Word: langland
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Avignon. But the struggles it evoked had firmly implanted in Europe a common heritage of religion, law, art, science and leisure. Even in the dark days of the 14th century, as the hoped-for synthesis was fast collapsing, Christian Europe threw up its greatest religious poets-Dante and William Langland, the poor London clerk who wrote Piers Plowman.* Both of them, says Dawson, although on different levels, wrote, convinced "that the world had gone astray...
Although Dawson, along with Dante and Langland, sometimes stops for a quiet tear over medieval man's passing, he is far more interested in communicating the worth of medieval man-his feeling for spirituality, his sense of social commu nity, his universal values-to his descend ants in modern Europe. For one thing, the medieval "world of Christian culture" is more akin to the present than the humanist traditions that have governed Europe since the Renaissance...
...Gibbon, writing in the Decline and Fall, scornfully dismissed them as "the triumph of barbarism and religion." - Dawson rates Langland's contemporary, Chaucer, as more of a courtly storyteller who "took the world as he found it," very like his Italian opposite number. Boccaccio. Not so Langland, who wrote bitterly of his times...
...Sleep of Prisoners is more austere than anything Fry has written; an inquiry into-and seemingly away from-spiritual desolation. But it lacks the strong simple current, the climactic movement, of religious and dramatic emotion alike. It has none of the widening allegoric vision of a Langland or a Bunyan. For one thing, each dream is really a self-enclosed characterization, so that the play has no organic development. By putting Adams' affirmative dream last, Fry allows it to point his moral, but not in dramatic terms: it is either Adams talking to himself, or Fry talking...