tone to some of the comparisons, too; award-winning contemporary fantasist China Miéville has,

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at different points, derided Tolkien as the “wen on the arse of fantasy literature” and praised Lovecraft as a writer who “fundamentally defined the shape of his chosen literary field.”4 Yet, the Middle Ages do live on in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. This essay, based on a preliminary survey of Lovecraft’s fiction, his critical essays, and a portion of his famously voluminous letters to friends and colleagues, suggests that the Middle Ages may be more crucial to the Lovecraftian imagination than his disavowals and his popular reputation (especially the Tolkien comparison) would make us think. The Middle Ages are well hidden in Lovecraft’s writing, rarely taking center-stage or serving as a direct and unproblematic source for his fiction or philosophy, yet, as this essay will show, the medieval appears at vital points in Lovecraft’s work, both in one of his breakthrough tales and in his account of the origins of “weird fiction,” the genre he proudly theorized and left as a legacy to current writers. To describe the curiously crucial but unacknowledged role of the Middle Ages in Lovecraft’s thought, we might say that they are, for Lovecraft and for his readers today, “unnamable.” “Unnamable” is a characteristically Lovecraftian word, used to express the inexpressibility of the monstrous beings and cataclysmic events in his fiction; in Lovecraft’s tale “The Colour Out of Space,” for example, the doomed Gardner family is tainted by “a breath from regions unnamed and unnamable,” while in “The Dunwich Horror,” the narrator shudders at the “deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity” done by sinister townsfolk.5 Fittingly, Lovecraft’s Middle Ages could be called “unnamable”; they are as difficult to describe, as fearsome, and yet as potentially enthralling, to his imagination as the horrors that appear in his stories. For Lovecraft, the Middle Ages are “unnamable,” in part because of his passion for classical Roman civilization and eighteenth-century Britain. Writing to a friend about his strong imaginative connections with other ages, Lovecraft confesses, “I would like to be a Roman consul of Scipio Aemilianus’s time, or a rural squire of the middle 18th century” (SL 4:168).6 Given Lovecraft’s fascination with these periods, it is no surprise that Lovecraft frequently invokes the stereotypical “medieval” as a contrast to the splendors of Roman civilization or the achievements of the Enlightenment. Lovecraft slings the predictable misconceptions. In one letter, Lovecraft mocks the Middle Ages for debating “how many angels can stand on the point of a needle” (SL 1:29). Another letter reviles the Middle Ages as a time of pathetic ignorance that “snivel[ed] along after real civilisation faded” (SL 3:304). And yet, a deeper fascination persists alongside the superficial denunciations, a fascination witnessed by

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the central role of the medieval in Lovecraft’s career-making short story “The Rats in the Walls,” which the first part of this essay will examine. The second part of the essay will turn to another prominent aspect of Lovecraftian medievalism that is particularly “unnamable” to Lovecraft’s readers today. Lovecraft’s most substantial attachment to medieval people, places, and events is based on his conception of Anglo-Saxon racial distinctiveness, an unpleasant reminder of the repugnant racism that troubles even Lovecraft’s most enthusiastic admirers. Lovecraft’s racism can appear directly, and quite shockingly, in his use of slurs and his dehumanizing descriptions, but it manifests more subtly in his ethnically chauvinistic conception of world history and of literary tradition; as S. T. Joshi puts it, ideas of race hierarchy are “fundamental to [Lovecraft’s] entire political philosophy.” 7 When the Middle Ages do appear in a more favorable light in Lovecraft’s writing, they are often tied to fantasies of the uniqueness and historical continuity of ethnic groups that Lovecraft labels “Aryan,” “Nordic,” or “Teuton.” Although Lovecraft’s writings engage in casual denunciations of the Middle Ages as a time of darkness and unreason, they also show an equally strong fascination for the medieval period as a time when these “Nordic” and “Teuton” groups seized power. Significantly, Lovecraft’s inf luential definition of “weird fiction” in the essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” ties this genre to the Dark Age fantasies of Nordic and Teuton lore. Lovecraft’s fascination with “Nordic” and “Teuton” heritage can be seen in several letters that enthusiastically identify with the world of medieval Europe as intensely as any fiction of Tolkien. Every Attribute of the Middle Ages Was Cunningly Reproduced Of course, Lovecraft’s short story “The Rats in the Walls” (1923) displays a very different engagement with medieval lore than the high fantasy of The Lord of the Rings; the story, indeed, can be read as a metaphor for its author’s vexed relationship to the Middle Ages. “Rats” is a vital turning point in Lovecraft’s work, and, significantly, it is a story in which Lovecraft directly confronts the medieval. When Lovecraft secured commercial publication for “Rats,” he arguably took up the career of professional horror fiction for which he is best remembered today. The writing of “Rats” was an event worth remarking for Lovecraft, who was, up to that point, mostly an amateur journalist. In a letter written shortly after the tale’s completion, Lovecraft refers to it as “the longest story ever to proceed from my pen” (SL 1:250). Although “Rats” was not Lovecraft’s

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first piece of professionally published horror fiction, it was the first story Lovecraft submitted to the pulp magazine Weird Tales, a publication that has become synonymous with Lovecraft, with his followers, and with the genre of “weird fiction” which Lovecraft espoused.8 “Rats” was also inf luential in Lovecraft’s posthumous rise to fame; S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz identify the story’s reprinting in the 1944 volume Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural as “a significant landmark in [Lovecraft’s] literary recognition.”9 In this story, so key to Lovecraft’s own literary afterlife, the Middle Ages are both omnipresent, an unmistakable part of the geography and architecture of the story, and yet also derided, stripped of glamour, and eagerly bypassed in search of more conventionally Lovecraftian time periods.10 The story is narrated by a Mr. Delapore, an American who returns to England after World War I to restore the ruined castle left vacant by his emigrant British ancestor in the seventeenth century. In his desire to reestablish ancestral connections, Delapore discovers a horrible family secret. Delapore’s antagonistic relationship to the medieval past (as Robert H. Waugh writes, he is “attracted and repelled” by his family history), provides us with a model of the Lovecraftian attitude towards the medieval.11 Indeed, the desire to return to the Middle Ages sets the story in motion and leads to Delapore’s horrible discoveries. The story dramatizes the powerful and “atavistic” hold of the European past upon an American of English descent.12 “One theme of the story,” Waugh writes, “would seem to be that whatever the consequences may be it is not so easy to dismiss Europe.”13 During the First World War, Delapore’s son meets a local man whose family owns the ruins of the old family castle, called Exham Priory, and Delapore buys it back from him. After Delapore’s son dies from war wounds, Delapore moves to England to restore Exham Priory and spends his considerable wealth making sure that in the rebuilt castle “[e]very attribute of the Middle Ages was cunningly reproduced, and the new parts blended perfectly with the original walls and foundations” (35). It is also worth noting that Lovecraft himself returned to the Middle Ages for his source material; Lovecraft seems to have drawn ideas for “Rats” from accounts of St. Patrick’s Purgatory and the death of Bishop Hatto in Sabine Baring-Gould’s 1869 compilation of medieval lore, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages.14 The gothic haunted house of “Rats” has a well-defined past in which the medieval plays a crucial role. In the elaborate timeline of “Rats,” the historical back-story matches the physical structure of Exham priory and also the stages of the narrator’s discovery of his family secret. As the restoration work proceeds, both Delapore and readers learn that Exham

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Priory is an extremely ancient building with “peculiarly composite architecture” (26). The medieval layers of the castle are built on top of a series of successively lower and older structures; the upper parts consist of “Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure,” while under these are earlier layers: “Roman, and even Druidic or native Cymric.” The whole building itself is “merged . . . with the solid limestone” of a large cliff (26). At the tale’s climax, Delapore and a team of scientists investigate the as-yet-unknown deeper portions under the Roman vault. In underground buildings within the cliff, the team discovers immense piles of bones that betray the horrible family secret hidden from Delapore throughout the story (spoilers!): When Delapore’s ancestors settled in the castle in 1261, they adopted an ancient local practice of raising and breeding humans for cannibalistic feasts. They continued this tradition through the generations until his last British ancestor killed the rest of the family and escaped to America. For Delapore, it is the attempt to go back to the medieval past that leads to his discovery of terrible secrets. And yet, the medieval is not the actual source of the terror; it is only a kind of echo chamber that magnifies the power of the ancient secret at the same time as it obscures its origins.15 The cannibalistic practices are picked up by the Delapore family during the Middle Ages, but do not have their origin there.16 Although Delapore’s efforts “cunningly reproduc[e]” the castle’s medieval form, the medieval re-creation gives Delapore (and the reader) a tantalizingly deficient knowledge. The story needs the Middle Ages to create suspense, to lead Delapore on, and, in some sense, simply to fill the time between prehistory and its contemporary setting (the story takes place in 1923, the year in which it was written). Ultimately, however, the narrator and the reader of “Rats” must bypass the Middle Ages if true knowledge (and narrative resolution) is to be found. In “Rats,” the Middle Ages (medium aevum) are truly a medium, in the sense that they stand between the narrator and the discovery of the family secret; the medieval is undeniably present but also indisputably disposable. This medial role can be seen in a key passage of the tale that provides a short history of Exham priory. As Delapore researches the local legends about the site, he gives an epitome of the site’s history, in what S. T. Joshi aptly calls “an encapsulation of the early history of England.”17 The medieval history is detailed indeed: I deduced that Exham Priory stood on the site of a prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must have been contemporary with Stonehenge. That indescribable rites had been celebrated there, few doubted; and there were unpleasant tales of the transference of these

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rites into the Cybele-worship which the Romans had introduced. . . .Tales added that the fall of the old religion did not end the orgies at the temple [of Cybele], but that the priests lived on in the new [Christian] faith without real change. Likewise was it said that the rites did not vanish with the Roman power, and that certain among the Saxons added to what remained of the temple, and gave it the essential outline it subsequently preserved, making it the centre of a cult feared through half the heptarchy. About 1000 A.D., the place is mentioned in a chronicle as being a substantial stone priory housing a strange and powerful monastic order and surrounded by extensive gardens which needed no walls to exclude a frightened populace. It was never destroyed by the Danes, though after the Norman Conquest it must have declined tremendously; since there was no impediment when Henry the Third granted the site to my ancestor, Gilbert de la Poer, first Baron Exham, in 1261. (30–31)

It is surprising to find Lovecraft writing medieval history, especially a history that resists monolithic categorization of the Middle Ages and emphasizes waves of migration, conversion, and cultural mixing. Nevertheless, even though the Middle Ages are given pride of place in Delapore’s history of Exham Priory, the period is quickly bypassed in the rest of the story. In “Rats,” the medieval serves as the link to ancient evil. And yet, the medieval is represented as an indirect link: it is a time which is confused enough, and distant enough from the truth of the ancient past, that room is left for suspense. The vagueness of the Middle Ages in this story becomes clear when Delapore investigates the local medieval folktales about his family. Delapore’s account of the legends emphasizes their obscurity and ambiguity. The tales told by the surrounding townsfolk are, he says, “all the ghastlier because of their frightened reticence and cloudy evasiveness” (32). For Delapore, the medieval here serves as a key contact point with the truth—a source of fascinatingly “picturesque” stories that give him insight into family history—and yet is caricatured as a time of “crude superstition” (33). Delapore even describes the medieval legends as actively hostile: “Such was the lore that assailed me as I pushed to completion . . . the work of restoring my ancestral home” (35, emph. added). The narrator’s belittling of the medieval contrasts with his open admiration for both the ancient and the modern. Notably, no answers are found within the story’s medieval architecture; the narrative depends on going deeper. Near the end of the story, when Delapore is exploring the ancient Roman vault, even though he is technically closer to the coming horror, he is nevertheless excited by his encounter with classical civilization; he confesses that he cannot “repress a thrill at the knowledge that this vault was built by Roman hands” (41). No such “thrill” is associated with

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the medieval parts of the building; in the same passage, the narrator disparages the castle’s medieval architecture, contrasting the “harmonious classicism” of the Roman vault with the “debased Romanesque of the bungling Saxons” (41). The contemporary, too, is valued at the expense of the medieval. When push really comes to shove and the ancient secrets must be discovered, Delapore does not rely on medieval lore but rather on modern science. He assembles a team of “archaeologists and scientific men” (46). The story repeatedly emphasizes the modern technology of “electric searchlights,” and the true nature of the ghastly remains in the deepest chambers is discovered through anthropological “classif[ication]” of bones based on evolutionary theory and on comparison to the still recent 1912 discovery of Piltdown man (46–47).18 The powerful certainty of modern knowledge contrasts sharply with the murky medieval legends. “The Rats in the Walls,” then, imagines the Middle Ages as a time of generative horror, a provocation to further discovery, perhaps, but also a darkness to be illuminated, a physical and epistemological barrier to discovery and revelation. One moment in the later part of the story stands out as representative. Terrorized by nightmarish visions, Delapore can fall asleep only “in the one comfortable library chair which my mediaeval plan of furnishing could not banish” (41). Restoring the Middle Ages is a joyless and impractical process here, and only the modern comfort of a “library chair” can offer escape. In this crucial early work of Lovecraft’s, establishing a linkage with the Middle Ages makes it hard to get a good night’s sleep. Weird Things That They Learn in the Woods In “Rats” the present though expendable medieval provokes the narrator’s interest in ancestral culture. The medieval plays a similar role in Lovecraft’s letters and criticism, where it receives more extensive treatment, even appearing in his discussion of the roots of weird fiction. This presence of the medieval is “unnamable” in several ways. In one way, it is not just “unnamable” but also unnamed, since, in his letters, Lovecraft often does not label medieval events as “medieval” but instead locates them in an unspecified past. For contemporary readers, Lovecraft’s medieval fantasies are “unnamable” in another way, since they draw our attention to the author’s repugnant conceptions of racial hierarchy. Lovecraft’s rationalist and scientific thinking might fit comfortably with the preoccupations of contemporary readers; a look at Lovecraft’s medieval ties, however, brings his racist views into unbearably sharp focus. Lovecraft’s nonfiction presents an unambiguously Anglocentric conception of world history and literary tradition. Lovecraft repeatedly claims

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that US culture and society is a continuation of English society. In a piece of amateur journalism from 1916, for example, the young Lovecraft denounces anyone who would “deny to the citizens of the United States the right to. . .remain faithful to the Anglo-Saxon ideals of their English forefathers” (CE 5:21). This Anglo-Saxon culture is conceived of as part of a larger “Teuton” or “Nordic” group, as when Lovecraft writes: “Ours is a Nordic culture, and. . .the roots of that culture are so inextricably tangled in the natural standards, perspectives, . . . and physical aspects of the Nordic stream that no other inf luences are fitted to mingle in our fabric” (SL 3:276). Lovecraft takes this so-called “Nordic” culture to be a continuation of Roman and Greek principles with the added infusion of the values of “Aryan” cultural groups. These terms have blurry definitions and are based on nineteenth-century racialist conceptions of history; as Joshi observes, “Lovecraft hurled about such terms . . . without stopping to define or distinguish them very clearly.”19 Lovecraft definitively depicts what we would call the medieval period as the heyday of these “Nordic” and “Teuton” groups. Although Lovecraft rarely uses the terms “medieval” or “Middle Ages” in his enraptured passages about Nordics, he clearly depicts these groups as sweeping in during the fall of Rome and then building the European monarchies of the Middle Ages. In an early letter, for example, Lovecraft connects the so-called Teuton race with major medieval European dynasties: “Who were those early ‘French’ kings and heroes that founded French civilisation? Teutons, to a man!. . .Who were the Normans? Teutons of the North” (SL 1:18). Elsewhere, Lovecraft claims that the Teuton group is responsible for post-Roman medieval culture. “Who but the Teuton,” Lovecraft writes, “has swept into every dying culture in Europe and revivified it with a verve and abandon which must evermore be beautiful. . .?” (SL 1:290). It is clear that although Lovecraft’s letters leave this period of Nordic and Teutonic f lowering unnamed, in these moments he is imagining a Middle Ages, though a Middle Ages so unlike Lovecraft’s received opinions about medieval ignorance that the letters themselves cannot definitively name the period. Perhaps Lovecraft found the specific word “medieval,” with its connotations (for him) of superstition and unreason, a distasteful label for his fetishized age of Nordic domination. Lovecraft’s letters show an eagerness to “establish a linkage” with this distinctly “Teutonicized” Middle Ages. For all of his current reputation as a scientist and rationalist, Lovecraft’s letters contain vivid moments of pseudomedieval recreation in which Lovecraft speaks in the first-person as a medieval warrior. Commenters on Lovecraft have remarked upon his tendency towards affective and mystical reveries. Joyce Carol Oates’s inf luential 1996 review of Lovecraft interprets his irrational moments as

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upswellings of repressed personal experience; Oates claims that Lovecraft “was a kind of mystic, drawing intuitively upon a cosmology of images that came to him unbidden, from the ‘underside’ of his life.”20 Similarly, Miéville notes Lovecraft’s “bleak atheist awe.” While Miéville does compare this awe to the “ecstatic tradition,” he nevertheless links this mystic impulse to Lovecraft’s materialist view of the universe. Yet, what seems to have gone unremarked is that often, for Lovecraft, the intrusion of the supernatural, of the mystical, of the dark outside that brings life into the mechanistic universe and monsters into the weird tale, comes from contact with the medieval past.21 One of Lovecraft’s lasting legacies is his technical definition of the “weird tale.” Lovecraft is justifiably credited with writing one of the first sustained literary histories of horror and the gothic in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” commenced in 1925 and revised throughout the rest of his life.22 At the beginning of this piece, Lovecraft famously defines what he calls the “weird tale,” a type of literature of “cosmic fear” distinct from simple ghost stories or gore: “the true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint. . .of. . . a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space” (CE 2:84). Scholars and fans have often linked Lovecraft’s inf luential idea of cosmic horror to his interest in science, and rightly so. Lovecraft expert S. T. Joshi has convincingly connected weird fiction’s “cosmic” aspects to Lovecraft’s lifetime interest in science, from his days as a young amateur astronomer to his life-long reading about developments in physics; without a doubt, Lovecraft’s science contributes to his cosmic perspective.23 Yet in the “Supernatural Horror in Literature” essay, Lovecraft assigns the medieval a special role in the origin of the weird. Noting the sources of this distinctive genre, Lovecraft claims that the weird tale had a “terrible intensity and convincing seriousness of atmosphere” in Western Europe because of its connection with the “mystical Teuton [who] had come down from his black Boreal forests and the Celt [who] remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves” (CE 2:85). For Lovecraft, the origins of his favorite form of horror fiction lie in the cultural memory of these ethnic groups who experienced, in the Lovecraftian version of history, the prehistoric horrors of unusual rituals and wild spaces. Readers are often drawn to the later parts of the “Supernatural Horror” essay, in which Lovecraft, in a more traditionally literary-critical and far less oddly mystical style, charts the development

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of weird fiction from early gothic novelists through to Poe and to his own contemporary favorites, Machen and Dunsany (CE 2:116–25). Right at the beginning of the essay, however, Lovecraft intimately links the weird tale with the Middle Ages. “In this fertile soil [that is, in medieval and Renaissance folklore],” he writes, “were nourished types and characters of sombre myth and legend which persist in weird literature to this day” (CE 2:86). The essay ties this myth specifically to the so-called Nordic groups: “Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense” (CE 2:86). In this case, Medieval northern weirdness trumps even the beloved classical civilizations, since, Lovecraft writes, the Greeks and Romans had an intrinsic love of rational explanations that “denies to even their strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings” (CE 2:86). Although Lovecraft idolized ancient Roman civilization, this passage from his history of horror identifies the weird tale as a medieval development. It is not a coincidence that Lovecraft, in passing, praises Beowulf because it is “full of eldritch weirdness” (CE 2:86). In letters written both before and after “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft affectively identifies with these post-Roman Nordics and Teutons, and he connects them with the origin of the weird horror stories theorized somewhat more soberly in the passages quoted above. In a 1923 letter, written shortly after “The Rats in the Walls,” Lovecraft claims that medieval Teutons were especially sensitive to the atmosphere of cosmic terror, which, as we have seen, is crucial to his definition of the weird tale. “This force of supernatural wonder,” he writes, “the faint clawing of black unknown universes on the outer rim of space . . . is a purely Teutonick quality” (SL 1:260). In several letters, Lovecraft enthusiastically steps into the role of a Teuton listening to these medieval weird tales. In one, Lovecraft imagines “sitt[ing] at the edge of the forest at evening, whilst the elders of the tribe draw their cloaks of deer-hide tighter and tell strange stories in the light of dim embers” (SL 1:315–16). In another, Lovecraft argues that Christianity is a poor fit for “a Celt or Teuton who has looked into enchanted forests or heard strange music on the raths in the dark of the moon” (SL 2:81). In an especially crucial letter, Lovecraft waxes even more poetical in his imaginations of medieval identity. Lovecraft’s Northern European rhapsody is worth quoting at length: Fancy a world without its Clovis—or its Charlemagne . . . and [without] the Vikings and Norsemen . . . ho for the frozen seas and the epick of sleet and blood, strange lands and far wonders! Greenland, Iceland, Normandy,

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England, Sicily—the world was ours . . . . By day we kill and seize, at dusk we feast and drink, by night we snore and dream big dreams of strange seas we shall sail, old towns we shall burn, stout men we shall slay, wild beasts we shall hunt, deep cups we shall drain . . . . We know the cool of deep woods, and the spell of their gloom and of the things void of name that lurk or may lurk in them. Bards sing them to us in the dark with great hoarse voices when the fire burns low and we have drunk of our mead. Bards sing them to us, and we hear. Great, gaunt bards with white beards and the old scars of good fights. And they sing things that none else have dreamed of; strange, dim, weird things that they learn in the woods, the deep woods, the thick woods. There are no woods like our woods, and no bards like our bards. (SL 1:274–75)

In this reverie, appropriately abounding in Anglo-Saxon diction and Beowulf-like alliterative patterning, Lovecraft rewrites the Middle Ages as the triumph of a brutal Nordic culture. This passage’s willingness to establish a “linkage” with the Middle Ages is worth noting, but even more significant is the fact that this passage credits medieval Northern European bards with the creation of “weird” fiction. The generic label of “weird” from “Supernatural Horror” appears, in this passage, as a description of the distinctive bardic storytelling of early medieval “Teuton” groups with an ethnically ingrained sensitivity to wild spaces; “our woods” whisper the secrets of weird fiction to “our bards,” in an echo of the “forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings” of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (CE 1:86). More than ten years later, Lovecraft wrote, in more measured but no less definitive prose, that “the need to imagine a mystery of the cosmos” was “a legacy of the northern blood side” (SL 5:352–53). Wyrd Tales At this point, Lovecraft’s Nordic rhapsodies begin to sound at least a little like the writing of Lovecraft’s present-day fantasy foil, Tolkien. Allowing for many fundamental differences, Lovecraft’s imagination of a distinctly ethnicized Middle Ages characterized by a muscular Anglo-Saxon independence, a penchant for supernatural storytelling, and a sense of human will opposed to a wild and uncaring cosmos—all of this resembles many of the passages from Tolkien’s famous 1936 essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Tolkien’s essay, a staple on many a syllabus, is recognized as a turning point in medieval literary criticism; whereas earlier critics had been embarrassed by the centrality of folkloric monsters to the plot of Beowulf, Tolkien suggested that the poem’s monsters richly embodied a medieval Northern European world view of cosmic struggle. The monsters, Tolkien writes, show “man alien in a hostile world,

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engaged in a struggle which he cannot win while the world lasts.”24 Just like Lovecraft’s imagined Teutons hearing weird stories of the outside, Tolkien’s imagined Anglo-Saxons are fascinated by the stories of the ogres and dragons of Beowulf—a poem which Lovecraft praised as “full of eldritch weirdness.” Just as Lovecraft imaginatively places himself in the mind of a medieval Teuton, Tolkien likewise closes his famous essay by evoking ethnic continuity as a connection between the past and the present. The closing paragraph of the “The Monsters and the Critics” ends with an evocation of shared identity: “[Beowulf ] was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and that land, it must ever call with a profound appeal—until the dragon comes.”25 The larger implications of a Lovecraft-Tolkien comparison are beyond the scope of this essay, but I want to suggest that the distance between Tolkien’s supposedly nostalgic medievalism and Lovecraft’s supposedly hardheaded scientism closes considerably when we align Lovecraft’s Nordic fantasies with Tolkien’s impassioned advocacy of Beowulf ’s fantastic creatures. For medievalists, the present popularity of Lovecraft, and the possibility of a Lovecraftian Middle Ages, could mean many things. It might pave the way for a stranger and more productively anxious relation to the medieval past. If many current forms of fantasy place the reader inside a monolithic, nostalgic Middle Ages, imagined as a fading time of romantic grandeur, Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” places the reader in a very vexed relationship to the Middle Ages. For Delapore, the “medievalist” of “Rats,” the Middle Ages are at once present and absent, and also full of horrifying bones: the carnage under Exham Priory is a concrete version of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”26 Lovecraft’s own barbarous racialist ideologies also remind us that popular relations to the Middle Ages are rarely, if ever, innocent—always there is a history of conf lict, always self-motivated distortions, always disturbing and repugnant connections. The medieval afterlife in Lovecraft shows us the plurality of ways in which the medieval can inspire and undergird literature that captures the popular imagination. Thinking about Lovecraft medievally is also appropriate for this intellectual moment. Lovecraft’s work, in its fascination with monsters and strange connections, resonates with the preoccupations of recent medieval studies. Already, Lovecraft has been taken up by philosophers and critics pushing towards a “posthuman” critique of anthropocentrism (the philosopher Graham Harman is writing a book on Lovecraft as this article is being written), and perhaps Lovecraft’s own monstrous, hidden, and hybrid Middle Ages will provide impetus for as-yet-unforeseen explorations. It is hoped that this

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essay will draw more attention to the f lickering medieval afterlife that is disguised, but vital, in Lovecraft’s problematic, challenging, and hugely popular literary work. Notes I would like to thank Courtney Reiner for her help as a research assistant on this project in Spring 2011. Thanks also to the Sonoma State University Arts and Humanities Faculty Forum for comments on an early version. Kind thanks to S. T. Joshi for his advice when I consulted him with some general ideas about this project’s beginnings; regrettably, my schedule prevented me from sharing any further thoughts or any drafts with Mr. Joshi. Any scholar working on Lovecraft is indebted to Mr. Joshi regardless of personal contact, though, since almost all current editions of Lovecraft’s work—as well as the fundamental critical examinations of him—are the fruits of Mr. Joshi’s labor. And last but never least, I am grateful to my wife and partner Sakina Bryant for her insights and her loving support. 1. This essay is based on a preliminary, exploratory survey of Lovecraft’s works and cannot claim to be comprehensive. I have investigated uses of the word “medieval” and related terms in the five volumes of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (Sauk City, WI.: Arkham House Publishers, 1965–1976). In investigating the Selected Letters I have referred to S. T. Joshi’s An Index to the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft (East Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1980). I have also examined the “Literary Criticism” (II) and “Philosophy, Autobiography, and Miscellany” (V) volumes of Lovecraft’s Collected Essays, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004–2006). Citations from both these collections will be included in parentheses as follows: Selected Letters are labeled SL, volume number, and page number. Collected Essays are labeled CE, volume number, and page number. 2. For Lovecraft and “Deep Time,” see the interview with Caitlin R. Kiernan in the documentary Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, dir. Frank H. Woodward (Cinevolve Studios, 2009). DVD. 3. Amy H. Sturgis, “The New Shoggoth Chic: Why H. P. Lovecraft Now?”, accessed March 14, 2012, http://www.amyhsturgis.com/?page_ id=510. Sturgis’s essay finds important and nuanced points of comparison and contrast between Lovecraft and Tolkien; nevertheless, Sturgis’s essay remains absolute in its identification of Tolkien as the only one of the two with any medieval interests. 4. Miéville’s comment on Tolkien is available in Justine Jordan, “A Life in Writing: China Miéville,” The Guardian, May 13, 2011, accessed March 21, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/china -mieville-life-writing-genre. Miéville’s remark on Lovecraft comes from his introduction to At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition (New York: The Modern Library, 2005), xi–xxv.

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5. Compare Miéville’s discussion of “undescribable,” xiv. The two short story references can be found in S. T. Joshi, ed. The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Dell Publishing, 1997), 80 and 109. 6. Lovecraft’s identification with Rome and the eighteenth century is wellknown enough to be a commonplace within Lovecraft scholarship. For a representative discussion, see S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (Berkeley Heights NJ: Wildside Press, 1990), 72–74. 7. Decline of the West, 74. Joshi comprehensively discusses Lovecraft’s racism (or “racialism”) in Decline of the West, 74–80; see also Miéville, Mountains, xviii–xix. On Lovecraft’s use of “Nordic,” “Teuton,” and “Aryan” see Decline of the West, 77. 8. See Lovecraft’s own description in his autobiographical “Some Notes on a Nonentity,” CE 5:207–11. Although that essay does not name “Rats” specifically, in it Lovecraft writes: “At that time [i. e., the early 1920s] I had no thought or hope of professional publication; but the founding of Weird Tales in 1923 opened up an outlet of considerable steadiness” (210). Also see Joshi’s discussion in The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, 8–9. 9. On “Rats” and Weird Tales see Joshi, The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, 9. For the quotation concerning reprinting, see An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), s. v. “Rats in the Walls, The.” All references to “Rats” are to the edition by S. T. Joshi in The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft; page numbers are given in parentheses in the text. 10. The analysis of “Rats” here is guided by two articles as well as by the discussion in Decline of the West: Timothy H. Evans, “A Last Defense Against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft,” Journal of Folklore Research 42 (2005): 99–135, especially 119–21; Robert H. Waugh, “‘The Rats in the Walls,’ the Rats in the Trenches,” Lovecraft Annual 2 (2008): 149–64. 11. Waugh, “Rats in the Walls,” 159. Evans notes a “profound dualism— nostalgia and terror, beauty and disgust” in Lovecraft’s attitude towards the past in general, though Evans is examining Lovecraft’s use of folklore as a whole and does not examine the author’s distinctive attitude towards the Middle Ages, 119. 12. Waugh, “Rats in the Walls,” 149. 13. Waugh, “Rats in the Walls,” 152. 14. Steven J. Mariconda, “Baring-Gould and the Ghouls: The Inf luence of Curious Myths of the Middle Ages on The Rats in the Walls,” in The Horror of it All: Encrusted Gems from the “Crypt of Cthulhu,” ed. Robert M. Price (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990): 42–48. Also see Evans, “Defense,” 20. 15. Evans’s comments on the use of folklore in the story in general could apply here: “In ‘The Rats in the Walls,’ traces of tradition serve both to open up another world and to foreshadow the protagonist’s descent into the irrational and prehuman” (120).

