The Medieval French 'Roman d'Alexandre' by Bateman Edward; Alfred FouletReview by: B. WoledgeThe Modern Language Review, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Apr., 1960), pp. 278-280Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4623556 .

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278 Reviews

without quoting any authority for this statement. (When I lectured in Edinburgh before 1951 I found Scottish students came up with a wider, and different, know- ledge of American literature.) He then describes the knowledge of American literature in Northern Irish schools ('poetry by T. S. Eliot and short stories by Hawthorne, Poe, Bierce, and 0. Henry') and says 'The English schools are prob- ably closer to the Scottish pattern. Some American literature is read, certainly more than before, sometimes even as part of the required syllabus (Hawthorne, Melville). But it is all dependent on the interest of the teacher, is usually extra- curricular, and hardly contributes much to a rounded picture of the United States.' There seems here a desire to have everything within the framework of a syllabus, a hankering for a centralized system. Without an interested teacher there would be little point in any activity taking place. And the extra-curricular activity covers much more reading in American literature than might be indicated, if, that is, inter- viewing schoolchildren on their private reading may be cited as a check to these superficial generalizations which Professor Skard rounds off with a statement written by an English master in 1956, 'It seems to me fantastic that such an enor- mous and fruitful field should be totally neglected by our educational system'. It is interesting that Professor Skard has that crusading zeal for his subject which tends to rule out other subjects: he disapproves of the 'relatively low total production of theses and dissertations with reference to North American civilization' at London and Oxford, regarding the figures as striking by comparison with the annual pro- duction of theses and dissertations 'regarding even quite out of the way and insigni- ficant places and phenomena within the Commonwealth'.

Professor Skard complains that American studies in England give an impression of inhibited growth and he is largely justified in this if progress in this field on the Continent is used as a yardstick. Whether he has given sufficient credit to the individual achievements of some British scholars, particularly in American history, is doubtful: and he may well underestimate the knowledge of American literature and society which exists in English academic circles without anything obvious in the record to indicate, by way of statistics, articles, theses, books or broadcasts, its existence. And beyond the academic circles there still exists in England the 'general reader' who may be civil-servant or businessman, artist or bus-conductor, who reads either because he was taught to do so or has taught him- self. He has no place in this work; he is a difficult person to generalize about; but perhaps he ought occasionally to be remembered in the midst of much of the personal comment which, of necessity, is included in this wide and enterprising study, or the picture would indeed be a gloomy one. As it is, the difficulty Professor Skard's work creates for the informed reader is that his information and therefore his con- clusions are no longer a picture of 'present organization' (particularly of British universities which are rapidly creating posts in American literature) but part of a 'history' which is now being left behind, as the literature and society of all the English-speaking peoples become more known to all those, wherever they may be, who study them comparatively. LEEDS

A. NORMAN JEFFARES

The Medieval French 'Roman d'Alexandre'. Volume vii. Version of Alexandre de Paris, variants and notes to Branch IV, with an introduction by BATEMAN EDWARDS and ALFRED FOULET. (Elliott Monographs 41.) Princeton Uni- versity Press. 1955. viii+ 132 pp.

This latest volume of the Elliott Monographs brings the great collective edition of the Old French Alexandre romance still nearer to completion. The only volume still

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Reviews 279

to come is presumably volume vi, which will contain the notes and variants to Branch III.

Branch IV, with which we are concerned in the volume under review, is the last and shortest of the branches of the Alexandre de Paris version. It tells of Alexander's poisoning, death and burial, and the bulk of it is formed of long speeches, a first series in which Alexander on his death-bed distributes his conquests among his lieutenants, and a second in which, after his death, they take it in turns to declaim laments. The text itself, established by the late Professor Bateman Edwards, was published in 1937 as volume II of this edition. The present volume can be considered as an introduction to Branch Iv; it contains a discussion of sources, a classification of the twenty manuscripts, a selection from the innumerable variants and a fairly copious series of notes; the authors do not claim to deal with style or literary qualities. The volume is mainly the work of Professor Bateman Edwards, but it was completed and to some extent rewritten after his death by Alfred Foulet.

It is impossible not to feel intense admiration towards the team of scholars whose years of patient study have made available to us the Old French Alexandre texts, works of capital importance but which, thanks to their many manuscripts and widely differing versions, present one of the most awe-inspiring tasks in the whole of French medieval scholarship. But one's gratitude is tinged with regret that the printed text is so far from any extant manuscript and that the wonderfully rich material gathered by the editors is so awkward to use.

