̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Helen Cooper

CS Lewis: 50 years after his death a new scholarship will honour his literary career

sj387 — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 12:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��author CS Lewis, best known to the general public for his children’s classics ̽��ֱ��Chronicles of Narnia, died 50 years ago on 22 November. He was much more than a children’s author: he was also a brilliant scholar, holding prestigious academic positions first at Oxford and then at Cambridge, as well as an influential Christian thinker.

In 1954, Lewis was awarded the chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, a post that was founded with him in mind. In order to support research in that broad field of Lewis’s interests, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� is in the process of establishing a CS Lewis Scholarship that will help to fund an outstanding graduate student.

Lewis will be honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey at a ceremony on the anniversary of his death. His memorial will join those of some of the most famous names in English literature including poets Milton, Eliot and Wordsworth, playwrights Marlowe, Shakespeare and Wilde, and novelists Austen, Lawrence and Thackeray.

̽��ֱ��CS Lewis Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey will take place at noon on Friday, 22 November and will be open to all those who have requested tickets. A collection at the service will be dedicated to the CS Lewis Scholarship.

̽��ֱ��current chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge is Professor Helen Cooper. Like Lewis’s, her work emphasises the continuity of literature across the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Early in her career she studied pastoral literature from the late Classical period to Milton. Her more recent books include one on romance, from its invention in the 12th century to the death of Shakespeare, and another on Shakespeare’s debt to the Middle Ages. She has also published extensively on the Canterbury Tales.

“Scholarship – reading, lecturing, critical writing and teaching – was CS Lewis’s day job. He came to devotional writing and fiction, whether for children or adults, quite late in his life, and although he is now more widely known for those than for his critical work, it’s not because they are necessarily better or more important,” said Professor Cooper.

“From the moment of its publication in 1936, Lewis’s Allegory of Love transformed how medieval studies might be approached. ̽��ֱ��finest of his books, ̽��ֱ��Discarded Image, based on a series of his lectures, appeared after his death and remains the best short introduction there is to how people used to imagine the universe they inhabited.

“Lewis described his empathy with such lost ways of thinking by casting himself as ‘Old Western Man’, the equivalent of a surviving dinosaur who embodied what the age of the dinosaurs was like, and so could teach things that more conventional academic processes could not.”

As a child growing up in Northern Ireland, Lewis was enthralled by the myths and legends of Norse, Greek and Celtic literature. ̽��ֱ��young Lewis (known as Jack throughout his life) and his brother Warren invented a make-believe world called Boxen which was ruled by animals. Lewis fell in love with the landscape of the Mountains of Mourne which he said later inspired him to write the Narnia books.

Lewis’s deep interest in the bold universal themes that are woven into ancient, medieval and early modern literature endured throughout his life. His novels and poems draw on his extensive knowledge of texts such as ̽��ֱ��Voyage of St Brendan (which underlies ̽��ֱ��Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and the early Grail romances (which inspired That Hideous Strength). At Oxford ̽��ֱ��, where he read English Literature, he proved to be an outstanding student and, on graduating with a triple first, went on to teach there for more than 30 years.

Much of Lewis’s non-fiction writing deals with broad religious and spiritual questions, from the problem of evil to miracles. He was brought up in the Church of Ireland but as a teenager became an atheist. At Oxford, where he remained for most of his adult life, Lewis was part of a literary group nicknamed the Inklings, which included Tolkien. During this time, and influenced by his friends, he reluctantly re-embraced Christianity. In 1949 he wrote his first children’s novel, ̽��ֱ��Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which can be read as a fantasy adventure story and as an allegory for Christ’s crucifixion.

Professor Cooper commented: “ ̽��ֱ��power of myth and legend that Lewis had discovered as a child helps to drive the Narnia books. ̽��ֱ��myths might be Greek or Norse or Christian – the last a myth that ‘really happened’, as he came to believe – and the legends might be Arthurian; but he had the gift of conveying something of their deep imaginative hold through his stories of children travelling in strange worlds, of talking animals and of battles against evil.”

̽��ֱ��year that Lewis became the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge saw the publication of his third (originally fifth) and eagerly awaited Narnia novel, ̽��ֱ��Horse and His Boy.

“At Cambridge Lewis was taken to represent a diametrically opposite mode of criticism from that of his contemporary FR Leavis, and undergraduates often aligned themselves behind one or the other. But despite their disagreements, Lewis expressed his admiration for Leavis’s powers as a critic,” said Professor Cooper. “Lewis’s belief in the importance of historical contextualisation was in many ways ahead of its time. That alertness to context included his recognition of the centrality of God in the medieval and early modern world. His lectures on Spenser’s Faerie Queene, like his earlier work on Milton, demanded that even atheist readers should start by understanding what each poet was attempting to do, and that included their reflection of, and on, the religion of their own age.”

Lewis worked in Cambridge for nine years. In August 1963, having discovered that he was terminally ill, he resigned his chair. He died in his home in Oxford and was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington. News of his death was overshadowed by the assassination of JF Kennedy.

Professor Helen Cooper is the sixth scholar, and second female scholar, to hold the chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. Like Lewis, she holds it in conjunction with a fellowship at Magdalene College.

Inset images from top: Magdalene College, jefurii (via Flickr), Keir Hardie (via Flickr)

CS Lewis, creator of some of the most-loved children’s stories and also a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, died half a century ago on 22 November. A scholarship to be set up in his name will support an outstanding graduate to study at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��

̽��ֱ��finest of his books, ̽��ֱ��Discarded Image, based on a series of his lectures, appeared after his death and remains the best short introduction there is to how people used to imagine the universe they inhabited.

