How to pronounce Arviragus / The Franklin's Tale

English Elm (Ulmus procera). Frome, 22 September 2021.

[Since the 1960s, this is about as big as the trees get in most of the UK. In their youth they are healthy, but once the bark becomes rugged enough it's sure to attract the Elm-Bark Beetle, which inadvertently introduces Dutch Elm disease, and the tree then dies. (In Brighton they take special measures to keep the disease at bay, so you can still see mature English Elms.) In the first Chapter of David Copperfield the "tall old elm-trees ... tossing their arms about", like the expectant Mrs Copperfield not knowing if it's a boy or a girl, signal an era that's long gone.]

This post is a singularly pointless bundle of notes, but it passes, I hope, through some interesting territory.

Arveragus is the name of the noble knight who marries Dorigen with great joy at the start of Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, and then (as knights do) takes off for a couple of years of knightly feats, leaving Dorigen to her own devices. The titular hero does just the same in Wolfram's Parzifal. But in Chaucer the story stays at home: we never hear or care about Arveragus' knightly feats, only that he's not here.

It's clear from the scansion that Chaucer pronounced the name on the second and fourth syllables: Arveragus.

The tale is set in Brittany and is announced as being a Breton lay (a well known medieval genre). Most scholars have believed that Chaucer confected the Breton setting: he adapted source material from Boccaccio (often one of his unacknowledged sources) and gave it a Celtic colouring. If this is true he did it very thoroughly. The name Arveragus could have come from Book IV of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History: one of the sons of Cymbeline, written Arviragus there and in Shakespeare's play. 

Certainly Chaucer's tale has marked differences from a Breton lay. But I do feel attracted to the argument by William Henry Schofield (1901) that there are indications in Geoffrey of Monmouth of the prior existence of exactly such Celtic traditions as appear in Chaucer's tale, both concerning Arviragus (famously happy marriage surviving sore trials) and Aurelius (magical rock removal). It's unprovable, but Schofield's basic contention is persuasive, that Geoffrey's fabulous history wasn't simply made up out of thin air but wove existing oral narratives into a framework of Roman history. So if he dwells on Arviragus' especially happy marriage it's because it was already proverbial.

(Schofield suggests that the original British form of the name was Arverus, with "ar" being a prefix and "ver" the root. The name, in the form "Arveri", appears on a Romano-British inscription.)

In Shakespeare's Cymbeline the name Arviragus appears frequently as a speech prefix and in SDs, but only once in the spoken text, and this appearance is inconclusive regarding pronunciation (taking into account the metrical freedom of late Shakespeare):

(Belarius.) ... The younger brother, Cadwal,
Once Arviragus, in as like a figure
Strikes life into my speech and shows much more
His own conceiving.

(Cymbeline III.3.102-105)

I suspect the stress pattern is meant to be second-and-fourth again: the rhythm of Arviragus matching that of his elder brother Guiderius and foster-father Belarius.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth Guiderius dies soon after becoming king. Arviragus becomes king in his turn and is the more important figure, reigning a long time, sometimes accepting the authority of Rome (he marries the Emperor Claudius' daughter) and sometimes rebelling.

He may have been a historical figure of the 1st century CE. As Geoffrey points out, he is referred to in Juvenal: A gift of a giant turbot to the Emperor is an omen, the flatterer Veiento claims, that "you will capture some king, or Arviragus will fall from his British chariot-pole". 

   -  v  v  /  -  v  v   /  -     v  v   /   -    ()  -   / -  v  v   /   -  v

 excidet / Aruira / gus. pere / grina est / belua: / cernis

(Satire 4, line 127)

Wikipedia gives the name as Arvirargus, which contradicts Chaucer's pronunciation and, so far as I can see, Juvenal's too. (But if you think my scansion is wrong, please let me know... it's been a long time since I parsed a dactylic  hexameter...)

The translators of Juvenal into English seem to agree with the stress on second and fourth. Dryden unfortunately never translated the fourth Satire, but here's Barten Holyday (1593 - 1661):

                                                        Yet came
Vejento short of him? struck with thy flame,
Bellona, he Divines: and, here, says he,
A wondrous Omen of Great Triumph see!
Some King thou shalt lead Captive, or at last
Arviragus from British Chariot cast.
The Beast is Forreigne: On his back behold,
Upright thy Darts stand! 

(Source.)

Dryden didn't think much of Holyday's over-literal translation, though he praised the notes. On Arviragus, the note is about the seeming contradiction of dates: Geoffrey of Monmouth placing him in the reign of Claudius (41 - 54 CE), and Juvenal in the reign of Domitian (81 - 96 CE). Schofield wondered if Geoffrey was misled by Juvenal's prudent naming of the Emperor: though he's in fact talking about Domitian he calls him "the bald Nero".  But then, as Holyday suggested, the same prudence might have led Juvenal to name a past rebel against the Empire rather than a current one. So Geoffrey may have ended up drawing the right conclusion about when Arviragus was active. 