For the Branch under discussion, the base-manuscript chosen was C (B.N. 25517), which the editor frequently altered in a variety of ways, mainly in an attempt to reconstruct the version of Alexandre de Paris. The present volume enables us for the first time to recapture the text of G, but in order to do so we have not only to pick out the rejected readings from a mass of variants (fifty-three rejected readings are given among the variants for the first hundred lines) but also to turn to another part of the book to find the complete stanzas that are rejected, while the order in which G arranges the stanzas is given in yet a third place. No one nowadays objects to a manuscript being emended if there are sound reasons for the emendation, but in this case the changes are so many, the reasons for them so controversial, and the base-manuscript so difficult to disinter that one must regretfully decide that the printed text does not offer safe material for detailed literary or linguistic study. This becomes even more saddening when we read page 25, where the editors, after repeating the reasons that led to the constitution of the text twenty-five years ago, confess that they are no longer confident of the validity of their classification.

The notes to Branch IV are perhaps the most interesting part of the book. They contain comparisons with other texts that will prove valuable to anyone working on the Alexander legend, and useful discussions of unusual words and linguistic forms, such as atendeor (1120), 'one who watches or waits'; plus vers que n'est jus de colire (1278); cune, cunele (748), Italianate words for 'cradle'; fesse (i.e. faisse, 697), 'bandage'; changier corroie por cordele (740), 'to make a change for the worse' (the editors call attention to another example of this in Saisnes, I, 177; a third example, from the R. de la Poire, is in Tobler-Lommatzsch, II, 883). The following items, though not included in the notes, perhaps deserve a mention:

biface (1296)-the name of a material. A fourth example to add to the three given by Godefroy and Tobler-Lommatzsch.

entroblier (468)-'to be parted from'. The dying Alexander says to his captains: 'Molt me samble grief chose de vos entroblier.' This meaning, which does not seam to be recorded elsewhere, seems to be due to the rhyme. The author's desire to write long and eloquent rhyming stanzas leads him frequently to employ rare or unexpected words.

escrioison (718)-'din, shouting'. This very rare word (Godefroy, III, 441a and Tobler-Lommatzsch, III, 999) seems to have existed only in order to provide a rhyme;

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280 Reviews some twelfth-century authors found the suffix -oison extremely useful for this purpose (airison, celison, demorison, plorison, etc.).

du lignage Jovis (1600)--This use of a Latin proper name, juxtaposed and in the genitive, occurs several times in the text (e.g. 1574). Latin genitives were also used in this way by the authors of Eneas (2957, 3932) and of the Munich Brut (172, 2075, 2091). LONDON B. WOLEDGE

La Farce du pauvre Jouhan. Edited by E. DROZ and M. ROQUES. (Textes litteraires franqais.) Geneva: Droz; Paris: Minard. 1959. 63 pp.

This farce has already appeared in Mlle Droz's edition of Le Recueil Trepperel, vol. I, Les Sotties (Paris, Droz, 1935), the second volume of which, to contain the farces, is eagerly awaited. There can, of course, be no rigid distinction between farces and sotties, and Le Pauvre Jouhan was included by Mlle Droz among the latter because it contains a sot who takes no part in the action but enlivens the play with his comments and songs. The present edition does not differ greatly from the earlier one.

The farce contains only two eight-line rondelets, characteristically used to open and close the play. The editors make no comment on this usage, which may perhaps be obvious,but does not seem to have been remarked upon by critics writing of the genre. The use of the rondelet in the farces and sotties was clearly not haphazard. Certain conventions which arose from both functional and artistic considerations were generally followed. The most obvious use was, as here, to open or close the play, and examples of this are legion. Other uses are, to mark the entrance or de- parture of a character-almost, one might say, opening or closing the 'scenes'- and to point the 'moral' (if such it may be called), or, very similarly, to embody the locution which the farce is representing in a comically literal fashion. That there was some abuse of these conventions is to be expected, but even in a farce like La Femme qui fut desrobee (Cohen, Recueil de Farces inddites du X Ve sidcle, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1949, pp. 179-85) which contains a very large number of rondelets, the majority will be found to conform to the conventions outlined. It is difficult to determine how many of these rondelets were actually sung. Two instances where the rubric gives definite directions to this effect are to be found in La Farce de trois amoureux de la croix (Cohen, op. cit. pp. 57-65, 11. 547-54) and La Farce du ramon- neur de chemindes (ibid. pp. 235-41, 11. 1-8). The mere existence of these rubrics suggests that singing the rondelets was not a regularly accepted thing, as does the fact that many plays open with both a chanson and a rondelet, but it is possible that some of the rondelets with their refrain based on a popular locution may have been intended for singing.

Mile Droz did not include the second rondelet (11. 456-62) in her Table des Incipits, refrains et chansons in the Recueil Trepperel, presumably because it is a line short. It seems probable that 'Je vouldroys ne l'avoir one veue' is the second line of the refrain and should be repeated after 1. 462, thus completing the rondelet.

A readily available scholarly edition of a farce is always welcome. Critical approach to the genre as a whole is greatly hampered by the fact that few have so far appeared. When the editors are Mlle Droz and M. Roques we have cause to be doubly thankful.

OXFORD R. C. D. PERMAN

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