Comparing “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, “The Canterbury Tales: The General Prologue” and “King Lear”

Introduction

The following study reviews in brief three literary works; their authors, the historical and other influences that inspired their composition, the main primary literary devices that were used in their writing, and the major themes that were addressed in these works. The three literary works are then compared and contrasted based on these criteria. These works are; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight composed by an unknown author, The Canterbury Tales; The General Prologue by Geoffrey Chaucer and King Lear, a play that was written by Shakespeare that heavily borrowed on the mythical legend of Leir of Britain.

Historical or Other Influences

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written in Middle English dialect that shows a link to the Northwest Midlands of Britain, either Lancashire or Cheshire. Little is known about the author, but scholars believe him to have been an official of a provincial estate or a university-trained clerk and is more commonly referred to as the Gawain Poet or the Pearl Poet. This work belongs to a literature type known traditionally as the alliterative revival that is usually linked to northern England. The poem starts and ends with references to the British lineage myth by way of British Trojan founder Brutus, from the ancient city of Troy. These references base the Arthurian romance in the tradition of epic literature and connect 14^th century England to Rome, a region that was founded by a Trojan named Aeneas. The poem shows the borrowing of culture by medieval England from classical antiquity. Although the poem presents an ironic tone in part, the Gawain poet derives much inspiration from England’s history, legends and literary forms, notably Arthurian romance, and relates them to classical antiquity.

Bricriu’s Feast, an 8^th century Middle Irish tale parallels the Gawain poem in featuring the beheading game. Its antagonist, just like the Green Knight, fakes three blows with the ax but lets his victim go without injury. Life of Caradoc, a Middle French tale from the 12^th century also features a beheading exchange. In the Perlesvaus made during the early 13^th century, Lancelot is asked by a king to behead him or face a similar fate. The Knight of the Sword and Hunbaut tell of knights who desperately try to reject women’s advances sent by their lords to test them. The Gawain poet may have derived inspiration from these stories as they are similar in that they feature beheading and tests by seduction.

Conversely, The Canterbury Tales; The General Prologue is the work of a late 14^th century English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. He worked as a soldier and a diplomat in the Hundred Years War as he was fluent in French, Latin and Italian. His work travels to Italy twice introduced him to two writers, Boccaccio and Petrarch who influenced his writing. He began to find ways to write English poetry that would be accessible linguistically to everyone and not limited by the Church whose official language was Latin nor the court whose official language was French.

Chaucer ended up writing in the vernacular, which was the English that was spoken in London at the time. He was influenced by writers such as Boccaccio, Petrarch and Florentines Dante who wrote their works in Italian Vernacular. The Canterbury Tales mainly derives immense inspiration from Boccaccio’s work, The Decameron, as it uses a frame story to link several shorter stories. Chaucer’s work as a government official in the import of cloth may be the reason why he describes his characters’ attire in great and specific detail. The General Prologue portrays the 14^th century middle class of England, a class that Chaucer and his wife were part of as they belonged to court circles; the pilgrims also emphasize the middle-class narrative as they were neither poor nor were they aristocrats. Chaucer’s work was in most part a reflection of his life, and his environment as his stories are based on pilgrims on their way to Canterbury Cathedral, a popular pilgrimage location as it housed the remains of a Catholic martyr and saint, Sir Thomas Becket.

King Lear was derived from the legend of Leir of Britain, who was a mythical pre-Roman Celtic king. This is a play about kingship as it was written at a time when the monarchy was of significant importance, and the monarch’s role received massive attention and was subjected to a lot of presupposition. The reigning monarch at the time King Lear was being composed and performed, King James the VI & I, theorized the political role of the monarch as the supreme leader with divine right greatly. Queen Elizabeth’s I (who came before James) reign, was characterized by limitless efforts to justify her kingship due to the fact that she was a woman and her rise to power through familial ties had been a difficult one. This was through the ‘king’s two bodies’ theory, that stipulated that her person was split into two parts, that is, her natural mortal body and her immortal political body of the kingship. These theories were a significant influence on the early modern England and its people such as Shakespeare who was the composer of King Lear. King Henry VIII’s decision to separate the country from the Catholic Church in the 1600s had a lasting spiritual, societal and political consequences that further emphasized just how much a monarch’s decision, made smartly or on a whim could affect the stability and structure of a country.

Shakespeare dwelt on the nature of the monarchy in the 1950s, and his plays not only featured narratives on kings but also thoughts on monarchical rule. Henry IV plays tackle the issue of succession, and Henry V plays addresses the role of the king as the national leader while the two Richard plays examine the limits, misuse and abuse of monarchical rules and the chances for its eradication. Shakespeare focuses on the issue of the patriarchal monarchy in King Lear, where the king is the head of both his family and the nation. Lear might have been the ruler of impossible status from ancient Britain, but King Lear addresses pressing imperative current concerns about the power of the early modern monarchs.

Primary Literary devices used

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the main ideas in the poem are elaborated through the application of rhetorical devices such as irony, alliteration, hyperbole, anaphora, simile, caesura, epithet, metaphor, polysyndeton and hyperbaton. The author uses hyperbaton to write that the lord of the castle who knows that his ‘wife it was that wore it’; a figure of speech where words are inverted from the usual order for emphasis. The lord also knows ‘well the tale’, and it shows irony as he had planned the situation. The lord refers to the behavior of Sir Gawain with the use of repetition ‘and’, the use of polysyndeton and parallelism ‘the count of your kisses and your conduct too’. A caesura ‘-’, which is a strong pause, is used to create suspense. A simile, ‘as pearls to white peas’, is used to contrast Gawain with the lady. The lord compares Gawain with other good knights with the use of a metaphor ‘so is Gawain, in good faith, to other gay knights.’ Parallelism is used to allude to the love of life and responsibility, ‘but that you loved your own life; the less, then, do blame’. An epithet is used to characterize Gawain’s bravery and determination, ‘the other stout knight’. Alliteration is used to show the sound of Gawain’s heart, ‘all the blood of his body burned in his face’; three words begin with the consonant b. An anaphora ‘but’ is used to depict that ‘the cause was not cunning, nor courtship either’.