(Juvenal announces his approach to naming at the end of Satire I, here in Dryden's translation:

Muse, be advised; 'tis past considering time,

When entered once the dangerous lists of rhime;

Since none the living villains dare implead,

Arraign them in the persons of the dead.

)

Here's the passage about Arviragus in the translation by William Gifford (1756 - 1826):

Nor fell Veiento short:—as if possest
With all Bellona's rage, his laboring breast
Burst forth in prophecy; "I see, I see
The omens of some glorious victory!
Some powerful monarch captured!—lo, he rears,
Horrent on every side, his pointed spears!
Arviragus hurled from the British car:
The fish is foreign, foreign is the war."

(Source.)

Gifford's is a somewhat infamous name in English Literature (though not to Byron), but even Hazlitt acknowledged the qualities of Gifford's 1800 Juvenal translation; it looks very lively to me.

*

A lost play Arveragus was performed at the court of Charles I in 1636.

*

Which was the mooste fre, as thinketh yow?

Online text of the Franklin's Tale: 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22120/22120-h/22120-h.htm#franklin

The main source for the Franklin's Tale can be read in the link below (in a sixteenth-century English translation), and it's very good reading. It's the fourth of thirteen "Love Questions" that are themselves an episode within Giovanni Boccaccio's enormous romance Il Filocolo. 

http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/authors/boccaccio/filoc.html

This particular Love Question is posed by a certain Menedon; as in Chaucer, it asks who showed the greatest liberality: the husband, the lover or the wonder-worker.  In Boccaccio (but notably not in Chaucer) there then follows a detailed debate.

In Menedon's tale, neither the husband nor the wife have names. The lover (i.e. the equivalent of Aurelius) is called Tarolfo. 

These characters lived, Menedon says, in his own memory and "in the countrey where I was borne", later described by Tarolfo as "the extremes of the west", and by Menedon (during the debate) as part of Spain. (Galicia? Might Schofield have been right, that Boccaccio too was drawing on Celtic story material?)

Unlike Arveragus the husband in this tale is never absent on business. Nevertheless his wife is pestered by the lovestruck Tarolfo, in the form of signs of attention, messengers, passing down the street outside, etc. She's completely loyal to her husband and thinks she'd better tell him about Tarolfo's behaviour before someone else does, so he doesn't suppose she encouraged it.  But then she worries that telling her husband is going to lead to a whole world of trouble, maybe even violence. So instead she comes up with the idea of putting a stop to Tarolfo's indiscretions by offering him a conditional promise that she'll never have to redeem:  OK, I'll give you my love if you can give me a May garden in the middle of January. (And in the mean time, quit hanging around.)

The bulk of the story consists of Tarolfo scouring the world for a way to do this, meeting an impoverished root-gatherer called Tebano and offering half his wealth to produce the required unseasonal garden; Tebano's deployment of herbal lore and observing the moon and pagan prayers, and his voyages around the world on a chariot pulled by dragons, gathering his herbs from exotic places. (His magical herbs are so powerful that even the dragons regain their youth.) And thus, in the midst of winter, Tarolfo has his blooming May garden. For good measure it even has the ripe fruits of August. 

The wife is sufficiently unconcerned to have a long appreciative look round the garden. But when she gets home reality hits, and she's very upset and in a quandary what to do. The husband, seeing her agitation, eventually prises the story out of her. He says, well you struck a deal and he's certainly delivered, so go and give him what you offered, but only this once. And I won't be cross with you, because I know you love me and you never meant for this to happen. But no more conditional promises, eh? So she dresses up and goes to Tarolfo and says: I'm here, do as you please. But once Tarolfo finds out that she's there with her husband's consent, he's struck by the husband's incredible generosity, makes his own generous surrender of his claim, and then the sympathetic Tebano makes the same surrender of his claim. 

Debating this, Menedon argues that the husband is the least liberal, because he offers such an insignificant trifle, something that costs him nothing; that Tarolfo is much more liberal, to give up the sexual satisfaction he's been burning for all this time; but the most liberal by far is Tebano, to give up the wealth he has fairly earned and return to a life of miserable poverty. 

But the queen has the casting vote, and she says that the husband is the most liberal of the three, though not the most wise: because what he offers up is his honour, which unlike a sexual conquest or a sum of money can never be replaced once it's gone. (The queen makes the point, as many modern readers of Chaucer have done, that anyway the husband is wrong to regard his wife's "promise" to Tarolfo as valid, since fulfilling it would break her prior marriage vow.)

*

This isn't a particularly scrupulous account of Boccaccio's tale, but I think it does get the tone about right. He extends himself on Tebano's pagan prayer and the crazy dragon journey, but he fairly rips through the rest of the story because, after all, it's only a prelude to the main course, which is the debate. This summary approach places little emphasis on the characters' emotions. It deals in the facts of the case, and its sped-up narrative even has a touch of fabliau: sexual shenanigans as matter for a hearty laugh rather than earnest ethical consideration. 

