The Renaissance

Abstract

Dating the beginning of the ‘modern’ period in literary history from 1500 is arbitrary, but not inexplicable, especially when we compare English literature of the sixteenth century with that which preceded it. The texts of the later Middle Ages—most notably Geoffrey Chaucer’s (in poetry such as the Canterbury Tales which was probably written from 1386 onwards) and even Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur of the late fifteenth century—immediately confront us with the problem that a substantial portion of the language reads like a foreign tongue, resembling English, but requiring translation. Chaucer’s ‘language’, wrote Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century, ‘is a cause of difficulty for us’. John Dryden, who was much closer historically and linguistically to Chaucer than ourselves (having lived in the seventeenth century), ‘translated’ several of the Canterbury Tales. In the next century Alexander Pope spoke of the failure to understand English from generation to generation and gloomily predicted:

Our sons their fathers’ failing language see, And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be.