Sydney Studies in Society and Culture

Words and Wordsmiths Front matter

Geraldine Barnes — 2023-12-21

On December 31, 1987, Leslie Rogers retired as McCaughey Professor of Early English Literature and Language at the University of Sydney, a Chair which he had held since July 4, 1966. The co-sponsorship of this volume by The University of Sydney Arts Association, of which he has been Secretary and President, and The Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture marks an appreciation of his long and active membership of the Faculty of Arts. Early in his career at Sydney, where, in 1958, he took up a Senior Lectureship in the Department of English, Leslie became Sub-Dean (1960--62) to Professor John Dunston and, subsequently, Pro-Dean to Professor Ralph Farrell in 1967. From 1968-71 he was Dean of the Faculty, during a busy period of re-structuring and expansion of the faculty system. He has served twice as a Fellow of Senate, first (1968-69) in his capacity as Dean, and later (1974-75) as one of three professorial Fellows· elected by the academic staff.

Make Me A Pedant Lord- But Not Yet

Don Anderson — 2023-12-21

'POLTROON. An abject and contemptible coward. From Old Italian poltrone, lazy good-for-nothing, apparently from poltrire, to lie indolently in bed.' In a word, ME. There I was helpless in my hospital bed, an eminent anaesthetist (or anaesthesiologist, if the Americans take over our language as they have our hotel rooms) about to insert a needle for an antibiotic and saline drip into my right arm my writing arm! - and he asks me what I do and I admit to being a member of the University of Sydney's English Department (happily, I don't have time to confess to being a newspaper columnist) and he turns out also to be an aesthetician, when it comes to matters linguistic. One of his sons, he informs me, sounding a note of betrayal of which Oedipus' dad would not have been unproud (pardon me, George Orwell!), recently used 'criteria' as a singular noun! And did I know that journalists had to be given lessons in how to write? The drip inserted, he lent (loaned?) me a copy of Wayne speak to cheer me up.

Chaucer's Double Telling of the Knight's Tale

Geraldine Barnes — 2023-12-21

Among literary deathbed scenes, the pathos of Arcite's passing in Chaucer's Knight's Tale ranks with that of Falstaff, Little Nell, and Marguerite. But while Falstaff babbles of green fields (Henry V, II. 3), Arcite delivers a formal lamentation in which he mourns the unhappy lot of man and commends Emily, his bride-to-be, to his cousin, friend, and rival, Palamon. The latter is associated with all the chivalric virtues: 'That is to seyen, trouthe, honour, knyghtede, I Wysdom, humblesse, estaat, and heigh kynrede, I Fredom, and al that longeth to that art' (11. 2789-91),1 although from what we've seen of Palamon's conduct to this point, these lines sound more like Falstaffs delirium than an accurate assessment of knighthood in general, and Palamon's in particular. Arcite's eloquent valediction is not the only occasion in the Knight's Tale where discrepancies arise between ritual (whether verbal, like Arcite's lament, or staged, like the tournament of Book IV) and 'reality'. Set within the framework of chivalric romance, that narrative form in which the noble hero is characteristically successful in his quest, loved by his lady, and in command of his destiny, the Knight's Tale upends such comfortable audience expectations in a world controlled by spiteful deities, baleful fortune, and arbitrarily minded despots, where the best man does not get the girl, the bride dedicates herself to the goddess of virginity on her nuptial eve, and the wedding feast becomes the funeral meats. Although it is a story of love and war, told by a knight, fitting the Knight's Tale into the mould of medieval romance is a square peg into round hole exercise. Its source, Boccaccio's Teseida, calls itself an epic but owes much to popular Italian romance. If Chaucer really intended, as is sometimes suggested, to turn the twelvebook epic into a chivalric romance, he made a botched job of it; but if his purpose was to make the frequently banal conventions and optimistic outlook of that genre play an ironic counterpoint to the tale's bleak picture of the human condition, the result is a tour de force.

Henryson's Figurative Technique in The Cock and the }asp

Philippa Bright — 2023-12-21

The Cock and the Jasp,l Henryson's fable about a cock who finds a precious jewel on a dunghill' only to discard it in favour of food, is one of the best known fables in his collection, yet it is also one in which his figurative methods have been consistently misunderstood. Most critics who have discussed the fable have felt that the cock is quite right in rejecting a precious jewel for which he has no use and have been surprised to discover in the moralitas that he is explicitly condemned for his folly. To account for the apparent reversal of their expectations they have usually adopted one of two positions: either they have concluded that the moralitas is a pious afterthought which has a purely arbitrary connexion with the preceding narrative or else they have argued that the shock of the unexpected interpretation is intentional and an essential part of the meaning of the fable. Both of these positions, however, are untenable since they are based on two quite erroneous assumptions, the first of which is that in the fable we are somehow dealing with a real barnyard fowl on a real dunghill and the second, that Henryson's poetic technique in the narrative causes us to sympathize with the cock's point of view.

Linguist for the Prosecution

Robert D. Eagleson — 2023-12-21

In 1981, a Sydney husband was arrested on a charge of homicide. When originally interviewed by the police, he had produced a six-page letter which he claimed had been written by his wife as a farewell to the children. Among other things the letter explained that the wife was leaving home to live with another man elsewhere. As the police could not find the wife's body, the authenticity of the letter became critical. Although the police were suspicious, any possibility of arguing for its genuineness would have seriously undermined the other evidence. Because the letter had been typed on the family typewriter, and because the husband insisted that the wife had written it, the likely authorship was reduced to either the wife or the husband. As the letter was completely typewritten without even a signature, it could not be subjected to the usual handwriting tests. However, the police were able to obtain a reasonable amount of material that had been written by both the husband and the wife in the months preceding the event. It became a question of comparing the disputed letter with other writings of the husband and wife to see which one was the likely author.

The Finn Episode in Beowulf: Line 108S(b) ac hig him gepingo budon

John Gray — 2023-12-21

This paper reconsiders that elusive section of the Finn Episode in Beowulf which concerns the offering of a treaty in lines 1080-961 after the slaughterous fighting at Finnsburh. The difficulties of the Episode are notorious. The identification of the pronouns in lines 1085-87 has proved as much a battlefield for editors as the mebelstede of line 1082 proved for Finn and Hengest. This section of the narrative is further complicated by a group called the 'Eotenas', whose identity is one of the longest standing debates in the study of Beowulf. This paper takes issue with one received method of examining the cruces in this section of the narrative and proposes a new reading of line 1085(b), the point at which the terms are first offered. l.e. Finn Episode is a narrative within a narrative. It is recounted by a Danish minstrel, Hrol'gar's scop, who, at a banquet to celebrate Beowulfs defeat of the monster Grendel, sings of the fighting between a certain Finn and a hero of the Half-Danes, Hnref Scyldinga. This long account is contained in ninety lines commencing from line 1068 and concluding at line 1169. What is the mode of narration of this episode? What occurs in the narrative? What features of the narrative are placed in the foreground by the mode in which it is recounted in Beowulf! A discussion of the difficulties in lines 1080-96 raises such questions, but, in the course of exploring these lines, one needs to remember also the mode in which the narrative was received by an audience of listeners. Since the narrative was orally delivered, I ask the reader to forgo one of the usual advantages of the printed page and to imagine that the narrative unfolds itself phrase by phrase, without that reassuring support given by a stretch of subsequent printed text which tacitly promises to explicate any immediate obscurity.

The Colonial Beer Drinker•

John Gunn — 2023-12-21

One trouble when ordering a beer in Australia is shared with other countries - you have to remember what amount you want, where you are at the time, and the local popular name or one according to the capacity of the glass. Even a 'glass' can be a specific measure - 200 ml. in Western Australia and Victoria but 225 in Queensland. The now uncommon pint is 575 ml. in New South Wales but 425 in South Australia. Some of the many names for large beers such as cruiser, dreadnought, silo, and Trickett (after a champion sculler) enjoyed limited or local use, while others established a place in history: long sleever was popular for many decades after the 1870s, less so deep sinker and Bishop Barker (he was 6'5" tall). During World War II an approximate pint was a cut down beer bottle which gloried in the name of Lady Blarney, honouring the wife of the C.I.C. Like the English 'dead men', empty bottles have been dead marines for over a century, perhaps via 'dead mariner' or, as Grose suggested, an expression of sailors' contempt for the seamanship of marines. Marine, hence mariner, marine dealing, and marining have been used in a formal way in connection with the bottle-o trade. The schooner of 425 ml. is now the main large drink in New South Wales and the Northern Territory, but it only holds 285 ml. in South Australia. There has also been rare use of Yankee schooner (suggesting its source), Botany schooner, a vague association with the Sydney suburb, and black schooner, the drink permitted in the coalfields before one cleans up after a shift.

