Marie de France and Her Middle English Adapters

Abstract

Marie de France and Her Middle English Adapters A. C. Spearing University ofVirginia 0f TI!E DOZEN m mm, short rommm in English that are describedas Breton lays, only three derive from lais by Marie de France. Lai le Freine, dating probably from the early fourteenth century and surviving only in the Auchinleck manuscript, is a translation ofMarie'sLe Fresne; Sir Landevale, also probably from the early fourteenth century, and surviving in five texts, the best of which is in manuscript Rawlinson C 86, is a translation ofLanval; and Thomas Chestre's Sir Laun/al, dating from the late fourteenth century and preserved only in manuscript Cotton Caligula A.II, is another version of the same lai, based, however, not primarily on Marie's French but on SirLandevale and on consultation or recollection of othersourcesincluding the anonymousFrenchlay Graelent. 1 In this article my aim is to examine the three Middle English lays alongside Le Fresne and Lanvalin such a way as to consider what the comparison reveals about Marie de France's poems as well as about the English versions ofthem. There is an earlier comparison of these five poems by Theo Stemmler,2 from which I 1 For information about Laile Freine, see Margaret Wattie, ed., The Middle English Lai le Freine, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, vol. 10, no. 3 (Northampton, Mass., 1929), from which I quote its text. For information about Sir Landevale and SirLaun/al, see A. J. Bliss, ed., Sir Laun/al(London: Nelson, 1960), from which I quote the texts of both poems; also M.Mills, reviewofBliss'sedition, MAl31 (1962):75-78, for adifferentopinionon the sources of SirLaun/al. To avoid unnecessary complication I do not attempt any detailed consideration of Sir Launfol's indebtedness to sources other than Sir Landevale, nor do I discuss variant readings in texts of SirLandevale other than Rawlinson (some of these variants are discussed by Elizabeth Williams, "Lanval and Sir Landevale: A Medieval Translator and His Methods," LeedsSE, n.s., 3 [1969]:85-99). Where any doubt might arise about whether a passage referred to but not quoted isfroma Middle English lay or its Frenchoriginal, I precede the relevant line numbers with E or F. 2 Theo Stemmler, "Die mittelenglischen Bearbeirungen zweier Lais der Marie de France," Anglia 80 (1962):243-63; subsequent references to this work are indicated in the text by author and page number. I must also acknowledge an important debt to an unpublished paper on the Old French and Middle English versions of Le Fresne by Richard Axton read to the Medieval Graduate Seminar of the Cambridge English Faculty in 1979. 117 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER have learned much and to which I refer from time to time. Stemmler was chiefly concerned with the narrative and representational techniques ofthe poems, and, while I shallsometimes add to whathe has to say on thisscore, my goal-inevitably more speculative-is an interpretation of the mean­ ings of these poems. By good fortune, as we shall see, the two lais by Marie of which Middle English translations have survived represent two of her most characteristic junctures of narrative and meaning-the focusing of meaning in a sym­ bolic object and an encounter between the human and fairy worlds. In Le Fresne, my contention is that the meaning of Marie's poem is inward and unfixed, being focused in her characters' consciousnesses as well as crystallized inprivatesymbols, while her Middle English translator system­ atically shifts the meaning outward into the realm of the public and the concrete. InLanval I find a different kind ofinwardmeaning, having to do with paranoid and wish-fulfilling fantasies; in SirLandevale something of this is retained, though in a form attenuated by the characteristic exter­ nality of Middle English, while in Sir Laun/al, by a strange paradox, Chestre destroys the meaning ofLanvalprecisely by identifying totally with the very fantasies that it represents. I begin with some observations on Le Fresne. Stemmler has noted that Marie's lai.r were written for an aristocratic public and are deeply pervaded by the hofische Wertwelt of the twelfth century (pp. 259-60). Le Fresne is no exception in being thoroughly aristocratic in setting...