More Evidence for Intertextuality and Humorous Intent in The Weddynge of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell

Abstract

Although scholars have come to agree that The Weddynge of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell (WSG) is a more sophisticated text than its early critics would allow, the late romance1 continues to provoke disagreement about its mode and intents. Donald Sands classifies the poem of his edition by the heading “Burlesque and Grotesquerie,”2 acknowledging the humor evoked by the poem’s incongruities; however, he ultimately devalues the work, referring to the poet as an “indifferent artist.”3 Derek Pearsall designates WSG as a symptom of the “process of degeneration” that accompanied the “popularisation” and haphazard reproductions of romance in the later medieval period.4 Similarly, though shifting the cause from scribal inaccuracy to the force of a new cultural ideology, Wim Tigges views WSG as an example of “romance adapting itself to a changed worldview” in a process of literary evolution.5 Tigges, like Pearsall, sees nothing designedly absurd about the poem and dismisses Sands’s evaluation of the poem’s peculiarities, asserting that WSG is not humorous at all, but exhibits “a righteousness about the events described . . . that makes it difficult for any audience to suspect anything like a debunking of conventional romance.”6 As early as G. H. Maynadier’s source study of 1901,7 scholars have noted WSG’s connections with folktale traditions and contemporary romance. However, contrary to Tigges’s assertion, these similarities often only resemble conventions in order to forge a connection with other texts and then diverge from them. Stephen H. A. Shepherd makes a convincing case for the poem as a humorous and allusive travesty, the creative product of a deft literary prankster.8 His close analysis of the textual links between WSG and its analogues extends the early twentieth-century source studies of Maynadier, R. S. Loomis,9 and Sigmund Eisner10 to reveal the