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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Illinois Press
The Middle English romance of Havelok is notable for its attention to the details of what would, in a later text, be called bourgeois realism--non-courtly characters, town life, labor and money, pathos and poverty. The young king who has grown up incognito as the son of Grim the fisherman regains his throne, of course, and as he rises in status the story expands to include several large-scale battles, a number of feasts, and most of the hyperbolic resolutions of popular romance--Havelok and his wife Goldeborw have, for example, fifteen children, "Hwar-of The sones were kinges alle,... And The douhtres alle quenes" (ll. 2981-83).(1) Nevertheless, for much of its length Havelok portrays with earnest affection a level of reality hardly treated in romance, and not often in medieval literature at all. Havelok takes place, in fact, in what most critics assume is the world of the audience for just such a work, the non-aristocratic milleu of towns and commerce whose members were unable or unwilling to read romances in French;(2) many critics have explained its representations of noncourtly life as a reflection of its non-courtly audience. John Halverson discusses the differences between Havelok and its French analogues(3)--among them the rank of Grim (a `barun' in the Anglo-Norman Lai d'Haveloc and a `Thral' in the English romance) and the praise of hard work and enterprise added to the English version--and concludes that "the English poem suggests what I should call vaguely a `middle-class' milieu, while the French Lai implies an upper-class source.... The English story seems more English because the culture that produced it was more `bourgeois' than the French."(4) Other critics who have examined the style of the poem appear to make the same assumption: Derek Pearsall states that "Havelok is unique among English romances in its systematic realization of the story in terms of humble everyday life.... Havelok has a claim, if any English Romance has, to be regarded as the genuine expression of popular consciousness."(5) Dieter Mehl asserts that "there is no doubt that the poem is addressed not to a courtly, but to a middle-class audience.... [The author! did not want to give detailed descriptions of things his audience would not be interested in and ... he made a very conscious effort to popularize his material."(6) A similar assumption is found in the Manual of the Writings in Middle English: "The English romancer aimed not at a courtly or learned audience but at the common people.... [T]he romancer portrays his hero's experiences with the gusto of one who himself relishes life in the kitchen and the fish-market."(7)
This assumption of a self-evident identity of textual representation and audience experience is at first glance a reasonable one, an analogy of narrative to literary history: just as the young king is forced to leave his royal patrimony and live among the common folk of Lincoln, so the romance story has left its courtly origins and taken up residence in the noisy, penny-pinching world of bourgeois realism. It is helped along by the example of the Canterbury Tales, in which, for example, the gentle Knight and the churlish Miller each tells a story in which he himself might appear as a character. Chaucer cannily dramatizes and dissects classical notions of stylistic decorum(8) on the level of narrator and audience, exploring the relation between representation and readership, narrative strategies and social structures. In a somewhat simplified form, this has provided both a justification and a paradigm for our contextualization of medieval literary texts: the French romances of the twelfth century have been described as a "self-portrayal of feudal knighthood,"(9) while stories of lower-class characters, such as the fabliaux, have been assumed to reflect the bourgeois world in which they were created and enjoyed.(10) I believe this assumption is deceptively simple, and would like to examine its implications in relation to Havelok, and compare its effect to a very different sort of medieval text whose purposes arc, I think, surprisingly similar.
If French courtly romances of the twelfth century offer "a very rich and pungent picture of the life of a single class," as Auerbach argued, then English popular romances might offer a similar self-portrayal of a different level of society, the peasants or townspeople excluded from representation in the French romance except as ancillary figures, "sometimes colorful but more usually comic or grotesque."(11) But the evidence for popular taste in the Middle English period works against the assumption that there ought to be an equivalence between representation and readership. In a different age one might remember that Emma Bovary would never have read the story of her own life; she preferred sentimental romances such as Paul et Virginie. The hallmarks of popularity in medieval romance, in addition to such stylistic features as repetition, redundancy, and a tendency towards meaninglessness in detail, include such narrative elements as fantasy, exaggeration, obscurity of motive, and an often stark bareness of setting, outline, and background--all the qualities parodied by Chaucer in the tale of Sir Thopas, and all features which are, for the most part, strikingly absent from Havelok.(12) The representational style of simpler and more fantastical romances like King Horn, Bevis of Hampton, and Guy of Wanvick is so utterly different from that of Havelok that one theory of popular romance cannot account for both kinds of story-telling.(13) Most English romances, like their French counterparts, describe the adventures of members of the highest levels of society; they deliberately distance themselves from the present and the world of the audience.(14) Havelok stands apart from these other popular romances precisely because the level of reality depicted is not different from that of the presumed audience for the tale. The bourgeois tone of Havelok is no transparent consequence of its social context; its narrative strategy of mirroring the world of its assumed audience is striking and atypical.
To appreciate the effect of this bourgeois tone in Havelok one need only compare it to the poem which accompanies it in manuscript, King Horn. Havelok and Horn are similar in many respects: both tell the story of a young man's growth, through love and battle, from dispossessed, powerless and exiled youth to revenging king. Both narratives are elaborately structured with balance and parallel; Havelok is, if anything, more carefully constructed than Horn. The plot parallels, such as those telling the dual stories of the death and succession of Athelwold in England and Birkabeyn in Denmark, are deliberately close; the patterns of repetition and variation, such as the three revelations of Havelok's birthmark or the progressive meals and feasts which mark the changes in the hero's fortunes, are scrupulously precise.(15) It is the manner of telling the two stories which is completely different. Horn is...
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