Shakespeare and the Medieval World

By Helen Cooper

Professor Helen Cooper was an undergraduate, research student and research fellow at Cambridge before being appointed as the first woman fellow at University College, Oxford, in 1978. In 2004, she returned to Cambridge as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance in English, a post originally created for C.S.Lewis - who also held it in Magdalene.

Helen Cooper’s most recent monograph in The Arden Shakespeare’s Arden Critical Companions series, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, was published at the beginning of Michaelmas term amid a high level of expectation following her book The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare in 2008.

In a recent interview, given to the Shakespeare Bookshop Newsletter, (reproduced here by kind permission of the editor) Professor Cooper talks of her fascination with the Middle Ages and her love of Shakespeare:

“I have been attracted to the Middle Ages since I was about four (all the best stories were about dragons), and was in love with Shakespeare by my early teens. My undergraduate work deepened my interest in the literature of both periods, dramatic and nondramatic.

For my PhD, I chose to work on pastoral literature from the death of Virgil to Milton, and to do it without skipping straight from the Classics to the Renaissance, as most literary histories did. I was told by one academic I consulted, ‘there was no pastoral in the Middle Ages: I have looked.’ But she was wrong, and it turned out to be an immensely rich topic. It also brought home to me something that has become something of a mantra with me, that where there is a difference between the Classical and the early modern, it is because of what happened in between. Shakespeare appears in that book too: his shepherds and his shepherd imagery are strongly inflected by medieval ways of thinking. So the links between the two periods have intrigued me for decades, but I was distracted for a few years by Chaucer. There was a book on The Canterbury Tales that needed writing but that no one had done, so finally I did it myself (The Structure of the Canterbury Tales, 1983). Once you have written one successful book on Chaucer, you get asked to do more, and it was a while before I managed to get away to other things. Those other things were mostly romances (including Malory: I have just done some of the programme notes for the current RSC Morte Darthur), and I came to realize that the articles I was writing were telling a single story – the story that became The English Romance in Time, in which Shakespeare has a still bigger role. So when the editors of the Arden Companions to Shakespeare asked me to write this latest book, it felt like my dream commission.”

Professor Cooper feels strongly that the Middle Ages seem to suffer unfairly from ‘bad press’ and makes the point that “it’s worth remembering how much the Middle Ages bequeathed to us: universities were invented in the twelfth century, parliamentary democracy in the thirteenth, and both those essentials of the modern world, the alphabetical index and doubleentry bookkeeping, were medieval inventions. And if you take cleanliness as an indicator of civilization, the Middle Ages were much more keen on baths than the Enlightenment.”

Professor Cooper is already looking towards her next book which she would like to write on the afterlife of Chaucer, including Shakespeare of course, Spenser and a host of other Elizabethan and Jacobean authors and dramatists; and an epilogue on Joyce.

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