Abstract
There can be little doubt that the sort of expectation we have been speaking of existed in classical culture, though it may not have been widespread. Although the reader of the Homeric epics is not consistently led to formulate expectations,1 the Odyssey and the Iliad both include a number of instances in which the revelation of a character’s intentions calls up quite precise expectations in the reader’s (or listener’s) mind of the course that events are likely to take.2 Expectation in Greek literature attains its height, however, with Sophocles rather than Homer. Critical discussions of Oedipus Rex have made much of the ‘tragic inevitability’ of the story, but it is an inevitability that only sinks home at the play’s conclusion: along the way we are constantly held in the grip of a series of expectations that Sophocles’ plotting arouses. Many of the plots of Roman literature also seem designed to arouse expectations. If the comedies of Plautus and Terence, for example, do not succeed in evoking so profound a response as do Greek tragedies, they nevertheless provoke a continual sequence of less powerful expectations.3
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Notes and References
This may result in part from the fact that Homeric Greek culture also seems to have been widely imbued with primitive thought processes. See Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational (University of California, 1951).
Kennedy, C. W. (trans.) Beowulf (Oxford University Press, 1940), 11. 410–11.
See, for example, J. B. Trapp’s gloss in Medieval English Literature (Oxford University Press, 1973) p. 31.
For a summary of the argument as to whether or not the term can be one of approval see the introduction to Scraggs, D. G., The Battle of Maldon (University of Manchester Press, 1981) p. 38.
Donaldson, E. T., in Abrams, M. L. (ed.) The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 3rd edn (New York: Norton, 1974), vol. I, p. 89.
Fowler, R., Old English Prose and Verse (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971) p. 71.
For this passage I have quoted the Kennedy rather than the Alexander translation: Kennedy, C. W., An Anthology of Old English Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1960) p. 118.
For these and many other fabliaux, together with English translations, see Harrison, R. (ed. and trans.) Gallic Salt (University of California, 1974).
Wilson, R. M., The Lost Literature of Medieval England, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1970) p. 123.
Rychner, J., Contribution a L’étude des Fabliaux (Geneva: 1960).
See Busby, K., ‘Conspicuous by Its Absence: The English Fabliaux’, Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters, 1982, No. 12, pp. 30–41;
and Cooke, T. D., The Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux (University of Missouri, 1978) p. 123.
Included in McKnight, G. H., Middle English Humorous Tales (London: 1913).
Wilson, R. M., Early Middle English Literature, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1952) p. 239.
Vinaver, E. (ed.) Malory: Works (Oxford University Press, 1971) p. viii.
The scene between Arthur and Bedwere, for example, which to my mind generates more powerful expectations that any other in Malory, follows the pattern of the Mort Artu and Le Morte Arthur very closely. See Vinaver, E., The Death of King Arthur (Oxford University Press, 1955) pp. 122–4.
Tolkien, J. R. and Gordon, E. V. (eds) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1967) p. xxiv.
Ibid., 11. 2259–69. Stone, P. (trans.) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959).
Henderson, G. (ed. and trans.) Fled Bricrend (Bricriu’s Feast) (Irish Texts Society, 1898) p. 99 and 101.
Aristotle, ‘Poetics’ in Russell, D. (ed.) Ancient Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p. 68.
Lewis, C. S., The Allegory of Love (Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 82. Lewis contrasts ‘the marvellous taken as fact (which he claims to be the characteristic subject matter of primitive literatures) with ‘the probable’ and ‘the marvellous known to be fiction’. The latter two become part of the ’equipment of the post-Renaisssance poet’.
See, for example, Todd, L., Some Day Been Dey (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979 ) p. 126.
Rumble, T. (ed.) The Breton Lays in Middle English (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965) pp. 80–95. Chaucer satirised metrical romances of this sort in his ‘Sir Thopas’ Tale’. If the host’s remarks as he cuts short Thopas’s discourse are any indication, however, the element that was intended to be ridiculed was the bad rhyming, not the ludricous improbability or disjointedness of the narrative. The host spends some time elaborating on the idea that Thopas’s ’drasty rymyng is nat woorth a toord’ (1. 2119), but says not a word in criticism of story or plot.
See Fowler, D. C., A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1968) pp. 165ff., and A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, vol. 6. (Anchor Publishers, 1980).
See Gurr, A., The Shakespearian Stage (Cambridge University Press, 1969) p. 146;
and Hathaway, M., Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) p. 40ff.
Craig, H. (ed.) Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ‘Pageant of the Shear-men and Taylors’ (London: Early English Text Society, 1957)11. 892–900.
Eccles, M. (ed.) The Macro Plays (London: Early English Text Society, 1969) 11. 1768–1840.
Fulwell, U., Like Will to Like in Happe, P. (ed.) Tudor Interludes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p. 359, 11. 1110–11.
See Sanders, N., ‘The Comedy of Greene and Shakespeare’ in Brown, J. R. and Harris, B., (eds) Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 3: Early Shakespeare (London: Edward Arnold, 1961) p. 51.
Greene, R., ‘Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’ in Thorndike, A. (ed.) The Minor Elizabethan Drama II: Pre-Shakespearian Comedies (London: Everyman, 1919) p. 217.
Farnham, W., The Medieval Heritage (New York: 1970) p. 267 (commenting on Cambises).
Hathaway, M., Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) p. 132.
In Fraser, R. and Roblin, N. (eds) Drama of the English Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1976) p. 464.
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© 1989 Don LePan
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LePan, D. (1989). The Ways of Thought of Medieval Literature. In: The Cognitive Revolution in Western Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09988-7_10
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