Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Abbreviations and conventions
- Timeline
- Introduction
- 1 ‘When the world woxe old, it woxe warre olde’: History, etymology and national identity, 1066–1337
- 2 ‘To destroy and ruin the whole English nation and language’: The chronicles of the Hundred Years War
- 3 ‘God gyue you quadenramp!’ Mimetic language in the war poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
- 4 ‘The brightnesse of braue and glorious words’: Language and war in the sixteenth century
- 5 ‘Talk not of France, sith thou hast lost it all’: The Hundred Years War on the stage in the 1590s
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
4 - ‘The brightnesse of braue and glorious words’: Language and war in the sixteenth century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Abbreviations and conventions
- Timeline
- Introduction
- 1 ‘When the world woxe old, it woxe warre olde’: History, etymology and national identity, 1066–1337
- 2 ‘To destroy and ruin the whole English nation and language’: The chronicles of the Hundred Years War
- 3 ‘God gyue you quadenramp!’ Mimetic language in the war poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
- 4 ‘The brightnesse of braue and glorious words’: Language and war in the sixteenth century
- 5 ‘Talk not of France, sith thou hast lost it all’: The Hundred Years War on the stage in the 1590s
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Summary
This book began with the sixteenth century's most proficient ‘medievalist’, whose etymological meditation on the ‘war-old’ worolde gave Chapter 1 its epigraph. Spenser's interest not only in the memes (allegory, etymology) but in the style and language of the older world are familiar. In his prefatory epistle to The Shepheardes Calender, the mysterious E. K. apologised for the ‘auncient’, ‘ragged and rusticall’ style of its author's language experiment:
as in most exquisite pictures they vse to blaze and portraict not onely the daintie lineaments of beautye, but also rounde about it to shadow the rude thickets and craggy clifts … for oftimes we fynde ourselues, I knowe not how, singularly delighted with the shewe of such naturall rudenesse, and take great pleasure in that disorderly order. Euen so doe those rough and harsh termes enlumine and make more clearly to appeare the brightnesse of braue and glorious words.
The apology was ostensibly a humble one, but its defence of the barbarity of vernacularity rested on a coy co-opting of classical eloquence: ‘for if my memory fayle not’, E. K. asserted, ‘Tullie in that booke, wherein he endeuoureth to set forth the paterne of a perfect Oratour, sayth that ofttimes an auncient worde maketh the style seeme graue, and as it were reuerend.’ Having the classical rhetorician vouch for rude and rugged English was playfully ironic: E. K. ventriloquised the spokesman of eloquence defending an idiom that defined itself in opposition to it. As Andrew Zurcher comments, ‘E. K.'s pre-emptive strike’ defended ‘Spenser's own archaisms with solid principles of classical rhetoric’, not only ‘justified on the grounds of decorum, but … even … a kind of imitatio.’ The ‘naturall’ rudenesse’ that could ‘enlumine’ (that familiar Chaucerian compliment, see p. 128) the ‘braue & glorious words’ has a ruddy lustre that, although its blazons may not ‘blaze’ with classical brilliance, nonethelesss somehow outshines its ‘brightnesse’. Chaucer takes on Cicero in this orchestrated debate, as Spenser, the humanist-medievalist, pondered how the old world met the new.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Hundred Years War in Literature, 1337-1600 , pp. 164 - 205Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016