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16. In a letter discussing “Rats,” Lovecraft confirms that the cannibalistic rituals of the story go back to a prehistoric practice (SL 1:258). 17. Note in Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, 31. 18. On Piltdown man, see note in Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, 49. 19. Decline of the West, 77. On Lovecraft’s ideas of contemporary Western culture as Greek, see CE 5:61 and the discussion in Decline of the West, 72–73. 20. Joyce Carol Oates, “The King of Weird,” New York Review of Books, October 31, 1996, accessed March 14, 2012, http://www.nybooks.com/ articles/ archives/1996/oct/31/the-king-of-weird/. 21. Miéville xii. 22. On the dating and revision of the piece, see Joshi’s notes in CE 2:125–26. 23. For a concise version of this argument, see Joshi’s discussion in The Annotated Lovecraft, 11–16. 24. Using the text as printed in The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Donald K. Fry (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968), 32. 25. Beowulf Poet, 41. 26. “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. (New York: Shocken Books: New York, 1968), 256.

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CHAPTER 9 CONFESSION, CONTRITION, AND THE RHETORIC OF TEARS: MEDIEVALISM AND REALITY TELEVISION Angela Jane Weisl

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hen Anna McCraney, the winner of Bravo television’s first season of The Fashion Show, was asked why she was so surprised by her victory, she said, “Well, I don’t really have a TV Personality.” Isaac Mizrahi, the show’s host and lead judge, turned to her in surprise and said, “Wait, you don’t have a TV personality? You cry every five minutes.”1 Equally pointedly, Judge Lisa Ann Walter, on Oxygen television’s original season of Dance Your Ass Off, exclaimed in the final episode, “I’m going to need a big box of tissues. I plan on crying early and often.”2 Both statements demonstrate what even the casual viewer knows—that reality television, far more than real life, is a locus for excessive weeping. The definition of a reality “television personality” as “someone who cries every five minutes,” which itself makes tears seem an authentic reaction, balances against Walter’s decision to “cry early and often” as if this is one of the rewards, or at least, expectations of reality show behavior, even for a judge, an ostensibly impartial observer. Unlike courtroom judges who provide objective interpretations of the law, reality show judges seem to function as surrogates for the audience, providing a model of affective weeping that inf luences the public’s response. This judicial weeping helps to determine the favored, the valuable, the meaningful—whether those concepts rest in an individual or in a specific performance. In one of the final episodes of Summer 2009’s So You Think You Can Dance, contestants Melissa Sandvig and Ade Obayoumi performed a contemporary dance routine to “This Woman’s Work,” created by choreographer Tyce Diorio for a friend undergoing treatment for breast

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cancer.3 As peacewisher08 noted in her YouTube post of the video, “This dance makes a lot of people cried including the judges and the audience.”4 Despite its fairly obvious symbology (Sandvig wore a scarf on her head to cover all her hair) and bland choreography, this piece became iconic, redanced on the show’s finale (although both contestants were eliminated the week they danced it), and shown as the number one dance on the next season’s “Top 15 Dances Ever” opening special. Although both dancers invested significant emotion in the piece and danced it effectively, by creating the story in advance of the performance, the judges’ and audience’s reactions seemed heavily overdetermined; the tearful response felt much less authentic than the more spontaneous tears evoked by a story-less waltz danced by Asuka Kondoh and Vitolio Jeune earlier in the season, which received very little subsequent attention.5 What is interesting about reality show weeping is that it functions in a way that might best be called medieval. Certainly people have wept between 1400 and the rise of reality programming in the late 1990s, yet as a ritualistic piece of the genre, weeping does suggest a medievalizing rhetoric; rather than a private show of emotion, weeping becomes an efficacious action in a public context. On these shows, weeping becomes a readable symbol that conveys specific meanings on the contestants and elicits specific reactions from its audience; it therefore becomes formulaic in ways that draw heavily on medieval antecedents. Or, as William Christian summarizes, “weeping [in a medieval religious context] was part of the economy of sentiment that could inf luence God.”6 This economy of sentiment is once again engaged in the reality television context, although “God” essentially means those who inf luence the contestant’s fate on the show, whether other contestants, the judges, or the audience. As a piece of a narrative of sin and redemption, in which tears can both move the sinner to grace and move observers to conversion, crying on reality shows conveys a sense of redemption that becomes affective beyond itself. The “socially controlled frameworks and forms of devotion that had their own meaning and process” 7 of medieval religious life are also replicated here, as are the stories that motivate them. Medieval ritualized weeping offers a taxonomy within these meanings and processes. Tears can be a sign of the authenticity of the weeper’s spiritual commitment and devotion; they can be acts of contrition and penance designed to cleanse the weeper of sin; they can be an exemplum to others, leading them to their own penance and, in early saints’ lives, to conversion. They can also be a way of speaking beyond words, of encoding spiritual meanings that cannot be articulated because they transcend the materiality of the physical world. Additionally, tears can engage several of these functions

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at once; a true devotional can also be an exemplum, and tears can indicate the authenticity of the cleansing they also represent. One of the most famous medieval weepers is Margery Kempe, although she comes from a long tradition of religious tears. Weeping is a common feature of hagiography, an example of the extraordinary compassion the saints feel for the unfortunate and their suffering. It is also a vital feature of conversion narratives, particularly sin-to-grace conversions, in which the repentant sinner endures weeping and penance in order to be cleansed of wrongdoing and achieve salvation. For Margery, who is not canonized but whose Book reads a great deal like a saint’s legend, the “gift of tears” occurs repeatedly throughout, “often in association with her meditations on the passion, sometimes in her ref lections on sin.” While Margery would “gladly have it stop while she was in public,” her weeping often “aroused others to cry.” She “insisted that her tears had salvific effect, and appealed to precedent in Christian tradition, such as the life of Mary of Oignies, for the gift of tears.”8 Discussing Kempe’s tears, Karma Lochrie notes: “Abjection gives place to compassion, but not without the physical tokens of defilement” of which tears are one. Julian of Norwich “justifies Kempe’s tears as tokens of the Holy Spirit in her soul.”9 Indeed, Christ tells Margery that she is a “mirror among men, a spectacular exemplum in which they may witness God’s violent grace and their own recalcitrant hearts.”10 Therefore, Margery’s tears serve two functions; they identify her as specifically chosen by God for her piety (the Holy Spirit in her soul), showing her worthiness as a penitent, and they are exemplary for others, who, seeing her weeping, should be moved follow her holy example. Tears, therefore, are a double gift, to both the recipient and the audience that views them. But what is also striking about Margery’s gift of tears is its public nature; unlike other sinners whose weeping takes place within private spaces and functions as a private act of devotion,11 Margery’s tears are usually played out in front of others so that they can enact both rhetorics simultaneously. By becoming public, tears take on a fully ritualized function. Piroska Nagy explores the ritual elements of medieval weeping, noting that “these strongly desired tears . . . were . . . reputed to be granted by God as a sign of his presence and were seen as efficacious means of his grace to wash away one’s sins.”12 An “intimate ritual” that occurs “without social formalization,” medieval weeping—at least in its intention—is profound and efficacious. The religious process of cleansing begins with “the internal feeling given by God, which is referred to as ‘compunction,’ a kind of puncture of the heart that results in the efficacious religious tears.” In addition, tears punctuated the stages of conversion, indicating

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a continuing spiritual path and a process of purification;13 therefore, tears, as an interior analogy for baptism, became the private and personal cleansing that the literal waters performed exteriorly. Think, for instance, of the sinners on the Terrace of the Envious in Dante’s Purgatory weeping as an outward sign of their inner contrition: da l’altra parte m’eran le divote ombre, che per l’orribile costura premevan sì, che bagnavan le gote. Volsimi a loro e “O gente sicura,” incominciai, “di veder l’alto lume che ‘l disio vostro solo ha in sua cura, se tosto grazia resolva le schiume di vostra coscienza sì che chiaro per essa scenda de la mente il fiume.”14 [While on the other side of me were massed Those supplicating souls whose cheeks were wet With tears that seeped out through the horrid seams. I turned to them and said: “O souls assured That someday you will see the light of Heaven, Which is the only goal that you desire, So may God’s grace soon wash away the film Clouding your consciousness, and thus allow The stream of memory to f low through pure.”]15

Dante’s sense of the tears as a sign of God’s grace is telling here; unlike the souls in Inferno who may curse their fate but never weep, tears in Purgatory are part of a series of penitential acts designed to show the sinners’ true contrition that leads to true redemption. The “stream of memory” which f lows “pure” at the end of the passage is both purified by the tears of the envious and is the tears of the envious. Their acts of self-purification additionally serve to inf luence Dante’s readers to their own penance on earth that will purify their own streams of memory, leading them, if not directly to Paradise, at least to a shorter stay on this terrace. Tied to religious acts such as prayer and penance, medieval tears demonstrate a personal process of spiritual seeking, a process of inner transformation, and an external process of connection to an observing audience. An inherently mysterious phenomenon, crying “belongs to body language, which, people feel, frequently communicates things of a depth that would be reduced and deprived of its very meaning if it were described in the analytical terms provided by language” and is “recognized as bringing a sensation of relief.”16 In a medieval religious context, weeping became associated with “the hope of salvation and slowly attained the reputation

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of being salutary in itself.” The “gift of tears” washed away the sins of the soul, indicated a sense of deserving in its recipients, and became a sign of God’s will and grace. Weeping, thus, became a “convenient way to communicate sincerely one’s inner truth,” and “tears were reputed to be more sincere than any word because they come directly from the heart or soul and are not manipulated by reason and will.”17 While one would certainly question how unmanipulated these tears are in the reality television setting, the sense that they stand for this sincerity (real or imagined) is evident. Whatever lies at their heart, reality show tears are supposed to convey to the audience an authentic and sincere emotion, an emotion which often leads to a kind of purgation, redemption, or, at least, contrition. Therefore, the intimate ritual of tears became publicly interpretable, a “means of grounding one’s spiritual authority, holiness, or religious respectability. Religious weeping with mediating efficacy was an authorized means of inner transformation.”18 Often, the province of “socially weak categories—hermits, illiterate laymen, and women,”19 tears became “integrated into formalized and ritualized processes of collective devotion,”20 which helped bring weeping into “larger, socially controlled frameworks and forms of devotion that had their own meaning and process.”21 It is possible to note Nagy’s shift in reality television as well; crying no longer becomes a primarily feminine activity, but one far more generalized, and in some ways, more potent in its masculine practitioners. However, reality show contestants may well be constructed as a “socially weak” category, given that they are essentially stripped of all the trappings of adult life and independent action, forced to live in groups and follow stringent and often arbitrary rules at the whim of the show’s producers. That said, in the Middle Ages, there was a sense that this process could not be “provoked, formalized, or prescribed, as it depends on God’s grace,”22 which may be the essential difference between medieval religious tears and the medievalizing tears of reality television. Although the process of compunction, confession, and weeping remains the same, the latter process seems very much “provoked, formalized, and prescribed.” One might think of the ways the trainers on the Biggest Loser often drive contestants to tears by yelling at them “for their own good,” or the ways in which contestants are often set up to receive disappointments in very public ways. The formalization of weeping seems to come from its copiousness, by which it becomes an expectation; voted off contestants often say, “I really wasn’t going to cry,” as they exit in tears. Its prescribed nature takes many forms; for instance, weepers often reference a heretofore unrevealed personal narrative; in the breast cancer dance, each lachrymose judge commented on knowing someone with cancer or someone

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who died from it. The exceptional rather than the average form of reality show tears, the weep fests on talent-based competition shows suggest just how significantly weeping has become a ritualized part of the reality genre. On competition shows based on something less tangible than one’s ability to dance, sing, or sew, crying is an essential part of the fabric, a semiotic activity that becomes nearly programmatic in its regularity. Heidi Patalano takes as an example Fox’s More to Love, “in which ‘average-sized’ women get to date a stocky, accomplished young man. In an early episode, the first group date takes place at a pool party, requiring a bunch of body-conscious women to don revealing swimsuits, which results in more than a few ladies crying in the confessional.”23 This language is striking, as is the process it implies; the inclusion of a “confessional” on so many reality shows encodes a kind of medieval understanding of the transformation process—a semiprivate revelation of the truth leading to public acts of contrition and cleansing. As Michel Foucault observes, confession was established as an essential ritual for the “production of truth”;24 confession functions both as an acknowledgment of one’s own actions and a guarantee of status and identity. Confession also authenticates the confessor by the “discourse of truth” he or she is “able or obliged to pronounce concerning himself.”25 Confession transforms action into words, and, through that, “produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it; it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation.”26 In real life, confession may have changed from its medieval form, but its narrative function remains unaltered; as a way to produce mortification and the path from there to redemption, it remains the same whether the booth is located in church and contains a priest on the other side of the window, or it is a small enclosed space in a reality television “house” with a camera instead of a window and the audience on the other side providing absolution. That the confession often has nothing to do with the show’s ostensible goals is irrelevant; these confessions function exactly as Foucault suggests: to modify the confessor, or at least the audience’s view of the confessor, to exonerate or redeem, changing that individual through these acts of self-f lagellation. This balance of mortification and purification is described by Peter of Celle, a medieval ascetic, as “aff liction,” by which, Mary Carruthers suggests, he means ascetic discipline, or “to mount a campaign against one’s wantonness, not one’s nature.”27 Aff liction takes the form of examination of conscience, together with oral confession, f looding tears, mortification, kneeling in continuous silence, psalmody, and lashing. While silence, psalmody, and lashing aren’t regular features of reality television

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(at least, not physical lashing, although other kinds of physical punishments are certainly de rigeur, especially on weight-loss shows), these other steps in the process become highly ritualized. The sense that these shows are designed to purge the contestant of his or her failures and replace them with virtues, on weight-loss shows in particular, “mounting a campaign against one’s wantonness” could virtually be the rallying cry, as contestants are taught (or, perhaps, forced) to abandon old vices for more approved behaviors—bad food for good, sedentary behavior for activity, and even emotional repression for emotional expression. While less overt on other types of reality shows, the whole rhetoric of “improvement” implies the shedding of bad habits through rigorous challenges. As a ritual, weeping on reality television fits the anthropologist Conrad Philip Kottak’s definition: “a behavior that is formal, stylized, repetitive, and stereotyped. . .performed earnestly as a social act.”28 It also acts “in terms of a transformation of the social status and/or the inner state of [its] participants”; weeping, after all, does not take place sui generis; it is a product of a set of assumptions, activities, and behaviors, and works towards a goal—a “win” on the show which will, in reality television parlance, produce transformative results. If a ritual is “a composite of a behavioral pattern—a visible performance (of gestures or speech)—that has a meaning well known to all,”29 then this process of contrition, confession, and tears within the reality television world is emphatically a ritual, since the meaning of these behaviors reaches and communicates directly to an audience (or a stand-in audience of judges) about the participant’s inner state of worth. Thus, reality show weeping becomes a kind of sign—if not a sign of God’s presence as it is in medieval theology, then a sign of some kind of greater meaning. And tears are thus constructed to wash away sins; for instance, in an early season of America’s Next Top Model, Eva Pigford, the eventual winner, was told by Tyra Banks, the show’s version of God, “I don’t want to cast another mean black girl.”30 Despite the warning, Eva was known, perhaps irresistibly, as “Eva the Diva” and loathed by the other girls for her nastiness; one episode featured an epochal fight between her and Yaya DaCosta, a sentimental favorite, which resulted in them screaming at each other. However, in a subsequent episode, a private chat with Miss Tyra caused Eva to break down into tears and reveal her own feelings of inadequacy and her difficult childhood. The confessional qualities of this scene cannot be overemphasized, and they were repeated in the hortus conclusus of the apartment’s “confessional”; a small private room that held a camera. After this episode, Eva’s popularity skyrocketed, and in the final episode, which predictably came down to her and Yaya DaCosta, the two were seen lounging together talking

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about how wonderful it was that the winner would inevitably be the show’s first black top model. In a sense, the genre offers two kinds of tears: those which are reactions to others or circumstances, and those which appear as reactions to one’s own behavior or situation, good or bad. Both serve to change audience opinion, creating compassion where none perhaps existed before. In season 7 of The Biggest Loser, Laura Denoux was generally considered a slacker who did not pull her proverbial weight and was only managing to stay on the show because her partner Tara Costa won every challenge. Comments on the show’s message board included KateD’s pointed “Laura is lazy and doesn’t try; she should go home now and stop pulling her team and Tara down.”31 However, in one of the show’s most emotiporn32ridden episodes, Laura went home when it was discovered she had injured her hip and couldn’t continue to work out at the level the show required. Sarah Kickler Kelber of the Baltimore Sun’s TV Blog described the conclusion of the episode: “Even with all of that, the majority of the tears were saved for the end of the episode, when Laura learned that she was injured. She’d been having shooting pains in her leg for a while, and the doctors discovered that she had a serious stress fracture at a pretty bad place in her hip. It was called the most serious sports injury anyone’s gotten on the show before, and she learned that if she didn’t take it super-easy, she could end up needing major surgery.”33 KateD’s forum posting shows the efficacious quality of Laura and her fellow-contestant’s tears: “I feel so baD that Laura went home its so sad; (She truley was a sweatheart and she will do awesome in the at home challenge. She has gone through so much and it was sad to see her go because of and injury. I love laura and tara and I was sad to see her go. Good Luck Laura and get that hip better!”34 This audience member’s change of heart operates as a potent example of the function of tears; Margery Kempe’s weeping allows others to see the image of Christ in her and the sin in their own recalcitrant hearts, and then they are moved to sympathy and then salvation, while Laura’s at least shows the affectivity of a kind of compunction, converting others from their own judgmental state to an acceptance and support for the one-time sinner in a way that also allows her to become an inspiration. If Nagy calls this compunction “a kind of puncture in the heart that results in the efficacious religious tears,” we can easily see how Laura’s sorrow transfers to others and makes her meaningful in the audience’s eyes. Mary Carruthers quotes Gregory of Nyssa on tears: “Tears are moist and hot. Rational argument is cold and dry. Tears’ effect upon a barren soul is life-giving. Boredom, indifference, tedium—the cold, dry effects of acedia—are remedied by weeping.”35 This physiological, humoral analysis can be found very early: thus St. Irenaeus (second century) considered

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that one must keep “a heart that is soft and pliable. . .lest being hardened you lose the impressions of [the creator’s] fingers.”36 Carruthers adds that “two centuries later, Evagrius of Pontus attributes the inability to weep to hardness of soul.”37 “Tears are like blood in the wounds of the soul,” says Gregory of Nyssa; “hot, moist, and restorative of deadened, scarred f lesh.”38 As we can see from the examples of both Eva Pigford and Laura Denoux, the impression that tears provide is that those who seem either resistant or hardened to the programs of self-improvement and transformation offered by their respective shows are finally remedied (if not redeemed). They seem, in fact, to be necessary; one of Laura’s fellow contestants, Ron Morelli, despite repeated attempts to sacrifice his own position on the show for his son’s, and his consistent hard work in the face of fairly debilitating injuries, never was able to gain any audience support and was consistently seen as a manipulator and con man. His ability to remain on the show was treated as some kind of a trick; because his son Mike was a more prodigious weeper, and was also willing to make sacrifices (for instance, giving one of his prizes to another contestant who needed it more than he did), it made him an audience favorite. Although he was certainly a part of any schemes his father created to keep both of them on the ranch, Mike always received viewer approval where his father could not. Tears do the work that language cannot; if in the medieval examples, they stand for an outpouring of religious feeling, communicating deep sentiment that cannot be expressed in words, even the words of prayer or liturgy, in reality television they often take on a meaning outside of what contestants and judges say, becoming meaningful in their own right. While we might critique the efficacy of the judges’ tears in seeing Melissa and Ade’s aforementioned cancer dance, since they were both sent home the following night, the tears each one—including the notoriously hard-hearted and critical Mia Michaels—shed stood in place of the usual commentary and judgment the pair would normally receive. Although both dancers were generally praised by the judges for their versatility, presence, and strong technique, none of those verbal judgments carried the same weight as their visceral responses. Comments about the performance on the show’s notice boards were effusive, including “I was moved to tears by the eloquence and passion and tenderness with which these two dancers told in dance the heartbreaking story of one woman’s battle with breast cancer and the man who was there for her every step of the way. Who among us has not been touched by cancer in some way, shape or form in our lives?”39 and, “Even though I haven’t liked Melissa and Ade before this, this was the most memorable number on the show.”40 Perhaps most importantly, tears on these shows project a sense of deserving, a way of communicating sincerity and one’s inner truth, as well

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as being a sign of authentic feeling, more sincere than any word could be, which comes directly from the heart and soul, and as Nagy pointedly says, is (theoretically) “not manipulated by reason and will.”41 There is a certain irony to this, since the tears are not ultimately efficacious without the stories, told in words, which lie behind them.42 In addition, it is likely that the copious weeping on these shows is, at least in part, created by circumstances—a lack of privacy, an intensity of scrutiny, an inability to communicate with the outside world, and most likely a paucity of sleep (and, some have suggested, excessive amounts of alcohol)—and that these circumstances are, at least partly, created by the show’s producers for the audience’s benefit; however, the rhetoric of tears does have a powerful effect on both contestants and audience. The circumstances that produce it do have something in common with monastic life: isolation, a rigorous schedule, a dedicated purpose outside the realities of everyday life. The way the contestants become exempla also aligns them, if not terribly neatly, with medieval saints and figures like Margery Kempe. As an imitation of a greater process of change, a kind of conversion, many reality shows (such as The Biggest Loser, Dance Your Ass Off, and even What Not to Wear, a surprising but perennial weep-fest) are designed of offer the audience an inspirational model to follow. Discussing the contestants on More to Love, Todd Cold, managing editor of entertainment website Fancast, notes, “They’ve dealt with really severe feelings of loneliness, alienation and low self-esteem. It’s painful and its [sic] disturbing.”43 In theory, the redemptive quality of the experience of being on the shows is supposed to change both the contestants’ lives and the lives of the audiences who watch them. Terri Russ offers a possible explanation: “the uses and gratifications theory says that we use media in a way to gratify ourselves. We can watch this show and say ‘Oh my God, thank God I don’t look like her.’ Also it sells. People are talking about it. Clearly, as reprehensible as it could be, somebody’s out there watching.”44 It is also striking to read the way respondents to message boards repeatedly comment on how inspirational and exemplary they found the contestants’ experience, and how they have used it either to motivate or model their own. For instance, an anonymous poster comments on the Biggest Loser notice board about the season 7 winner: “Helen has been a great inspiration to me. I am the same age as she is and have been obese my entire life. I thought at 48 years old that I could never change. Helen showed me that if she can do it, so can I. THANK YOU Helen and Biggest Loser. I have a long way to go, but already my blood pressure is lower and my health is better.”45 Echoing this rhetoric of affectivity are Jackie Rios’s comments about Mike, who didn’t win: “You are such an inspiration to me. I have been watching the Biggest Loser for a couple of years now, and you are the one that

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has inspired me to lose weight. I have been losing weight & I have now joined a gym (this is a first for me!). . .i would really like to hear from you so I can stay motivated and lose the weight I want gone.”46 There is no question that ritual efficacy “stems from Christian theology and liturgy,”47 of which contrition, confession, and tears are a profound part. These function efficit quod figurat (they “make happen what they signify”) in medieval sacramental parlance. Elina Gertsman points out an anonymous twelfth-century homily on Psalm 126 that classifies four kinds of tears: “tears that are like aqua maris—the salt water of compunction; tears that are like aquae nivis—the snow-water of regret on behalf of the others; tears that are like aquae fontis—the well-water of the worldly contempt; and tears that are like aque roris—the dew water of longing for heaven.”48 Only the aquae fontis seem absent from our television weepers; few contestants use their participation in this medium as a means to gain contempt for, and therefore rejection of, the material world, although viewers might develop a different kind of contempt through these nightly doses of emotiporn. The tears of compunction and regret are often wept in response to a perceived slight or the contestant’s own wrongdoing; for instance, Mark, on the fourth season of the Biggest Loser, turned to effusive weeping after realizing that his strategic game playing had made him widely disliked and ultimately got him sent home. A twist in the game allowed him to return to the ranch, where his conniving from the first part of the season seemed replaced by generosity, openness, and lots of crying. And the “dew water of longing for heaven” may be seen as the longing for the ultimate redemption that these shows offer—the winning of the prize (usually monetary) that signifies a kind of spiritual transformation. In a universe where transformation is the goal, contestants begin in the wrong and strive to be redeemed. This is particularly striking on the range of weight-loss shows, where, as Patalano puts it, “rather than preaching acceptance, these shows try to portray heavy people as wrong, striving to be right.”49 In one of the first legends in the Legenda Aurea, St. Andrew proves himself an avid weeper; hearing the tale of an old man named Nicholas who struggles with the sins of lust, but who is f lung out of a brothel because he carries the gospel with him, Andrew “began to weep and remained in prayer for many hours; and then he refused to eat, saying: ‘I will eat nothing until I know that the Lord will take pity on this old man’.”50 In a sense, St. Andrew here is acting as the reality audience; moved by the struggles of the unfortunate, this audience uses its own power to redeem the contestants’ suffering. Prodigious weeping is a feature of many saints’ lives and appears in many forms—the weeping of the Saint who longs for salvation or feels

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his own guilt, such as Augustine; the mysterious weeping of the mystic, most forcefully narrated in the Book of Margery Kempe; the weeping of the repentant whores bricked up in their anchorholds in Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s Abraham and Pafnutius; and the weeping with sorrow over the plight of the unfortunate, as in the St. Andrew model. While the first three are essentially private acts (although often enacted in public)—a dialogue between the saint and God—the last, as an intercessionary act, is more public in its function; by working outside the saint, it becomes an act of compassion that leads to charity for others. Whether reality television actually produces acts of charity is debatable, but certainly as a genre it encodes that idea; it relies on the sense that the prize goes to the most deserving—the one who has exhibited the most authentic transformation or the most profound emotion; the one who has made the greatest progress on the road from sin to redemption; the one who has confessed the most trauma and shed the most tears; the most humble or the one who learns the most humility. This medieval pattern remains very much alive and well, remaining very much a part of the way we tell stories, and of how we live them. Therefore, a reality television contestant might do best to follow the advice of Gregory of Nyssa: “What must one do who desires tears? Do this: Imagine your soul weeping as it keeps vigil, as you have often seen it weeping in a dream. Weep and shed tears before God in your intention . . . . I know some who did not stop there, but by dint of faith and prayer they changed the rock of their soul into a stream of water . . . [and] they have caused f loods of tears to spring up from within, through eyes of stone.”51 In so doing, this contestant would recognize the necessary and efficacious function of tears within this genre, acknowledging the afterlife of this essentially medieval rhetoric of weeping. If many of the ritual functions of the Middle Ages are lost from modern life, in the seemingly contemporary phenomenon of reality television, tears continue to do a medieval kind of work. The taxonomy of the medieval gift of tears allows these emotional acts to work, not as something outside speech or representation, but as something encoded in a system of meaning. As a ritual, they operate both to construct a narrative and to connect the audience (medieval or contemporary) to these narratives. Yet, in so doing, they also offer a kind of transcendence of materiality, in which actions are transformed into something beyond themselves, and meaning is created not out of what one does, but what one (ostensibly) feels. Clearly, reality television provides a staged ritual, reminiscent of medieval religion without the devotional expectations; within the settings of the tribal councils, panels, and ceremonies, contestants are exiled or redeemed, given absolution or forced to enact a kind of penance—we see a return to elements

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of medieval popular religion. Thus the past, in sometimes hidden ways, brings a great deal to bear on the production of the present, shrinking the distance between them. If reality television contestants are looking for something beyond the ending of the shows, a kind of transformation and transcendence, the path by which they undertake that offers many echoes of the Middle Ages, especially in its understanding and use of tears. Like a medieval penitent, crying “early and often” on reality television may be the most efficacious path to a redemptive future.52 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

The Fashion Show: Ultimate Collection, season 1 (Bravo TV, 2009), DVD. Dance Your Ass Off, season 1 (Oxygen TV, 2009), DVD. So You Think You Can Dance, season 5 (Fox TV, 2009), DVD. “Dance That Will Make You Cry—Performed by Melissa and Ade,” accessed January 12, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s67Yc_ ozOgA. For surprising proof of this search YouTube.com, “Melissa and Ade— woman’s work” produces eight pages of hits, while “Asuka and Vitolio waltz” produces only one hit that actually shows them dancing. Pieroska Nagy, “Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West, in Ritual in Its Own Right, ed. Don Handleman and Galina Lindquist (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004), 132. Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 132. Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 189. Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 107. Lochrie, Margery Kempe, 179. See, for instance, the weeping of the harlot Thaïs in Hrostvit of Gandersheim’s Pafnutius; bricked up inside an anchorhold, Thaïs prays “not with words but by tears.” However, this action takes place off stage; the audience is only privy to Thaïs’s intention to weep, and the result. Katharina M. Wilson, ed. and trans., The Dramas of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Peregrina, 1985), 106. Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 119. Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 124. Dante, Purgatorio, canto 13, lines 82–90. Digital Dante Project, accessed January 12, 2012, http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/index.html. Mark Musa, trans. Purgatory (New York: Penguin, 1981), canto 13, lines 82–90. Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 122. Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 123. Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 131. Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 132.

142 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

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Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 124. Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 120. Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 120. Heidi Patalano, “Weighty Issue: Weight-Oriented Programming Walks the Line between Celebration and Exploitation,” New York Metro, September 3, 2009, 11. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Press, 1990), 58. Foucault, History, 58. Foucault, History, 59. Mary Carruthers, “On Aff liction and Reading, Weeping and Argument: Chaucer’s Lachrymose Troilus in Context.” Representations 93 (Winter 2006): 12. Conrad Philip Kottak, Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity (New York: McGraw Hill, 1999), 238, quoted in Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 120. Kottak, Anthropology, 238, quoted in Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 120. America’s Next Top Model, season 3, episode 1 (Paramount TV, 2004), DVD. The Biggest Loser, season 7, discussion forum, accessed September 8, 2009, http://boards.nbc.com/nbc/index.php?s=764b3566274a7fde57fc3586be b7784f& showforum=377. Many of the posts from the season 7 discussion boards are no longer available. All notes to discussion boards preserve the original language and spelling. This term, coined by Robert Squillace (personal communication), encompasses the way tears are used in reality television to draw the viewers’ attention in a voyeuristic way; as with pornography, the audience is invited to invade the contestants’ privacy for its own titillation. Sarah Kickler Kebler, “Reality Check TV Blog,” accessed April 15, 2009. Kebler’s “Reality Check” blog is no longer available. Kebler is the television reporter for the Baltimore Sun. The Biggest Loser, season 7, discussion forum, accessed September 8, 2009, http://boards.nbc.com/nbc/index.php?s=764b3566274a7fde57fc3586be b7784f&showforum=377. Carruthers, “Aff liction and Reading,” 7 Carruthers, “Aff liction and Reading,” 7. Carruthers, “Aff liction and Reading,” 7. Carruthers, “Aff liction and Reading,” 7. So You Think You Can Dance, discussion forum, accessed September 9, 2009, http://www.fox.com/dance/community/. Past seasons’ discussion forums are currently unavailable on the Fox website. So You Think You Can Dance, discussion forum, accessed September 9, 2009, http://www.fox.com/dance/community/. Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 123. Thanks to my research assistant, Kevin Stevens, for pointing out this irony.

