French romances occupy a central position in the development of medieval European literature. Their most popular subject matter by far was the Arthurian legend, which, though it had its origins elsewhere, was first cast in romance form in France: the Round Table, the tragic love story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the notion of the Grail quest were all French innovations. So too was the very genre of romance, a sophisticated and complex form that dramatized quests and tests and explored the connections - and often the conflicts - of love and adventure.

The legacy of French romance in other literatures is almost incalculable. Writers in every language of Western Europe adapted or translated French texts; and even when they were not openly reworking French sources, indeed even when they sought to assert their independence from those sources, their own romances frequently betray a decided Gallic influence in their use of the structures and conventions of romance, their borrowing of popular motifs or characters, or their rhetorical procedures.

Throughout the second half of the twelfth century, with the great masterpieces of Chrétien de Troyes, the Tristan and Iseut romances of Thomas and Béroul, and a number of other works, verse had been the preferred vehicle for the composition of romances, which were generally intended to be read aloud before groups of listeners. Prose was at that time reserved largely for history writing, for legal documents, and for sermons and other religious texts.

Medieval vernacular romance is assumed to bear the stamp of the class to which it was first directed, namely the French feudal aristocracy of the twelfth century. Typically, in fact, the romances of other times, places, and socio-political contexts are compared to the first generation of French romance, and judged inadequate. The Old Italian romanzi rarely win praise from romance scholars, who tend to assume that their authors and audiences did not really understand what chivalry and chivalric literature originally meant. This assumption deserves scrutiny in light of the unusual, even unique, example of the Italian peninsula in the Middle Ages.

The Italian peninsula featured a variety of political systems quite unusual for medieval Europe. The south, including Sicily, was dominated by a monarchical model; after the death of Frederick II in 1250, though, the southern kingdom split into two hostile kingdoms, Angevin in Naples and Aragonese in Sicily. In the center and north, on the other hand, there was a myriad of smaller political organizations: semi-independent city-states called communes; the republic of Venice; the Papal State, including the territory around and north of Rome; the towns and lands governed by one noble family; and other intermediate forms of government. This political heterogeneity was not peaceful.

The essays in this volume analyze critical features of what is arguably the most influential and enduring secular literary genre of the European Middle Ages. The story of medieval romance’s evolution is one of translation and transformation, adaptation and refashioning, and fertile intertextual and intercultural exchange among the linguistic and political entities of medieval Europe. Medieval romance narratives astound the modern reader by their broad circulation in France, Germany, England, The Netherlands, Italy, Scandinavia, Portugal, Greece and Spain, and by the many stories, characters, themes, and motifs they hold in common. These fictions continue to intrigue modern audiences - as they undoubtedly did medieval ones - by the diversity of their forms and subject-matter, the complexity of their narrative strategies and perspectives, and the many critical responses they invite.

Romance’s history is integrally bound up with the creation of elite lay culture in courts and wealthy households throughout the European Middle Ages. However, romance narratives are rarely simple reflections of courtly ideals. Romances of all national origins are remarkable for their authors’ capacity to remake their shared stories anew in different contexts and to reposition their ethical systems as they respond to particular audiences, in distinct geographic locations and social contexts – often with a critical perspective that calls social ideals or practices into question. The Companion to Medieval Romance is intended as an introduction to the voyages, transformations, and interrogations of romance as its fictions travel within and between the linguistic, geo-political, and social boundaries of Europe from 1150 to 1600.