*

Chaucer buries that worldly matter-of-factness in an exalted atmosphere of courtly love. His characters are feeling creatures, full of sentiment. In a prelude to the main story Arveragus is shown as an exemplary humble wooer who intends to maintain the same submissive devotion to his lady even now they are married. His wife Dorigen is (unlike the wife in Boccaccio) tormented by her own feelings of love for her absent husband and fears for his safe return to their dangerous coast. In Boccaccio the wife tells her husband: "I will rather rid my self of life, than do any thing displeasant to you, or dishonor to your person"; that hint becomes Dorigen's agitated list of the women she should emulate by dying rather than suffering dishonour. Likewise Tarolfo's passing remark to Tebano that he would gladly welcome death is enormously heightened by Chaucer, Aurelius' "two yeer and moore" of bed-ridden despair matching the two years of silent devotion to Dorigen that preceded the eventual revelation of his feelings for her. And though, in the denouement, Arveragus reflects some of the husband's sang-froid, he's unable to maintain it for long and breaks down in tears. Even Aurelius' brother (one of Chaucer's innovations) is seen to weep and wail. 

With this foregrounding of sentiment we can link the major new features introduced by Chaucer: the unusual set-up of his couple's marriage, with neither having the "maistrie" -- evidently responding to the preceding tales by the Wife of Bath and the Clerk, as Kittredge observed --, the Breton setting and  "thise grisly feendly rokkes blake". 

In Boccaccio, the wife's conditional promise to Tarolfo was well-motivated. Dorigen's, on the other hand, is strikingly unexpected. After her first uncompromising response to Aurelius ends with "Taak this for final answere as of me", this is what immediately follows:

But aftere that in pley thus seyde she:

"Aurelie," quod she, "by heighe God above,

Yet wolde I graunte yow to been youre love,

Sin I yow se so pitously complaine.

Looke what day that endelong Britaine

Ye remoeve alle the rokkes, stoon by stoon . . ."

It's positively tantalizing, the draping of this cold shower in such lacy curtains. And Dorigen's tease or sarcasm or whatever it is seems completely unnecessary: Chaucer has eliminated the motive. By doing so, he's created an enigma for his audience to decide for themselves. (Is Dorigen uncontrollably giving vent to her fears about the rocks and her husband's safety? Is she furious with Aurelius for pursuing her when defenceless and alone?) And yet, this dialogue between Dorigen and Aurelius is profoundly convincing, partly because of its switches of tack and tone. These people are many-sided, they scintillate, changing from moment to moment. 

It's a bit like how Shakespeare leaves it up to his audience to ponder Hamlet's delay or Iago's malignity: whereas, in Shakespeare's sources, Saxo's Amleth had a very good reason for delay and Cinthio's Ensign had a very clear though very bad reason for malignity (towards Disdemona, not her husband). Both Chaucer and Shakespeare whirl us into new narrative depths by sacrificing explanation.

*

It's an intriguing insight into Chaucer's creative process to see how he nevertheless retains some apparently dispensible elements of Boccaccio in transmuted form. 

In Boccaccio, the wife's sense of Tarolfo's irritating persistence was important to the plot. Boccaccio says: "Now for all this, Tarolfo surceased not, folowing the precepts of Ovid, who saith, that a man must not thorough the hardnesse of a woman leave to persever, bicause with continuance the soft water pierceth the harde stone." Chaucer dropped the lover's irritating persistence, yet he retained the worn stone image, applying it to the well-meaning friends who persist (with partial success) in trying to console Dorigen:

By proces, as ye knowen eeverichoon,

Men may so longe graven in a stoon

Til som figure therinne emprented be . . .

Likewise, the garden of Boccaccio's story, though it no longer comprises the "impossible" task, strangely lingers on: as the May garden where Dorigen is taken by her friends, where Aurelius sings and dances and reveals his love (but this time, it really is May); and where, at the end, Dorigen has arranged to meet Aurelius; though as it turns out they run into each other on the way. Nor has Chaucer forgotten about the midwinter aspect of Boccaccio's story: this becomes the beautifully described December season in which Aurelius and the "philosophre" return to Brittany. Finally, Tebano's prayer to night and the stars and Hecate and Ceres seems to have suggested Aurelius' prayer to Apollo and Lucina; though Tebano's prayer produces dramatic results and Aurelius' prayer produces no result whatever. 

*

Looking at these details of what Chaucer did with Boccaccio can seem sort of illegitimate. I mean, these transformations are emphatically not part of what Chaucer expected his audience to see. He did not expect them to have even heard of Boccaccio. You could say we've stopped looking at the front of the tapestry and are looking at the knots on the back. 

But then, we're not in Chaucer's audience any more. Reading six hundred years later, one of the things we keep coming up against is the alien nature of medieval art; the pervasive sense that, in spite of everything we enjoy and relish and admire and love, there are fundamental aspects of Chaucer's poetic that we don't entirely grasp. That Chaucer's narrative logic isn't quite like ours. That his idea of what is or isn't relevant often surprises us. And when we feel a restiveness, so that we impute e.g. sarcasm or irony or boredom or failure, these imputations feel less secure than they do with later writers. Medieval culture is complicated, sophisticated, full of differences to ours, and yet full of similarities that may be genuine, but may also mislead us.