This proves to be meaningful in terms of the adventure of Gawain in that his strict adherence to ‘cortayse’ brings him very close to endangering the other virtues of the pentangle at various times in the tale. The first mention of his renowned courtesy is at the beginning, when he will not rise from the table to come to Arthur’s aid in accepting the Green Knight’s challenge for fear of being discourteous to Guinevere: ‘Wolde ye, worthilych lorde’, quoth Gawain to the kyng/ Bid me boche fro this benche and stoned by yow there…And that my legge lady lyke not ille…’ (343-6). Although it could be argued that there is no real urgency required here on the part of Gawain, the Green Knight’s challenge nevertheless swings in the balance between a game and a threat. Later in Bertilak’s castle, Gawain’s dilemmas become more serious as he is tempted by the ‘luflych lady’:
Such semblaunt to that segge semly ho made
Wyth still stolen countenaunce, that stalworth to plese,
That al forwondered watz the wyche and wroth with hymseluen,
Bot he nolde not for his nurture nurne hir agaynez
Bot dalt with hir al in daynte, how-se-euer the dede turned
Towrast.
(Gawain, 1658-63)
Although his actions could possibly be misconstrued, Gawain risks this in order to remain true to his ‘cortayse’ and ‘nurture’ or good-breeding. Despite the supposed equality of the virtues, Gawain seems intent on maintaining his courtesy almost at any cost. When the lady first visits his room Gawain feigns sleep- surely this dissembling does not accord with ideas of ‘trawthe’? Aquinas points out the necessity of ‘balance’ in the virtues, and Gawain struggles to maintain all the virtues equally in the face of such temptation: ‘He cared for his cortaysye, lest craythen he were/ And more for his meschef if he schulde make synne/ And be traytor to that tolke that that telde acht’ (1773-5). The lady pushes him so near the limits of his courtesy that he is almost forced into making a choice between the two virtues, ‘cortaysye’ and ‘trowthe’.
Interestingly, Aquinas imagines this sense of balance and equality as a unified organism:
Virtues grow all together, proportionately like a man’s fingers, sharing the one growth of prudence which makes virtue virtue. But because the inclinations which are the material for virtue are not necessarily equal, and vary with temperament, practice and grace, one saint is praised for one virtue and another for another.
The choice of a man’s fingers as a metaphor for virtue echoes the five pentads of the pentangle, indeed, one of the pentangle’s virtues is the infallibility of Gawain’s five fingers. Aquinas notes that while, in theory, the virtues are equal, differing inclinations can result in different virtues being emphasised. We can see this quality in Gawain. Courtesy could be seen as the most artificial or constructed of the virtues, in its secular function at least. It is dependent largely on social considerations and outward appearances. Laura Hubbard Loomis describes talk in Gawain as ‘an art’ and comments that ‘the conversations between Gawain and the lady suggest the advances and retreats of a courtly dance.’ To achieve perfect courtesy it certainly seems necessary to be very skilled, but I am unsure whether goodness and virtue is truly a part of that.
In Pearl however, we see the sacred incarnation of courtesy. Each of the five virtues had a secular and sacred counterpart, and whereas secular courtesy seems to be synonymous with a kind of emphatic and delicate social politeness, heavenly courtesy is associated with divine graciousness. Fitt VIII is circles round the virtue of courtesy, describing Mary as ‘the quen of courtaysye’. (Perhaps this association is why Gawain is especially linked with Mary: when he is being tempted by the lady ‘Gret perile bitwene hem stod/ Nif Mare of hir knight mynne (1768-9)). The poet refers to St Paul, saying that through courtesy,
Al arn we membrez of Jesu Kryst:
Als heued and arme and legge and naule
Temen to hys body ful trwe and tryste
Rycht so is vch a Krysten sawle
A longande lym to the Mayster of myste.
(Pearl, 458-62)
He sees courtesy as uniting Christ’s followers in the way that the parts of a body are united. We are reminded of Aquinas’s metaphor of the virtues as the fingers, and there is this same sense of an organic whole, a living church. But the reference to the body also makes us think of the ‘body politic’. While Pearl takes place in an imagined heaven, the marks of feudal hierarchy are very much present in its organisation. Throughout the work there is a constant interplay between a Christian and a courtly ethical vocabulary. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron imagine the dreamer in Pearl as ‘a social inferior trespassing in the grounds of a castle’ and the Pearl-maiden finds him ‘vncortoyse’ later.
The intrusion of courtly virtues into heavenly ones can also be seen in Pearl in the allusions to courtly love practices. The divine love of Jesus for the Pearl-maiden is realised in the language of the courtly lover: ‘Cum hider to Me, My lemman swete’ (763). The glossary of Norman Davis’s edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight gives ‘lemman’ as ‘loved one or mistress’ and then notes ‘though there are exceptions, this word was generally already derogatory’, something on a par with ‘wenche’. Whether the word had these connotations at the time Pearl was written or not, the sense is certainly one of a human rather than a divine love. The compliment is reciprocated by the maiden a few lines later in 796, referring to Christ as ‘my Lemman fre’ and then in 805 ‘In Jerusalem watz my Lemman slayn’.
