Text
Stories about the Arthurian court were popular in medieval England, and the worn condition of some of the manuscripts suggests that they were well read. The Ragnelle narrative may have been intended for a festive or less than serious audience. Thomas Garbaty sees the poem as a humorous parody of the Arthurian legend, where Arthur is cowed by both the challenging knight and Ragnelle, "passing the buck" to Gawain. The Wedding of Sir Gawain survives in a poorly copied 16th-century manuscript located in the Bodleian Library (Bodleian 11951, formerly Rawlinson C.86) though it was probably written in the 15th century.
Read more about this topic: The Wedding Of Sir Gawain And Dame Ragnelle
Famous quotes containing the word text:
“If ever I should condescend to prose,
I’ll write poetical commandments, which
Shall supersede beyond all doubt all those
That went before; in these I shall enrich
My text with many things that no one knows,
And carry precept to the highest pitch:
I’ll call the work ‘Longinus o’er a Bottle,
Or, Every Poet his own Aristotle.’”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Don Pedro. But when shall we set the savage bull’s horns on the sensible Benedick’s head?
Claudio. Yes, and text underneath, “Here dwells Benedick, the married man?””
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)