The author used an alliterative revival style of writing to compose the 2530 lines and 101 stanzas of the poem. This style was made up of pairs of stressed syllables at the beginning of the lines in agreement with other pairs at the end of the lines. The lines include a pause, a caesura for stress. The author split an alliterative lines into different lengths and ended the stanzas with a rhyming section of five lines referred to as the bob and wheel; where the bob is a very short line with two syllables at times, followed by the wheel that was longer lines with internal rhyme.

On the other hand, in The Canterbury Tales: The General Prologue, Chaucer used several literary devices to beautify his poetry. He uses alliteration, ‘and frenssh she shak ful faire and fetisly’, with an ‘f’ being the common sound at the beginning of words, to emphasize the speech of Prioress. Chaucer uses characterization, whereby he tells of a real person to make his audience understand a character better. He uses humor in ironical and satirical forms to make fun of the appearance of Bath’s wife who wears a hat as large as a buckler over a scarf. The irony is used to depict Bath’s wife character who might appear religious but has questionable character as she marries a new person wherever she goes. Sarcasm is used to address corrupt religious leaders and monks; ‘and I seyde his opinion was good’ whereby the author shows that he agrees with the monk that the Bible is not a holy book, but in reality, he disagrees with him. Dream allegory is used, ‘WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote…’, to inform the reader on the arrival of spring and colorful flowers. The author might have disorganized The General Prologue deliberately to reflect the chaotic mix of travelers that had brought odds together.

In King Lear, a majority of the play is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter which is referred to as blank verse. It contains a number of important soliloquies-speeches delivered by a character on stage alone to portray his/her inner feelings and thoughts- such as when Edmund proclaims ‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law/My services are bound’. Shakespeare uses a double plot whereby he integrates two different scenarios, the Gloucester plot and the Lear plot. The Lear plot dominates until the end of act 3 after which the Gloucester plot dominates, and they later converge in the end. King Lear applies the use of spectacle to narrate tragedies on stage like when Gloucester’s eyes are crushed out.

Themes applied

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight employed several themes which include the following:

1. Times and seasons. Times, dates, cycles and seasons in the poem are symbolic in nature. Examples include; the start of the story on New Year’s Eve with a beheading and ends on the following New Year’s Day and Gawain leaving Camelot on All Saints Day and arriving at the castle of Bertilak on Christmas Eve.
2. Hunting and seduction. Shakespeare used significant parallels of the fox chase to the third seduction scene. Just as the fox looks for ways to avoid death by the Green Knight’s ax, Gawain looks for ways to avoid seduction by the Lady’s advances.
3. Games. Games in medieval times were viewed as tests of worthiness like when the Green Knight challenged the court’s right to its name in a ‘Christmas game’.
4. Emotion and narrative empathy. Gawain experiences immensely emotional events throughout the poem and the reader is invited to empathize with him as this flawed but understandable hero.

In comparison, The Canterbury Tales: The General Prologue implemented the following themes:

1. Class. The comparison of the people who belong to the upper class and the people who try to appear as though they belong to the high social status explores this theme. An example of this is the comparison between the Prioress and the Parson. The pilgrims’ wealth is explored and how their families are adjusting to their newfound social status.
2. Competition. This is a major theme in The Canterbury Tales as its vastly explored in the tales and also present among the pilgrims. The pilgrims set out on a storytelling competition, and everyone tries to tell the best tale.
3. Corruption in the Church. Most of the characters associated with the Church are not as righteous as they would like to appear. The medieval Church emphasized on the superficial show of piety, but characters like Parson reveal that there is something more required in order to be truly holy.
4. Lies and deceit. Most of the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales try to appear different from who they really are. The Merchant wants people to think he is financially solvent while the Prioress wants to appear to be a courtly amateur.

Finally, Shakespeare in King Lear explored the following themes:

1. Ego. King Lear is split into two types of people; the egoist characters such as Lear at the beginning of the play and Edmund and sacrificial, humble characters who are driven by love and loyalty to laws beyond themselves such as Cordelia and the servant who defends Gloucester against Cornwall.
3. The Gods. King Lear is set in pre-Christian Britain and focusses on the nature and power of the gods. In his prayer on the heath, Lear sees that the nature of god is somehow determined by the behavior of the people. Gloucester believes that the planet has an influence on the workings of the world and that the gods kill people for the fun of it.
4. Love. King Lear explores the different forms of love among people. Cordelia describes love as the quality of tender recognition of the Other’s value and its manifested in self-sacrifice and devotion to the truth beyond herself. Goneril and Regan express lust as love, that is, the desire to possess.
5. Insanity. Madness, an idea and a reality, is portrayed in the play. Lear fears running mad, and he does even though there are sanity and knowledge in his apparent mad proclamations on the heath and with Gloucester in Dover. Edgar assumes madness as a disguise in the play.

Regardless of the author, or overall differences in styles of the works, the three pieces are similar in that they were all set in the medieval times, they have all used the theme of time symbolically, and they have used their different styles to express their main ideas to their respective audiences. Arguably, they are all reflective of the times, the natures of their creators, and the social, political and cultural environments in which they were created.

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