Regardless of national or temporal factors - romance is the most enduring of literary forms. From the paradigmatic Garden of Eden to contemporary or even futuristic - often highly technological - expressions, this “secular scripture,” as Northrop Frye terms it, continues to flourish. Its origins in the folktale, the optimism projected by its representation of human heroism are clearly compelling. Yet, far from merely entailing the naïve appeal of a prelapsarian order for the individual reader, romance, as Fredric Jameson explains, involves a continuous and sophisticated reinvention of itself as a response to an ever-changing historico- political environment. Indeed, we see that history frequently appropriates romance paradigms in order to legitimate itself as when, for example, Bernal Díaz clearly presents Spain’s New World conquest and colonization as a continuation of the exploits of Amadís. Whatever form it takes, romance is committed to the celebration of a coherent system of socio-political values. This extra-textual frame of reference can take a variety of forms - from political propaganda that offers a self-aggrandizing depiction of the nobility or equivalent patron for whom the text is being produced, to the articulation of escapist fantasy - futuristic or archaizing. It is, for example, nostalgia for the lost world of chivalric romance which Cervantes embodies in the figure of Don Quijote, a foolish old man driven insane by his obsession with this perennial literary form.

Alexander the Great approaches the beautiful and rich Queen Candace. He is disguised as his own messenger, and travels under the protection of Candace’s son. Long ago she had sent Alexander letters offering both her realm and her love, but only if he would take her as his equal (“si a pier la volt avoir”). Since then he has heard a prophecy of his approaching death and has defeated his last great enemy, the emperor Porrus of India, but now he puts aside both militancy and impending mortality. Candace awaits, gorgeously dressed, attended by minstrels,

An aristocratic society lies at the center of the fictive worlds proposed by most medieval romances. The life of this literary aristocracy may have borne relatively little material resemblance to the lives of its medieval audiences, but it is nonetheless linked in recognizable ways to their interests, longings, ambitions, concerns, and values. And thanks to the significant continuity between medieval literary practices and modern ones, something of this implicit identification between the audience and the aristocratic society at the heart of romance survives for the modern reader. Even we modern readers, that is, sense that the members of the central aristocratic society we encounter in a romance are the protagonists with whom it is assumed we will identify, that the central aristocratic society is in some sense “our” society.

Opposite this central aristocratic society, most medieval romances establish, or assume the existence of, other social “worlds” of various kinds. The members of these other worlds may resemble the members of the central society – they may be as sophisticated, rich, elegant, well-mannered as members of “our” society – but their worlds are nonetheless recognizably different from “ours.” Their motives and customs may be enigmatic or at least strange, and they themselves may be monstrous.

In the opening lines of Guillaume de Dole (c. 1209-1228), Jean Renart claims that his text is both a romans (lines 1 and 11) and “une novele chose” (“a new thing”) because he interpolates lyric stanzas into his narrative (13-14). He thereby simultaneously signals continuity and change. He writes a romance, but self-consciously produces something different from previous romances. He plays on the parameters of two textual traditions (romance and lyric), but in incorporating one type of text into another he troubles these parameters as he evokes them: he gives the stasis with which lyric frames desire a forwards (narrative) movement and he injects a startling formal and temporal rupture into his romance since the lyrics necessarily halt the action temporarily. Guillaume de Dole is thus a romance that contests the generic framework to which it belongs. Furthermore, even the term Jean uses to designate the genre he seeks to change - romans - is problematic. Roman derives from the expression metre en roman, “to translate into the vernacular,” and initially means simply a narrative translated from Latin. If some writers use the term in a manner that suggests a distinct category of text that we call romance, roman is not infrequently used to describe texts that we think of as belonging to other genres, while some 'romances' are called contes by authors or rubricators. Thus if the genre is unstable, so is the terminology used to designate it.

Critics and historians have long acknowledged that medieval French romances helped to promulgate ideals of chivalry and love throughout European courtly society and that those ideals held men and women to different standards of conduct. Notions of idealized “masculine” and “feminine” comportment were so forcefully articulated in medieval romances and didactic literature that their outlines survived well beyond the Victorian age: well-bred men should exercise courage and prudence in the public domains of government and war; ladies should devote themselves to the private sphere and cultivate the arts of adornment, sentimental refinement, and mothering. Scholars and critics today are quick to question such cultural constructions and to seek to discern the social realities that lie behind them, as do Richard Kaeuper and Sarah Kay in this volume, for example.

But critical reflection is not the exclusive purview of modern readers. Although many of the more than 200 extant French romances seem to uphold traditional gender roles without questioning them, others provide more complex, critical views of relations between men and women. Beginning with the earliest instances of romans d’antiquité, lais, and Arthurian romances, many courtly fictions opened up a discursive space where gender roles were scrutinized and where underlying social and sexual tensions were explored. After looking briefly at the historical context in which aristocratic gender roles evolved, this essay will take the intriguing thirteenth-century Roman de Silence as a guidepost for some of the question

The shape of romance in medieval France compels, even as it escapes, our urge to define it. This fundamental dichotomy contributes in no small measure to the vitality and appeal of medieval romance from its start in the mid-twelfth century, when French verse romances introduce a new literary type and set up models that will be vigorously imitated and reinvented by romancers for centuries thereafter. To follow this development, we need to analyze closely not only specific shapes but the art of shaping that gives romance its characteristic traits. The self-reflexivity of romance form calls our attention to the way stories are put together in writing by authors who enjoin the reader to admire the work’s shape, its conjointure, as a source of pleasure, but no less as a source of meaning.

If shape is paramount in defining romance, it is in part because romance is the shape-shifter par excellence among medieval genres, a protean form that refuses to settle into neat boundaries prescribed by modern critics. If we line up a spectrum of medieval literary types, we can distinguish romance from saints’ lives, epic, lyric, short tales, all contemporary competitors for audience attention. But we also have to account for the way romance interacts with and even co-opts these other forms and materials. Romances may end after 3000 verses like Floire et Blancheflor or stretch to 30,000 like the Roman de Troie – with a variety of intermediate sizes in between. Eight-syllable rhyming couplets dominate the linear narrative of romance, but occasionally give way to ten- or twelve-syllable lines and epic or lyric stanzas. From the thirteenth century on, verse competes with prose, as the pattern of change itself remains the major constant of the romance genre.

Editors’ note

The political, cultural, theatrical, and feminist matrix is very different in the 1980s from that of the 1970s that Michelene Wandor charts at the close of the last part. In terms of the Women’s Movement specifically, a major shift by the end of the 1970s was constituted by thinking about difference, rather than sisterhood; acknowledging that not all women are oppressed in the same way, but, for example, are affected by different economic, class, or ethnic factors. Susan Bassnett’s chapter which opens this part looks at 'the politics of location' as a site of difference in 1980s and 1990s politics and culture, arguing that where you are, where you live, is inextricably bound up with issues of who you are - with issues of gender, identity, and oppression. This is particularly true in Britain which, as Bassnett describes, has constituent national cultures in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England. The politics of these national cultures and locations will create very different stage pictures, arguments, and feminisms. Chapters in this section examine women’s playwriting in relation to the various 'politics of [national] location'.

Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland all have histories of seeking separate national identities from England. In Wales in the late 1960s the assertion of identity was marked by the campaigning of the Welsh Language Society and the bomb outrages committed by the Welsh Home Rule Group. When it came to the referendum on devolution in 1979, however, the vote went convincingly against a national assembly. This, coupled with the election of Margaret Thatcher had, as Anna-Marie Taylor describes in the introduction to Staging Wales, 'a bearing on our lives well on into the 1990s.

Historians of post-war British theatre have typically taken as their starting-point the pivotal 1956, the year of the Suez Canal fiasco, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the formation of the British New Left, and the first performance of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Black performers had been a presence on radio and television as early as the 1930s, but 1956 was likewise a critical moment for the emergence of a distinct black British theatre; it was in this year that John Elliott’s television docu-drama about Caribbean immigrants, A Man from the Sun, was performed on BBC, that Errol John wrote Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, and, critically, that Pearl and Edric Connor established the Edric Connor Agency to represent black artists in theatre, radio, and television. During the next thirty years, largely ignored by the rapidly expanding fringe movement and its sponsors and critics, black artists in the theatre sought to reflect the lives and aspirations of post-colonial immigrant communities whose populations in Britain had increased dramatically in the aftermath of the war and the dissolution of the British empire. The years from 1956 through to 1963 witnessed a burgeoning of work for black actors, especially on the stage, and the performance of a series of plays by black writers, including Errol John, Wole Soyinka, and Barry Reckord. A number of amateur drama clubs such as the West Indian Students' Drama Group channelled the talents of younger artists.