Professor Helen Cooper

GeeJo via Wikimedia

̽��ֱ��Searcher, a statue of CS Lewis by sculptor, Ross Wilson, at Holywood Arches Library in Belfast

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Shakespeare's medieval world

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A number of universities have chairs in early modern literature, a few in Middle English; Cambridge is unusual in combining the two, in the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English originally set up for C.S. Lewis. His example of working across the periods has been followed by many of its later occupants, even though most scholars are cautious about crossing the invisible boundary between them. As the current holder of the Chair, I was delighted to be commissioned to write a book on Shakespeare and the Medieval World. Although we think of Shakespeare as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, his world was still largely a medieval one.

Subtle glimpses of a changing time

Research is most often a process of discovering what’s there. That may be achieved by new technology, from Galileo’s telescope to the electron microscope, or simply by looking at things from a new angle or seeing them differently. Shakespeare’s medieval world is of the second kind.

We have, for instance, a number of early 17th-century engravings of London that are regularly reproduced in histories of the early modern city or books on Elizabethan drama. Apart from the newly-built theatres on the south bank, however, almost everything in the pictures is medieval: the great hulk of old St Paul’s towering over the city, the serrated skyline of the towers and spires of the parish churches, the bridge (completed in 1209) with its display of traitors’ heads, William the Conqueror’s Tower. They show, in fact, not so much ‘Shakespeare’s London’ as ‘Medieval London in the age of Shakespeare’.

Staging the world

̽��ֱ��same principles apply to drama. Many of the great cycles of Biblical mystery plays, which we think of as medieval, continued to be performed until half-way through Queen Elizabeth’s reign, a couple of them (both now lost) into the reign of King James I. Coventry, not far from Stratford, had one of the best known; it was last performed in 1579, when Shakespeare was 14 years old. His plays contain a number of allusions to the cycle plays – ‘out-Heroding Herod’ is the most famous of them – and most of them bear a particularly close relationship to what is known of the Coventry cycle. It can’t be proved that he saw it, but of the many unknowns in his life, that he did so is one of the safer conjectures.

̽��ֱ��cycle plays, furthermore, offered a model of theatre that was at the opposite extreme from the Classical Latin drama that was taught in the schools and imitated by humanist playwrights. It was insistently inclusive. ̽��ֱ��motto traditionally ascribed to the Globe, ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem’ (something between ‘all the world’s a stage’ and ‘everyone acts a part’), declared that the theatre was as large as the world: the maxim first appears in the 12th-century writer John of Salisbury, whose works were regularly reprinted in the Renaissance and were known, among others, to Ben Jonson.

̽��ֱ��theorists might insist that kings and clowns should never share a stage, but it was the very point of the Biblical plays that both kings and shepherds came to the newborn Christ. They did not separate out comedy and tragedy, both newly-imported terms: they offered an all-embracing play, in which black humour and deep grief could mix in the Passion sequences. They had no qualms about presenting a vast range of time and space on stage, from the Fall of the Angels to the Last Judgement, in ways that can make Shakespeare’s embrace of Rome and Egypt within a single play, or a time span that allows for babies to grow to adulthood, seem quite modest. And above all, they acted their action. Classical and humanist drama relied on messengers to report what was happening outside the single location it allowed itself, and especially any kind of violence. Medieval and Shakespearean drama performed it, blood and all.

Those ideas are so familiar now – so much part of what plays do – that it is easy to forget how much they needed to be asserted. Some, such as the mixing of tragedy and comedy, incited bitter hostility among Elizabethan theorists and have continued to cause unease for much longer (hence the notion of ‘comic relief’: it’s more complicated, and more profound, than that). ̽��ֱ��dramatists for the public theatres, like their medieval forebears, assumed that the stage had the same freedom of representation that we now accord to the cinema screen. No one expects the screen to obey the Aristotelean principles for the stage rediscovered around 1500 – that it should show only one place, or that the action shown on it should approximate to real time; both are possible, but exceptional. Medieval principles of theatre gave Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights the freedom that the neo-Classicists wanted to forbid.

What Shakespeare read

‘Medieval Shakespeare’ extends not just to his theatre, but to his reading, and to what he wrote about. Not only his plays on English history, but Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear draw on history or legendary history as it was carried forward from the Middle Ages.

̽��ֱ��story of Hamlet was first written down around 1200, and was in oral tradition before that. Lear was invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain(c. 1136), and Holinshed’s great Chronicles, the Elizabethans’ encylopaedic history of their real and supposed past, took the story from there. Lear’s Tom o’ Bedlam quotes from a folktale, and from one of the medieval verse romances that in cheap print provided the 16th century with much of its pulp fiction. ̽��ֱ��Trojan Troilus and Cressida draws on Chaucer and Caxton much more than on Homer; Chaucer is the sole source for ̽��ֱ��Two Noble Kinsmen, a collaboration with John Fletcher, and is the major inspiration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower, whose tomb faces the grave of Shakespeare’s brother in what was once the parish church for the Globe and is now Southwark Cathedral, is both the source for the story of Pericles and appears on stage as its presenter. Around half of Shakespeare’s plays have direct or indirect medieval sources, and they are a minor presence in many more.

None of this means that Shakespeare was a medieval writer: he changed everything he touched, whether inherited or new. But it is only possible to measure what he achieved, or even to see it clearly, when we recognise how much the Middle Ages gave the world’s greatest playwright to work on.

For more information, contact Professor Helen Cooper (ehc31@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of English or Magdalene College.

Medieval culture pervaded Shakespeare's life and work. Professor Helen Cooper examines its influence on the work of the world's greatest playwright.

Although we think of Shakespeare as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, his world was still largely a medieval one.

Professor Helen Cooper

ell brown from Flickr

Statue of William Shakespeare at the centre of Leicester Square Gardens, London

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

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