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43. Quoted in Patalano, “Weighty Issue,” 11. 44. Quoted in Patalano, “Weighty Issue,” 11. 45. The Biggest Loser, season 7, discussion forum, accessed September 8, 2009, http://boards.nbc.com/nbc/index.php?s=764b3566274a7fde57fc3586be b7784f& showforum=377. 46. The Biggest Loser, season 7, discussion forum, accessed September 8, 2009, http://boards.nbc.com/nbc/index.php?s=764b3566274a7fde57fc3586be b7784f& showforum=377. Posts relating to Mike and Ron can still be found in the “Father Son” thread. 47. Nagy, “Religious Weeping,” 121. 48. Elina Gertsman, “Call for Papers: ‘Crying’ at the International Congress on Medieval Studies,” Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, May 7–10, 2009, accessed January 12, 2012, http://fmrsi.wordpress. com/2008/07/17/cfp-cr ying-international-congress-on-medievalstudies-kalamazoo-7–10-may-2009/. 49. Patalano, “Weighty Issue,” 11. 50. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. 2 vols. Trans. William Granger Ryan. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:14–15. 51. Carruthers, “Aff liction and Reading,” 8. 52. I am grateful to several colleagues who read this essay and provided commentary, help, and their own lively (and lurid) examples: Robert Squillace, Kevin Stevens, Karen Gevirtz, Jonathan Farina, Donovan Sherman, and Jamie Rooney.

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CHAPTER 10 ROBIN HOOD, FRENCHED Richard Utz

Oftentimes the adventures of amours and of war are more fortunate and marvellous than any man can think or wish. Jean Froissart, Chronicles

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n playwright Eric Durnez’s 2002 play, Brousailles, one of the characters, the adolescent Albert Jardin, remembers the evening during which his parents announced their decision to get a divorce: My father and mother had their share of disagreements just about like any other couple. Maybe even fewer than average. Nevertheless, one evening they became very serious and told me that they needed to talk with me and asked that I switch off the television, just about when Thierry la Fronde was about to start. At school, we acted out Thierry la Fronde. [My friend] Tom Patinaud played Thierry la Fronde, and I was often a spy prisoner whom Thierry had liberated. It was really the first time my parents made such a fuss about having a conversation. Normally, they just talked, that’s all, and they never told me in advance that they needed to talk . . . I asked if we might have the talk after Thierry la Fronde, but my father straight out tore out the television cable, saying that there were more important things in life than Thierry la Fronde.1

Like Albert, who reminisces in this passage, this essay will not focus on the serious issue of divorce, but the fact that he still deplores, years later, that his parents deprived him of an essential experience in his childhood: watching another episode of the television show Thierry la Fronde. The show, first broadcast in fifty episodes on Sunday evenings on the

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sole French television station ORTF between 1963 and 1966, became so uniquely popular with its original audience that vast numbers of viewers today still view it as one of their formative experiences. So beloved did its protagonist become that he was instrumental in helping Thierry, a relatively underused French first name of medieval origin, peak as the country’s most popular boys’ name between 1965 and 1967.2 Furthermore, the success of the French series in France and Belgium convinced other national broadcasting companies in countries as different as Australia (The King’s Outlaw), Canada (Thierry la Fronde / The King’s Outlaw), Poland (Thierry Smialek / Thierry the Daredevil), and the Netherlands (Thierry de Slingeraar / Thierry the Sling) to include the series in their programming. As one of the early European television series, the Thierry la Fronde brand was recognizable enough to spawn the production of a set of twenty-four action figures (twenty-four to twenty-five mm in size), an illustrated novelization (Thierry la Fronde, with noted publisher Hachette), a comic book series (Thierry la Fronde), and numerous reports and articles in the new magazines specifically targeting emerging young adult audiences in the 1960s. The ubiquitous popularity of the series was demonstrated only recently when, on January 10, 2011, journalist Laureen Peers reported the death of crooner John William (Ernest Armand Huss), at the age of eighty-eight, in the French news magazine L’Express. Her article’s headline does not remember William/Huss as the singer who “Frenched” the title songs of Hollywood blockbusters such as The Longest Day, The Great Escape, or Doctor Zhivago for French audiences, but as the voice singing the title song of Thierry la Fronde, “La marche des compagnons.”3 The plot of the series was simple enough: Thierry de Janville, a young Sologne nobleman who had fought valiantly against the English occupation of French territories during the Hundred Years’ War, loses his title and land due to the machinations of his disloyal steward, Florent of Clouseaules, who is on the payroll of the power hungry Charles the Bad, King of Navarre. Supported by a small group of trusted outlaws, his fiancée Isabelle, and an anti-English population, he defies Florent, the King of Navarre, and the English troops commanded by Edward, the Black Prince. Through fifty-two episodes of twenty-six minutes each, Thierry displays an idealistic love for justice and morality on a quest to support his king and free his occupied country. His impeccable chivalric virtues and unselfish service earn him back his title and the friendship of the French King, Jean II (nicknamed “the Good”), and even the leaders of the English grudgingly respect and admire him. It is not difficult to establish why French television in the early 1960s was open to producing a series that took place in the Middle Ages and featured an hors-la-lois (outlaw).Right across the (English?) channel, British television had achieved a phenomenal success

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with The Adventures of Robin Hood, whose 143 half-hour episodes were watched by some thirty million people in Britain and the United States between 1956 and 1959.4 The series featured Richard Greene as Robin Hood, who returns from the Crusades only to find that his ancestral lands have been taken over by a Norman nobleman. Framed for the nobleman’s murder, Robin becomes an outlaw and fights for English freedom and against the loathsome Normans led by Prince John. However, Anglo-American success at bringing historical fiction to the small screen quickly crossed the channel and had begun to invade the French small screen in April of 1959.Like The Adventures of Robin Hood, the thirty-nine half-hour episodes of Ivanhoe had been geared toward British as well as US markets, but the series was also very well received by French audiences. Loosely based on Walter Scott’s famous 1819 novel and starring a dashing and eternally wrong-righting Roger Moore, this series, too, was set during the reign of Richard the Lionheart, with a nasty Prince John as Sir Wilfred van Ivanhoe’s nemesis. It is this specific Anglo-American invasion by the popular Ivanhoe that inspired screenwriter and actor Jean-Claude Deret that France should produce her own medieval “feuilleton” (serial) for television, one based on the country’s own usable history.5 It is clear that the ORTV leadership shared his national enthusiasm. As soon as Thierry la Fronde was available, its episodes replaced Ivanhoe in its prime time slot on Sundays at 7:20 p.m.6 While Deret, who would himself play the treacherous Florent de Clouseaules, was critical of the Anglocentric historical backdrop of The Adventures of Robin Hood and Ivanhoe for French audiences, he and Director Pierre Goutaz keenly recognized the ingredients that rendered these series so successful. Therefore, in Thierry la Fronde, they produced a veritable pastiche of these two predecessors. Here are the essential features and how they were adapted for the French audience. The Young Hero Twenty-four year old Belgian actor Jean-Claude Drouot was selected to play the young Thierry de Janville. Better than Richard Greene and Roger Moore, who were thirty-seven and thirty-one when they began playing Robin and Ivanhoe, Drouot’s youth and fitness underlined the insouciantly idealistic and egalitarian nature of his outlaw role.7 The Love Interest French-Canadian actress Céline Leger, the wife of screenwriter JeanClaude Deret, played young Isabelle. Like “the Maid” Marian, Isabelle’s

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main function was to support and admire Thierry. Their relationship was utterly wholesome and without even a hint of sexual attraction. Unlike Robin’s Lady Marian Fitzwalter, however, who was a noblewoman, Isabelle was a parentless local commoner, an added element that linked Thierry closely with his commoner friends and supporters and seemed to indicate that the ideals and virtues that Thierry represented par excellence existed among good people of all social classes. The Merry Men The title sequence has Thierry and Isabelle happily saunter toward the camera while three merry male outlaw compagnons emerge from the forest left and right behind them. As in The Adventures of Robin Hood and that television series’ main source, Disney’s 1952 The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, these compagnons’ behavior highlights the ideal nature of their fellowship. This inner circle of friends is introduced during the first two episodes: Judas (forty-one out of fifty-two episodes), a traveling actor whose convincing performance of the role of Judas Iscariot in morality plays has audiences regularly chase him out of town, suspecting him to be a Jew; Martin (forty-one episodes), Isabelle’s uncle; Bertrand (forty episodes), Thierry de Janville’s cooper and a nod to French winemaking, who replaces the similarly hot-tempered and somewhat slow Little John; Jehan (forty episodes), a former cut-purse; Boucicault (forty episodes), a mild-mannered man who suffers from memory loss and finds a new home among the outlaws; Pierre (thirty-two episodes), a minstrel who publicly satirizes the rampant abuse of the French peasants by their (English) overlords. Finally, there is a “Friar Tuck.” However, Thierry’s Prieur (seventeen episodes) only supports the compagnons from time to time and does not live with them. All these men are attracted by Thierry’s virtues, noble cause, and leadership skill. Weapon of Choice Robin Hood’s fame rests on his skills as an archer. Thierry’s weapon of choice, even before he takes up outlaw life, is the (shepherd’s) sling. Just as Robin’s preference for the longbow marks his roots with the common people (especially the yeomen) of England, Thierry explicitly states that he prefers the shepherd’s sling to all other weapons because his friends, the French villagers, have taught him the use of the weapon (Hors-la-loi).8 Thus, the weapon of a French David against an occupying English Goliath reinforces his close connection with the commoners, in whose name he fights. Like Robin, Thierry also gets ample opportunity to fight

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with the nobler sword. In fact, authentic swashbuckling, often placed next to scenes of hilarious slapstick violence, was taken to new heights by the producers of Thierry la Fronde, as cast members received extensive training at the hands of Raoul Billerey, a top French master of arms, stuntman, and actor. Stock Scenes The producers of Thierry la Fronde also gleaned a multitude of plot elements, scenarios, sequences, and production techniques from Ivanhoe and The Adventures of Robin Hood, including dramatic horseback rides by the hero, hide-and-seek situations, ambushes in the forest, and stairway swashbuckling. Simple interior sets were designed of basic components so that they could be reassembled and reused quickly for various episodes. On the French and English production sites, “artfully placed drapes and curtains are sometimes the only means of differentiating one scene from another.”9 If all these individual building blocks of the predecessor series could be copied and slightly adapted to a French audience, a major challenge remained: how to situate a story about a quintessentially English hero before an historical backdrop that would allow French viewers to suspend their knowledge of the Robin Hood narrative and identify instead with Thierry as one of their own. Screenwriter Jean-Claude Deret resolved this challenge by inserting the English building blocks into a moment in history he remembered from his childhood.10 Instead of twelfth-century England, the aftermath of the Third Crusade, and the tensions between Normans and Saxons as novelized by Walter Scott, he brought the Frenched Robin Hood to life in 1359, the final year of the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War and three years after Edward the Black Prince had captured the French King Jean II (1319–1364) and many of his nobles at Poitiers. It is impossible to determine with certainty which traits or events, if any, impressed Jean-Claude Deret about King Jean II and his reign. What may be determined, however, is that Deret’s depiction of the French ruler conforms to none of the positive or negative epithets commonly attached to Jean the Good by commentators, historians, and schoolbooks.11 In Thierry la Fronde, he is a mere figurehead to whom Thierry owes and shows absolute loyalty. King Jean is France, and France needs to be freed from English occupation.12 The writers and producers of The Adventures of Robin Hood made some notable stabs at authenticity by hiring historians as consultants and using a small number of medieval Robin Hood ballads as the basis for certain episodes.13 Thierry la Fronde, however, despite its

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insertion of numerous historical figures like Edward, the Black Prince, or Charles of Navarre, proposes a complete simulacrum of the medieval, one whose representation of the fourteenth century owes many of its features to an earlier, already ideologically and fictionally distorted depiction of Robin Hood’s alleged twelfth century, but bears only the most tenuous relation to any medieval reality. One plausible explanation for the immense popularity of a thinly veiled pastiche of Robin Hood in France is that Thierry la Fronde catered to a deeply felt need for a French hero in a pro-French narrative as a counterweight against the overpowering Anglophone cultural productions about the past which, not surprisingly, highlighted Anglophone values and traditions. It is this feeling of being invaded and occupied that made Jean-Claude Deret situate his feuilleton during the Hundred Years’ War, when English armies waged wars on French soil and when, in the words of British author Stephen Clarke, “the millennium-old rivalry between the French and anyone who happens to be born speaking English” reached a major peak.14 To illustrate the point: in episode 48, La fourche du diable, Thierry saves King Jean’s personal cook, who had decided to travel to English-occupied territory without a military escort in his keen desire to save the palates and stomachs of the captive French knights there from having to consume steak with “gelee à la menthe” and similarly terrifying repasts. This staple of French prejudice against English cuisine is even further enhanced by the French cook introducing the backward English barbarians to the use of the fork, thus confirming for French audiences their country’s cultural and civilizatory superiority. If this example sounds like good-natured humor, French television leadership’s decision to cancel the broadcast of Thierry la Fronde on Sunday, January 30, 1965, the day of Winston Churchill’s state funeral, indicates how conscious French television managers were of the anti-British tendencies dominating the series. They thought it “out of the question that a Frenched Robin Hood,” the “sworn opponent” of the Black Prince, his “henchmen,” and the “perfidious Albion” in general “might bring to mind the Hundred Years’ War on this day of mourning.”15 What is ironic about this allegedly French reaction is that British viewers, too, thought of their Adventures of Robin Hood series as a victory of homemade television against the powerful inf lux of American imports, especially the numerous Westerns purchased by ITV and the BBC. As James Chapman summarizes: The Adventures of Robin Hood was generally well received as “a lively entertainment for juveniles and adults alike” (Variety, 5 October 1955 . . .).

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In Britain it was championed as an example of British-made product in contrast to American imports . . . . As a correspondent to TV Times wrote: “Before the advent of ITV my two small daughters played at cowboys. Now there is not a gun about the house or a ‘bang, you’re dead.’ Instead they have home-made bows and arrows like their new hero, Robin Hood” (TV Times, 28 October 1955 . . .). This point was echoed by Leslie Mallory in the News Chronicle [5 September 1956], who wrote that “today’s youngsters have a new TV idol—Robin Hood. Davy Crockett and Superman have been ousted to the limbo of television while the kids clamour for English longbows and jerkins of Lincoln green . . . .”16

Similar to French parents and teachers, who may well have interpreted their children’s skyrocketing use of Thierry’s allegedly medieval French shepherd’s sling as a sign of healthy resistance against an overpowering Anglophone cultural assault,17 British audiences believed that their country could maintain its own distinctive national character vs. American inf luences by producing television shows that delved into past events that they viewed exclusively Britain’s own. What screenwriters, producers, and audiences completely underestimated was the degree to which medievalism on the small and big screen in the 1950s and early 1960s, like the Middle Ages itself, was a common Western cultural phenomenon, one that could not be claimed by any one country. In fact, as John Fraser explains in his magisterial 1982 study of America and the Patterns of Chivalry, the United States, despite (or perhaps because) of its foundational emphasis on rationality and progress, had developed a particular desire to connect with medieval ideas of chivalry and nobility, ideas that would penetrate all areas of cultural production. “The chivalric,” Fraser writes, “was the magical kingdom of castles and greensward, and twisting cobbled streets at midnight, and sun-baked islands and jostling wharves, and graceful Southern plantations, and velvet tropical skies, and the majestic spaces of the Western landscape, and enchanted composite realm of the imagination in which picturesquely garbed figures coped with the ever changing configurations of warfare or cattle drives, or the intricate rituals and plottings of aristocratic society.”18 Because Americans could not claim original medieval narratives as their national property as readily as their counterparts in Britain and France, their appropriation of medieval culture became more superficial but also more widespread, seeping into representations no longer distinctly recognizable as hailing from the Middle Ages. Such representations include the legion of knightly Westerners in print and celluloid sired by Owen Wister’s The Virginian and their Indian counterparts. They include Robin

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Hood, Errol Flynn’s especially, and Zorro, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, and gentlemen buccaneers, like Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Peter Blood . . . . They include the officers and gentlemen rankers of Lives of a Bengal Lances, and the gentleman rankers of Beau Geste, and the First World War aviators of Dawn Patrol, and clean-cut American f ly-boys like Steve Canyon . . . .They include John D. MacDonald’s battered, rangy knight-errant Travis McGee. They include gentleman knights like Prince Valiant, and Nature’s gentlemen like Tarzan and Joe Palooka, and miscellaneous samurai, and the martial-arts experts of Bruce Lee. They include Superman and Buck Rogers. They include men about town like Philo Vance, the Saint, and Dashiell Hammett’s Nick Charles, and the figures played by Fred Astair. They include gentlemanly English actors like Ronald Colman and George Sanders, and . . . gentlemanly American ones like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and William Powell, and those immortals, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, and the rest, who have epitomised native American gallantry and grace.19

As reimports of a geographically removed, but recognizably Western medievalism, the easy and immediate success of these figures, behavioral patterns, and plots in American films and television series in Europe becomes more plausible. While British viewers had a more direct connection with the mentalité expressed in these productions for obvious linguistic and historical reasons, French postwar audiences shared in it, too, albeit sometimes at a degree once removed from the easier unique continuity British audiences felt between the medieval past and present. Unlike the decisive break France experienced with its medieval and Christian past during the French Revolution, the history of Britain, enshrined in the linguistic habit of naming the only major revolutionary event in that history “Glorious” or “Sensible,” or “Bloodless,” infers the perceived absence of similarly disruptive events. For the imagined community of Britain, therefore, not only the monarchy itself survived, but ever new reimaginations of Britishness could find their inspiration and continuity in specific medieval traditions. This is true even for the most recent reenactment of the Robin Hood narrative, English director Ridley Scott’s 2010 Robin Hood, a popular movie that, just like the many other retellings of Robin Hood on film and television, celebrates the foundational anchors of Anglo-American/Western civilization/democracy in the events surrounding Magna Carta, Richard the Lionheart, and John Lackland.20 Despite its clearly more traumatic relationship with the medieval period, the French reaction to the worldwide distribution of the Robin Hood narrative on the small and big screen was not directed against the Middle Ages as a period of Christian obscurantism and the aristocratic abuse of power, but was an expression of a deep-seated discomfort at the

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ease with which Anglo-American productions connected with the medieval past and the speed with which these productions occupied international cultural space and implied, even to French and Francophone television and movie audiences, that contemporary civilization and democracy were the exclusive achievements of Anglo-American traditions that began in medieval times. This discomfort not only explains the reactive adaptation of the Robin Hood story, but also the belated reactions to other elements of a postwar chivalric revival, mostly driven by Anglo-American political needs, economic developments, and their concomitant cultural productions. During and after World War II, for example, the British Royal Air Force had given a “significant boost” to what Jeffrey Richards has rightly named “the last great age of chivalry,” the 1950s: “Winston Churchill compared the pilots of the RAF to the Knights of the Round Table and the Crusaders, and British boys’ books of the 1950s, particularly W. E. Johns’ Biggles books, gave this image wide popular currency.”21 As late as 1967, right before French uniforms lost their positive connotation for much of France in the streets of Paris, French television utilized and rekindled the same enduring popular connection between medieval chivalry and modern fighter pilots in Les chevaliers du ciel, a series of thirty-nine episodes that featured France as an internationally active military power that competed and collaborated with the United States and Britain.22 Despite the external desire for national identity formation, the French, British, and US medievalist television shows in the 1950s and early 1960s had more in common than some of their makers and almost all of their viewers could have fathomed at the time. Some of those shared features had to do with the necessity to reappraise the political and social status quo questioned during World War II. In all three countries, one solution was to continue conservative value systems that had, in the eyes of a majority of citizens, helped the Western allies win the war against totalitarian enemies and would sustain them during the Cold War. This could well be the reason why the central leadership of the country (King Richard; King Jean II) is never questioned in any of the three television series. In The Adventures of Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, it is a small number of corrupt and/or amorous mid-level English administrators (for example, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Sir Roger de Lisle; Sir William de Courcier; Sir Dunstan of Travers; Lord Giles of Richmond; Sir Jack of Southwark; Sir Roger Fitzwilliam) and King Richard’s notoriously wayward royal brother who cause all the problems. In Thierry la Fronde there exists only one single French traitor, perhaps significant at a time when France was not yet ready to consider the extent to which French citizens collaborated with the German authorities between 1939 and 1944.23 And that single

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collaborateur, Florent, breathes his last breath at the hands of Thierry, the leader of the French résistance, during the penultimate episode of the series (Le drame de Rouvres). Stephen Knight has indicated that both protagonists in The Adventures of Robin Hood, similarly, share traits that audiences would have recognized as those of a “squadron leader” (Robin) and a “highly capable” female officer in Britain’s Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British army during World War II (Marian).24 A second conservative social feature on which writers, producers, and audiences in all three countries seemed to agree was the wholesome heterosexual relationship between romantic hero and heroine. Thierry, like his immediate television forebears, is not married to Isabelle, and their scenes of intimacy are limited to many idealistic gazes and occasional prudish hugs. In the final episode (La fille du roi), it is King Jean II himself who “orders” Thierry to return to his native Sologne together with Isabelle since they belong together. King Richard, in the Hollywood swashbuckler, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), similarly reinstates Robin as an Earl and “orders” him to marry Lady Marian.25 There are other elements uniting the medieval Anglo-American and French television series in the late 1950s and 1960s, subversive elements that managed to live in peaceful coexistence with the overriding conservative ones. Few contemporary viewers, for example, were aware that The Adventures of Robin Hood was the brainchild of US producer Hannah Weinstein, who had escaped McCarthyite persecution at home and developed the shows in Britain with a crossover audience in mind. Thus, under the guise of an unfailingly royalist Robin acceptable to conservative audiences, The Adventures of Robin Hood, written in large part by the pseudonymous left-wing American writers to whom Weinstein provided gainful employment, displays a noticeable focus on issues of social justice, particularly the exploitation of the peasantry by their abusive aristocratic overlords.26 Moreover, the screenwriters for the series strain not to refer to Robin as a knight, the Saxon-Norman rivalry becomes legible as “shorthand” for class conf lict, and a “liberal attitude” toward minorities prevails in certain episodes.27 Across the Channel, postwar national reconciliation led to shared political control over French television. While the Gaullists were more or less in control of the news, political commentary, and documentaries, the Communists dominated the rest of the program, especially the quickly growing number of series based on fiction.28 Unsurprisingly, therefore, Thierry la Fronde, although a nobleman, prefers to spend time with his friends in the village; loves Isabelle, a commoner; protects those who would be beaten or killed as dangerous cultural and religious “others”

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(for example, Judas in Les compagnons de Thierry; the Rabbi Jacob and the Muslim doctor Zakaria in Le fléau de Dieu); confronts nobles who abuse their privileges; and exposes numerous premodern beliefs as obscurantist superstitions (for example, the causes of the Black Death). Most importantly, Thierry chooses the decidedly unaristocratic shepherd’s sling as his preferred weapon. His choice of the sling ( fronde) invoked for French audiences the homonymous civil war during the reign of King Louis XIV. The Fronde derived its name “from a parallel jokingly drawn between, on the one hand, the behavior of rebellious members of the Paris Parlement [sic], held in check by the frequent appearances in their midst of the boy-king’s uncle; and, on the other hand, the activities of the Parisian youths, accustomed to break off their stone-slinging fights whenever the seventeenth-century equivalent of the local police superintendent arrived on the scene, but to regroup as soon as his back was turned.”29 Actor Jean-Claude Drouot, a self-declared Marxist, would have found this connection quite appealing.30 And this is probably also true of the managers and directors of state television in Socialist Poland, where Thierry la Fronde, Ivanhoe, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Zorro were broadcast on Thursday afternoons, during prime time for teenager viewers.31 By conf lating the fictional Thierry with a homonymous historical event during which peasants, citizens, and youth resisted an increasingly oppressive central government in the streets of Paris, the makers of the series almost seem to presage the events of May, 1968. Then, millions of French students and workers went on strike in Paris and set French society on the path toward a liberal and more permissive society, in which a television series promulgating the traditional patriotism and respect for centralized authority à la Thierry la Fronde may not have garnered the kind of uncomplicated enthusiasm the young Albert Jardin shows in Eric Durnez’s play, Brousailles. Of course, Albert’s parents were going to announce to him the news of their impending divorce, perhaps an indication that the period during which the fictional Thierry won the hearts of millions of French television viewers was not all the way as idealistic, unified, and socially stable as post hoc grand narratives about the postwar period would want us to believe. Notes 1. Durnez’s play was published in his Trilogie pour une compagnie (CarnièresMorlanwelz: Lansman, 2002). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French into English in this essay are mine. I would like to thank Anne-Françoise Le Lostec (Department of Modern Languages, Western Michigan University) for reviewing the translations with me. A preliminary version of this essay was first presented at the 26th Annual

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2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

International Conference on Medievalism at the University of New Mexico in October, 2011. I am indebted to numerous colleagues for their questions and suggestions during that meeting. See Anne-Marie Guillon, “Emma si c’est une fille, Enzo si c’est un garçon,” Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques, July 2008, accessed January 12, 2012, http://insee.fr/fr/themes/document. asp?reg_id=4&ref_id=13339. See Laureen Peers, “John William, le chanteur de Thierry la Fronde, est décédé,” L’Express, January 10, 2011, accessed January 12, 2012, http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/musique/john-william-le-chanteur-dethierry-la-fronde-est-decede_951097.html. In 1992, thirty years after broadcasting the first episode, TF1-vidéo became available on videotape. The DVD set of all fifty-three episodes became available in 2003. The set contains a fifth DVD, entitled Les archives secrèts de Thierry la Fronde, which includes twenty-five minutes of interviews with actors, details about stunts, and various short scenes announcing and promoting the series at the time. This nostalgic medievalist revival also inspired, in July 2007, the city of Mennetou-sur-Cher to celebrate its seventh annual Medieval Festival under the auspices of Thierry la Fronde. The medieval city, situated in Thierry’s “native” Sologne region, was occupied in 1356 by Edward, the Black Prince. Jeanne D’Arc, on her way to deliver Orléans, spent a night in the village priory, which was later bought by screenwriter Jean-Claude Deret’s father. According to James Chapman, “The Adventures of Robin Hood and the Origins of the Television Swashbuckler,” Media History 17.3 (2011): 274, the Adventures “exemplifies two separate, though related, processes in the television industry during the 1950s: the rise of international coproduction-distribution arrangements and the trend towards telefilm production.” Jacques Baudou and Jean-Jacques Schleret, Les feuilletons historiques de la télévision française (Paris: Huitième Art, 1992), 25. In 2006, the French Ministry of Culture “knighted” Deret as a “Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres” for his life-time contributions to the artistic and literary culture in France and the world, an honor quite befitting the creator of Thierry la Fronde. In part because of his age and “sensible” attitude, Jeffrey Richards, “Robin Hood on Film and Television since 1945,” Visual Culture in Britain 2 (2001): 68, called Richard Greene “everyone’s favorite uncle.” Screenwriter Jean-Claude Deret explained in an interview (Baudou and Schleret, Les feuilletons, 25): “William Tell had a crossbow, Lancelot a lance, and Ivanhoe a sword. My hero would have a sling.” Patrick Mahé, La télévision autrefois (Paris: Hoëbeke, 2006), 96–97, mentions the noticeable inf luence the series exerted on children’s games during school recess as well as an increased use of the sling all over France. Chapman, “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” 276.

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10. Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, Quand la télévision explore le temps. L’histoire au petit écran 1953–2000 (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 132. 11. Raymond Cazelles, “Jean II le Bon: Quel homme? Quel roi?” Revue Historique 251.1 (1974): 5–26. 12. One possible connection with the Robin Hood narrative in Ivanhoe and The Adventures of Robin Hood, where Robin assists in raising the ransom for freeing Richard II, is that King Jean II also had to raise a ransom as part of the peace agreement after the Battle of Poitiers. However, this ransom never becomes more than a superficial motivating factor or plot element in Thierry la Fronde. 13. Richards, “Robin Hood on Film and Television,” 67–68. 14. 1000 Years of Annoying the French (London: Transworld Publishers, 2010), 14. 15. Mahé, La télévision, 96. 16. Chapman, “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” 276–77. 17. Mahé, La Television, 96. 18. John Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 12. 19. Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry, 16. 20. Richard Utz, “Coming to Terms with Medievalism,” European Journal of English Studies 15:2 (2011): 103–6. 21. Richards, “Robin Hood on Film and Television,” 66. 22. Mahé, La Television, 104. 23. Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, “Les guerres de mémoires à la télévision: du dévoilement à l’accompagnement,” in Les guerres de mémoires. La France et son histoire. Enjeux politiques, controverses historiques, stratégies médiatiques, ed. Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 275–76. 24. Stephen Knight, “Which Way to the Forest? Directions in Robin Hood Studies,” in Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice, ed. Thomas Hahn (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2000), 120. 25. The most inf luential French youth magazine of the 1960s and 1970s, Salut les Copains, used the popularity of actor Jean-Claude Drouot to promote romantic love that leads toward marriage. See Chris Tinker, Mixed Messages: Youth Magazine Discourse and Sociocultural Shifts in Salut les copains (1962–1976) (Berne: Peter Lang, 2010), 154. 26. See Steve Neale, “Transatlantic Ventures and Robin Hood,” in ITV Cultures: Independent Television over Fifty Years, ed. Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005), 73–87. Weinstein also produced four other TV series which are either set in the Middle Ages or include various forms of medievalisms: The Buccaneers (1956–1957); The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956–1957); Sword of Freedom (1958–1960); and The Four Just Men (1959). 27. Richards, “Robin Hood on Film and Television,” 68–71. 28. Veyrat-Masson, “Les guerres des mémoires,” 275.

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29. Wendy Gibson, A Tragic Farce: The Fronde (1648–1653) (Exeter: Elm Bank Publications, 1998), 1. 30. Gérald Meryll, “Qui es-tu Jean-Claude Drouot? Pas tellement Thierry la Fronde,” Salut les copains 20 (1964): 54. 31. In Poland, as in Britain and France, the decision to broadcast numerous medievalist television shows may indicate a postwar need to connect with the past as well as simply to provide entertainment. Moreover, Maciej Jerzy Ziminski (born 1930), a well-educated journalist, writer, and editor of print and nonprint media for young people, who was in charge of these afternoon programs, was also a member of the Polish scout movement, a movement whose British founder, Robert Baden-Powell, had applied the codes of medieval chivalry to the modern projects of empire, nation, and masculine militarism. I am indebted for this information to my colleague Piotr Toczyski from the Polish Academy of Sciences. One might also add here that compagnons, the term used to describe Thierry’s merry men, not only includes joviality among its semantic shadings, but is also often used as a synonym for camérades when referring to members of the Communist Party.

CHAPTER 11 BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: ARTHUR’S EPIC JOURNEY IN ANTOINE FUQUA’S KING ARTHUR (2005) Leslie Coote

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he journey is one of the most frequent tropes encountered in medieval epic, of either the “historical” or the “romance” kind. Classical Roman writers of epic exercised a powerful inf luence on the medieval imaginary, and none more so than Virgil. Virgil’s Aeneid, along with Dares Phrygius’s narrative on the fall of Troy, entered into the foundation myths of several medieval kingdoms, presenting Aeneas, through Brutus, as an ancestor of Arthur, himself an ancestor of the kings of England. In the Aeneid, the Trojan hero Aeneas undertakes a journey that leads him from the fall of Troy to the founding of what will become a new world power—Rome—while he himself develops from a man of ambiguous moral worth (a “traitor” or “other within”) to become the founding “father” of a new world.1 A series of “brief encounters” include not only his fated romance with Dido of Carthage (an encounter which tests his ability to put the greater good before personal happiness), but also his katabatic journey to the underworld and back.2 In this encounter, Aeneas confronts his own past in order to face the future and to discover his own identity and his role within it. The trope of the epic journey and the themes implicit in it are deployed by Antoine Fuqua in his 2005 film King Arthur, one of a series of twenty-first-century cinematic representations of the medieval epic story of Arthur, best known to Anglophone audiences in the form of Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century literary epic, Le Morte Darthur.3 If epic, as a recognizable generic form, has such longevity, then it follows that there must be continuity in its formulae, tropes, and themes,

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and this is true. However, in its translation from one society to another (geographical and chronological), and from one medium to another (in terms of the twentieth century, from literary to cinematic, then to digital “new” media), it must also undergo a certain amount of translation. Fuqua’s film demonstrates both the similarities and the changes implicit in the re-representation of the Arthurian epic in the first decade of the twenty-first century. His Arthur, like Aeneas, embarks on a journey of exile—although in Arthur’s case this is “internal” exile—during which a series of brief encounters will enable self-realization and self-discovery, leading to the formation of a new identity and a new social role, in a new nation of which he himself will be the founder. This very modern film, therefore, has a very “medieval” core, and a very “medieval” structure, based upon a favorite classical model for medieval epic narratives. The landscape through which the hero will travel is of fundamental importance in an exile narrative, and it is with the land that Fuqua’s film begins. An aerial camera moves at speed over wide grassy plains, evoking vastness, fundamental to epic as a genre, in which people are insignificant, yet present even by their absence. Young Lancelot is the first recognizable character the audience encounters. He is riding a horse across the grassy landscape, empty of all but himself, to the accompaniment of a swelling orchestral score. The movie audience is already aware of the meaning of this image of man and horse as one; it is a culturally determined evocation of physical and spiritual freedom, allied to (heterosexual) masculinity. The horse represents the freedom of Lancelot, his people, and his land. At the film’s end, the final shots return to this, with the spirits of the mature Lancelot and his dead comrades returning home in the form of horses, in an eternal landscape of swirling, misty cloud. They have become the spirit of freedom, no longer tied to any land in particular. The swelling orchestral score is a convention of epic cinema, but in this case it is played in a minor key. The joy at the revelation of the homeland is always already tinged with the sadness of exile, the inevitability of which is explained by an older Lancelot’s “out of body” narration.4 He also gives the reason for this, which is, basically, that his people fought the Roman colonizers, and lost. The apparent “freedom” of this vision is undercut, first by Lancelot’s words and then by the Roman soldiers who take him away from his family by force: it is revealed to be as illusory as the pax romana is peaceful and benign. Exile is a state which most frequently occurs, in movies as in medieval romances and epics, when protagonists are cast out, or cast themselves out, of familiar surroundings—their own country—and journey to unfamiliar places. Arthur, however, makes his journey of exile within a territory that, until his exile, he has regarded as “his own,” a land in which he has

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been, until then—apparently at least—socially and politically included.5 Like Ruy Diaz (the Cid), Roland, Beowulf, Alexander, and other “journeying” leaders, Arthur himself becomes the “home” for his people on their travels. He is the unchanging, still center of their world. Eventually, he will build a new world for them.6 In this way Arthur, as in Malory, will create a new, unified Britain centered around himself as king. Arthur will also provide a new religious ideology for the kingdom and nation. This will be based on a heretical (in Roman, papal eyes) Christianity which tolerates and values the beliefs of all, in particular the native religion of the indigenous Woads. Roman rule, and religion, will be reclassified as viral and invasive, like that of the Saxon invaders, and both will ultimately be cleared from the land. Fuqua is careful to present Christianity as having two faces. The institutional and therefore “unacceptable” face of Christianity is the Roman Catholic Church, which owes its loyalty to “the Pope of Rome.” The pax romana is also the pax christiana, whose representative is the highly unpleasant, somewhat reptilian Bishop Germanus, and whose dictates are enforced by Roman soldiers bearing the Chi-Rho symbol (the classical emblem of Christ) on their shields. This is contrasted with the gentle, natural, freedomloving Christianity of Pelagius, who will be destroyed by the Pope and his military power. Pelagianism is “good,” “acceptable” Christianity, tied to the land, like the paganism of the Woads, by its indigenous origins. Pelagius’s doctrines are reenvisioned as modern toleration and democratic meritocracy. Arthur believes that Pelagius embodies the spirit of Roman Christianity, and that the people of Rome will see their value and subscribe to them. Bishop Germanus, as Rome’s representative, shatters (literally) these illusions when he casts Arthur’s own image of Pelagius over his shoulder as a thing of no worth, to break into pieces on the (Roman) tiled f loor behind him. This affords the audience an insight into his attitude, which Arthur does not yet see. This idea of “good” and “bad” religion, based on race and nationality, can also be found in Anthony Mann’s reinterpretation of the Cid’s story. In El Cid, there are “good” and “bad” Muslims, represented by the Cid’s tolerant friend and ally Mutamin (a Spanish Moor) and the militant, kohl-eyed, black-clad Ben Yussuf, the leader of the African Moors. This presentation invites comparison with the interests and ideological imperatives contemporaneous with the film in 1961. The story has been interpreted as a right-wing, anti-Communist narrative relating to both General Franco’s Fascist agenda in Spain itself and to the Civil Rights movement and Cold War fear of Communist invasion in the United States at that time.7 Mann’s representation of “good” Muslims making common cause with “Spanish” Christians (who would actually, in the

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twelfth century, have been mostly Castilians) in face of an external threat from foreign “bad” Muslims could be seen to represent the need for racial harmony in the face of a perceived Communist threat. Similarly, “what we fought for” is the most powerful leitmotif of King Arthur—the answer is “freedom.”8 This theme is an ideological paradigm of “the Western World,” led by the United States, commonly invoked in the context of US and Allied involvement in the Middle East in recent times. The image of former Roman draftees abandoning their own interests in favor of helping the locals defend their homeland and pursue the hope for a new national identity transfers easily to the ideology of US and Allied troops going to the aid of embattled Iraqi and Afghan citizens and any politically oppressed groups. In European terms, the allegory translates also into a figure for the diasporic nature of its national populations (particularly so in today’s Britain / United Kingdom), trying to find a national identity in a postcolonial world of mixed-race, mixed-ethnicity populations. In the Chanson de Roland, too, there are “not-so-bad” Muslims (the European emir Masilie and his followers) and “really bad” Muslims (the African leader Baligant and his men). Unlike the modern narratives, however, there is no tolerance of religious difference: “the heathens are in the wrong and the Christians are in the right.”9 Lancelot’s family are as one with their surroundings. They live in tents made of naturally dyed wool and wear homespun garments of the same cloth. The horse has important religious significance for them, tying their equally “ethnic” religious beliefs to the land and to nature. As Lancelot is taken away, a young girl gives him a token in the shape of a horse’s head, which he wears throughout the film, representative of spirituality and national and ethnic identity and, perhaps most important of all, inclusion. When we first see Arthur, he is a boy in a similar green, grassy landscape, with his mother and his “substitute father,” the British priest Pelagius. They, too, live simple, domestic lives in a natural setting, and Pelagius wears a simple homespun monk’s habit. Arthur’s Romano-Britishness is indicated by the ornamented hem of his finely woven tunic, however. The boy has a handcrafted religious token, too, made by himself for Pelagius, whose image it bears. The priest’s instruction that he should keep it until they meet again in Rome undercuts this image as Lancelot’s narration does earlier—the meeting will not happen. This undercutting continues with the arrival of the young Sarmatian hostages on the hill above them. Arthur is identified with the exiled youngsters, who will be his knights, by means of a sharp edit from his face to those of the boys on the hill, then an edit (with the orchestral score acting as a sound bridge to bind the scenes together) to the adult Arthur with his knights. This is shot from above as they ride in similar fashion to

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Lancelot in the opening scene, across the grassy landscape. This establishing sequence sets up the main themes of the story, and its elegiac mode, against a background of the foreign, artificially imposed, and illusory security of Roman rule represented by shots of Hadrian’s Wall. The Wall is also, technically, illusory, being partly CGI-reconstructed in the manner of a “heritage” display, as is the Roman fort to which the knights return.10 Both will be undermined and rendered useless by the end of the film. When Arthur begins his journey of exile, then, he occupies an apparently stable and defined place within the hierarchy of Romano-British society; his father was a Roman commander, and he has risen to a similar position of command. As is the case with medieval epic heroes, Arthur’s breeding and prowess in arms, along with his racial and religious credentials, must be established early on, before moral and emotional qualities can be displayed or developed. That Arthur is a man whose social status is defined by violence is apparent from the first action of the film, in which Arthur and his knights fight a bloody skirmish to rescue the Roman bishop Germanus from a group of savage, barbarian Woads. The Woads are dirty, disheveled, painted, semiclothed in animal skin, exemplifying conventions for the “barbarian Other” as established in “sword and sandals” and “Viking” epics.11 These opening scenes perform a function similar to the welcoming and f lyting speeches in early medieval Germanic epics such as Beowulf: “Hail to you, Hrothgar! I am kinsman and young thane of Hygelac. In my youth I have undertaken many glorious deeds.”12 These heroes are all members of a military caste whose purpose is to deploy lethal violence in defense of church, religion, and the state. However, Arthur’s position is as unstable as the social, political, and religious unity of the pax romana. Arthur is British-born, of mixed race, with a Roman father and a native British mother, who Merlin, religious and military leader of the Woad forces, later describes “one of us.” His Roman paternity has been subverted by his upbringing: his “father substitute,” Pelagius, brought him up in the tenets of Pelagianism, a particularly British heresy. This is an erroneous assertion on the filmmakers’ part, although the Venerable Bede does note, in the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, that there was a resurgence of Pelagianism in Britain in the early fifth century, the time in which the film is set.13 Arthur’s position is further destabilized by his identification with potentially polluting Sarmatian (foreign, pagan) “others.” The encounter with the Woads serves to demonstrate his distance from the barbarians, but also troubles this, by demonstrating the “barbarian otherness” of his own comrades and friends. When asked by a trembling Christian priest where

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the knights come from, Ray Winstone’s dirty, bloodstained, Bors replies simply, “from hell.” The Woads and the Sarmatians are not the only barbarian presences in the film. The Saxons are dirty, unkempt, with hair uncombed, and with lots of facial hair. They wear laced woolen leggings and leather shoes, with cloaks of shaggy animal skins.14 Their leader, Cerdic, has braids in his otherwise disheveled hair, while his son Cynric has a closely shaven head. Cerdic growls all the time, while Cynric whines. In other words, they are as barbaric as, but more animalistic than, the Woads. They are bestially brutal and savage, unlike the Woads, who are reasoning human beings. The catalyst for the hero’s alienation and subsequent journey of exile is the political instability, verging on panic, created among the Romans by the Saxon invasion. For Arthur, the Saxon invasion is a secondary matter (although of primary importance to his political masters), until he becomes embroiled in the mission to save Marius and his family. Until the point at which his knights’ erroneously termed “discharge papers” are temporarily withheld by Bishop Germanus, Arthur intends to say farewell to his knights, to go on a physical and ideological pilgrimage to Rome, and to meet up with Pelagius, with whom he will embark on a vague socioreligious crusade in the name of “freedom” and “equality.” His interests are personal, rather than political. He has no stake, as the bishop points out, in fighting the terrifying Saxons in the interests of the Britons or the Woads. The Romans, of whom Arthur is counted as one, can leave them to fight it out for mastery of the island. Medieval epic heroes like Beowulf and Roland are already formidable military leaders, but they do not, like Arthur, occupy an official position in their world: they are young men in the process of “becoming.” Arthur’s position in the film resembles, rather, that of outlaw exiles such as Ruy Diaz (the Cid), or the most famous outlaw of all, Robin Hood. Arthur is not formally outlawed, as these two are, but the sending of the hero and his knights on a suicidal mission beyond the Wall to rescue Marius and his family from the advancing Saxons represents Rome breaking its word to them. This is a form of abandonment, a breaking of faith, which is tantamount to outlawry in that the bishop, Rome’s representative, is declaring them to be of no value. A society based upon law and the giving of oaths declares that oaths given to these men do not need to be kept. It is at this point that the rupture between Arthur and his Roman masters is made; he and his knights have been effectively cast out from society and the rules by which it operates. Arthur does not choose exile, but from this moment on, he is aware that he is “on his own.” He alone is responsible for the decisions by which they will live or die, and he is aware that the decisions he does make will

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widen the gap which separates him from the representatives of the Roman state. Those he trusted have betrayed him. He is cut off by society, like an outlaw, not becoming a victim of personal animosity, like Roland: “Sire,” said Ganelon, “this is Roland’s doing; I shall never love him all the rest of my life; nor Oliver, because he is his companion, nor the twelve peers because they love him so dearly. I defy them, sire, in your presence.”15 Fuqua’s Arthur is, therefore, both exile and outlaw. In a very recent article, Antha Cotton-Spreckelmeyer notes the similarities of description and language use between Robin Hood and the exiles of Old English elegiac poetry.16 The outlaw as exile is a very interesting idea, but what is more interesting in the context of King Arthur is the idea of the exile as outlaw, and of Arthur, the epic hero, as both. Arthur, who is already a ruler, has more in common with medieval heroes and rulers like Alexander, Richard Coeur de Lion, and Ruy Diaz than with heroes such as Roland or Beowulf, who do not yet occupy a fixed place or rank in society. Like Alexander and Coeur de Lion in their medieval romance epics, Arthur is a young “ruler” setting out to prove to others a worth that is already recognized by those who know him; he has a reputation, but he needs to demonstrate to others that it is based on reality. He is a man already driven by the power of his “name.” Like Ruy Diaz, he is a ruler in fact, but not (yet) in name.17 For medieval writers, the boundary between dux and rex was always a porous one, and there are difficulties inherent in navigating between the two. The king must be a war leader, and the strongest war leader could easily be, or become, a king, especially given the “right” lineage. Fuqua encounters the same problem: Malory, who treats the process by which Arthur journeys towards his acclamation as king with considerable economy, offers little help. Fuqua finds his solution, as does the Poema writer, in selecting a conf lation of outlawry and exile as a cause of the hero’s journey. In a more modern twist, Fuqua’s Arthur absorbs many of the qualities present in medieval and modern representations of Robin Hood. Robin Hood is a leader, who is a ruler in the greenwood, although he is a yeoman and not a king. Like Arthur in the film, he leads his band of outlaws into a series of episodic encounters with figures representative of societal authority. With each encounter, Robin tests their spiritual and moral worth, and, with few exceptions, finds them wanting. At the same time, Robin models the behavior that these people should be demonstrating, although they obviously do not. He models good leadership, just punishment and reward (a feature of kingship)—he rewards the truthful, while punishing liars and office abusers (especially the religious) and demonstrates true devotion (to the Virgin Mary) and chivalric courtesy. His outlaw society exists in opposition to a world run by abusive officials

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such as the sheriff of Nottingham, a king who is well-meaning but out of touch with what is going on his name, and churchmen who act like rapacious lords in contravention of their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and of the ideals associated with Christian love. In modern versions of the Robin Hood story, the outlaw hero also steals back unjustly taken money (usually unjust tax revenues) and gives them back to the poor. This Robin is not only an equalizer, but also a unifier, uniting people of all ages, genders, and racial, religious, or ethnic backgrounds under a “national” banner; his band of followers includes women, Muslims, and people of color.18 At each of the “brief encounters” Arthur experiences on his return journey from the fort to Marius’s villa and back again, he also models the kinds of ideals and behavior that are lacking in those who have authority in his world. Arthur’s first encounter is with the Woad leader and prophet Merlin, who tries to persuade Arthur of his own essential Britishness and of their mutual interest in an alliance against the invading Saxons. Here, Arthur displays not only the courage and leadership required of him as a military leader, but he is also prepared to treat the Woads with respect, acknowledging their right to live in the land and worship as they please, although at this point he does not accede to Merlin’s request. Unlike the bishop, who refers to native people as “dogs,” Arthur is prepared to respect their strangeness and their difference and to place a value on their humanity. Arthur then encounters Marius, the model of assumed imperial and colonial superiority, whose extreme racism, ethnicism, and religious bigotry (to the point of torturing and immuring men, women, and children in the name of God) cause Arthur to openly disobey Roman authority for the first time. Arthur assumes Marius’s position of authority in the community, causes a village elder who has been tortured and tied up to be released, and elevates a local agitator to a leadership role. He then frees the prisoners, taking the survivors, including the Woad Guinevere, with his rescue party to the Roman fort, despite Marius’s vociferous objections. By these actions, he displays true rulership in the face of a corrupt and “failed” ruler. On the journey back to the fort, Arthur demonstrates his care for the refugees, including the women and children, offering an example of good, paternal fatherhood to Allecto, Marius’s son and the pope’s favored godson. Helped by Guinevere, he saves a young Woad child when Marius and his soldiers threaten to kill the boy. Both Marius and Cerdic are dysfunctional fathers. Cerdic threatens to kill his son in return for military failure: he then humiliates him by “adopting” a replacement son and again by sending Cynric’s men to certain death as “arrow fodder” for Woad archers in the final battle. Arthur is able to save the young Allecto

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from his father’s wrong values and actions, giving an example of the education, physical prowess, public service, moderation, and self-control prized by the Roman patriciate. He is also kind to the women, resetting Guinevere’s broken fingers, although she is a Woad and technically his enemy. In addition to treating Guinevere and the child like animals and understanding them as such, Marius addresses his wife in the same manner as his servants. He is a man used to ordering everyone around according to his own whims. In other words, he is a tyrant. The Saxons are first encountered attempting to rape a Romano-British woman. Cerdic forbids them and orders her to be killed, in order to prevent her impure blood from contaminating Saxon bloodlines. For him, women are objects, to be taken or dispensed with as convenient or desirable. On his arrival back at the fort, Arthur signals his break from the failed performance of the compromised, self-serving Roman elite, by refusing to distribute the “discharge papers” to his men. His response to the bishop’s congratulatory, but unctuous, welcome conveys the distance between them: “Bishop Germanus! Friend of my father!” As the end approaches, Allecto wants to stay in the besieged fort with Arthur, but Arthur, putting public before private once more, sends the younger man back to Rome, in order to be a witness to what he has seen as a companion on Arthur’s journey. Although a successful war leader, Fuqua’s Arthur is not a “ring giver” in the Old English, heroic sense, as neither pillage nor plunder would be considered acceptable in twenty-first-century heroes. Instead, he wants to give his men, and then all people, the modern concept of “freedom.” He puts the needs of those who depend upon him before his own needs and desires and ultimately offers his life for their wellbeing. It is out of this, rather than out of patriotism, that the new Britain is born. His values may, in part, echo the oath extracted from his knights by King Arthur in the Morte Darthur, but, like the medieval and modern Robin Hood, he is “everybody’s King Arthur.”19 Arthur’s cinematic band of followers is less Malorian Knights of the Round Table, more outlaw band, or “merry men.” Their loyalty to him is contingent, a feature of Robin Hood’s men which (according to Ohlgren) derived from the political stance of Robin’s fifteenth-century mercantile audience.20 Like Robin’s outlaws, each of the knights is skilled in his own form of fighting craft. They are presented as a group made up of individuals, each with his own personality and life context, who have a common interest, for the present, in following Arthur and obeying his commands. They have to serve for fifteen years, after which time they are entitled, if they survive, to their discharge. Their characteristics carry some echoes of their Malorian counterparts. These are first revealed in

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the banter which passes between them on their first journey back to the fort. Galahad is somewhat aloof from the others, somewhat naive and the butt of the others’ humor; Gawain talks continually about women, while Tristan is aristocratic and, like his medieval alter ego, a skilled hunter. He carries his hawk on his wrist, releasing it only before the final battle.21 Bors is outspoken and tough (he is played, after all, by Ray Winstone), like the Bors in the Morte Darthur, who agrees to fight for Guinevere only after telling her what he thinks of her unfair conduct towards Sir Lancelot.22 Lancelot is clever, honest, popular, respected, and the generally acknowledged “first knight,” sergeant to Arthur’s captain. Lancelot displays characteristics which derive both from the medieval “Little John” and from the medieval “Oliver” respectively, those of the “outlaw buddy” and of the “epic friend.” The latter is loyal, but often more worldly wise than the hero, who has a tendency towards rashness: “Roland is valiant, Oliver is wise.”23 Like Oliver, who begs Roland to blow his horn rather than commit his men to certain death at the hands of the Saracen army, Lancelot’s advice is practical, but his thoughts are usually for others, not for himself. He counsels Arthur to leave the civilians behind to face death at the hands of the Saxons, not out of fear for himself, but because they will endanger both the lives of the other knights and the success of the mission. When Arthur is too disgusted to hand out the discharge scrolls to the knights, Lancelot picks them up and hands them out instead. He always pleads with Arthur in the interest of the other knights and also in what he sees as Arthur’s own interest. Despite speaking his mind, he remains Arthur’s loyal best friend until the end, willing to accept Arthur’s decisions and their consequences. Ultimately, this love “between men” wins out over his own interests, as he elects to die rather than abandon Arthur to his fate. His “alternative” viewpoints serve to highlight his friend’s heroic altruism. Lancelot is, however, also an “outlaw buddy.” Despite his close friendship with Arthur, he retains his aloofness, an independent stance, exemplified in his willingness to differ from Arthur on fundamental principles such as religious belief, the men’s freedom, obedience to the Romans, and his tolerant relationship with the Woads. He is prepared to lead the knights away from the final conf lict, until friendship draws him back. That the surviving knights will follow him is not a “given” consequence of this; he is acting independently. Little John is similarly independent, acting in similar ways in the medieval Robin Hood stories. He argues with Robin in Robin Hood and the Monk, and has different religious preferences: A ferly strife fel them between, As they went bi the wey;

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Litull John seid he had won five shillings, And Robyn Hode seid schortly nay. With that Robyn Hode lyed Litul Jon, And smote him with his hande; Litul Jon waxed wroth therwith, And pulled out his bright bronde. “Were thou not my maister,” seid Litull John, “Thou shuldis by hit ful sore; Get the a man wher thou wil[t], For thou getis me no more.”24

In the Gest of Robyn Hode Little John leaves Robin to become the sheriff of Nottingham’s servant under an assumed name, then returns of his own accord to his leader and friend. His loyalty is a personal one, based on his leader’s qualities rather than on his position as leader.25 It is, however, by his relationship with Guinevere that Arthur is most profoundly challenged and inf luenced. Guinevere in King Arthur is not the model of a frail, vulnerable soul, but when Arthur finds her in Marius’s underground cell she is both of these. During the journey to the fort, Guinevere dons a Roman woman’s diaphanous toga, presumably given to her by Marius’s wife, who she befriends on the journey. During this phase of the journey, she is a British Woad in a Roman costume, mirroring Arthur’s own mixed heritage and increasingly divided loyalties. She builds up personal relationships with the other women, and with the children, offering comfort to the young child “adopted” by Dagonet after his death in the “battle on the ice.” It is during this journey that she attempts to seduce Arthur and to bring both sides together. She occupies the border space between the two races, religions, and societies, between Arthur and Merlin, and—more postmedieval Maid Marian than Malorian queen—she uses a combination of her body and her brains to try to bring them together. Ultimately, her union with Arthur will embody the unity of Woad and Briton, the promise of internal sociopolitical harmony and united resistance to external attack. Like the brides of Old English epic, she is a “peace-weaver.”26 Her success, like Arthur’s, has not been without cost to herself. She, too, has to make a choice regarding whether to follow her duty or her personal inclinations, and she also puts her duty to people and nation first. She elects to seduce Arthur for political reasons, rather than to follow her own personal attraction for his friend and second-in-command, Lancelot. When she tests Lancelot, he gives the wrong answer. On hearing that he would have left her—and the others—at the villa to die, she leaves him, and goes out into the night to wait for Arthur. In the end, love for man and country will become one for Guinevere, although

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this will always be (as on the night before the final battle) open to coitus interruptus in the interests of her own, and Arthur’s, ideals of people and nation.27 Lancelot’s death in the final, victorious battle against the Saxons means that this Guinevere will never betray Arthur with Lancelot, nor will they ever bring down the kingdom. Interestingly Tristan, Lancelot’s adulterous counterpart in the Morte Darthur, also dies in the last battle. There is no room for such potential instabilities in Fuqua’s version of the story. Like Robin’s Marian it is Guinevere, above all, who supports her man and enables him to make the journey from man, to legend, to national icon. In accordance with epic tradition, these elements are all written on the hero’s iconic body, which ultimately acquires a transcendent spirituality in excess of its super-human qualities. “Legend” becomes conf lated with ideas of “sainthood,” a canonization gained through blood, sweat, and struggle.28 As the Saxon army draws near in overwhelming numbers, Arthur rides from the back of the shot, onto the top of a ridge, wearing full armor with plumed helmet, carrying his pennanted lance. His armor and weaponry is essentially “Roman,” although he has a horse’s head (the pagan symbol of Sarmatians like Lancelot) on the end of the lance. The shot is held as he halts between heaven and earth, the cosmos and the nation’s soil for which he will fight and possibly die. In this apotheosis, the hero’s earthly, heavenly, and legendary selves become one, with his supra-human body as the link. This scene marks the symbolic end of Arthur’s journey, his transition from hero to legend to icon. Arthur does not, like many modern epic heroes, physically die at the end of the film. It is Lancelot who dies physically, but his death is also symbolically Arthur’s (“it was my life to be taken . . . not this!”). As in Malory’s Arthurian cycle, a king and knight may espouse similar values, but their roles are, in reality, worlds apart. King Arthur is much more accomplished, and more important, than its “popular culture” label might convey. Antoine Fuqua and his team have had to tackle the problem of how to re-present the Arthurian epic in a way relevant to their own times, which is the same problem faced by the Arthurian writers of the European Middle Ages. In order to do this, they have utilized a medieval model and framework, but have moved the story into an historical time space which allows them the greatest freedom for reinterpretation. Provided the medieval essentials (characters, national ideological imperatives) remain the same, the huge gaps in the fifthcentury narrative may be filled “creatively.” In providing a modern identity for Arthur, they have employed ideas from early and later medieval literary epic, modern cinematic epic, and both medieval and modern interpretations of the outlaw, Robin Hood in particular. Similarly, Malory’s

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“matter of Britain” derives ultimately from Geoffrey of Monmouth, but via Chrétien de Troyes, Robert de Boron, and other anonymous writers. Each of these manipulates his material, inserting “modernizing” elements, such as chivalry, courtly love, monsters and faeries, and religious quests. Life-instruction books, such as the Secreta secretorum (believed to be based on advice given to the epic hero and king, Alexander), were popular with Malory’s audience, and the Morte Darthur provides this. So does King Arthur, although some elements of the message have been adapted to make Arthur a modern, more middle class, icon.29 The film marks another “brief encounter” on the continuing journey of the Arthurian, epic, hero: rex quondam, rexque futurus. Notes 1. On the history of epic narrative, see Adeline Johns-Putra, The History of the Epic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 2. The best-known medieval work to be inf luenced by this was, of course, Dante’s Inferno. 3. The edition used for reference here is Helen Cooper, ed., Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 4. There is a similar example of such scenic representation and orchestral score in Mel Gibson’s 1995 film, Braveheart, where the music has a similarly “Celtic” feel. 5. The best interpretation of the Cid’s exile is Theresa Ann Sears, Echado de tierra: Exile and the Psychopolitical Landscape in the Poema de mio Cid (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1998). 6. Johns-Putra, History, 211; Sears, Echado, 26–28. For the twelfth-century source, see Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry, trans., The Poem of the Cid (London: Penguin Books, 1985). 7. John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (London: Routledge, 2003) 136–40 and 145–46; Derek Elley, The Epic Film: Myth and History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 159. 8. Another similarity with Braveheart. 9. Jessie Crosland, trans., The Song of Roland (Cambridge, ONT: In Parentheses Productions, 1999) 22; F. Whitehead, ed., La Chanson de Roland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 30. 10. For CGI in the film, see Nicholas Haydock, “Digital Diversions in a Hyperreal Camelot: Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur,” in A Companion to Arthurian Literature, ed. Helen Fulton (Chichester, West Sussex: WileyBlackwell, 2010), 531–35. 11. Examples also in Gibson, Braveheart. 12. Michael Swanton, ed., Beowulf (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 52–53. 13. Betram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds., Bede: Ecclesiastical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 52–53 and 62–67.

