Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction. The Anglo-Saxons: fact and fiction
- 1 Victor and victim: a view of the Anglo-Saxon past in LaƷamon's Brut
- 2 Kings, constitution and crisis: ‘Robert of Gloucester’ and the Anglo-Saxon remedy
- 3 The South English Legendary: Anglo-Saxon saints and national identity
- 4 King Ælle and the conversion of the English: the development of a legend from Bede to Chaucer
- 5 Saxons versus Danes: the anonymous Edmund Ironside
- 6 New times and old stories: Middleton's Hengist
- 7 Crushing the convent and the dread Bastille: the Anglo-Saxons, revolution and gender in women's plays of the 1790s
- 8 Anglo-Saxon attitudes?: Alfred the Great and the Romantic national epic
- 9 ‘Utter indifference’?: the Anglo-Saxons in the nineteenth-century novel
- 10 The charge of the Saxon brigade: Tennyson's Battle of Brunanburh
- 11 Lady Godiva
- 12 The undeveloped image: Anglo-Saxon in popular consciousness from Turner to Tolkien
- Index of Anglo-Saxons mentioned in the text
- Index of authors and works cited
6 - New times and old stories: Middleton's Hengist
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction. The Anglo-Saxons: fact and fiction
- 1 Victor and victim: a view of the Anglo-Saxon past in LaƷamon's Brut
- 2 Kings, constitution and crisis: ‘Robert of Gloucester’ and the Anglo-Saxon remedy
- 3 The South English Legendary: Anglo-Saxon saints and national identity
- 4 King Ælle and the conversion of the English: the development of a legend from Bede to Chaucer
- 5 Saxons versus Danes: the anonymous Edmund Ironside
- 6 New times and old stories: Middleton's Hengist
- 7 Crushing the convent and the dread Bastille: the Anglo-Saxons, revolution and gender in women's plays of the 1790s
- 8 Anglo-Saxon attitudes?: Alfred the Great and the Romantic national epic
- 9 ‘Utter indifference’?: the Anglo-Saxons in the nineteenth-century novel
- 10 The charge of the Saxon brigade: Tennyson's Battle of Brunanburh
- 11 Lady Godiva
- 12 The undeveloped image: Anglo-Saxon in popular consciousness from Turner to Tolkien
- Index of Anglo-Saxons mentioned in the text
- Index of authors and works cited
Summary
In rereading and reworking history, each generation picks up what it needs or recognizes or understands, and leaves out what it finds uninteresting or obscure. History is a process of partial appropriation, focusing on points of similarity or difference. When Thomas Middleton dramatized the first invasion of Britain by the Saxons in his play Hengist, King of Kent, he acknowledged this at the outset, explaining that he was reworking a traditional legend as a tale for his own times. The monk Raynulph (Higden), acting as prologue, reminded the audience that
Fashions that are now Calld new
Haue bene worne by more than you,
Elder times haue vsd ye same
Though these new ones get ye name,
So in story whats now told
That takes not part with days of old?
Then to proue times mutuall glorye
Ioyne new times loue, to old times storye.
(Chor. i. 11 – 18)The story he proceeded to tell was one that interested contemporary historians whose several versions reflected their developing sense of nationhood and of the need for myths to support that concept. While the details might vary, the main outline had been established by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia regum Britanniæ. It was the tale of Vortiger(n), the proud tyrant who persuaded Constans (Constantius, in Middleton's play), eldest son of Constantine, to leave his monastery and become king. Constans was subsequently killed by his own bodyguard, and his younger brothers, Aurelius Ambrosius and Uther Pendragon, fled to Brittany (Historia, vi. 6–8).
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- Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century , pp. 107 - 121Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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