Although our initial impression was that the Dreamer and the Pearl-maiden were father and daughter, later in the poem he looks at her almost through the eyes of a courtly lover:
Delyt in me drof in yche and ere,
My manez mynde to madding malte;
Quen I sech my freely, I wolde be there
Byonde the water thach ho were walte.
(Pearl, 1153-6)
The idea of lovers being ‘smitten’ through looking at the loved one was current at the time, and here the metaphor is of secular love and passion overcoming the dreamer’s reason as he gazes upon the maiden. Andrew and Waldron describe this ‘terminology of earthly pleasures as typical of [the poet’s] willingness to use courtly language metaphorically to express the values and relationships of heaven.’ Indeed, the concatenation word of this Fitt is ‘delyt’, a word which can mean both ‘delight’ and ‘desire’, and in this context, as Andrew and Waldron note, serves to emphasise both the bliss of salvation and the Dreamer’s desire to cross the river and join the saved.
This sense of multiple meanings attaching to words of symbols is also a particularly important one for Pearl and Gawain, and is part of the notion of the ‘endless figure’: it can accrue meaning indefinitely. Hence the pearl at the beginning represents the dead child (presumably) of the dreamer and simultaneously a jewel fit for a prince, it then represents a kind of beauty that can only be found in Paradise, an emblem of moral purity, a sign of salvation (along with the penny), the ‘badge of the elect’, the gates of the New Jerusalem and ultimately the kingdom of heaven itself. In its smooth, spotless, spherical perfection the pearl signifies virtue in its purest form. Unlike the jagged pentangle there is no fear that is might unravel: it is three dimensional and still a single entity.
The fivefold pentangle seems more vulnerable somehow, and ultimately it is broken down as Gawain gives in to the urge for life. It is not his adherence to courtesy that ultimately causes Gawain to sin as earlier episodes seemed to threaten, but his submission to cowardice in accepting the girdle:
For care of thy knokke, cowardyse me tacht
To accorde me wit couetyse, my kynde to forsake:
That is larges and lewte, that longez to knychtez
Now I am fawty and falce, and ferde haf ben euer
Of trecherye and vntrawthe… (2379-83)
Gawain, in accepting the Green Knight’s challenge, was acting as representative of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and his experience ultimately shows that they are not worthy to wield the pentangle as their symbol. Instead, they adopt the girdle of the Green Knight, thus changing Gawain’s ‘bende of this blame’, ‘token of vntrawthe’ into a positive emblem ‘For that watz accorded the renoun of the Rounde Table/ And he honoured that it hade, euermore after.’ (2519-20). The girdle, representing metaphorically the unravelling of the pentangle can also be seen as a physical embodiment of that, a single strand that was perhaps bound up in the virtues of the Knights.
The sense of the ‘endless figure’ represented symbolically in both Pearl and Gawain are reflected in their structure. Both poems end in the same way that they began, come full circle:
Pearl 1 Perle plesaunt, to prynces paye
- Ande precious perlez vnto His pay
Gawain 1 Sithen the sege and the assaut watz sesed at Troye
- After the segge amd the asaute watz sesed at Troye
In Pearl in particular the poem itself is ‘endelez rounde’. Each twelve line stanza has only three rhymes, one used six times per stanza. The stanzas are grouped in fives, the last line of each stanza in the group being connected to the first line of the next by a repeated syllable, word or phrase, and all the stanzas in the group are further linked by having the same rhyme in lines ten and twelve. There are twenty of these groups, which are themselves linked at the beginning and the end by similarly repeated phrases. A.C. Cawley has described the metrical form as ‘probably the most complex in English’. The poem itself becomes an emblem for virtue and heavenly bliss. The less complex but equally effective metrical pattern of Gawain links words by sound in the alliteration, creating much the same unifying effect as the rhymes and refrains of Pearl. Muscatine describes the forms of the works as ‘a kind of celebration of the ultimate unity of his work, whether it be God’s or the poet’s.’
Whether the ‘endelez rounde’ is discredited as in Gawain or upheld as in Pearl, there remains no doubt in the poems as to the poet’s pure and uncompromising morals. He may be tolerant of human imperfection, but he is always aware of the ideal, the pure, the perfect, the pearl. Indeed, his poetry could be described in the words of Aquinas describing virtue: ‘a certain fullness of ability, measured by a perfect fitness to act.’
St Thomas Aquinas, ‘Living Well and Living Badly: Virtue’, Summa Theologiae, A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott
St Thomas Aquinas, ‘Living Well and Living Badly: Virtue’, Summa Theologiae, ed. Timothy McDermott.
Laura Hubbard Loomis, Introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, translated with an introduction by Casey Finch
Norman Davis, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ed. JRR Tolkien and EV Gordon, second edition ed. Norman Davis
Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Walron, The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, trans. Casey Finch
A.C. Cawley, quoted by Charles Muscatine in Medieval Literature, Style and Culture
Charles Muscatine, Medieval Literature, Style and Culture
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae