1 - The Pleasure of Popular Romance: A Prefatory Essay

Summary

This piece aims to provide a particular context for the essays that follow by revisiting an essay on Middle English popular romances that I published nearly fifty years ago. It is an essay that has been frequently cited, though in a manner that is instructive of historical change. In early years, it was quoted with sometimes enthusiastic approval, but in recent years it has been increasingly singled out for criticism as an example of an outdated mode of approach. A recent scholar, writing on Havelok, is representative: she quotes one of the essay's many caustic criticisms of popular romance and says that it ‘typifies an early tradition of reading romance as hack-work written for a peasant or bourgeois audience’.

The ostensible point of the 1965 article was to provide a place for Middle English popular metrical romance in a formalist literary history, and to do so by concentrating on metre. The main body of Middle English metrical romance – the term ‘metrical’ being conventionally understood to exclude alliterative romance – was to be recognised, it was argued, as belonging to one of two significantly different metrical traditions, the one characterised by its use of the short octosyllabic couplet, the other by its use of tail-rhyme, in its various forms. The latter had been identified as a group and discussed at length by Trounce in a series of essays thirty years before, but his attempt to define a specifically East Anglian cultural milieu for tail-rhyme romance was flawed and his other arguments therefore subsequently neglected.