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14. They contain elements of the Germanic barbarians in Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, 1964) and Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000), and screen Vikings as in The Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958) and Alfred the Great (Clive Donner, 1969). 15. Crosland, Song, 8; Whitehead, Chanson, 10. 16. Antha Cotton-Spreckelmeyer, “Robin Hood: Outlaw or Exile?,” in British Outlaws of Literature and History, ed. Alexander L. Kaufman ( Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2011), 133–45. 17. In the Poema, unlike in Mann’s film, the Cid does become ruler of Valencia after conquering it. Hamilton and Perry, Poem, 87–91. 18. This is the case in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (Kevin Reynolds, 1991), Robin of Sherwood (Richard Carpenter et al., 1984–1986), and the BBC Robin Hood (Foz Allan, Dominic Minghella et al., 2006). 19. “Then the King. . .charged them never to do outrage nor murder, and always to f lee treason, and to give mercy unto them that asketh mercy. . .and always to do ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen and widows succour” (Cooper, Morte, 57). 20. Thomas Ohlgren, “The ‘Marchaunt’ of Sherwood: Mercantile Ideology in A Gest of Robyn Hode,” in Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression and Justice, ed. Thomas Hahn (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 175–90. 21. Cooper, Morte, 172. 22. Cooper, Morte, 408–9. 23. Crosland, Song, 23; Whitehead, Chanson, 33. 24. Robin Hood and the Monk, stanzas 13–15. See Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, TEAMS Middle English Texts, accessed March 4, 2012, http://www.lib.rochester.edu/ camelot/teams/monk.htm. 25. The Gest of Robyn Hode, Fytte 3, stanzas 144–204, in Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood. 26. Gillian Overing, “The Women of Beowulf: A Context for Interpretation,” in Beowulf: Basic Readings, ed. Peter S. Baker (New York: Garland, 1995), 219–60; Swanton, Beowulf, 63–65 and 91–93. 27. This refers to the director’s cut only; the theatrical release offers a different, ideologically diluted, version. 28. Roland is taken up into heaven by angels, in a manner more usually associated with saints. See Crosland, Song, 48; Whitehead, Chanson, 70. 29. Johns-Putra, History, 191

CHAPTER 12 “MY OTHER WORLD”: HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS AND REFRACTIONS IN MODERN ARTHURIAN FANTASY Philippa Semper

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he significance for modern fantasy writing of the medieval world in general and the Arthurian legend in particular is well documented; as one scholar notes, “one can hardly call to mind a fantasy work in any genre or media without calling up the medieval (and usually the Arthurian).”1 Yet, the relationship between “the medieval” and “the Arthurian” is complex. Many authors have attempted to write Arthur as historical fiction, setting their work in the fifth–sixth centuries when the “real” Arthur is supposed to have lived, rather than the twelfth or fifteenth, when the most famous medieval Arthurian texts were composed. Dan Nastali has characterized this as “Arthur without fantasy,” since it seeks to present a historical past, albeit an imagined one.2 So prevalent is this approach that Snyder has claimed that “nearly all of the contemporary Arthurian authors, from the late 1970s on, prefer the historical approach to Arthur.”3 Yet, even the most historically concerned attempts are forced to deal with the magical elements of the Arthurian story, even if they seek to downplay or explain them, leading some writers to invoke the legend by means of what has been termed “historical fantasy” instead. As Ransom explains, the relationship between history and historical fantasy is one of imitation rather than description: “in an historical fantasy, more than just one event and the plausible extrapolation of its consequences must be altered; rather, everything must change. All is invented; none of it is

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‘true’.”4 Historical fantasy might show a medieval world very similar to the “real” one, but have the freedom to introduce “forms of magic and other elements of difference to engage the reader. Furthermore, it does not make reference to specific historical events or figures recognizable to the reader.”5 Guy Gavriel Kay, whose fiction Ransom categorizes as historical fantasy, sees this approach as a means of distancing the narrative from any vestiges of historical realism, through which the writer can acknowledge the extent to which both speculation and temporal distance affect our responses to the past.6 Another, more radical, means of dramatizing the gaps between the past and the historical fiction that brings it into play is the writing of “alternate history,” in which an imagined “point of divergence” from actual events opens up a range of possibilities of how else things might have gone, from the likely to the frankly fantastical.7 While this may not be quite what Higham meant when he referred to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie as “an alternative history of Britain,” it offers an interesting perspective on the development of the Arthurian legend itself as a means of reconstructing and rewriting the past in the service of the present.8 However, it is difficult to define much modern Arthurian writing as alternate history simply because of the difficulty in deciding upon the “real” temporal setting in which the story originates: where would the point of divergence be? What, if anything, is the “real” history of Arthur? These complex relationships between history, fiction, and fantasy have often resulted in what, for want of a better term, might simply be referred to as “Arthurian fantasy”; fictional writing in which the historical location of some imagined origin is less important than the currency of the Arthurian story itself, a currency which includes the use of magic as an expression of—and also a metaphor for—the structures of power it represents. It is in just such a manner that T. H. White reworked the Morte Darthur in A Once and Future King, using it as a means to explore education, the nature of rule, and war, in which Merlin’s magic operates primarily as a teaching mechanism.9 White’s inclusion of anachronisms served to highlight the ambiguity of any supposed historical setting; as he himself remarked, “I can only say that for me, as I believe it was for Mallory [sic], the latest date for Arthur is the end of the fifteenth century, while the earliest is the end of the twelfth.”10 In such writing, the past itself becomes fantastical in its nonspecificity: Arthur’s world is located everywhere and nowhere within the span of three centuries, sealed into a generalized chivalric environment whose actual historical moment is impossible to identify. However, the relationship between “real” history and Arthurian fantasy located in the nonspecific past appears to have taken a new turn in

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the form of a trilogy collectively headed Arthur and published between 2000 and 2003: The Seeing Stone, At the Crossing-Places and King of the Middle March. Written by Kevin Crossley-Holland, these books were well received; later editions have pages of praise attached, and the cover informs readers that “The Seeing Stone won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, the Tir na n-Og Award, and the Smarties Bronze Medal”—it was also shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year—and “the trilogy has won worldwide acclaim and is being published in 21 languages.”11 Despite this, it has been paid very little critical attention. Like The Once and Future King, the Arthur trilogy is supposedly aimed at children and young adults, but proved just as attractive to adults; reviewing The Seeing Stone in The Times, Sarah Johnson proclaimed it to be “truly a cross-over book, settling in the interesting space between children’s and adult fiction.”12 The trilogy also appeared to present another interesting crossover: between historical fiction and fantasy. Crossley-Holland, an academic and prolific author, described his approach to the story as a development from his previous extensive experience in reworking medieval texts to make them available to modern readers: “So I came to the fiction table late, and somehow despite myself. I wanted to find a way of approaching Arthurian romance that seemed to me valuable and revealing and my solution was the Arthur trilogy: historical fiction incorporating, anticipating and ref lecting legend.”13 Crossley-Holland’s “solution” seems to offer an alternative to the history/fantasy conundrum in two ways: by creating a protagonist Arthur, similar enough to the legendary king to mirror his life but sufficiently different to avoid the traps of origin and truth claims; and by placing that protagonist in a minutely observed latetwelfth, early-thirteenth century environment, accurate enough to earn the trilogy the desired label of historical fiction rather than historical fantasy. Further, Crossley-Holland’s choice of the twelfth century neatly preserves the world described by Malory while leaving open the temporal location of the “original” Arthur. The Arthur of these books is a boy, growing up on a manor in the Welsh Marches through his teenage years and progressing from boy to squire to knight during his service in the Fourth Crusade. The first book leads him to the discovery that, like his legendary namesake, he has been brought up by foster parents and his difficult older brother is not his sibling at all. This prevents him from becoming betrothed to his actual half-sister, Grace, thus avoiding the sin that King Arthur slipped into, and not breeding a troublesome son of his own. The second book covers his training with the local lord, growing attraction to Winnie (his own version of Guinevere), and trip to Soissons to take up the Cross.

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In the final book, he travels to Venice and then to Zara before leaving the Crusade to bring his wounded lord back home; in the process he learns that Winnie, despite being betrothed to him, is at least as interested in his friend and half-brother Tom, and thus avoids the king’s error of marrying a potentially unfaithful wife. Hence, Arthur de Caldicot fights, travels, loves, and, eventually, comes to rule his own small kingdom in the shape of the manor which he inherits from his father. In these respects, the trilogy does appear to resolve the problem of King Arthur’s historicity while simultaneously providing an exercise in avoiding the king’s errors; Crossley-Holland’s Arthur encounters many of the same or similar problems and adventures, but can be read as a “real” character, in a specific historical context, who learns from both his own and his namesake’s mistakes. However, this solution is less straightforward than it seems. Arthur de Caldicot learns about King Arthur’s life through the seeing stone of the first book’s title—a piece of obsidian in which events appear to him—by what means is never explained. Moreover, the obsidian is a gift from his unpredictable and inexplicable mentor: Merlin. The apparently historical world thus slides into the fantastical and events in the stone become the boy’s “other world.” The story of King Arthur has happened some time prior to Arthur de Caldicot’s viewing of it in the obsidian, but it is not clear when, raising the problem of the location of the original legend all over again. This is further problematized by Merlin himself, who has been around for a long time but has not aged and has already undergone his period of magical confinement by Nimue. Even in the supposedly historical surroundings of the manors of the Marches, Merlin evidently “knows magic. He leaped the salmon leap. Forty-seven feet! And once he just vanished on the top of Tumber Hill.”14 So, rather than this being a past that might have happened, it is yet another fantastical past; the distinction between a magical Arthurian world and a nonmagical historical one ceases to be possible. These interactions between the historical and the magical ref lect the nature of the Arthurian tradition in the medieval period, shifting between the “history” as told by Nennius, William of Malmsbury, and Geoffrey of Monmouth (including, of course, various “magical” elements) and the numerous romances that reimagine the world of the king and his knights. They also re-create the sense of distance between those medieval writers who tell the stories of Arthur, and the world they describe. From Malory’s perspective, the times of King Arthur seemed remote: “love that tyme was nat as love ys nowadayes,” and then there was “love, trouthe, and faythefulnes.”15 Malory’s desire for an inaccessible, idealized past reappears in modern reworkings of the Arthurian story too, though

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the focal point of that desire may change: from love to honor or loyalty or even self-discipline. In Crossley-Holland’s trilogy, this desire manifests itself in a “real” past that is not strange and unapproachable, but explicable and accessible to modern readers. Yet, Arthur de Caldicot’s access to magical items simultaneously detaches the books from a reachable, comprehensible past. Arthur’s knowledge of Merlin and possession of the seeing stone also detach him from his own historical context; he is not just any boy growing up at that time. Indeed, the story plays with the relationship between him and his namesake, and for a while the boy himself cannot distinguish between them: “I recognise him. I am Arthur. Arthur-in-the-stone is me.”16 Much of the first book is about identity, as he learns who he is by birth and by choice, and Merlin is there to provoke his questions: “But who are you? . . . And who are you to be? That’s what matters.”17 Eventually, the boy can explain that “in the stone, I’m myself but not myself; I’m a boy who looks like me, and talks like me, but is not me because he knows magic,”18 although the distinction is made on grounds of the differing events of their lives rather than through any absolute sense of identity. Though his character is more strongly developed in the following books, boundaries between the two Arthurs continue to blur. At the end of the second book, he realizes that the manor he will inherit—Catmole—is an anagram of Camelot19 and on returning home at the end of the third book he finds that he has, according to Merlin, “discovered the king in yourself.”20 He is now given “King Arthur’s own reading-pointer” in exchange for the stone.21 These magical items in Arthur de Caldicot’s world—the seeing stone and the reading pointer—are connected in several ways: firstly by material, since the stone is obsidian and the pointer is made of “ivory and gold and obsidian”; secondly because they are both gifts from Merlin; and thirdly because they both serve to point up the subjective nature of narrative. The obsidian is “made of fire and ice,” by nature a combination of opposites, and described by Arthur as “my rough-and-shining stone! My dark halo!”22 This contrary substance shows a version of the Arthurian canon which appears to be literally set in stone, but, like any gemstone, can also be polished and shaped to ref lect and refract light, showing the story differently according to the perspective of the viewer. To Arthur de Caldicot it is both “guide” and “echo,” simultaneously leading him and responding to him, showing how his active participation in the process affects what is told and how it is told.23 From the reader’s perspective, Arthur himself is a ref lection of his namesake, his life both mirroring and differing from the king’s, and his narrative is not only a recapitulation of the story but also a form of analysis and interpretation.

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He eventually recognizes his own agency in the workings of the seeing stone: “I’ve seen in it my own thoughts and feelings. All I hope to be; all I must never be.”24 If looking into the stone becomes a metaphor for the ways in which stories shift and change according to the teller and the listener, the reading pointer makes the connections between stories and lives explicit. Arthur de Caldicot’s response to it—“I waved it like a wand. I made words out of air”—suggests that that the creation of worlds through story-telling is Arthur de Caldicot’s own form of magic.25 During his trip to the scriptorium at Wenlock Priory (“like entering a world inside our world . . . even with its own time”), he tells the monks “I love making ink . . . It’s a kind of magic.”26 His ability to make word-pictures of the world around him is thus equated with the operation of the stone. However, the reading pointer is an object which appears in King Arthur’s possession within the stone. Like Merlin himself, therefore, it also serves as evidence that what appeared in the stone was, in some sense, “true”—and that this “truth” is meaningful insofar as it directly connects to Arthur de Caldicot’s life. The presentation of the story as a prototype diary emphasizes this further. The boy writes down the details of his life and the stories he sees in the stone, ref lecting on relationships between the two. This has the value of providing first-person narration but is another departure from “real” history, since access to sufficient parchment to cover a story this long (let alone the will to write of oneself in this manner) seems unlikely for a humble squire at this time. It is indeed Arthur de Caldicot’s world that is presented in the trilogy, rather than the world of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries per se. This fact sits rather uncomfortably with the level of detail provided about daily life at the time. The short chapters present information about feasts, farming, terminology from armor to carving meat and meals, social systems of the time from monarch to peasant, crime and punishment, the tensions of life in the Welsh Marches, and both the ideal and the reality of the Fourth Crusade. These are most successfully integrated with the narrative in the first and third books; in the second, a large space is taken up by the Arthurian story as seen in the stone, and events in the “real” world progress more slowly. If at times the integration of both details and the Arthurian tales with the narrative are a little forced, they may be explained by the trilogy’s relation to another book by Crossley-Holland published in 2004 under the title King Arthur’s World, which originally appeared in 1998 as The King Who Was and Will Be.27 This book is described in the foreword as “all the places and objects crucial to King Arthur’s world, the ideas and emotions that link them into lasting stories” and is the outcome of a process which began when

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Crossley-Holland started to write the trilogy and “soon discovered that I knew much less than I thought I did!”28 It reads like a rough outline, not only in its form (an extensive series of short chapters), but also its content: knights, squires, armor, love, castle life, specialist terminology, and various tales from the Arthurian canon may all be found therein.29 King Arthur’s World shows how the same material can be used in different ways: while the trilogy takes the legend and uses it in the creation of an apparently historical medieval past which is in fact fantastical, King Arthur’s World takes material from the historical medieval past and uses it to make the legend of Arthur appear “real,” showing it alongside other historical and cultural material as a means of explaining it. Particular insight into the development from research context to trilogy may be found in the chapter on Merlin in King Arthur’s World, which suggests that “we may even catch ourselves thinking the whole story of Arthur is, somehow, Merlin’s invention.”30 This is clearly not how the books were finally set up, yet there are traces of Merlin as author played out through the seeing stone; he provides the object itself and appears as omniscient guide to the lives and tales of both Arthurs. The portrayal of his imprisonment by Nimue as “Merlin, Rockfast” when he becomes “the voice in the rock” f lirts further with this idea, but Merlin-in-the-rock (unlike Arthurin-the-stone) cannot contribute to or interact further with the story; in his case, the rock eradicates the Arthurian world rather than reveals it.31 After all, allowing Merlin to author the story would have meant detaching the trilogy from the Arthurian tradition beyond these books and removing all possibility of “real” historicity for the king himself. However, although King Arthur’s World provides a convincingly authentic background for Arthur de Caldicot, it only serves to muddy the historical context of King Arthur further, since it appears that “King Arthur’s World” is the same as that of his later namesake. But it does provide the rationale for the trilogy’s approach to history, in its description of medieval Arthurian romance: “The writers of romances were not in the least interested in what life was really like . . . in the early Middle Ages. They cheerfully gave Arthur medieval attitudes and medieval clothing, and put him at the head of a court of knights and ladies caught up in quests and love matches and magical encounters.”32 Thus, the general disregard for when exactly King Arthur is supposed to have lived, despite the extreme attention to when Arthur de Caldicot lived, can be seen as an outcome of Crossley-Holland modeling his King Arthur on that of the romances. The trilogy’s relationship with medieval romance is worked out in several ways. Most explicit are the retellings of various stories from the Arthurian tradition, mostly following Malory. It has been suggested that

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Malory’s inf luence is key in tracing the tendency for “filling in gaps in the legend” more generally, in that Malory’s acknowledgement of his own sources and habit of leaving some tales open-ended provides an invitation to “further story-telling.”33 Zambreno proposes that it is “the very ‘piecemeal’ nature of Arthurian narrative, the way in which it has been assembled from various sources, that encourages later adaptations . . . the space, or spaces, contained in the framework of the story allow the creative imagination of later authors room in which to work.”34 Crossley-Holland makes the most of “various sources” as well; the Wheel of Fortune episode in the final book relies on the Alliterative Morte Darthur, while in At the Crossing-Places the chapters “The Green Knight” and “The Green Belt” form a version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.35 Some of these are present simply to move the story of King Arthur along, while others provoke specific responses in Arthur de Caldicot. For example, divided between the chapters “Erec and Enid” and “Love’s Disobedience” is Chrétien de Troyes’s story Erec and Enide, also brief ly outlined in King Arthur’s World. There it is invoked as an example of an Arthurian romance in which “the point of the quest is the journey itself.”36 The young Arthur, however, is moved to see it as an example of the tensions inherent between marriage and chivalry, and therefore pertinent to his own situation as he prepares to leave Winnie and take up the Crusade.37 Malory remains the primary source though, and the chapter in which Arthur pulls the sword from the stone is even titled “Lightly and Fiercely,” the adverbs used by Malory (and Crossley-Holland) to describe that action. There is even an instance in which a known medieval writer makes an appearance in the text, in the shape of Marie de France at Wenlock Priory. This is not altogether surprising, since she also has a chapter in King Arthur’s World, but the information there remains sparse, merely noting that her identity remains largely unknown and giving a very brief outline of Chevrefoil and Lanval.38 In At the Crossing-Places, however, recent scholarship suggesting that she was the daughter of the Count of Meulan is used to give her a clearer identity.39 At Wenlock, Marie tells the story recognizable as Laüstic, wherein a nightingale pays the price for the impossible love between a married woman and her knightly neighbor.40 The incident affords Arthur de Caldicot a brief encounter in which she tells him “you can make a story,” thereby validating his own project and also prompting a ref lection on the interconnectedness of narratives: “I’m telling a story about a lady who told me a story about telling a story inside this story of my own life.”41 Marie’s significance in relation to the developing forms of late twelfth-century poetry, including the commentary she provided in prologue and epilogue, make her a useful choice for Arthur de Caldicot, whose shaping of his own story and that of the king

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he sees in the stone are another form of the creative reworking of old tales in new ways. By the time he meets Marie, he has already “seen” her Arthurian tale of Sir Lanval.42 Arthur de Caldicot’s retellings of the stories he “sees” are those of a boy in the process of becoming an adult, and are also shaped by the expectation of an audience of young readers. They were apparently edited with a consciousness of “the impatient eye of a twelve-year-old” and were certainly marketed as children’s literature.43 However, the themes— violence, social justice, adultery—do not fit well into this category without considerable mediation. Finke and Shichtman point out that at least one medieval interpretation “suggests that Arthurian romance is a loaded weapon, dangerous in the wrong hands—the young, the impressionable, the passionate, those with miserable marriages.”44 Yet Crossley-Holland’s narrative structure seems designed to counter this, presenting Arthurian stories as devices that teach a “young, impressionable, passionate” hero how to deal with life, love, and “miserable marriages,” acting more often than not as warnings. For example, Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair enables Arthur de Caldicot to recognize the attraction between Tom and Winnie and thus avoid the conf licts and betrayals of Arthurian romance. Crossley-Holland creates a youthful medieval reader of romance who is neither corrupted nor belittled by it, and, by this means, also validates its reading for a younger, modern audience. Despite this, when examined closely, the Arthur books seem to respond as much to trends in recent criticism on Arthurian literature as they do to the desire to provide young adults with a historically nuanced and potentially didactic reading of the Arthurian legend. Their handling of the relationships between Norman and Welsh in the Marches and of Norman participation in the Crusades works out ideas raised in relation to colonial and postcolonial discourse and the role of romance in negotiating competing identities.45 The connection between the Crusades and the Grail Quest enables the trilogy to examine the nature of the relationship between Saracens and Crusaders as portrayed in romance and within a historical context, a subject which was high on the critical agenda while the books were being written and published.46 If Arthur de Caldicot’s reaction to his experiences on Crusade is rather more modern than medieval, this serves both to provide space to investigate critical responses to violence and racism in the past and to emphasize the liberties that modern fantasy writing, as opposed to historical fiction, can take with the Arthurian legend.47 For Crossley-Holland’s story does not seek to reinvent a lost past, but rather to re-create it as a place where people of different genders, classes, and ethnic origins can work together in the pursuit of a unified Camelot in microcosm, ruled over by a better, wiser Arthur.

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The creation of this past-that-never-was is supported by the publishing format of the Arthur trilogy, which participates in and conforms to the norms of fantasy literature. All three books are provided with handdrawn maps in the manner that has become common in fantasy novels since Christopher Tolkien first drew maps for The Lord of the Rings, leading readers to expect strange worlds to which they require a visual guide. These maps could also have connected to the trilogy’s historical aspirations, but instead they show places which did not actually exist: invented manors inserted into the historical landscape of the Welsh Marches. The small linedrawings found scattered throughout each book are images from medieval manuscripts and representations of unfamiliar objects or scenes. Many of these resemble woodcuts, appealing to a sense of the past that is anachronistic for the twelfth-century context of the story and somewhat newfangled even for Malory. They also call to mind The Amber Spyglass from Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, in which each chapter is headed with similar boxed line drawings. These visual cues appear to answer to the Arthur trilogy’s attention to historical detail, but locate that detail in a past which never happened and align it with the worlds found in recent fantasy writing. The wordlists at the back perform a similar role; although they contain English words, generally with some technical sense that keeps them from modern vocabulary, they take on the character of the strange that belongs to the invented languages of fantasy literature. To a certain extent, all the extra material—the maps, the wordlists, the character lists—connect back to Tolkien’s extensive appendices and, by association, emphasize the fantastical rather than the historical in the Arthur trilogy. The Tolkien connection goes further still. The seeing stone itself calls to mind the palantírs, such as the “Orthanc Stone” retrieved from Saruman in The Two Towers. Like the obsidian, it is a mixture of dark and bright: when Pippin looks into it “at first the globe was dark, black as jet, with the moonlight gleaming on its surface. Then there came a faint glow and stir in the heart of it, and it held his eyes.”48 The seeing stone seems to have the opposite effect to the palantírs, however: while Arthur de Caldicot learns to see himself and others more clearly, Saruman, Denethor, and even Sauron are deceived by what they think they see in their stones. The Arthur trilogy also has its ring, which again seems to invert the symbolism of the One Ring; Arthur de Caldicot’s ring is a gift from the mother he has never met and represents his personal quest to find her: “Wear it, and keep it warm” advises Lord Stephen.49 The ring is also a symbol of betrayal, however; it is conveyed to Arthur as a token of trust by two of his real father’s servants who later prove to be untrustworthy and self-seeking, and it betrays Arthur’s knowledge of his mother to Sir William himself. When it is thrown into the sea, the ring becomes

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an emblem of lost hope, reversing the casting of the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom.50 Merlin is described as “like an all-knowing and unblinking eye, still watching us,” at once recalling the “watchful and intent” eye of Sauron and reworking the image as a benevolent gaze.51 Finally, the Arthur trilogy culminates with Arthur’s return to his own “Shire”—an idealised agrarian society—where he claims that what he wants is “one fellowship. One ring of trust. I want everyone in the manor to know we all need each other and each one of us makes a difference.”52 This statement is also strongly reminiscent of Galadriel’s words in Peter Jackson’s film version of The Fellowship of the Ring (2001): “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”53 These connections serve to emphasize the strong ties that the Arthur trilogy has with medievalist fantasy. They may also reveal a shared relationship with the medieval past by two academics, both of whom have spent a lifetime studying it and respond by writing and rewriting it into their own work. A deep knowledge of the underlying structures of medieval romance appears to produce medievalist fantasy which makes similar use of magical objects and personal quests in the pursuit of an idealized social structure which will resonate even in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Thus, Crossley-Holland seems to be presenting a set of historical novels as a means of negotiating the problematic context of the Arthurian legend and avoiding, in the process, a slip into either “truth” or fantasy. Yet, the “other world” of the stone, the blurring between the two Arthurs and the presence of Merlin in both worlds set these books firmly in the realm of the fantastical, ensuring that Arthur de Caldicot’s twelfth and thirteenth century is one that can only be accessed by those in possession of a magical object—not a sword in the stone, but a story in the stone that at once causes and predicts the connection between the two Arthurs and the events in their lives. If the magic of this object is closely aligned to the “magic” of story-telling itself, the references to objects and images familiar from other fantasy novels push the trilogy beyond historical fiction, even as the expansion of Arthur de Caldicot’s experience develops his ideas far beyond what could be conveyed in the Arthurian legend itself. In its readings of medieval romance, the trilogy is already more literary than historical; in the “other world” that Arthur sees within his stone, historical context has already been abandoned in favor of the invented world depicted in the romances. Rather than attempt a new approach to the historicity of King Arthur himself, Crossley-Holland has created a new context in which the story can be read. But that, too, is an imaginary past, one in which a twelfth-century boy with twenty-first century attitudes attempts to re-create Camelot in his own small world.

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Notes 1. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” Arthuriana 17.4 (2007): 104. 2. Dan Nastali, “Arthur without Fantasy: Dark Age Britain in Recent Historical Fiction,” Arthuriana 9.1 (1999): 5. 3. Christopher A. Snyder, “The Use of History and Archaeology in Contemporary Arthurian Fiction,” Arthuriana 19.3 (2009): 114. 4. Amy J. Ransom, “Warping Time, Alternate History, Historical Fantasy and the Postmodern uchronie québécoise,” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 51 (2010): 275. 5. Ransom, “Warping Time,” 274. 6. Guy Gavriel Kay, “The Fiction of Privacy: Fantasy and the Past,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 20 (2009): 247. 7. See, for example, Susanna Clarke’s magical reimagining of the early nineteenth century in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). For a full discussion, see Karen Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001). 8. N. J. Higham, King Arthur: Myth-Making and History (London: Routledge, 2002), 223. 9. See further Andrew Blake, “T. H. White, Arnold Bax and the Alternative History of Britain,” in Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity, Extrapolation, Speculation, ed. Derek Littlewood and Peter Stockwell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 25–36; François Gallix, “T. H. White and the Legend of King Arthur: From Animal Fantasy to Political Morality,” in King Arthur: A Casebook, ed. Edward Donald Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 1996), 281–98; Aaron Isaac Jackson, “Writing Arthur, Writing England: Myth and Modernity in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone,” Lion and the Unicorn 33 (2009): 44–59. 10. Entry dated 8.xii.mcmxxxix, from White’s unpublished journal 1939– 1941. “T. H. White on Malory,” Appendix E in Kurth Sprague, “The Troubled Heart of T. H. White: Women and The Once and Future King,” Arthuriana 16.3 (2006): 167. 11. Kevin Crossley-Holland, Arthur: King of the Middle March (London: Orion, 2004), back cover. 12. Kevin Crossley-Holland, Arthur: The Seeing Stone (London: Orion, 2001), front matter. 13. Kevin Crossley-Holland, “Fiction,” accessed March 20, 2010, http:// www.kevincrossley-holland.com/fiction.html. 14. Crossley-Holland, King of the Middle March, 42. 15. Malory, Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 676 and 649. 16. Crossley-Holland, The Seeing Stone, 155. 17. Crossley-Holland, The Seeing Stone, 319. 18. Crossley-Holland, The Seeing Stone, 337.

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19. Kevin Crossley-Holland, Arthur: At the Crossing Places (London: Orion, 2002), 362. 20. Crossley-Holland, King of the Middle March, 386. 21. Crossley-Holland, King of the Middle March, 388. 22. Crossley-Holland, The Seeing Stone, 53–54. 23. Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places, 3. 24. Crossley-Holland, King of the Middle March, 382. 25. Arthur even describes prayer as a form of magic performed by those who pray, rather than a request to God; of the haymaker’s prayer he says: “So with our magic words we wake and quicken the year; we say it green and sing it ripe.” Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places, 205. 26. Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places, 279 and 281. 27. Kevin Crossley-Holland, The King Who Was and Will Be (London: Orion 1998); republished as King Arthur’s World (London: Orion, 2004). While the 1998 edition contained “illustrations in colour by Peter Malone,” the 2004 edition has line drawings by Hemesh Alles who also illustrated the Arthur trilogy. The cover design was reworked to correspond with the covers on the three books of the trilogy too. 28. Crossley-Holland, King Arthur’s World, foreword. 29. For example, “Verb that Carving” taken from Wynkyn de Worde’s Book of Kerving has its counterpart in The Seeing Stone where Sir John de Caldicot tests Arthur on carving terms (Crossley-Holland, King Arthur’s World, 81 and The Seeing Stone, 262–63); Arthur’s efforts to dress Sir John draw heavily on “Dressing your Lord” in King Arthur’s World, based on John Russell’s Book of Nurture (The Seeing Stone, 14–15 and King Arthur’s World, 74–75). 30. Crossley-Holland, King Arthur’s World, 17. 31. Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places, 205–7 and 217–18. 32. Crossley-Holland, King Arthur’s World, 6. 33. Mary Frances Zambreno, “Why Do Some Stories Keep Returning? Modern Arthurian Fiction and the Narrative Structure of Romance,” Essays in Medieval Studies 26 (2010): 120. 34. Zambreno, Some Stories, 118–19. 35. Crossley-Holland, King of the Middle March, 98–102 (the Wheel of Fortune episode also appears in King Arthur’s World, 82–83); Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places, 268–74 and 284–90. 36. Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places, 219–24 and 231–35; King Arthur’s World, 121. 37. Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places, 235. 38. Crossley-Holland, King Arthur’s World, 63–64. 39. P. R. Grillo, “Was Marie de France the Daughter of Waleran II, Count of Meulan?” Medium Ævum 57 (1988): 269–74. 40. Laüstic is a Breton Lai in Anglo-Norman, but neither the language in which Marie delivers her tale at Wenlock nor its form are mentioned. The trilogy mainly avoids the difficult question of the languages spoken

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49. 50. 51.

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by a well-born young man in the Welsh Marches at this time; however, according to Crossley-Holland, King of the Middle March, Arthur de Caldicot speaks only a little French (236). Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places, 293. Marie appears to Arthur both “not really Christian” and saintly (283). Like his ideas of “wordmagic,” her story telling crosses literary and religious boundaries. Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places, 246–51. Author’s note and acknowledgements to Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places. Finke and Shichtman, “Out of Mind,” 106. Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 3 and 9. See Jacqueline De Weever, “The Saracen as Narrative Knot,” 4–9; Peter H. Goodrich, “Saracens and Islamic Alterity in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,” 10–28; Meg Roland, “Arthur and the Turks,” 29–42; Donald L. Hoffman, “Assimilating Saracens: The Aliens in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” 43–64; Maghan Keita, “Saracens and Black Knights,” 65–77, all in Arthuriana 16.4 (2006). See also Meg Roland, “From ‘Saracens’ to ‘Infydeles’: The Recontextualization of the East in Caxton’s Edition of Le Morte Darthur,” in Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes, ed. K. S. Whetter and Raluca L. Radulescu (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2005), 65–77. Compare, for example, the Arthurian story in Susan Cooper, The Grey King, (London: Puffin, 1977); as Zambreno points out, “the importance that Susan Cooper gives to the individual’s free choice . . . speaks more to a modern world than a medieval one—but the legend easily opens up to express that concept” (124). For an examination of race in relation to modern fantasy, see Brian Atterby, “Introduction: Race and the Fantastic,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21 (2010): 334–37. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 229 and 241. The function of the two is different; the palantírs are used to see what is happening in other locations, and for communication. Crossley-Holland, King of the Middle March, 26. Crossley-Holland, King of the Middle March, 54–55. Crossley-Holland, King Arthur’s World, 19; J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 478. Crossley-Holland’s characterization of Merlin as “prophet and enchanter, trickster, shapeshifter and wise guide” aligns Merlin more traditionally with Gandalf, but could also apply to Sauron’s earlier dealings with the Númenóreans. Crossley-Holland, King of the Middle March, 382. The Fellowship of the Ring, dir. Peter Jackson (New Line, 2001), DVD.

CHAPTER 13 QUEER ORIGINS, DEFORMED LINES: SEEDING THE FUTURE IN TORCHWOOD’S “CHILDREN OF EARTH” Gail Ashton

Beginnings “The children feel no pain. . .live long beyond their years” “It’s still just a child!”1

Like so many foundational stories with their repressions and complicities, the origins of this essay are at least partially obscured. One of its births lies in the diverse ways in which contemporary sci-fi and fantasy quests reimagine the medieval. I have no intention of exhausting moments I have spoken of elsewhere,2 or, indeed, of avowing them as a truism; nevertheless, the strange and intricate genealogy of latter-day romances sparks many of the lines of enquiry that will track an essay intended as provocation rather than as a final word. My focus is the UK BBC television series Torchwood, specifically its five-installment “Children of Earth” (series 3) sequence. There the immortal, space-time anomaly, Jack Harkness, leads his team against a potential global devastation by the alien “456” that he was complicit in sparking years before. In 1965, on behalf of the British government, Jack secretly handed over eleven orphans (the twelfth escaped) in return for the 456 standing down from war. When the 456 returns and demands 10 percent of the earth’s children, the Torchwood organization—Jack, Gwen Cooper, and Jack’s lover Ianto Jones—becomes the only meaningful resistance to an apocalyptic invasion that classically signals medievalism’s defamiliarized self in our time.3

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Torchwood’s cult following—audiences of over six million, plus a record as the highest-rated drama on the digital channel BBC3 before its move to mainstream BBC4 —is due, in part, to its pliable, multifaceted construction. Its self-referential details and correspondences hold it in a proliferating family tree of medieval romance afterlives, most notably BBC television’s Doctor Who. Those same keynotes also orchestrate it within a Jamesonian postmodern “hyperreal”—in which signs and tropes increasingly circle back upon themselves—and as part of a discernible turn away from a playful “site of ironical revisitation”5 towards “‘history,’ ‘trauma,’ and terror.”6 Torchwood, too, is irretrievably marked as a border zone as evidenced by its BBC Cymru, Wales, writing and production “roots.” As such, it is a cross-pollination of many genres, histories, and traditions, a medieval insular romance as much as it is Arthurian, Celtic, even British, susceptible to ambivalences and paradoxes, and fully implicated in what José David Saldívar calls “a paradigm of crossings, intercultural exchanges, circulations, resistances, and negotiations.” 7 Saldívar’s theoretical mappings of border territories and liminal zones also intersect postcolonial medievalism’s notions of time and space. These refuse the idea of the past as a (colonial) point of origin, a lost, gone-now moment that has no bearing on the present save as a clearly demarcated foundation. Rather, the past is an “always-already existed alongside.”8 Fragments of the past inevitably recur in the present—or, else, are forcibly brought center stage—as a traumatic history or effect to demand that we rethink the problematics of power across time.9 Torchwood’s “Children of Earth” directly speaks to the same kinds of issues about nations, hybridities, and temporal boundaries that exercise postcolonial medievalists. So, too, the uneasy “British” history of trauma that Torchwood series 3 reenacts upon its children is less about nostalgia or a fantasy of origins— though it bisects these ideas—and more about a continuing anxiety over contemporary Britain’s (inter)national status in which both past and present are called to account. Even the official BBC “Children of Earth” website both proclaims Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States and, at the same time, harks back to a former Empire glory when Ben Stephenson, Controller, BBC Radio Drama Commissioning, asserts “we have a long history of working with many US networks” and looks forward to being “reunited with the best of British” original writing and production team.10 Who’s the Daddy? Jack Harkness, founding father of modern day Torchwood. Origins: unknown. Viewers of Torchwood’s parent series Doctor Who will have first

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seen Jack, a renegade Time Agent from the future, at the height of the London Blitz in World War II Britain, 1941. There, he dances with a Union Jack–tee shirted Rose Tyler, the Doctor’s companion, on the face of Big Ben. Yet another iconic symbol of Britishness, the dome of St. Paul’s, can be spotted in the distance. Captain Jack Harkness wears his trademark British services greatcoat. Nearby, in the “Albion” hospital, is a host of mutated humans, and all around a German war machine is, says the Doctor, marching through the map of Europe, every city falling “until one tiny damp little island says no, no, not here.”11 This is not the only time Jack Harkness is associated with a national crisis point, itself a recurrent reminder of an ongoing and always contested narrative of origins in which “little Britain” staunchly resists invasion. Torchwood recruits Jack in 1869 with the words “Work for us and assist the Empire.”12 The idea that Torchwood is an historical reality in Britain’s so-called glorious conquering past is further embedded when we learn that the team Jack engenders is paid by the crown, and then immediately undercut by its status in “received” wisdom as outlawed. Hence, Torchwood is the stuff of legend, an underground organization—“a pain in the backside”—beyond the jurisdiction of UK and global law or intelligence, United Nations and the United States included (“Children of Earth,” Day 1). Accordingly, Jack’s Torchwood family is housed in Cardiff, Wales, a “province,” like the Scottish moorland sequence which opens the series and from where the 456 takes the children of 1965. This site is an historically contested border or edge that also constitutes an authoritative parent-state located in a literal and metaphorical central London. Further, the fictional Torchwood hub is clustered on a dangerous time rift which is also the site of Cardiff ’s former medieval plague hospital to become a site of both annihilation and regeneration. At the start of “Children of Earth,” the UK government fears Jack’s “longevity” is linked to the Torchwood building, hence the bomb planted inside him in Day 1. Yet the hub, like Jack, encodes subversion; it exists simultaneously and multiply in time and space, able to “survive anything” (Day 1). Medievalists are, of course, entirely familiar with borderlands, those sticky points where textual (and actual) resistance clusters and coheres imaged as split discourses such as exile/home, legitimate/outlawed, public/private. Torchwood structures these ideas spatially as well as temporally. The 456 speaks through the bodies of the children of earth. Even though it claims to have homed in on the UK because “you have no significance” (Day 3), every child gives voice in unison and in English to intersect the conf licted, “lost Empire” status of English as a global language. Threat is no longer localized, past, safely aborted, as the opening scene might

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suggest, but recurs in the endless closing down of “insular” spaces: from open moors to ministerial cabinet offices, prison cells and holding bays, locked coaches full of children taken from their families, body bags, an automatically sealed-off Thames House, or Jack encased in concrete. These contractions intersect the ever expanding global threat witnessed via television newsf lashes and filmed footage. So, too, the impulses of colonization operate in a corresponding maneuver that pits scenes of a gridlocked London against shots of the provinces, a Welsh council estate, Welsh hills, Scottish moors, and East Grinstead, the northern town where Clem McDonald—the escaped twelfth child of 1965—has been in lifelong hiding from the 456. Elsewhere virtual spyware, database hackers, and Torchwood’s camera-eyes penetrate minds and bodies. Jack is impregnated, repeatedly shot, and blown to pieces so tiny that next to nothing of him remains, yet he always regenerates. Gwen and her husband hide in the back of a lorry to make their way to London in a moment recalling the iconic English media image of economic migrants, just as Gwen’s former colleague from the Welsh police force tells a London-based Intelligence Officer that “sometimes there’s no substitute for local knowledge” (Day 2). Elsewhere, all the children of the world, coordinated by British time, turn and point to London, Thames House, f loor 13, where a tank is being prepared for the 456’s arrival, and the British prime minister is accused of contravening international law and US protocol by trying to establish “the sovereign court of Great Britain” (Day 3, emphasis mine.) Are You My Mummy? In one sense, Captain Jack Harkness is born during the first series of Doctor Who in a two-part episode called “The Empty Child.”13 He inadvertently releases nanogenes into the earth’s population, which, instead of healing, as they were intended to do, cause human DNA to mutate. The nanogenes lock onto the first object they encounter and reproduce the human form in the likeness of that host mother, here the small lost boy in the gas mask wandering the London streets at the height of the 1941 blitz and asking everyone he meets, “Are you my mummy?” Only when the Doctor makes the boy’s sister Nancy admit that she is actually his mother can the regeneration processes be reversed and the world restored to its literal former image. This Doctor Who installment is significant on several counts. First, it seeds Torchwood’s “Children of Earth,” where human descendants are destined to become the eternal corpse-child glimpsed in the 456’s tank, its inverted womb. It is not until Day 4 that the 456 admits it is not alone in the structure it demanded for its entry to earth. The horror it

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conceals from a watching world is “Children of Earth’s” central image, that of the eternal prepubescent child in whom the deformation of history, genealogy, and genre coheres. This is the child suspended in time and permanently attached to a perverse maternal body, the alien 456, by a cord that, far from nourishing it, in fact allows the child to breathe the filtered, noxious, amniotic swirl of gases in the tank and, at the same time, allows the 456 to inhale the child’s life force as a drug. Just as “The Empty Child” that Jack unwittingly engenders in his Doctor Who debut transmits his frozen-in-time mutation to everyone he touches, thereby endlessly replicating the “infection” that has colonized his body and signaling human extinction, so, too, the events of 1965 reverberate in the present. Equally, the 456 speaks through the world’s kids to demand “your children. We will take your children” (Day 3). The desiring child searching for his mummy in Doctor Who becomes the child of earth who, seemingly, suffers no loss at all, no severance from a (m)other who both desires and consumes it. The 456’s insistence that the species does not harm the children is, of course, a grotesque parody of a nurturing instinct that, beyond the literal attachment of the breathing apparatus that hooks up alien and child, refuses all parental responsibility. A range of cultural anxieties inheres in the generic violence done to many of the children who inhabit sci-fi, fantasy, and medieval texts. More particularly, the “children of earth” function as markers of a queer use of time and space that develops both within and “in opposition to the institution of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.”14 Childhood is both oppositional to and constitutive of adulthood. It is at once bounded in linear time—whereby it precedes maturity—and cyclic, for without children family lines peter out, something the 456 recognizes when it demands “your descendants. . .the offspring of the human race” (Day 4). Childhood is, then, a state of f lux being both fixed and progressive. As such, children are liminal, able to slip time and space. In a similarly conf licted maneuver, as points on a genealogical line, they mark the past and the future, yet f licker in and out of a now in which they are an ambivalent presence: cherished representations of hope and innocence, and colonized, without status or rights and subject to violation. Accordingly, the “child of earth” in the 456’s tank is held in 1965, in the words of its grown-up peer Clem McDonald, “still just a child!” (Day 5). It also inhabits cosmic time for it lives “long beyond its years,” despite the 456 consuming it “for the hit” (Day 4). That terrible moment is imaged in its ancient shriveled death-head, even as its huge eyes and shrunken body—“nourished” by the cord that literally binds it to the 456—recalls the unborn fetus, final symbol of hope, safely inside Gwen Cooper. Equally, Clem, the one who escaped, remains the terrified child

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of all those years ago. When Gwen tracks him down, she finds him “a long way lost,” minus his name, his Scottish tongue, and in a mental institution just outside Leeds. Clem’s childhood fear of the 456 persists as a traumatic effect in the here and now, hence his cry of “They’ve found me!” on Day 1 and the constant looking over his shoulder. Like a child, he giggles at the idea that the 456 has no mouth and rocks like a baby in Gwen’s arms when he sees Jack, the man of his nightmares, in the present, as physically frozen in time as Clem is psychologically. So, too, his body is an acute vibrational frequency tuned to the 456, while his senses have been scrambled: he can “smell” not only the aliens but also Gwen’s unborn baby. Clem’s development arrested at the exact moment he escaped the 456 and so points up an interesting reason for his survival; Clem was on the cusp of puberty, about to mature and lose his liminal status. We’re Having a Baby It is, however, not just Torchwood’s children who deform normative patterns of kinship. I began by remarking Jack’s “birth” in Doctor Who in 1941 when he steals a name and a coat to resurrect a dead man and simultaneously deletes him from official history. The events of “Children of Earth” play out through Jack because he, too, is liminal, not least by virtue of his mysterious origins and his promiscuous bisexuality. Jack inhabits both history (1941) and cosmic time. By the laws of sci-fi logic in Torchwood, he is its founding father and its nemesis, with a crucial part in the originary dramas of several competing narratives. As a historical figure, he “makes” the fictional Torchwood and is the key player, or constitutive edge, in the repressed trauma that founds a secure nation state, a future Britain. As a literary archetype, he is the mythological savior of the world, the once and future Arthurian-style king who nevertheless instigates destruction and “dies” without descendants or legacy. And Jack is the living embodiment of a queer time predicated on a crucial dialectic, one that is alternately aborted or suspended and endlessly regenerated. When, in the middle of galactic battle, the Doctor’s companion Rose Tyler accidentally takes in all of time, a fragment transfers to the dead Time Agent who says he is Jack Harkness and resurrects him.15 Jack becomes a fixed point in time and space, never ageing, always regenerating, an endlessly new-born, cosmic child. Jack’s queer slippage through time disturbs even the Doctor, the last surviving Time Lord—because he cannot undo its “impossibility”16 —and fractures family dynamics. Jack’s genealogical narrative is rewritten so that his grandson Steven thinks he is his uncle—which means that he must pretend to be a brother to his

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daughter Alice. Alice says, “I can’t stand it dad. I look older than you do and it’s never going to stop” (Day 1). Jack’s immortality places him outside “real-time” and its affiliations to make him a “bastard,” so “dangerous” that Alice has been in hiding from him on a Witness Protection Program (Day 1). Jack also has a “real” birth family, his parents and beloved brother Gray, who once lived in future time on the Boeshane Peninsula in the fifty-first century until an invading force made them f lee for their lives. Jack let go of Gray’s hand and lost him, a trauma that forever haunts him. Gray returns in series 2, looking to destroy Torchwood and “the favoured son. . .the one who’ll always live.”17 But Jack kills Gray before deep-freezing him in the Torchwood vaults to reprise his own 107-year cryogenetic suspension in an alternative dimension. Here, that Jack exists simultaneously with the present-day Jack, whom viewers see in all of the Torchwood series, frozen for precisely this anterior crisis by Torchwood in 1901 after Gray buried Jack alive in 27 CE, consigning him to a cycle of endless death/rebirth. Trapped in a space-time continuum, Jack may live forever but his family line cannot. Gwen has her baby with her husband Rhys; the love she and Jack share stays unconsummated. Jack’s relationship with Ianto forecloses the possibility of children by “natural” means, and so queers future time. Gwen calls them “twins” and “the Chuckle brothers,” inadvertently pointing up a nonprocreative kinship. Similarly Jack declares “We need a child” as he and Ianto sit in the square—meaning one to help explore the phenomenon of the world’s children chanting in unison—and shouts to him “We’re having a baby” as he sees Gwen’s on the Torchwood scanner. That irony intensifies when his own “bomb-baby,” placed there by government agents, shows up at the same time (Day 1). And, of course, Jack aborts all future stories of origins when, with Gray and his parents dead, he sacrifices his own grandson Steven in order to save the world’s children (Day 5). We Are Coming (Back) Torchwood, “Children of Earth,” Day 5, closing scene. Cue the dead of night, an uninhabited open space reminiscent of 1965’s Day 1. Gwen and Rhys drive down a track to where “the road runs out.” On the top of a hill, Jack is waiting. Gwen asks if he’s ever coming back. “What for?” Jack says. “Me,” she replies. A f lash of light and he is gone, exactly as the children of 1965 were spirited away, beyond the limits of the known world and its earthly time. Gwen and Rhys stay at home, in Wales. This is the time of exile, a deferral of a time which has yet to come. This ending

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reprises Day 1’s opening scene to archive its events but also to transform the past, the present, and to seed other futures. Viewers see Gwen, visibly pregnant, walking away in Rhys’s embrace, yet looking back over her shoulder into the past, to where Jack was standing a few moments ago, and, too, down the long lens of the future, waiting for his return. Meanwhile Jack opens a window on time when he tells Gwen, “I have lived so many lives. It’s time to find another one.” The recurrence implicit in Torchwood’s series 1 to 2 and so to “Children of Earth,” series 3, is but one way in which a sci-fi / fantasy genre wreaks “temporal havoc” by folding inwards and reworking familial (and familiar) structural patternings.18 So, too, the interlacing of textual seeds or plot “time bombs” creates a generic family tree. “Children of Earth” began as a Torchwood finale, a last ever sequence whose end point is retrospective and prospective in equal measure. In the same way, series and episodes intertwine to create a narrative composite that mingles f lashback, f lash-forward, recollection, media footage, files, archives, repetitions, and echoes; some characters even seem to have foreknowledge of events. A series history—its past—seeds the future that, in turn, resonates with what has gone before, with the present, and all that is yet to come while its repeated tracking through and across episodes, series, and programs defines the genre even as it leaves it susceptible to mutability and transformation. One small instance is the character interchange which creates the Doctor’s “family.” Torchwood’s Jack first appears in Doctor Who,19 a moment then reprised on many subsequent occasions while both Martha Jones, the tenth Doctor’s former companion, and Mickey, the boyfriend of Rose Tyler, recur in Torchwood. The Doctor and Rose believe that the Gwynneth they meet in Cardiff, 1869, in “The Unquiet Dead” is Torchwood’s Gwen Cooper; the same actress, Eve Myles, certainly plays them both.20 Equally, Torchwood both is a family and is part of another generic family unit. Doctor Who spawns Torchwood and its sibling The Sarah Jane Adventures. Each of these stand-alone programs shares characters, story seeds, and their “originators”: Julie Gardner, former Head of Drama, BBC Wales, and a writing team headed by Russell T. Davies whom she commissioned first to reinvigorate Doctor Who for a teatime audience in 2003, then Torchwood in 2006. Torchwood has origins, ancestors, a genealogy—of sorts—and gives us a perverse mirror of reality and of romance’s generic “family” structures. When the Doctor returns for Jack at the end of series 1, it seems the team has lost its founding father and, without him, is in disarray in the opening episode of series 2—until his return with the cry, “Hey kids, did you miss me?”21

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Even as the Torchwood institute seemingly has no point of origin, f lashbacks reveal that Jack is crucial to its inception, having “fathered” several families in three separate hubs after his enforced recruitment in Victorian Wales. In one respect, Torchwood and its parent Doctor Who are medieval in spirit, if not in origin, with numerous suggestive riffs and references scattered throughout both. Not the least of these is the BBC Wales production context with its implicit reminder of Wales as a legendary home of Arthur and Camelot and its recurrence in medieval romance as an always-contested cultural, national, even linguistic, border. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that in Doctor Who the Sycorax invasion occurs via the Guinevere I ship,22 or that Jack’s former Time Agent partner hopes the Torchwood team is “not Excalibur!”23 So, too, in the fictional history of Doctor Who and Torchwood, Cardiff is the haunted site of the former plague parish of St. Mary and St. James.24 But to speak of origins ignores the fact that neither time nor history is simple or progressive in these contemporary romances. Rather, origins are always obscured; the future is always conditional on the past—as in the “no kids, no consequences” refrain of “Children of Earth” (Day 1) and its recurrent trauma of origins—but never in ways that are entirely consequential. The latest Torchwood (series 4, “Miracle Day,” 2011) is a global collaboration involving BBC Wales, BBC Worldwide via its “parent” Julie Gardner, senior vice president (scripted) for BBC Worldwide Productions from 2009—and the US network Starz Entertainment. It is, too, already replete with the repetitions, parallels, and continuations familiar from previous series. “Exit Wounds” (series 2, episode 13) with its deaths and virtual “living” archives, points to “Children of Earth” (series 3). “Children of Earth” forms a two-way bridge looking to the next via its “descendants,” the almost “remnant” children who are saved for series 4 even as the new “Miracle Day” gazes over its shoulder at its precursor—for here the threat to humankind is that nobody can die, except Jack. He is now a mutated human, the only mortal being left on earth. Gwen and Rhys have “gone underground,” which is exactly where viewers left them at the end of series 3, while later, Jack will use a fake Federal Bureau of Investigation ID in the name of Torchwood’s Owen Harper—who died at the end of series 2—to guarantee him entry under the “456 protocols.” No Kids, No Consequences Torchwood is, then, a narrative of origins deformed. The foundational story it repeatedly inscribes upon on its children is the serial violence

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of a power traumatized by its past as colonizer and its long history as the colonized island subaltern, not least for the long “medieval” years after 1066. Britain fears the marauding “alien” who in the end turns out to be just like us. The 456 justifies its narcotic consumption of children by insisting they “feel no pain. . .live long beyond their years” (Day 4). Yet there is no future for these kids or for the species they represent. Snatched from the paternalistic care of a state orphanage in 1965, they are broken in time: semi-immortal, cosmic, dead-alive children. Yet, the monster of this narrative is not an invading alien force but the human world complicit with it, self-serving and so focused on securing national borders that its covert operations queer the “natural” trajectory of progressive time by culling its children and curtailing its own future. No wonder the Task Force Officer who discovers what the 456 has done can speak only as a “father” and not in his official capacity (Day 4). The British government chooses its 10 percent by subterfuge. Claiming the threat is to all of “civilization” and that “in a national emergency, a government must plan for the future,” it exempts its own extended families by right of privilege (Day 4). Britain’s “contribution” initially comes from a center housing failed asylum seekers awaiting deportation. The cabinet later selects more by using the school league tables for the purpose they were “really intended,” as social engineering enabling the removal of children from those “failing” schools most likely to harbor future offenders and welfare claimants (Day 4). Here, too, the government repeats and amplifies the cultural script it wrote upon the children of 1965 when, bereft of their real family and abandoned by a British government that neglects its duty of care in loco parentis, the twelve orphan children were given to the 456. Just as Jack knew that it was “easier” to hand over nameless children in 1965 (Day 5) and the 456 warns “the remnant will be disconnected” (Day 4), the cabinet commodifies the rest with talk of “units,” “the . . . erm . . . process,” or how “the world population needs trimming.” In this ideology children are expendable, things to own and disclaim at will. One moment Frobisher asks the 456 not to use “our children” for communication (Day 3), and the next Jack admits that in 1965 “I gave them twelve children.” “What for?” asks Gwen. “As a gift” (Day 3). Later the British prime minister insists that to have traded twelve for twenty-five million was “a good deal” (Day 4). So, too, it’s “Uncle” Jack who leads the children of 1965 across the moors to their living death. This impersonal, euphemistic language—which reaches its height in the casual, almost delighted cruelty of an onlooker’s “that kid’s gonna fry!” as Jack realizes how to defeat the 456 by using his own grandson as a transmitting frequency—contrasts the personal narratives of the survivors and first-hand testimony recounted

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through Gwen on Day 5. Equally, Steven’s cry of “Uncle Jack! What’s happening? What do you want me to do?” when his grandfather sacrifices him, resonates with Jack’s recognition that global choices impact at the smallest, most human level: as he’s arrested Jack whispers to Gwen, “They’ve got kids—Ianto’s niece and nephew. Save them!” (Day 5). The End Is Where We Start From Who better than medievalists to know that public discourse records but one official history, one foundational story shifting and palimpsest by many more? Its principles of operation are, like time itself, complex and unbounded, revealed through several contingent and contested categories: archival material or virtual data and “living” memory or eyewitness account with its diverse modes of circulation—oral testimony, television, or film footage, and off-the-record or silenced witness. Actions with the most far-reaching consequences in Torchwood usually happen “underground” or “off the record.” Lois Abiba, civil servant turned Torchwood spy, describes the Torchwood team as “unsung national heroes,” known unofficially, that is through “common knowledge” (Day 1). Later, Ianto speaks privately to his sister in a cell phone he knows is being bugged, to warn all those “listening on the wire,” the covert Channel 141 which the government later closes down, about plans to take Britain’s children for the 456 (Day 5). Jack is central to these narratives because the name of Captain Jack Harkness, 133 Squadron, British Royal Air Force, vanished without trace from all official records in 1941 even as that identity is archived in top-secret files as Torchwood’s commander. So, too, Jack’s pivotal role in the secret handover of 1965 drives the “Children of Earth” series which begins by revisiting that past precisely in order to wipe it from history when head of the Civil Service, John Frobisher, quietly issues a “blank page” to Torchwood (Day 1). “History” is never a dead and gone precursor of the present but is queerly alive in every moment. This pivotal paradox continues when Frobisher explains the idea of “off the record” to the 456, which then agrees that its previous visit is not to be spoken of. History is rewritten to keep hidden potentially catastrophic events and evade accountability. Yet, the presence of the 456 insistently points to the very ideas that Frobisher’s attempted deleting of archival evidence wipes clean. The year 1965 is an originary point that has consequences for the present, for the 456 has returned with further demands. The 456 agrees to an interaction that is beneath the radar of any official historical narrative even as it archives its private conversation with Frobisher ready to replay it to a listening world (Day 4). This subversion of privacy demonstrates how stories always

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circulate and are in a constant state of f lux, both as linear progressive narrative (history) and more contingently, as personal testimony to contest and mesh with other versions (historiography). In “Children of Earth” this happens in a number of ways. Using Torchwood’s camera spy eyes both Lois Abiba and Frobisher’s aide Brigitte record all of the interaction with the 456, plus the potentially devastating decisions of the inner sanctum of government office when the cabinet discusses how to select the required 10 percent of children. When the threat from the 456 is finally averted, the Prime Minister—always anxious to deny responsibility—announces he was “lucky,” not least because all intelligence has been engineered to “blame” the Americans (Day 5). But, of course, these private conversations are on record and will call people to account. Attempts to protect individuals also fail in “Children of Earth.” Jack’s daughter Alice and his grandson Steven appear on no official files, for they have assumed identities as part of a Witness Protection Program ostensibly intended to shield them from Jack’s occasionally cavalier disregard for life. That same program will lead government agencies directly to Jack through his family and consequently to Jack sacrificing Steven for the good of millions (Day 4). Similarly, Gwen switches off the CCTV camera to persuade Clem McDonald, the “missing” twelfth child from 1965, to talk “just between you and me” (Day 1), to reveal a personal testimony that must be told even though, despite Gwen’s best efforts, it will kill him. The gulf between individual recall and public cultural discourse is central to “Children of Earth.” Storytelling in all its ancestral forms is a means of making sense of the present, of hoarding real time as a past historic narrative that simultaneously gives it a life in the future. Gwen’s name riffs upon that familiar Arthurian figure, Guinevere. The character is played by the Welsh actress Eve Myles whose voice, in classic bardic tradition, calls up that medieval (m)other of stories The Mabinogion and reminds us of the cultural agency of contemporary Welsh speakers. Gwen engenders a crucial narrative when she recounts the events of “Children of Earth.” Her story is an oral eyewitness testimony with a twist, for Gwen has a unique two-way perspective. She accesses the direct experiences of those who have gone “underground” in response to central government’s collusion with the 456 and, thanks to Lois Abiba’s “eyes,” knows the official authoritative discourse of that power, masculine “written” history in the making. Gwen’s role as the emotional center of Torchwood and as Jack’s “human” conscience extends to make her the mother of stories. It is Gwen who bears Clem’s private anguished life story and makes it known, Gwen who uses a sacrosanct family narrative to persuade Ianto’s sister

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to meet him despite the danger, at the place where “dad broke my leg” (Day 3) and, later, will recount her own memories of Ianto in order to prompt his sister to gather up all the children in her care and disappear (Day 5). Though driven by the logic of plot, the medium in which Gwen recounts her story is also significant. By talking to Rhys’s hand-held camcorder on Day 5, “so you can see. . .how the world ended,” she brings oral testimony and new technology together to transgress “official” discourse. More than a simple record of events, though, it fills in the gaps of history to reveal the consequences of impersonal decisions taken in unaccountable sources of power. Accordingly, Gwen speaks in close-up, directly into a camera that pulls away only to reveal the shocked faces of the handful of adults and children she led to safety. The sequence is crosscut with television footage of the increasingly apocalyptic consequences of the 456’s claim to the world’s children. Gwen recounts this narrative “in case anyone ever finds it” (Day 5), in other words for posterity. In the same way, when Brigitte visits Lois Abiba in prison she tells her John Frobisher’s life story, how he was “a good man,” for the simple fact of his humanity will “be forgotten when people tell the history of this thing” (Day 5). Such retellings must be told in order to keep the past alive and seed the future. In this way, too, revelation connects to the cyclic nature of time. Clem recounts his version of 1965 on Day 2. We see these events only in fragments, in f lashback, until Day 4, when Jack must finally become accountable and tell the full story of that time and the part he played in it. The moment of that telling gains further resonance through Ianto’s repeated accusations (including in previous Torchwood series) that Jack is a living secret who will reveal nothing of his personal or family history. The queer families of contemporary “medieval” romance are always on the point of threatened or actual disintegration. Gwen contemplates aborting her unborn baby (Day 3). Jack’s daughter Alice, only returned to him in “Children of Earth,” loses her son and must walk away from her father. Jack is alone again, in eternal wait for his “father,” the Doctor, hankering after what Gwen calls “the old days” and “the man who appears from nowhere to save the world,” except “sometimes he doesn’t, all those times in history when there was no sign of him” (Day 5). And in the same way Gwen, in the closing moments of Day 5, looks back over her shoulder for her parent lover Jack who by the laws of continuous real time transmission and corporate commissioning should never reappear, yet always will: via archived footage, repeats, iplayers, DVD box sets, wikis, fanzines and, of course, reprised in Torchwood series 4 in 2011, an entire season after this last ever series “Children of Earth.”

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Notes 1. Torchwood, series 3, “Children of Earth,” day 4. Written by Russell T. Davies, John Fay, and James Moran. Aired on BBC television, July 6–10, 2009. All dialogue transcription mine. References to the five-episode “Children of Earth” series are indicated in the text by day of broadcast. References to other Torchwood and Doctor Who episodes are indicated in the notes. 2. Gail Ashton, Medieval English Romance in Context (London: Continuum, 2010), 131–33 and 143–47. 3. See Umberto Eco, “Dreaming the Middle Ages,” in Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986), 72. 4. BBC Press Office, “Torchwood cast joined by Independence Day and ER stars,” accessed May 16, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/ bbcworldwide/worldwidestories/pressreleases/2011/. 5. Eco, “Dreaming,” 69. 6. Andrew Dix, Brian Jarvis, and Paul Jenner, The Contemporary American Novel in Context (London: Continuum, 2011), 164. 7. Jose Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), ix. 8. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 3. 9. See Cohen, Postcolonial Middle Ages, 5–8. Also Patricia Ingham and Michelle Warren eds., Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 49–53. 10. “Monday 7 June 2012,” accessed May 10, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ torchwood_new_series/, emph. mine. 11. Doctor Who, series 1, episode 9, “The Empty Child,” written by Steven Moffat (BBC Worldwide, 2005), DVD, and episode 10, “The Doctor Dances,” written by Steven Moffat (BBC Worldwide, 2005), DVD. 12. Torchwood, series 2, episode 12,”Fragments,” written by Chris Chibnall (BBC Worldwide, 2008). DVD. 13. Doctor Who, series 1, episodes 9 and 10, “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances,” 2005. 14. Judith Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 1. 15. See Doctor Who, series 1, episode 13, “The Parting of the Ways,” written by Russell T. Davies (BBC Worldwide, 2005), DVD. 16. See Doctor Who, series 3, episode 11, “Utopia,” written by Russell T. Davies (BBC Worldwide, 2007), DVD. 17. Torchwood, series 2, episode 13, “Exit Wounds,” written by Chris Chibnall (BBC Worldwide, 2008), DVD. 18. See Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place, 3. 19. Doctor Who, series 1, episode 9, “The Empty Child,” 2005.

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20. Doctor Who, series 1, episode 3, “The Unquiet Dead,” written by Mark Gatiss (BBC Worldwide, 2005), DVD. 21. Torchwood, series 2, episode 1, “Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang,” written by Chris Chibnall (BBC Worldwide, 2008), DVD. 22. Doctor Who, series 2, episode I, “The Christmas Invasion,” written by Russell T. Davies (BBC Worldwide, 2006), DVD. 23. Torchwood, series 2, episode 1, “Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang,” 2008. 24. Torchwood, series 2, episode 6, “Reset,” written by J. C. Wilsher (BBC Worldwide, 2008), DVD, and Torchwood, series 2, episode 7, “Dead Man Walking,” written by Matt Jones (BBC Worldwide, 2008), DVD.