Merlin: Ambrosius and Silvester

Sonya Jensen — 2023-12-21

In speaking of the ancient seer known to us as Merlin, Giraldus Cambrensis distinguishes two separate prophetic characters, each with a different name: 'iste qui et Ambrosius dictus est' ('the one who was also called Ambrosius'), begotten by an incubus and prophesying in the time of King Vortigern; the other coming from Scotland, 'qui et Celidonius dictus est' ('who was called both Celidonius') from the Caledonian Forest in which he prophesied, 'et Silvester' ('and Silvester') because in battle he perceived a fearsome monster, became demented, and, fleeing to the forest, 'silvestrem usque ad obitum vitam perduxit' ('lived out the rest of his life as a man of the woods'). This second Merlin is placed by Giraldus in the time of King Arthur! For the prophecies of his character Merlin Ambrosius, Giraldus sometimes draws on Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, although he ignores the prophecies presented in Geoffrey's later Vita Merlini. In the earlier of these two works, Merlin (Ambrosius) has the role of prophet. He enters the text in the time of Vortigern, but disappears from it after the time of the birth of Arthur. In the later work, Merlin's character is very much altered: here he is a wild man, living intermittently in the Caledonian Forest, though also a soothsayer who has knowledge of events from the time of King Vortigem, through the time of Arthur, and up to the time of Conan (pp. 88-96). The name 'merlinus siluestris. siue caledonis' ('Merlin Silvester, or Caledonis') forms part of the heading of one manuscript of the poem;4 but nowhere is it suggested that the character of this text is separate from the Merlin portrayed in the Historia Regum.

The Pilate of the York Mystery Plays

Lee Jobling — 2023-12-21

The characterization of Pilate, one of the most complex figures in the Passion sequence of the Corpus Christi plays, has inspired few studies. Apart from Arnold Williams' book of 1950 on the Towneley Pilate and Robert Brawer's 1972 article on the York Pilate, this pivotal character is usually given perfunctory treatment by scholars of the English cycle plays. Of the four cycles, York has generally been considered to have the least consistent Pilate figure. This may, however, not be the case. A close study shows that he always attempts to be fair and just to Christ despite the constant haranguing of the Jewish priests. When he exhibits anger it is usually directed at them because of their blatant lies and deceit. He is, on the other hand, also shown to have recognizably human failings which lead him, in the end, to resign authority to the Jews and, thereby, become a party to a deed against which his own instinct warns him. As its dire consequences unfold, his fear impels him to encourage the suppression of the truth. Thus his earlier, token agreement with the Jews is consolidated, and he is forced to become at one with them in responsibility for the Crucifixion. Though he shows a desire to see Jesus treated fairly, he is also proud, sensual, and self-seeking, and it is these latter qualities that lead him into error.

Lexical structure in The Battle of Maldon

Alex I. Jones — 2023-12-21

The poem known as The Battle of Maldon tells in circumstantial detail the story of one of the many English defeats at the hands of the Northmen during the long and ill-starred reign of Aethelred. Though the poem is not without its moments of clumsiness,and bathos lines 5 and 6 and line 325 spring to mind, as do the awkward jingles of lines 271, 282, and 2991 - the episode it describes has all the power of classic tragedy as it moves from the fatal self-confidence of Byrhtnoth to his death, the breaking of the English ranks in the following confusion, and the final unforgettable enunciation of the heroic values by Byrhtwold, the old and hardened warrior steadfast in the face of the inevitable. But what, finally, is the poem about? If the battle is its topos, what is its purpose? It does not seem appropriate as a memorial piece for Byrhtnoth: there is no encomium on the fallen leader, though undoubtedly his followers hold him in high esteem. If it is a celebration of heroism and the heroic values it is a deeply ironical one - generosity and honour seem to lead to collective and individual disaster. There is no sign here of the give and take that is so affecting in the story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard; here a society is confronted with treachery within and savagery without and crumbles before them. Again, the poem is not a Christian one in the sense that as a whole it dramatizes a religious message: it is not overtly an exemplum. Although the contrast is drawn between Byrhtnoth in prayer for his soul (11. 173-80) and the hapene scealcas (l. 181 ), the English never claim to be fighting for christendom, but for their king and their land.