The dynamics of identity and community, marginality and self-reflection, inclusion and exclusion, are key themes across a range of writings by contemporary Scottish women playwrights. At root is a concern with the idea and the representation of the 'nation' that is Scotland.

In arguing for the efficacy of the 'imaginary' - of the nation as 'an imagined political community' - Benedict Anderson outlines a version of belonging that is eclectic, multifarious, and resists closure. He allows for a version of the nation, a version of community, that is open, egalitarian, and pacific. In opposition, and in practice, the application of the idea of the nation may be less tolerant; for nations also define themselves as exclusive and sovereign, building barriers (both literal and metaphoric) to limit access and regulate membership, determinedly separating the elect from the ostracised. It follows that nationalism will prefer, prioritise, value, and reward one grouping over another. The point in the establishment of society, of community, at which one group, one identity, is legitimised and the other disenfranchised, marginalised, cast, however crudely, as 'other', is a result of the socio-cultural development of the community, a conjunction of historical, economic, social, and political factors but defined in the nation’s traditions, myths, and collective imagination, and replayed in its cultural texts. One might suggest that, whilst nations emerge as a geo-political phenomenon, developing through an interaction of socioeconomic, cultural, and political factors, gender is a similar construction, a biopolitical system whose meaning is as dependent on shared moments of recognition and rites of passage as is that of national identity and nationalism.

Consistent in all of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s writing has been a problematisation of the global politics of identity, a problematising marked by characters - from ex-expatriates to middle-class professionals - struggling through a crisis of identity. She offers on-stage a view of late twentieth-century 'Great' Britain in which she examines the multiple and conflicting subjectivities of the world and brings to life the various 'others' created by hierarchies of gender, race, and nation. In her 1990s play, The Break of Day, Mihail, a disenfranchised Eastern European trying to strategise his way out of communism to capitalism, places his hope in what he calls 'cross-border children', children who 'will be wilfully international, part of a great European community'. Broadly conceived, such cross-border children - with their multiple cultural heritages, their welcoming of fluid identity, and their consciousness of both future and past - are at the heart of Wertenbaker’s drama. In her varied plays, she examines the problems and triumphs of living in a world of porous cultures and shifting identities.

I would like to explore the powerful energies of Wertenbaker’s plays with a focus on two issues. First I will detail her attention to language, a focus most obvious in her characters' self-consciousness about words; Wertenbaker’s own self-consciousness is clear in her building of intertextual relations between her plays and other texts, and in her sensitivity to the conscriptions of language by those persons or institutions with power.

A new phenomenon is increasingly apparent in contemporary British women’s theatre: from relatively parochial origins, there is an increased internationalism, that reflects major changes in the culture of the British Isles. This internationalism is apparent both in the choice of material from which to create theatre, whether scripted or devised, and in the broader base of performance styles that reflects a greater traffic and exchange of skills in theatre as a whole. It also reflects the shift towards a more integrated idea of Britishness, that is no longer premised on assumptions about ideals of (predominantly male) English behavioural models.

Feminist theatre in Britain from the 1970s to the end of the 1990s has gone through a series of quite distinct shifts of emphasis. Mid-way through the 1970s, women’s theatre began to shift away from its initial socialist agenda to an exploration of broader debates about gender and sexuality. The subjects of women’s performances also changed. From plays looking at motherhood, wages for housework, equal pay, exploitation of women in the workplace, and a general emphasis on women’s work, attention shifted to more personal explorations of incest, domestic violence, and then to questions of sexual identity and preference. By the early 1980s, gay and lesbian theatre was increasingly important, and there was a marked increase in the number of solo performers and performance artists. This emphasis on the body, which was directly connected to feminist politics in general, was also accompanied by a growing interest in exploring theatre form.