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CHAPTER 14 THE MEDIEVAL ENTERTAINMENT CHANNEL: THE SHREK QUARTET Kathleen Coyne Kelly

These complex temporal reckonings, and especially an expanded understanding of contemporaneity, the now, begin my rumination. . .on history and time, past and present. Such thinking leads me to a concept of queer history, for in my view a history that reckons in the most expansive way possible with how people exist in time, with what it feels like to be a body in time, or in multiple times, or out of time, is a queer history—whatever else it might be. Historicism is queer when it grasps that temporality itself raises the question of embodiment and subjectivity. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Temporalities” They don’t tell you what time it is; they tell you what kind of time it is. Clifford Geertz, “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali”

F

or the past several years, whenever I teach Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” (ca. 1385), students say, “it’s like Shrek.”1 At a cultural moment in which everything is available everywhere at once, what we formerly thought of as a unidirectional (that is, chronological) arrow of inf luence and allusion has morphed into a matrix of multiplying and constantly reorganizing relations and affinities. Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz), by day beautiful, human, and white,2 and by night ugly, ogre, and green, is a Loathly Lady analogue that people encounter in the realm of pop culture before meeting, if ever meeting, her medieval sisters. Fiona and the Loathly Lady live in what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “great time”: in which cultural productions break through the boundaries of their historical moment, and, I would add, swirl around in a kaleidoscope of new, never to be repeated, patterns.3

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One way that the medieval can have an afterlife, then, is minus the after: when it has no genealogy, no past, when it was never before or then, or once upon a time. In this sense, the “medieval” is asynchronous, located in the gothic arch of the nineteenth-century church down the street; in the pointing finger hovering over a hyperlink on a webpage; in the figure of a college student hunched over her book in the library, hoodie up like a monk’s cowl; and in the digitized castles, knights, damsels in distress, and dragons found in the Shrek Quartet. The Medieval Entertainment Channel, a feature in Shrek 2, is not just a sly cinematic joke; it broadcasts live, here, now, all the time. DreamWorks’s Shrek films are located in a time that we commonly call the “Middle Ages.” (We learn in Shrek Forever After that the date is 1409.) And, just as we are introduced to scores of hybridized creatures—talking animals, ambiguously gendered humans, and polymorphously perverse nonhumans, “rais[ing] the question of embodiment and subjectivity,” as Dinshaw in my first epigraph says—the Middle Ages into which we are invited is also a mix, made up of “complex temporal reckonings.” While the Shrek films employ a general medievalized aesthetic, they also draw on later historical periods for inspiration. The seventeenth century is mined for Charles Perrault’s fairy tales; the eighteenth century for the baroque court dress that Shrek (Michael Myers) and Fiona brief ly wear in Shrek 2; the nineteenth century for the Fabergé egg of a carriage that Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn) drives in Shrek Forever After; and, of course, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for attitude, various pop culture allusions, and pop music. Overall, all four films offer an idealized preindustrial setting; as such, the films are medieval-like, medieval enough, or, as Tison Pugh puts it, “medieval-ish.”4 Amy Kaufman, distinguishing neomedievalism from medievalism, says: “The neomedieval idea of the Middle Ages is gained not through contact with the Middle Ages, but through a medievalist intermediary: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, T. H. White’s Once and Future King. . .Neomedievalism is thus not a dream of the Middle Ages, but a dream of someone else’s medievalism. It is medievalism doubled up upon itself.”5 As Kaufman and others note, the medievalism versus neomedievalism debate parallels the arguments that privilege high culture over low culture, and in which all things neo are associated with popular, consumerist culture. While I would describe the Shrek Quartet as neomedieval, I am less interested in taxonomies than I am in the fact that medievalism and neomedievalism are both derivative and belated. In what follows, I read the Shrek Quartet as an allegory for neo/medievalism itself, at a time in which medievalism and its practice, history, and theory are generating

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exciting new work in medieval studies, which Nickolas Haydock provocatively describes as “a sub-set of medievalism.”6 Neo/medievalism itself is queering, a disrupting force in history and to chronology, leading us to question not only when Anglo-American medievalism began (with Beowulf ?) but also when the Middle Ages ended: we have never been modern, as Bruno Latour says, and many of us like to quote.7 While we in the academy debate the ends, limits, and possibilities of the medieval, medievalism, and neomedievalism, DreamWorks and other purveyors of pop culture (who obviously employ scores of smart people with liberal arts degrees) are gleefully creating mash ups, or cut ups (as William Burroughs described his experiments with shuff ling random bits of text), or versions of word clouds out of the “medieval,” which, for Hollywood and most of its audience, includes Malory’s Morte Darthur as much as it does Dungeons and Dragons, making the medieval already mashed up before producers, directors, writers, and animators begin to mash it up even more for public consumption. How queer. The medievalism of the Shrek Quartet both contributes to and is a result of what Judith Halberstam calls “temporal havoc,”8 and what Elizabeth Freeman calls “queer temporalities”: “[That] sensation of asynchrony [which] can be viewed as a queer phenomenon—something felt on, with, or as a body, something experienced as a mode of erotic difference or even as a means to express or enact ways of being and connecting that have not yet arrived or never will.”9 I locate queer time at work in the Shrek films in the way that a fractured medievalism makes time for humans, animals, and nonhuman characters to shift identities, put on and take off disguises, and/ or undergo metamorphosis, processes which call into question the boundaries constituting human subjectivity. In the Shrek Quartet, the directors, writers, and animators experiment with subject positions that undermine the boundaries between men and women, between human and animal— between human and everything else, actually—and between and among heterosexual desires, homosexual desires, and polymorphous desires. Ultimately, however, these experiments are cancelled out by a conservative agenda that privileges human heterochronology. Just as a child at play is instructed to put away all her toys and dolls and costumes before arriving at the dinner table, all transgressive play with boundaries in the Shrek Quartet is boxed up neatly at the end of each film: the jack is put back in the box. Put another way, an anarchic asynchrony, created by the juxtaposition of the medieval and the contemporary, is yanked offscreen in favor of linear, reproductive, heteronormative time. My main focus is on those times in the Shrek films that the jack is out of the box, bobbing and grinning and nodding crazily at us.

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In the Queerness of Time Moviegoers who first saw Shrek in theaters did not have to be versed in film or contemporary literary criticism to know that something queer was going on. Such knowledge, to follow D. A. Miller, is generated by the process of connotation, which “allow[s] homosexual meaning to be elided even as it is also being elaborated,” rendering queerness both absent and present.10 Miller says that connotation “will always manifest a certain semiotic insufficiency . . . appearing doubtful, debatable, possibly a mere eff luvium of rumination (stereotypically, the English professor’s) fond of discovering in what must be read what need not be read into it . . . . connotation enjoys, or suffers from, an abiding deniability.”11 Queer spectatorial pleasures of “semiotic insufficiency” and “deniability” abound in all four of the Shrek films. These pleasures are sited in, and are seemingly rendered safe by, DreamWorks’s innovative technologies of digitized animation and by the strategic deployment of once upon a time in a medievalized land called “Far Far Away.” None of the characters, after all, are human, even the human ones; their sexed/gendered identifications and/ or behaviors are hyperreal and hyperbolic. However, thinking of Shrek and his friends as “only” virtual may lead us into the erroneous belief that their contraposition to the real preserves the integrity of the real; by saying so, I am thinking of Jean Baudrillard’s assessment of Disneyland as “imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.”12 The queerness of the Shrek films is not an alternative discourse, usually construed as only available through gaps and fissures or unconscious slips. Rather, because the films depend so much on allusion to, quotation from, and imitation of pop culture, queerness is already present in much of which is being parodied; the films are simply reproducing existing and recognizable queer codes.13 As such, the films are exercises in timing; that is, they exploit that split-second synapse in which the connotative registers (that is, mainly for adults) but is not yet deniable, reverberating like the dah dum cha of a rimshot. Writing about mass culture in general, Alexander Doty says that “queer erotics are already part of culture’s erotic center, both as a necessary construct by which to define the heterosexual and the straight (as ‘not queer’), and as a position that can be and is occupied in various ways by otherwise heterosexual and straight-identifying people.”14 What I find most provocative is Doty’s argument that a viewer, no matter what her/his sexual orientation, may well fantasize about occupying different queer positions, and take pleasure in doing so. However, I would add that, for some, it is the deniability—a space in time—inherent in a connotative reading that allows for such pleasurable fantasies. Surely this is

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true of the PG-rated Shrek films. The pleasures of Shrek and his friends, along with the pleasures of purple Teletubbies and Sponge Bob Square Pants, might be described as a form of frottage: one can rub up against such bodies and then back away in order to disavow what Dinshaw, in Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, famously describes as the “touch of the queer.”15 The makers of the Shrek films seem well aware of the pleasure of deniable touches and are quite willing to exploit them. Let us consider Farquaad for a brief example, and his name: say it aloud quickly for the joke. It is crudely obvious once one hears it a few times, but also disingenuously deniable. Robin Hood serves as an example of queer connotative deniability. His effeminacy is registered first through his Frenchness, and, later, in his and his Merry Men’s performance of “YMCA” (Village People, 1978).16 Another example is Wolf from the tale of Red Riding Hood, who has, apparently, always already eaten the grandmother. He wears her cap and nightgown on all occasions. The friendship between Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Shrek (Mike Myers) serves as an extended example of queer connotative deniability. Throughout the four films, their various interactions move back and forth along a homosocial/homoerotic continuum, triangulating first with Fiona in Shrek, and then with Puss-in-Boots in Shrek 2. Donkey and Shrek’s relationship conforms to a familiar pattern found in the heterosexual romantic comedy, in which one (or both) of the protagonists initially cannot stand the other. Donkey pursues Shrek out of his own self-interest, but mainly because he is a friendly and cheerful but socially clueless donkey. Shrek wants nothing to do with him. Donkey is charmingly immune to Shrek’s insults and rebuffs, as in the following exchange: Donkey: You, uh. . .you don’t entertain much, do you? [eyeing the “KEEP OUT” signs surrounding Shrek’s home] Shrek: I like my privacy. Donkey: Y’know, I do too. That’s another thing we have in common. I hate it when you’ve got someone in your face, you try to give someone a hint and they won’t leave, and then there’s that big awkward silence. . . Can I stay wit’ you? Can I stay wit’ you? Please? ... Shrek: NO. Donkey: Please. I don’t wanna go back there. You don’t know what it’s like to be considered a freak. . .well, maybe you do, but that’s why we gotta stick together. You gotta let me stay!

Moreover, Shrek and Donkey’s unlikely alliance recalls the dynamics of the classic buddy film in which two men with conf licting styles and

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personalities are thrown together in pursuit of a common goal, to discover, despite their differences, they actually complement—and even come to like—each other. As Vito Russo demonstrated in The Celluloid Closet (1981, rev. 1987), the buddy film is a subgenre in which homoerotic content is, generally speaking, latent; that is, connotative.17 Perhaps the most famous and most quoted scene in Shrek is the one in which Donkey, attempting to befriend the solitary, morose ogre, imagines an evening of male bonding: “Oh! This is gonna be fun! We can stay up late, swappin’ manly stories, and in the mornin’. . .I’m makin’ waff les!” While I am not suggesting that Donkey has amorous designs on Shrek, there is a frisson, a what if split second in which the absent is made present: speculations and/or fantasies sprout in the time between the telling of stories and the making of waff les. Patricia White, in Uninvited: Classic Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (1999), uses the term “uninvited” to describe how a lesbian spectator might actively turn a given moment in a film into a fantasy in which her desire is made manifest and able to be experienced.18 The waff les scene, one among many in the Quartet, is a moment open to the uninvited (and I include furries here); it is a “writable” moment, as Roland Barthes says of texts that allow for multiple interpretations, and thus a moment for multiple identifications.19 The connotative is, above all, transactional between reader and text, viewer and film. Many popular films set in the Middle Ages or with medievalized themes imported into modern times take the rituals of coming into heterosexual manhood as their main subject and often do so by f lirting with the possibility of a homoerotic in order to reject, deny, or discount it. Often, one of the dangers that a hero must overcome in such films is the pleasures of the homosocial bond itself—pleasures that range from malemale friendship at one end of the continuum to same-sex acts or identities at the other end. Consider such films as Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, 1975)—granted, an obvious choice— but also consider Knightriders (George Romero, 1981)—unusual, if not anomalous, for its weighty treatment of the medievalized homosocial—as well as The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (Mel Brooks, 1993), A Knight’s Tale (Brian Helgeland, 2001), and Garden State (Zach Braff, 2004). Why is it that in American mass cultural productions we often find the medieval or the medievalized to be such a popular and dynamic site at which to enjoy a queer touch? Perhaps because the Middle Ages itself, to return to Miller, eludes denotation; that is, it refuses a singular, unambiguous, and neutral meaning, thus allowing for all sorts of semiotically

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insufficient and deniable touches. Much of what we have classified as neo/medievalism rejects denotation as the only way into understanding, reproducing, and even experiencing the Middle Ages. Time Sensitive Halberstam argues that “queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.”20 In Shrek, before Lord Farquaad decided to take on his ethnic cleansing project in his fiefdom of Duloc, all the resident and, for the most part, unique fairy-tale creatures might be viewed as living quite happily in queer time, in which reproduction and the raising of offspring is not the organizing principle of their society. Shrek, for example, is the only ogre. (We meet ogres in Shrek the Third, but they exist only in Shrek’s nightmare about fatherhood. And in Shrek Forever After, other ogres only exist in a parallel world.) As a shape-shifter under enchantment, Fiona is unique. There is one Donkey, one Pinocchio, one Wolf, one Gingerbread Man (he had a mate, but she was eaten). Almost every nonhuman creature that we meet in the Shrek-verse is a singleton (in mathematics, a set with exactly one element; a 1-tuple) with no past (ancestors) and no future (descendants). The exceptions to the rule of the 1-tuple are notable: only Merry Men follow Robin Hood; the Three Pigs and the Three Blind Mice are all male; the coven of witches is all female. These circumstances furnish the grounds for a number of uninvited ruminations and speculations. (On the other hand, plurality of species and duality of gender belong solely to humans, a fact which contributes to the privileged position of humans in the films.) Because the dragon is such a familiar index of the medieval, the singleton that is Dragon deserves some comment. Initially figured as the villainess, Dragon, upon meeting Donkey, plays a key role in the heteroromance plot that straightens out the curve of queer time. While medieval dragons such as Fafnir and Beowulf ’s dragon (and medievalized dragons, like Tolkien’s Smaug) are also singletons, they are not Dragon’s precursors; instead, Dragon owes her lineage to Disney’s dragons in The Reluctant Dragon (1941), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and Pete’s Dragon (1977). This is to be expected, given DreamWorks’s satirical targeting of Disney figures throughout the Shrek films. DreamWorks’s Dragon, once removed from the medieval, is another resident of Bakhtinian great time. The cinematic romance genre dictates that if Fiona and Shrek pair off, then Donkey must, too. In Shrek, Donkey comes into proper heterosexual identity first through the discipline of an ogre, and second through

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misrecognition. Trapped by Dragon in Fiona’s castle, Donkey resorts to the same strategies that he used to win Shrek’s friendship. Donkey begins to f latter what he thinks is a he: Donkey: Oh, what large teeth you have. I mean white sparkly teeth, I know you probably hear this all the time from your food but you must bleach or something, ’cause that’s one dazzling smile you got there and do I detect a hint of minty freshness? [Dragon swoops in closer; Donkey sees that she has lipstick on] Donkey: A girl dragon! Of course you are! You’re just reeking of feminine beauty. Hey, what’s the matter wit you, you got somethin’ in your eye? [Dragon cuddling Donkey]

The reluctant Donkey finally gives into the blandishments of Dragon, who is fifty times his size. Donkey and Dragon’s romance, kinky as it is, helps to distract us from an even more shocking story: the intermarriage of a human and an ogre. In Shrek and Shrek 2, Shrek and Fiona morph between being human and being ogres. Sometimes they are human at the same time; sometimes they are both ogres. However, when Fiona is a woman and Shrek is concurrently an ogre, the possibility is raised—only to be denied—that they might enter into a cross-species union, that they might, to use an inf lammatory (and dated) word, miscegenate. Fiona and Shrek’s choice to remain big, ugly, and green is often read as celebrating difference, but it is only within the category of the nonhuman that difference is permitted. A much more radical version of difference would be an ogre-human romance—and offspring.21 The singletons Donkey and Dragon are permitted an interspecies romance and a family because, I would argue, they are animals, and Shrek, for all its play with animals and monsters, is invested in keeping the category of “the human” inviolate. When Donkey meets his offspring for the first time, he exclaims happily: “Little mutant babies!” Donkey’s reunion with Dragon and his dronkeys is a warmly sentimental moment. It would appear to be a positive message on tolerance and diversity, but again, diversity at this level is allowed only in the realm of the nonhuman. Still, not all viewers experience the relief, as it were, of binarization that protects the human from the nonhuman. As posters to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), a rich source of material for reception studies, put it: “Babies are awful and not funny. God, why did donkey have to marry off with the dragon? That’s just dumb” (k-man-3).22 “When I saw the dronkeys onscreen for the first time I suddenly became disturbed” (Pinkspecialist).23 These and similar comments are illustrative

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of my point about timing, connotation, and the necessity of deniability: contemplating little mutant babies might well send a viewer down an imaginative path preferably not traveled, even if the dronkeys are adorable (they are highly neotenized, with big eyes and pug noses; they make very nice plush toys in the real world). Donkey himself experiences some anxiety about his offspring; at least, the parallel-world Donkey does. In Shrek Forever After, Shrek tells Donkey about his life in the original Far Far Away: “You’re married to a fire-breathing dragon and you have little mutant donkey dragon babies.” Donkey asks, “Do my babies have hooves or talons? Tell me, are my babies cute, or do they just make people feel uncomfortable?” Pinkspecialist is one of many voices on the Internet who have expressed everything from salacious curiosity to disgust about the Donkey-Dragon union. I am tempted to conclude that DreamWorks paid attention. Donkey’s questions suggest that the makers of the Shrek films are well aware of the transgressive nature of cross-species love and its consequences. Medieval Times In Shrek, Shrek says to Donkey that “sometimes things are more than they appear.” The use of more rather than different is telling. Let us take Shrek’s words as a commentary on Derrida’s notion of the supplement— that contradictory something extra that completes—that is, enhances presence—but also demonstrates the impossibility of completion—that is, dramatizes absence. Moreover, Shrek says “sometimes things are more than they appear” while attempting to explain who he is. Louis Althusser argues that, when culture calls, we are compelled to answer according to the identity that culture imposes.24 (Shrek’s very name is a Yiddish shriek of fright.) Note the hyperbolic Althusserian hailing inherent in names like Donkey, Dragon, Prince Charming, Fairy Godmother, and Ugly Stepsister, names that not only emphasize their 1-tupleness, but also register a confusing combination of the literal (in Shrek Forever After, Donkey says: “If I was a dog, they’d call me Dog, not Donkey”) and the allegorical: these singletons are very like personifications in a medieval play. Shrek and a number of other outcasts accept but more often resist their interpellated selves throughout the films, and do so through a strategic use of the supplement. DreamWorks’s Shrek is certainly more than what William Steig created in his children’s book. And Shrek means for us to understand that an ogre is more than a nasty bug-eating monster living in a swamp: he may be a complex, decent, perhaps even noble figure, layered, as he says, like an onion. Shrek has more stoic heroism in him than any of the men he encounters; as an ogre, he is more macho than his

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human enemies, who f lee in fear from him. In Shrek 2, as a man under enchantment—a supplement in itself—Shrek is more handsome than any other. He is certainly more masculine as an ogre than his rival, the vain Prince Charming (Rupert Everett). And Fiona is more than a woman; after initially believing that her heart’s desire was to be a beautiful human princess, she chooses to be something more ambitious: an ogre. Donkey is a talking donkey. In Shrek 2, he transcends donkeyness by coming into steedliness, albeit temporarily, when the “happily ever after” potion transforms him into a Pegasus. His disappointment at becoming Donkey again functions as a counterpoint to Shrek and Fiona’s acceptance of their ogreness. However, returning to donkey shape also allows Donkey to be something more: a loving father to his children. As we have seen, Dragon is more than a fire-breathing, princess-protecting terror; Dragon is “a girl dragon.” Pinocchio is more than a wooden toy: he is a thong-wearing wooden toy. And the King ( John Cleese) is more compassionate as a frog than he was as a man: “I’m sorry, Lillian,” Harold says in his frog shape in Shrek the Third, “I just wish I could be the man you deserve.” The Queen ( Julie Andrews) responds: “You are more that man now than you ever were, warts and all.” I would like to return to Miller’s argument about the queer uses of connotation, which itself depends upon Derrida’s notion of the supplement. Following Rousseau, Derrida sexes the supplement by describing masturbation as the supplement to “normal” sexuality.25 Critics have since engaged with Derrida’s heterocentric paradigm in order to describe the relationship between heterosexuality and homosexuality as one of supplementation—though which is supplementing which is open for discussion. Let us consider the overdetermined character of Ugly Stepsister, as well as that of Gretched ( Jane Lynch), the singleton female ogre in Shrek Forever After who continues the argument that Ugly Stepsister’s ambivalent gender instigates. For both characters, the notion of “ugly” resides in a palimpsest, though it is unclear if the masculine leaks through the feminine, or vice versa. The collapse of gender categories creates ugliness, compounded, in Ugly Stepsister’s case, by the feminine, if not feminist, notion that she is a “sister”; categories are further (and deliberately) confused by the fact that Ugly Stepsister is voiced by Larry King. While Ugly Stepsister is either a transvestite or transgendered figure who passes without much comment in Shrek 2, she is foregrounded as a queering force in the DVD supplement (films are no longer complete in and as themselves). In the “Far Far Away Idol Contest,” when Ugly Stepsister performs “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” (Cyndi Lauper, 1983), Fiona, with a puzzled glance at Shrek, says: “You go. . . girl?” Fiona’s half-question highlights the inadequacies of denotation; language has no words for Ugly Stepsisters.

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The IMDb often includes comments from moviegoers unrestrained by polite critical discourse. Here are excerpts from a thread on Ugly Stepsister: Silentmovie: Give me a break. That cross-dressing freak ruined the movie. It was totally inappropriate for a kid’s movie to have a man dressed as a woman, saying things like he gets “hot” thinking about Prince Charming, etc. Just another example of the Hollywood politically correct crowd doing their damndest to brainwash kids into accepting PERVERSION as normal!!! Violent midget: It wasn’t a tranny, just a very ugly girl. All you’ve proven is that you’re a complete dick. Go bathe in acid. Silentmovie: Yeah, sure. Voiced by Mister Gay himself, Rupert Everett. Idiot. HorrorSexMetal: Rupert Everett did not voice the ugly stepsister, he voiced Prince Charming you f^cking idiot. And it was just an ugly woman and it worked very well for the movie. You are a true moron. Go crawl under a rock you PC piece of crap. Then you won’t have to worry about dumb stuff like this. [Sic]26

This exchange is part of a larger debate about the merits of the Shrek films. Holding strong opinions on deniability does not affect in the least the posters’ unanimous belief in the message of the films as Executive Producer Jeffrey Katzenberg has explained it: “Whether you’re a princess, a donkey, or even a big, green, stinky ogre, you can find love and happiness.”27 Such a belief is a distinctly modern, American one, predicated upon such notions as individualism, entitlement, hard work, and freedom of choice. Believing in Katzenberg’s message may well create cognitive dissonance for these IMDb posters: an “ugly girl” has a right to love and happiness, but a “tranny” does not; therefore, if one believes in truth, justice, and the American Way, the tranny must be denied as a subject. Much of the pop music in the Shrek Quartet reinforces the master narrative of the American Dream and extols an enlightened, entitled individuality. For example, at the end of Shrek the Third, Donkey and Puss-in-Boots sing “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin” (Sly and the Family Stone, 1969). However, I read this duet cynically—and medievally: everyone, animal, monster, human, must take its/his/her ordained place in a Shrekian scala naturae. Shrek himself seems to believe this: in Shrek the Third, he schemes to make Fiona’s distant cousin Artie the king of Far Far Away. Shrek abdicates in favor of human sovereignty. Ogres have no business ruling; they belong, and desire to belong, in a swamp. The Middle Ages offers more than a date and a look for the Shrek Quartet; it also provides a worldview.

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As I have been arguing, play with identity and subjectivity in the Shrek films results in a subversion-repression back-and-forth in which alternative and transgressive subjectivities are explored, only to be boxed into a narrative that ultimately privileges heterosexual, human hegemony. How medieval. Human dominance over animals as a trope and a given has its origins in Genesis, of course, at the point at which Adam names the animals; it is greatly expanded upon in Augustine and Aquinas as well as in medieval bestiaries and encyclopedias. The belief in human hegemony underwrites modern conservationism (as opposed to environmentalism); in this context, perhaps we can read Shrek not only as green, but as a Green Man. In addition, the Shrek Quartet offers models of subjectivity that are distinctly medieval in origin. Humans, animals, and nonhumans possess faults that sort themselves nicely into the Seven Deadly Sins. We laugh at the Three Little Pigs, but we recognize their gluttony; we find Lord Farquaad’s self-aggrandizing behavior amusing, but conclude that he is a fool for his pride. Prince Charming and Rumpelstiltskin suffer from envy; Shrek battles with despair and anger. Thus, the predicaments of contemporary life are expressed within a system that has its origins in the medieval world. Concomitantly, the positive traits that Shrek and his friends come to embody recall the Seven Catholic Virtues, especially charity, diligence, patience, and kindness. In Cinematic Illuminations, Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman offer an explanation for what Angela Weisl calls the “persistence of the Middle Ages” in pop culture: “the Middle Ages is the excluded other of the narrative about progress and enlightenment that are major themes in Western history without which those narratives would lose their consistency.”28 Finke adds that the medieval is “the uncanny that haunts the rationalism of modernity.”29 The Middle Ages, as a number of scholars have argued, not only lies anterior to but is also parallel to modernity, a modernity which depends upon the medieval—rather, depends upon a break with the medieval—in order to define itself. Shrek and the Shrek films play (with) the medieval against the modern, reproducing the debates that contributed to the medieval/modern split in the first place. In fact, I think that the ideological confusions of the films are the result of a promiscuous mash up of the medieval and the modern. I am not suggesting that the people at DreamWorks read Kathleen Biddick’s The Shock of Medievalism (1998); rather, the directors and writers, bricoleurs par excellence, are simply caught in the same cultural time warp created by the push-pull of modernity as anyone else. Shrek himself might be seen as an effect of this oscillation: quintessentially Unheimliche, Shrek is human-like and monster-like, but not really one or the other. He is neither medieval

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nor modern. As a liminal figure, Shrek occupies the center of the Shrek Quartet as much as he haunts its margins. “Let’s All Do the Time Warp Again” I conclude with a final rumination on the scene in Shrek Forever After in which Donkey explains to Shrek that the contract Shrek has signed with Rumpelstiltskin has an “exit clause,” a mandated loophole, “according to fairy tale law.” Donkey says: “Used to be, you had to guess his name, but now everybody knows who Rumpelstiltskin is.” These days, one must be an adept at exegesis. Donkey knows that one needs the proper hermeneutic to make transparent the logic of the text. Shrek and Donkey stare at the beautifully illuminated, black-lettered contract. It is a lovely abyssal moment. Forever After begins with an illuminated manuscript in which Rumpelstiltskin reads about Princess Fiona’s fairy-tale rescue. This bit reproduces the opening of Shrek, which also begins with a manuscript, one in which Shrek reads about fairy-tale princesses rescued by knights in shining armor. Thus Shrek’s contract in the last film of the series is a text within a symbiont text dependent on a text that inaugurates the first film in the series. In Forever After, the very world in which Shrek finds himself exists only because Shrek has written it into being by signing his name to Rumpelstiltskin’s contract. Donkey’s way into the text, into the piece of parchment that he holds down with his hooves, is not to read it—that is, to treat it as a text that needs to be dealt with rationally and chronologically. Instead, Donkey folds the manuscript page this way and that into an origami in which the message “try Lou’s bliss” appears. This clue is not necessarily wrong; it is simply Donkey’s solipsistic reading. Still, the clue (like a phrase conjured up on an Ouija board) does not help Shrek, who must now deploy his own “complex polygonic foldability skills” (to use Donkey’s phrase) to manipulate, literally, his own meaning. Shrek refolds the parchment so that the message “true love’s kiss” is revealed—a seemingly cryptic message that is actually quite obvious to Shrek and his audience, who know that Shrek and Fiona initially achieved their happily-ever-after through a kiss. In an essay concerned with time and what kind of time, as Geertz says in my second epigraph, I read the folding over of the medieval parchment allegorically, not only for its schematic—fortuitously for me—of Einstein’s theory of “spacetime” as curved, able to be bent or folded, but also for its visual dramatization of what happens when modern folks get their hands on the Middle Ages. Imagine the folded parchment, the result of an arcane intervention into the text, as standing in for DreamWorks’s project in the Shrek films. The manuscript (invented and belated), itself

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a metonymy for a whole that can never be recovered or reproduced, is able to be endlessly manipulated, yielding countless possibilities along the space-time continuum. While all of the Shrek films violate linear, chronological time by interpolating the present into the past, Shrek Forever After explicitly plays with time and temporality by focusing not only on past time, but also on such modes as another time, in the nick of time, running out of time, and out of time. The film appropriates and parodies the plot of that most human of Hollywood stories—Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), which itself is a meditation on timing: George Bailey ( James Stewart), it turns out, was always already in the right place at the right time—he just did not know it (he suffers from despair) until it was almost too late. Parody, Linda Hutcheon says, “is very much an inscription of the past in the present.”30 One might argue that “the Middle Ages” is itself a parodic construct, a supplementation barnacled on the idea of a retrievable past—a past that is done, finished, and therefore complete. Yet the vitality of medievalism and neomedievalism suggests otherwise. Our study and our continued experience of the Middle Ages is partial and contingent, making any representation of the Middle Ages epiphenomenal, not as a derivation of a primary phenomenon, but of the lack of a fully-articulated primary phenomenon. Perhaps parody is, in the end, the only way that we can know the Middle Ages—or so it seems to me that DreamWorks argues in the Shrek Quartet. Notes 1. Shrek, dir. Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson (DreamWorks SKG, 2001), DVD; Shrek 2, dir. Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury, and Conrad Vernon (DreamWorks SKG, 2004), DVD; Shrek the Third, dir. Chris Miller and Raman Hui (DreamWorks SKG, 2007), DVD; Shrek Forever After in 3D, dir. Mike Mitchell (DreamWorks SKG, 2010), DVD. All supplementary materials are from Shrek: The Whole Story (DreamWorks SKG, 2010), DVD. All dialogue transcribed by me. 2. The negative representations of race in the Shrek films (especially with respect to the character of Donkey) deserve more analysis. 3. M. M. Bahktin, “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee and ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 1–9. 4. Tison Pugh, “Introduction,” The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy Tale and Fantasy Past, ed. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). 5. Amy Kaufman, “Medieval Unmoored,” Studies in Medievalism 19 (2010): 4.

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6. Nickolas Haydock, “Medievalism and Excluded Middles,” Studies in Medievalism 18 (2010): 19. 7. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 8. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 3. 9. Elizabeth Freeman, Introduction to “Queer Temporalities,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.2–3 (2007): 159. 10. D. A. Miller, “Anal Rope,” Representations 31 (1990): 124. 11. Miller, “Anal Rope,” 123–24. 12. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 12. 13. Shrek The Musical (music, Jeanine Tesori; lyrics, David Lindsay-Abaire, 2008) is more explicitly queer-identified. When the cast sings “Let Your Freak Flag Fly,” Pinocchio declares, “I’m wood, I’m good, get used to it,” riffing on Queer Nation’s slogan, “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.” 14. Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3–4. 15. Since my focus is on pleasure, I’m setting aside what happens when disavowal becomes homosexual panic, observable in the Christian Right’s reaction to the Shrek films. However, surely the Right deserves credit for their accurate decoding—or rubbing—powers. 16. “Shrek in the Swamp Karaoke Dance Party,” Shrek: The Whole Story (DreamWorks SKG, 2010), DVD. 17. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper and Row, 1987). 18. Patricia White, Uninvited: Classic Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 19. Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. and ed. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 70–72. 20. Halberstam, Time, 1. 21. The author of Beowulf was not afraid to tell a similar story with respect to Grendel’s genealogy. 22. K-man-3, “Board: Shrek the Third,” IMDB.com, accessed April 7, 2008, now apparently deleted. 23. PinkSpecialist, December 31, 2007, “Board: Shrek the Third,” IMDB. com, accessed March 29, 2012, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413267/ board/thread/93037372?d=93548555&p= 1#93548555. 24. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 127–242. 25. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 153. 26. Silentmovie, Violent midget, HorrorSexMetal, “Board: Shrek the Third,” IMDB.com, accessed April 7, 2008, now apparently deleted.

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27. “Spotlight on Shrek,” Shrek: The Whole Story (DreamWorks SKG, 2010), DVD. 28. Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 15. 29. Finke, personal email, December 19, 2011. 30. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), xii.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Gail Ashton is an independent scholar, ex-lecturer in English at the University of Manchester and former Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is the editor of the Handbook of Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture (Continuum, forthcoming), and author of a short biography of Geoffrey Chaucer (Hesperus, 2011) and Medieval English Romance in Context (Continuum, 2010 ). She coedits a major literature series for Continuum. Candace Barrington is Professor of Medieval Literature at Central Connecticut State University. She has written American Chaucers (2007) and coedited, with Emily Steiner (University of Pennsylvania), Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (2002). She has also published many articles for, amongst others, Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World (2009), American Literary History (2009), European Journal of English Studies (2011), Dark Chaucers (2012), Gower at 600 (2010) and Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England (forthcoming). Brantley L. Bryant is Assistant Professor of English at Sonoma State University. He has published articles in The Chaucer Review, postmedieval, and Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, as well as the book Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog (Palgrave, Macmillan, 2010). Lesley Coote is lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Hull where she specializes in teaching medieval romance literature and culture, and medievalisms (including digital medievalisms, historical film and the “medieval/renaissance” novel). She is the author of Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer/York Medieval Texts, 2000), an edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Wordsworth, 2003) which she is currently revising, and a wide variety of articles on the subject of political prophecy, medieval/Arthurian romance and the medievalism of film. Louise D’Arcens teaches in the English Literatures Program at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. She is author of

234

CONTRIBUTORS

Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840– 1910 (Brepols / University of Western Australia Press, 2011) and Laughing at the Middle Ages: Comic Medievalism (Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming), and is coeditor of Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Writers (Brepols, 2004) and The Unsocial Sociability of Women’s Lifewriting (Palgrave, 2010). Steve Ellis is Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, and author of books on the modern reception of medieval writers such as Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T. S. Eliot (1983) and Chaucer at Large: the Poet in the Modern Imagination (2000). He recently published Virginia Woolf and the Victorians (2007) and is finishing a monograph entitled The 1939 State: Literature and the Outbreak of World War II. Steve Guthrie is Professor of English at Agnes Scott College. The essay in this volume is the latest in a series of essays on uses and misuses of the Middle Ages by American popular culture and US foreign and domestic policy. Other titles include “Torture, Inquisition, Medievalism, Reality, TV,” in Eileen Joy, et al., eds., Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), and “Medievalism and Orientalism,” Medieval Perspectives, 19 (2006). Kathleen Coyne Kelly is Professor of English at Northeastern University. She coedited Queer Movie Medievalism (2009) and Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (1999) and also wrote Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (2000). Daniel T. Kline is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He has published essays in Mass Market Medievalism (MacFarland, 2007), Essays on Medieval Childhood (Shuan Tyas, 2007), Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2007), and Levinas and Medieval Literature (Duquesne, 2009), amongst others. He is the editor of Medieval Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2003), and the Medieval British Literature Handbook (Continuum, 2009), as well as the author/webmaster of The Electronic Canterbury Tales . Andrew Lynch is Professor in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. With Helen Dell and Louise D’Arcens he edited a special issue of postmedieval, “The Medievalism of Nostalgia,” 2.2, 2011, including an essay on Walter Scott, and has recently published in Australian Literary Studies on the medievalism of Randolph Stow, and medievalist burlesque theatre in colonial Melbourne.

CONTRIBUTORS

235

Philippa Semper is lecturer in Medieval English at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Old English Poetry in Context (Continuum, forthcoming) as well as numerous articles and chapters such as “‘Byð se ealda man ceald and snof lig’: Stereotypes and Subversions of the Last Stages of the Life-Cycle in Old English Texts and AngloSaxon Contexts” in Medieval Lifecycles: Continuity and Change, ed. Isabelle Cochelin and Karen Smyth (Brepols, forthcoming) and “Old English Literature” in The English Literature Companion, ed. Julian Wolfreys, Palgrave Student Companions Series (Palgrave, 2010). Robert S. Sturges is Professor and Associate Chair in the English Department at Arizona State University where he teaches medieval literature and queer studies. Recent books include Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (2000), Dialogue and Deviance: Male-Male Desire in the Dialogue Gerre (2005), and Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (2011). His current projects include a monograph on The Circulation of Power in Medieval Drama and, with Elizabeth Urquhart, an edition of The Middle English Pseudo-Augustinian Soliloquies and its Anti-Lollard Commentary. Richard Utz is Professor of Medievalism Studies and Chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Much of his scholarly work happens at the intersections of medieval culture, literature, and language and their reception in postmedieval times. Among his recent publications is an essay on “Coming to Terms with Medievalism: Toward a Conceptual History” for the European Journal of English Studies 15.2 (2011): 101–13, and a Festschrift for William Calin, Makers of the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, MI: Studies in Medievalism, 2011), coedited with Elizabeth Emery. He is the current president of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. Angela Jane Weisl is Professor of English at Seton Hall University. She is the author of The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003), and Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present, with Tison Pugh (Routledge, 2012), as well as several articles and book chapters on medieval subjects.

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INDEX

Abbreviatio Chronicorum, 38 Abramovich-Lehavi, Sharon, 69 Abu Ghraib, 108 Acéphale, 73–74 Adams, Jenny, 104 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (1938 film), 35, 153 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (television series), 147, 148, 149, 150, 153, 154, 155 Aeneas, 159, 160; and the Aeneid, 159 Aeschylus, 53 Alighieri, Dante, 6–7, 11; on celebrity, 48; on community and the individual, 46, 48–53; as private and domestic, 51–52; and T. S. Eliot, 50–51, 52; and Virginia Woolf, 43–53; and weeping, 132 Alliterature Morte Darthur, 180 Althusser, Louis, 211 America’s Next Top Model, 135 Amy de la Bretèque, François, 86 anachronism, and YouTube Prioress’s Tale, 18; and T. H. White, 174 Andrews, Julie, 212 Antigone, 47 anti-Semitism, 6, 14; and five narrative strategies, 20–23; and scholars, 14–15; sensitivity to, 14; and YouTube idioms, 20; in YouTube productions of The Prioress’s Tale, 13–28 Arabian Nights, The, 67 Aronstein, Susan, 10, 41, 86, 216

Arthur, King, 4, 8, 11, 188, 192; and Arthur de Caldicot, 175–78; in the Arthur trilogy, 175–77; Disneyfication of, 99; in King Arthur (2005), 159–72; and King Arthur’s World, 178–80; in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 71–72, 77–80 Arthur trilogy (Crossley-Holland novels), 173–86; and Arthur de Caldicot, 175–78; historicity of, 176, 179; history vs. legend, 183; and King Arthur’s World, 178–79, 180; and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 180; and Tolkien, 182 Arthurian legend, 4, 30, 78, 79, 173, 176, 178, 183, 188; canon, 177, 179; epic, 160, 170, 171; as fantasy, 173–86; as film, 4; and Geoffrey of Monmouth, 174; and Guinevere, 198; knights, 79; and Lanval, 181; Malory’s cycle, 170; in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 72, 74; mythos, 78, 80; as novels, 8; romance, 175, 179, 180, 181; as world, 179 Ashton, Gail, 5, 8, 10 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 65, 203; Bakhtinian great time, 209 Banks, Tyra, 135 Baring-Gould, Sabine, 116 Barthes, Roland, 40, 73, 208 Bataille, Georges, 72–75, 76 Batman (film), 4

238

IN DEX

Baudrillard, Jean, 206 beast fable, 32 Bede, 163 Bedford, Brian, 33 Benjamin, Walter, 124 Beowulf, 124, 161, 163, 164, 165, 205; “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” 123; dragon, 209; and H. P. Lovecraft, 122, 123, 124 Biddick, Kathleen, 5, 10, 87, 88, 95, 214 Biggest Loser, The, 133, 136, 138, 139 Bildhauer, Bettina, 85, 86 Billerey, Raoul, 149 Black Knight (film), 106–7, 110 Black Prince, 8, 146, 149, 150 Blanchot, Maurice, 73 Bluth, Don, 29 Boggs, Wade, 87 Borel, Adrien, 77 Bryant, Brantley L., 10 Burroughs, William, 205 Callois, Roger, 73 Capra, Frank, 216 carnivalesque, 65, 75 Carruthers, Mary, 134, 136–37 Chance, Jane, 10 Chanson de Roland, 162; and Oliver, 168; and Roland, 165 Chapman, Graham, 76–77 Chapman, James, 1; and the Adventures of Robin Hood, 150 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 15, 31, 32, 44, 45, 52, 67; The Canterbury Tales, 13, 15, 16, 44, 67; The Canterbury Tales (television series), 4; Chaucer: The Animated Tales (television series), 4; The General Prologue, 16; The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 32; The Prioress’s Tale, 13–28; The Wife of Bath’s Tale, 203 chivalry, 72, 101, 104, 105–6, 151, 153, 171; America and the Patterns of Chivalry, 151; and capitalism,

109; as chivalric, 78, 101, 102, 104–6, 109, 146, 151, 153, 165, 174; marriage and, 180 Chomsky, Noam, 110 Christian, William, 130 Churchill, William, 150, 153 Clarke, Stephen, 150 class, 66, 78, 106, 107, 109, 148, 181; as class conf lict, 154; as class struggle, 95; and Frozen River (film), 90; as lower class, 35, 36, 63; as middle class, 61, 171; as popular class, 57; and Robin Hood (film), 32–33; as ruling class, 58, 65; and Second Shepherds’ Play, 88–91; as working class, 39, 59, 60, 66 Cleese, John, 76–77, 212 Clements, Pamela, 10 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 5, 11 Cold, Todd, 138 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 49 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (novel), 101 Connery, Sean, 35 Costa, Tara, 136 Costner, Kevin, 35 Cotton-Spreckelmeyer, Antha, 165 Crockett, Davy, 151 Crossley-Holland, Kevin, the Arthur trilogy, 173–86 Crowe, Russell, 35 DaCosta, Yaya, 135 Daily Mail, The, 1 Dance Your Ass Off (television series), 129, 138 D’Arcens, Louise, 5, 7 Darton, Harvey, 14 DaVinci, Leonardo, 74–75 Davis, Kathleen, 86, 96 Decameron, The, 67 Denoux, Laura, 136, 137 Deret, Jean-Claude, 147, 149 Derrida, Jacques, 73; supplement, 211, 212

IN DEX

Diaz, Cameron, 204 Diaz, Ruy, 165 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 4, 107–8, 203, 204, 207 Diorio, Tyce, 129 Disney, Walt, 32–33 Doctor Who, 188; birth of Jack Harkness, 190–91, 192; parent series of Torchwood, 4, 194, 195 Doctor Zhivago, 146 Dohrn, Walt, 204 Donner, Richard, 101 Doomsday Book (novel), 101 Doty, Alexander, 206 Dover, Carol, 78 Drouot, Jean-Claude, 147, 155 Drury, Ian, 1 Dungeons and Dragons, 4 Durnez, Eric, 145, 155 dystopia, 103, 109 Eco, Umberto, 3, 5, 10, 95 Einstein, Albert, 215 Eisenberg, Nora, 45, 46 El Cid, 161 Eliot, T. S., 47, 50–51, 52 environment, 78, 174; as environmentalism, 88, 214; and the Second Shepherds’ Play, 88–90, 92 ethnicity, 88 Everett, Rupert, 212 Excalibur, 79, 195; casino, 4 excrement, 75–77 Falkland Islands, 1 fantasy, 4, 36, 41, 101, 124, 183, 191; and Arthurian legend, 173, 174; fantasy literature, 182; fantasy writing, 173, 181, 182, 183; as historical, 96; as historical fantasy, 173–74, 175; and historical fiction, 175; and lesbian spectator, 208; as medievalist, 183; and nostalgia, 95; and origins, 188; and

239

religion, 95; and science fiction, 5, 187, 194; and Timeline, 104–5; and Tolkien, 114, 115, 123 Farfan, Penny, 47 Farrell, Joseph, 63, 69, 70 Fashion Show, The (television series), 129 fiction, 7, 8, 99, 100, 109, 154, 174, 175; as children’s, 175; as fictional, 8, 13, 52, 100, 150, 155, 174, 189, 192, 195; as historical, 100–101, 147, 173–74, 175, 181, 183; as horror, 115–16, 121; and Lovecraft, 114; as Pulp Fiction, 107; as science fiction, 101, 106; and Tolkien, 115; and Virginia Woolf, 51, 52; as “weird fiction,” 114, 115, 116, 119, 121, 122, 123 Fields, James T., and Edwin P. Whipple, 14 Finke, Laurie and Marty Shichtman, 10, 85, 86, 88, 106, 107, 181, 214 Fo, Dario, 59; and Bakhtin, 65; and commedia dell’arte, 61–62; and Franca Rame, 59; and the giullare, 61, 63; and Gramsci, 59, 65–66; and Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe, 64; and medieval performance traditions, 61–62; and Mistero Buffo, 59–70; and Pasolini, 66–68; and popular culture, 59; as social critic, 60–61 folk culture, 58, 65 fort/da, 86 Foucault, Michel, 73, 108; and production of truth, 134 Freeman, Elizabeth, 205 Friar Tuck, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 148 Fugelso, Karl, 10 Fuqua, Antoine, and King Arthur (film), 4, 8, 159, 160, 161, 165, 167, 170 Game of Thrones, (television series), 4 Garden State (film), 208 Geertz, Clifford, 203, 215

240

IN DEX

gender, 20, 40, 78, 88, 166, 181, 204; ambivalent, 212; categories, 212; duality of, 209; as gendered identifications, 206; as roles, 46, 104, 106; transgendered, 212; as values, 40 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 171, 176; and Historia Regum Britanniae, 174 Gertsman, Elina, 139 Gest of Robyn Hode, The, 169 “get medieval,” 4, 108, 109 Gilliam, Terry, 76 Goutaz, Pierre, 147 Gramsci, Antonio, 58–59, 66 Great Escape, The, 146 Greene, Richard, 147, 156 Gregory of Nyssa, 136, 137, 140 Guinevere, 198; in Crossley-Holland, 175, 181; in King Arthur (film), 166–67, 169–70; in Malory, 168; as peace-weaver, 169 Halberstam, Judith, 209; and temporal havoc, 205 Hall, David, 57 Hardman, Robert, 1 Harman, Graham, 124 Harrington, C. Lee, and Denise D. Bielby, 58 Harry Potter (novel), 4; Harry Potter (film), 4 Harty, Kevin, 40, 85 Haydock, Nicholas, 86, 205 Hegarty, Paul, 83 hegemony, 58, 65, 66, 214 Helgeland, Brian, 35, 36 historical fantasy vs. historical fiction, 173–75 Holland, Kevin Crossley, and the Arthur trilogy (The Seeing Stone, At the Crossing-Places, and King of the Middle March), 175–86 Holsinger, Bruce, 10, 95; and Ethan Knapp, 70 House on the Strand, The (novel), 101 Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, 140

Hunt, Courtney, 90 Hutcheon, Linda, 216 ideology, 64, 162; Christian, 92; and Dario Fo, 59, 67; in King Arthur (film), 161; in Robin Hood (1973 film), 34; in Torchwood, 196 immigration, in Frozen River, 88 Ingham, Patricia Clare, 5 Irenaeus, 136 Ivanhoe (novel), 30 Ivanhoe (television series), 147, 149, 153, 155 Jackson, Peter, 4, 183; The Fellowship of the Ring (film), 183 Jean II, 149, 153, 154 Jeune, Vitolio, 130 Johns, W. E., 153 Jones, Terry, 76 Joshi, S. T., 115, 116, 117, 120, 121 Julian of Norwich, 131 Jungle Book, The (1967 film), 38 Katzenberg, Jeffrey, 213 Kaufman, Amy, 5, 204 Kelber, Sarah Kickler, 136 Kempe, Margery, 138; the Book of Margery Kempe, 140; tears and, 131, 136 King Arthur, 4, 176, 180; Disneyfication of, 99; King Arthur (2005 film), 4, 159–72; and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 71, 77–79, 80; and Morte Darthur, 167, 176 King Arthur (2005 film), and the Aeneas, 159–60; and Beowulf, 163; and exile, 160–61, 163, 164–65; Guinevere, 166–67, 169–70; and Lancelot, 168–69; and Morte Darthur, 159, 167, 168, 170; and Pelagius, 162; and religion, 161–62; and Robin Hood, 164, 165–66, 167, 168–69; and transcendence, 170; and Woads, 163–64

IN DEX

King, Larry, 212 King, Rodney, 107 Klaitz, Jay, 90 Kline, Daniel T., 5, 7 Knight, Stephen, 10, 40, 154 Knightriders (film), 208 Knights of the Round Table, 153, 167; and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 71, 80 Knight’s Tale, A (film), 208 Kojève, Alexandre, 73 Kondoh, Asuka, 130 Kottack, Philip, 135 Lackland, John, 152 Lancelot, in King Arthur (film), 160, 162–63, 169–70; in CrossleyHolland, 181; in Malory, 168 LARP (Live Action Role Playing), 4 Lauper, Cyndi, 212 Legenda Aurea, 139 Leger, Céline, 147 Leiris, Michel, 73 Leo, Melissa, 90 Lerer, Seth, 15 LeRoy, Mervyn, 38 Lewis, C. Day, 46 L’Express, 146 Liddy, G. Gordon, 107 Lochrie, Karma, 131 Longest Day, The, 146 Lord of the Rings, The (novel), 4; Lord of the Rings, The (film), 4 Louis XIV, King, 155 Lovecraft, H. P., 113–28; and classical civilization, 114; and genealogical research, 113; and the Middle Ages, 114–15; and race, 115, 120, 122–23; and “The Rats in the Walls,” 115–19, 124; and “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” 121–22; and the unnamable, 114–15, 119 Lynch, Andrew, 5, 6 Lynch, Jane, 212

241

Mabinogion, The, 198 MacNeice, Louis, 46 Magna Carta, 35, 36, 152 Mallory, Robin, 151 Malory, Thomas Sir, 11, 45, 159, 161, 170, 175, 182, 205; and Arthurian tradition, 179–80; and audience, 171; and King Arthur (2005 film), 165; “matter of Britain,” 170–71; as source, 180; and view of the past, 176 Mann, Anthony, 161 Marie de France, 180; Chevrefoil and Lanval, 180; Laustic, 180 Marshall, David, 10, 85 Mary of Oignies, 131 mash-ups, 205 Masson, Andre, 73 Mayakovsky, Vladmir, 64 McDermott, Charlie, 91 McGuire, Mark, 87 McRaney, Anna, 129 Medieval Times, 5 medievalism, and comedy, 68; and Dario Fo, 59, 62; and defamiliarized self, 187; and film, 85–86, 87, 96; as high and low, 5; and Lovecraft, 115; and medieval studies, 87; as medievalisms, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11; as/and neomedievalism, 10, 95, 204, 205, 209, 216; and Orientalism, 85; and popular culture, 107, 151; as postcolonial, 188; and Robin Hood, 30, 31; and the Shrek quartet, 204–5, 216; and Timeline (novel), 101; and Tolkien, 113, 124 MEMO (Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization), 10 Merlin, 2, 4; in Crossley-Holland, 174, 176–79, 183; in King Arthur (film), 163, 166, 169 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 64 Michaels, Mia, 137

242

IN DEX

Miéville, China, 121 Miller, D. A., 206, 212 Miller, Roger, 31, 40 Mistero Buffo, 59; and Bakhtin, 65; and capitalism, 65; and Francis, the Holy Jester, 66; and the giullare, 62; and historicism, 61; and Marc Bloch, 61; and Mayakovski, 64; and mystery plays, 59; and Pasolini, 66–67 Mizrahi, Isaac, 129 MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), 4 Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 7, 71–84, 85, 208; and the “accursed share,” 76; and Bataille, 76–80; and beheaded historian, 74; Black Knight, 78; comic disbelief, 73; death and life, 75; and the execratory, 76–77, 80; and the Pythons, 82; and quest structure, 72; and violence, 79 Moore, Roger, 147 More to Love (television series), 134, 138 Morelli, Ron, 137 Morrissey, 1 Morte Darthur, 11, 159, 171, 205; Bors in, 168; King Arthur in, 167; and The Once and Future King, 174; Tristan in, 170 multiculturalism, in Frozen River, 94 Murder in the Cathedral, 47 Murphy, Eddie, 207 Myers, Michael, 204 Mystery Bouffe, 64 Nagy, Piroska, 131 Name of the Rose, The (film), 85 Nastali, Dan, 173 nativity, in Frozen River, 88, 92–93, 94 Nennius, 176 neomedievalism, 5, 10, 11, 216; conservatism, 95; vs. medievalism, 204–5 nostalgia, 1, 3, 10, 95; and origins, 188; as politics, 86; in Timeline, 105

Oates, Joyce Carol, 121 Obayoumi, Ade, 129 Oedipal father, 74 Once and Future King, The, 175 Orientalism, 85; temporal Orientalism, 100, 110 Palin, Michael, 76 Paris, Matthew, 38 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 66–68, 70 Patalano, Heidi, 134 Peers, Lauren, 146 Pelagius, in King Arthur (film), 161–62, 163 Penn, Sean, 1 Perceval le Gallois, 85 periodization, 5, 10, 87–88, 95, 96 Peter of Celle, 134 Pete’s Dragon (film), 209 Phillips, Utah, 99 Pigford, Eva, 135, 137 Pillars of the Earth (television series), 4; novel, 100 Pink Floyd, 1 popular culture, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 170; as American popular culture, 100; and conf lict, 22; and Mayakovsky, 65; of the Middle Ages, 67–68; theories of, 57–59, 109 postmedieval, 7, 59, 109, 169; postmedieval ( journal), 10, 11 postmodern, 58, 86, 87, 88, 94; as hyperreal, 188 poverty, and Robin Hood (1973 film), 32, 34; and Frozen River, 92, 166; and Second Shepherds’ Play, 88–90, 91 Power, Eileen, 52 Princess Bride, The (film), 208 progress, 100, 214; and Renaissance, 109–10; rationality and, 151; theory of, 103 Pugh, Tison, 10, 85, 204 Pullman, Philip, 183; The Amber Spyglass, 182 Pulp Fiction, 107

IN DEX

Pyle, Howard, 31 Pythons, The, 81–82 queer, 8, 192, 197, 207, 212; codes, 206; connotative deniability, 207, 212; erotics, 206; families, 199; history, 203; and neo/medievalism, 205; space and time, 191, 209; spectatorial pleasures, 206; temporalities, 205; time, 192, 193, 196, 205, 209; touch, 207, 208 Quo Vadis (film), 38 Racicot, William, 87 Rae, Heather, 90 Ramey, Lynn T., 10, 85 Ransom, Amy J., 173–74 Reilly, James, 91 Reluctant Dragon, The (film), 209 Renaissance, 43, 103, 108, 109, 110; beliefs, 109; folklore, 122; ideal, 74; as model, 99, 100; myth, 106, 110; as origin, 45, 103; Renaissance-centered, 107, 110; theater, 39 resurrection, in Frozen River, 93, 94, 95, 96; of Lazarus, 62 Reynard the Fox, 32, 33 Rhames, Ving, 107 Richard the Lionheart, 30, 152, 165 Richards, Jeffrey, 153 Rios, Jackie, 138 ritual, 73, 77, 80, 121, 135, 140, 151; coming into manhood, 208; and confession, 134, 139; and weeping, 130–31, 133, 134, 135, 140 Robin Hood, 7, 8; and King Arthur (film), 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170; and Shrek, 207, 209; and Thierry La Fronde, 145–58 Robin Hood (1973 film), 6, 29–42; Alan-a-Dale, 31; characterization in, 38–40; and class, 35; economics in, 33–34; ending, 40; Friar Tuck, 34–35; Nottingham,

243

32; opening sequence, 31; power structure in, 36; reputation, 29–30; Robin as leader, 27; and Robin Hood (2010 film), 35–36; villains, 37–38 Robin Hood (2010 film), 35, 152 “Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow,” 38 Robin Hood and the Monk, 168, 172 “Robin Hood and the Potter,” 39 Robin Hood: Men in Tights (film), 208 Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991 film), 34, 36 Robinson, Carol, 10 romance, as genre, 4, 78, 87, 101, 104, 105, 159, 160, 165, 176, 183, 187, 188, 194, 195, 199, 209; Arthurian, 175, 179, 180, 181; heterosexual, 40, 159, 209; in Shrek, 209–10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 49, 52, 212 Russ, Terri, 138 Russo, Vito, 208 sacrifice, 73, 74, 76; in Frozen River, 94, 95; in Second Shepherds’ Play, 92, 93 Saldívar, José David, 188 Sand, George, 49, 52 Sandvig, Melissa, 129–30 Scott, Ridley, 35–36, 152 Scott, Walter, 147, 149 Scuderi, Antonio, 59, 65 Second Shepherd’s Play, 89–90, 91, 92, 93–94 secondary education, 15 Secreta Secretorum, 171 Shakespeare, 51, 53; Macbeth, 39 Shinde, Gargi, 93 Shrek quartet, 203–18; as allegory, 204; dragon in, 209–10; heteronormativity, 214; hyperreal, 206; interspecies romance, 210; manuscripts in, 215–16; medieval as asynchronous, 204; and

244

IN DEX

modernity, 214; neomedievalism vs. medievalism, 204–5; personification in, 211; queer connotative deniability, 207–8, 211; queer time in, 205, 209; queerness of, 206–7; Seven Deadly Sins in, 214; singletons in, 209, 212; and temporal havoc, 205; and Unheimliche, 214 Siewers, Alfred K., 10 Silver, Brenda, 45 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 180 Slaughter of the Innocents, The, 42 Sleeping Beauty (film), 209 Sly and the Family Stone, 213 Snow White (1937 film), 29 Snyder, Christopher A., 173 So You Think You Can Dance?, 129 Spamalot, 5 Star Trek, 4, 87 Star Wars, 4, 87 Steele, Tommy, 33 Steig, William, 211 Stephenson, Ben, 188 Stewart, James, 216 Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, The (1952 film), 148, 152 Strinati, Daniel, 58 Studies in Medievalism, 10 Superman, 151 Sword in the Stone, The (1963 film), 31 Tarantino, Quentin, 107 terrorism, 93, 94, 96 Theirry la Fronde, 145–58; vs. AngloAmerican productions, 153; vs. British viewers, 152; characters, 147–48; and chivalric virtues, 146; and conservatism, 153–55; and cuisine, 150; and Hundred Years’ War, 149, 150; and medievalism, 151–52; and pro-French narrative, 150; and the shepherd’s sling, 155; stock scenes, 149–50 Thomas, Terry, 38

time travel, 86, 100, 101, 106 Timeline, 101–12; characters, 102; chivalry in, 102, 104–5; corporate feudalism, 103–4; gender, 104; and origins, 103–4; setting, 102–3; technological capitalism, 101 Tolkien, Christopher, 182 Tolkien, J. R. R., 11, 115; and “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” 123; vs. H. P. Lovecraft, 113–14, 123, 124; and Lord of the Rings, 4, 204; and Smaug, 209 Torchwood, “Children of Earth,” 187; and childhood, 191–92; and children, 195–97; and Doctor Who, 190–91, 194–95; and Jack Harkness, 189–90; and history, 197–98; history vs. personal testimony, 198–99; and postcolonial medievalism, 188; and queer temporality, 192–93; and temporal havoc, 194 Toschi, Paolo, 61 Upham, Misty, 90 Ustinov, Peter, 37–38 Utz, Richard, 5, 7, 10, 11 Vericchio, Pasquale, 67 Village People, 207 Virgil, 159; the Aeneid, 159; and Dante, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53 Vitruvian Man, 74–75 Wakefield Master, The, 88 Walter, Lisa Ann, 129 Weinstein, Hannah, 154 weird fiction, and Nordic groups, 122; and Northern European rhapsody, 122–24; technical definition, 121 Weisl, Angela Jane, 8, 10, 87, 214 Wendover, Roger, 38 What Not to Wear, 138 White, Patricia, 208 White, T. H., 174, 204

IN DEX

William, John (Ernest Armand Huss), 146 William of Malmesbury, 176 Williams, David John, 86 Winstone, Ray, 164 Woolf, Virginia, 43–56; “Anon,” 43–44, 46, 52; Between the Acts, 46, 51; and Chaucer, 44–45; and Dante, 48–49, 50–51, 53; Flush, 52; “How Should One Read a Book,” 47–48; the individual and the community, 46–50, 53; “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” 52; “The Leaning Tower,” 46, 53; and the medieval, 48; and Miss La Trobe, 44, 45, 46–47; Mrs. Dalloway, 50; The Pargiters,

245

53; “The Pastons and Chaucer,” 52; “The Reader,” 43, 45; A Room of One’s Own, 45, 51–52; Three Guineas, 45, 49, 51, 53; To the Lighthouse, 50; and T. S. Eliot, 50–51; The Waves, 50, 51; The Years, 48–49, 51 Wordsworth, William, 46 World of Warcraft, 4 World without End (novel), 100 Wyeth, N. C., 31 Year’s Work in Medievalism, The, 10 young adult literature, 16 YouTube, 6, 9, 13–28, 30, 130 Zambreno, Mary Francis, 180

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