The Gobar in Egils saga Skalla-Grimssonar

John Kennedy — 2023-12-21

Egils saga Skalla Grimssonar is unusual among the Islendingasogur in setting most of its action outside Iceland. Its eponymous central figure lives quietly when at home in south-west Iceland: he does not generally meddle in local affairs, and few are anxious to challenge him. The saga might, therefore, seem an unpromising source for a student of the gobar: Icelandic sources very rarely portray gobar exercising their authority outside that country; and the powers and responsibilities of the Icelandic gobar naturally impinged most on those who actively involved themselves in the life of the community. Yet the saga is, in part, the story of the establishment, in their new country, of a powerful and prosperous Icelandic family, the Myramenn, and both Egill and his son, Porsteinn, are gobar. If, as has often been suggested, Egils saga was written by the famous author and statesman Snorri Sturluson (1178/79-1241), it is the work of a man who was a descendant of the early Myramenn, a gobi himself, and a leading panicipant in the thirteenth-century power struggle whose protagonists strove, inter alia, to accumulate goborb ('Chieftainship'), the rights and powers attached to the gobi's office. If, as generally believed, Snorri came to possess the Myramannagoborb, one might expect him to take a shrewd interest in its ninth- and tenth-century origins, and perhaps even to present it in a way which subtly bolstered his own claims to authority in the Borgarfjqor district.

The Living God in Aelfric's De Falsis Diis

N. M. Robinson — 2023-12-21

'He always took great pleasure in instructing the young men and boys, in explaining Latin books to them in the English language, in teaching them the rules of grammar and metre, and exhorting them gently to strive for greater things.' This was said of Aethelwold, bishop of Winchester 963-84, but the same and more could be said of his pupil, Aelfric, with the added proviso that linguistic competence was desirable, not merely as an end in itself, but as the means to a greater end, the propagation of the faith. Writing in English for the benefit of a non-Latinate audience, Aefric addressed the problem of an inadequately educated clergy with realistic practicality by providing two collections of homilies for the Temporale and some supplementary pieces. For the monastic schola he produced a grammar based on Priscian, the first such work in English, a Latin-English vocabulary, and a colloquy to assist in learning Latin. In response to specific requests or requirements he also wrote an anthology of saints' lives for devotional reading, a condensed version of the Regularis Concordiae, several pastoral letters, and some translations from Scripture into the vernacular, this last being undertaken with the utmost reluctance on Aelfric's part. In each case the appropriate material is presented in a style both rich and lucid, innovative and apt, guiding understanding, correcting error, teaching the true faith.

A Table of Contents for the York Corpus Christi Play

Margaret Rogerson — 2023-12-21

Fifteenth-century civic records from York provide detailed information about the contents of the Corpus Christi Play presented by the guilds under the supervision of the council. This information is found in two entries in the A/Y Memorandum Book (a civic memorandum) and in the council's register of the texts of the episodes of the play. The A/Y Memorandum Book entries were compiled by Roger Burton, who was the Common Clerk from 1415 to 1433; one, the Ordo Paginarum (1415), contains guild names and brief descriptions of 51 episodes in the play; the other, a second list of pageants (c. 1420), gives guild names and titles of 56 episodes. The council's register of the texts belonging to the guilds (1463-1477) contains 48 episodes with space for another 3. These sources suggest a total play captaining at least 51 episodes.

Chaucer and Bawdy

G. R. Simes — 2023-12-21

The reputation of a medieval poet is such that a successful dramatist of the 1960s could rely on the mere mention of his name to convey to the audience of the play the ideas of naughtiness and bawdy. Presumably the expansion of senior-secondary and tertiary education after World War II, the gradual relaxation of sexual mores, and the ready availability of a lively translation of the Canterbury Tales had all been factors that contributed to a popular dissemination of Chaucer's reputation for bawdiness. If that is so, it occurred in the absence of scholarly activity and interest in the topic. It is true that Chaucer shares with Shakespeare the singular honour of having a book devoted to his bawdy; yet that book was published as recently as 1972 and, modelling itself on Partridge's pioneering work on Shakespeare, takes the form of discursive glosses, apart from a brief, conceptually uncritical introduction. In general, before the later 1960s, while many medievalists privately took pleasure in Chaucer's treatment of sexual and excretory matters, they did not write upon this aspect of his work with the same unembarrassed candour that the poet himself had shown. Among general readers this aspect of Chaucer, and to an extent Chaucer's very name, was very often an occasion for sniggering.

Aventure or grace: Lucky in Love in the Franklin's Tale?

Margaret Singer — 2023-12-21

The end of the Franklin's Tale is undoubtedly satisfactory to all the parties in the action. Everyone gains something, intangible though the gains of the warm inner glow may be: such rewards are, if less than anticipated, perhaps more than deserved. This general satisfaction has not extended to all readers of the tale. The capacity of the characters to experience and practise true love, Christian marriage, gentillesse, trouthe, self-control, and self-abnegation has been examined and explained in a large critical literature, and the challenge of the teasing final question has been exhaustively answered. Whether or not the tale was intended to address itself to such serious matters when it was written, the last eighty years of Chaucerian criticism have determined that it does so now; and once the proposition is assumed that the tale is seriously concerned with difficult issues of right conduct and divine guidance, the ending cannot but fail to resolve its complexity.

Language and Perspective in the Physician's Tale

Diane Speed — 2023-12-21

Two recent reviews of criticism of the Physician's Tale suggest that a continuing unease exists amongst readers as to how the tale should be apprehended. In the Variorum edition of the Physician's Tale Helen Corsa reports a 'general indifference to, or devaluation of, the tale'. Then, in The Riverside Chaucer, C. David Benson reports that the majority of critics have found the tale 'poorly written and motivated', while some have actually gone on to apologize for its failures as intentional on the part of the poet, functioning to cast an ironic light either on the Physician or on the literary premises of the tale. Briefly, the tale concerns a worthy knight called Virginius and his beautiful but chaste daughter, Virginia. A judge called Appius conspires with a fellow called Claudius to have her made a ward of court so that he can possess her, but Virginius, after explaining matters to his daughter, with her willing participation beheads her instead of handing her over. The people rise against Appius, he is imprisoned and commits suicide, and Claudius is exiled. The Physician draws the lesson that whoever sins will be punished, and he urges the audience to forsake sin. In the following link passage the Host observes that the girl's beauty was the cause of her death.

Malory's Launcelot and Guinevere abed togydirs

Betsy Taylor — 2023-12-21

In Malory's account of the ambush of Launcelot in Guinevere's chamber he obliquely denies the authority of his sources:

For, as the Freynshhe booke seyth, the quene and sir Launcelot were k>gydirs. And whether they were abed other at other maner of disportis, me lyste nat thereof make no mencion, for love that tyme was nat as love ys
nowadayes.

Both his sources put Launcelot and Guinevere abed, but Malory says he prefers not to discuss the matter ('me lyste nat thereof make no mencion'); instead he links the lovers' activities here with the love he anatomizes, however cumbersomely, at the beginning of 'The Knight of the Cart' episode:

But the olde love was nat so. For men and women coude love togydirs seven yerys, and no lycoures lustis was betwyxte them, and than was love trouthe and faythefulnes. And so in lyke wyse was used such love in kynge Arthurs dayes. (p. 1120, II. 2-6)

Christina Stead's The Puzzleheaded Girl: The Political Context

Michael Wilding — 2023-12-21

The fiction of Christina Stead (1902-83) is at last receiving something of its proper recognition after years of critical neglect, ascribed variously to her gender, to her expatriate status (born in Australia and spending her creative life in Europe and America), and to her left-wing politics. Her work is now being brought back into view within the general reappraisal of women writers and the extending of the canon of Australian literature. This essay explores her political vision with an examination of her volume of four novellas, The Puzzleheaded Girl. The collection of novellas, even more than the volume of stories, is most publishers' least favourite form. It
has proved similarly unattractive to critical commentary. Yet so many fiction writers have felt most at their ease in the novella, enjoying the space for amplification denied !n the short story and free from the necessity of the ramifications of complex plotting and narrative expected in the novel. The novellas in The Puzzleheaded Girl work not by conventional plot but by the great monologues her characters deliver and the obliquely realized, compulsive, seemingly unwilled, and unmotivated entanglements in which they live. Stead catches most remarkably the way people talk, and the way, talking, they reveal themselves, their sexual and political involvements and obsessions - though the characters themselves could never recognize them as obsessions. The world of intellectual, radical, fringe bohemian groups during the late 1940s and the McCarthyite period and its aftermath is effortlessly documented. None of the actions has that neat Jamesian form, but instead a succession of seemingly inconsequential events. It seems sometimes as if Christina Stead is writing a variation on, or descant to, material a more mundane writer would have treated naturalistically; though we could never reconstruct those ur-novellas. It is a manner that leads to a remarkable concision, an elliptical compression, resulting in a solidity and fulness free from any ponderousness; and from the elisions and ellipses retaining a powerful energy that imprints these stories on the memory.