When Patience’s Jonah, cowering in the storm-tossed ship in a vain attempt to escape both God’s wrath and his fellow-mariners’ sacrificial impulses, falls asleep in despair, his slobbering and snoring highlight the correspondences between his somatic vulgarity and his spiritual and social misconduct. Sleep, as both signifier and state, likewise occurs – with thematic significance – in each of the other three poems in Cotton Nero A.x. In Cleanness, Belshazzar’s immoral feast leads to the sleep of excess which overcomes his men, allowing Darius’ soldiers to slaughter them; in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK), Gawain’s sleep, both real and feigned, repeatedly marks his temptations and anxieties during his sojourn at Hautdesert; and in Pearl, the dreamer’s sleep, as the vehicle for his vision of the maiden and the New Jerusalem, is the main postulate of the poem.² Perhaps it is the very obviousness of this sleep which has caused it to receive remarkably little attention in itself; yet the Gawain-poet’s representations of sleep reward critical scrutiny not least for that obviousness, because through their recognizability – their cultural legibility – they contribute to the ways in which the poems ask their contemporary audiences to engage with their ideals. Despite the poems’ divergences in genre, themes, and type of sleep, they all approach sleep as an act invested with ethical implications. This paper reads the Gawain-poet’s rhetoric of sleep as a discourse concerned with the current moral state of those who enter into (or are propelled out of) it. The work sleep performs is further contextualized by examining the partially analogous role of sleep in other Middle English poems. Sleep in Cotton Nero A.x, through its dialectical relationship with the ideals of courtesy propounded by the Gawain-poet and by the courtesy books designed to educate the aristocratic and aspiring middle classes, interrogates (im)proper spiritual and social conduct.

Courtesy is foregrounded in all four poems as an outward manifestation of inward virtue; criticism has concentrated especially upon its nature as an ideal of personal integrity and politeness to be performed in one’s actions and speech towards others, both human and divine.³ Jonathan Nicholls and Ad Putter focus on the shared behavioural models that late medieval courtesy books and the Gawain-poet present to their readers. While the primary concern of the courtesy books – and, correspondingly, of Nicholls’ and Putter’s analyses of them – is hospitality and mealtime etiquette, these books also manifest related interest in sleep. Just as self-control was fundamental to courteous speech, table manners, and receiving or being a guest, so self-regulation was required with regards to sleep, particularly after mealtimes:

The measures and postures prescribed here for unnatural but irresistible daytime or post-prandial sleep involve exerting – and visibly displaying – temperance. Moreover, even when sleeping is sanctioned, correct procedures must be observed:

Thus, courtly persons needed to be conscientious about the state in which they performed their loss of consciousness. The courtesy books further indicate that failing to adhere to such standards of conduct was understood to have consequences not merely for physical health. Sleeping at an inappropriate time or place would (if observed) have implications for one’s social reputation, and the sloth inherent in such actions connoted sinfulness.⁶ These intertwined implications are especially clear in one courtesy book’s instruction to readers of all ages who wish to learn good manners and avoid vice:

Monitoring sleeping habits, then, affected well-being on the three levels associated with courtesy: somatic, social, and spiritual.

In the Cotton Nero poems, sleep is ontologically invested with the same three-fold significance, and its occurrences therefore contribute to the poems’ explorations of suitable behaviour. In the passage of Patience quoted above, Jonah’s act of falling asleep in the bottom of the boat, when he has “Slypped vpon a sloumbe-selepe, and sloberande he routes” (186), represents his impropriety on all three counts of this code of conduct. Sleep, in medieval religious writings, is often a sign of lack of moral awareness, and Jonah’s sleep was interpreted as such by medieval commentators because it contravenes ascetic observance.⁸ The poet, however, gives his Jonah a sleep more uncouth than that of his Vulgate source,⁹ perhaps because Jonah has behaved unethically not only towards God, whose command to go to Nineveh he has disobeyed, but also towards his human community, since the other seafarers are endangered solely on his behalf. The sailors, by accusing Jonah in similar terms, demonstrate that his sleep is as recognizably uncommendable to his fellow-characters as to the poet’s society: “Hatz þou, gome, no gouernour ne god on to calle, / þat þou þus slydes on slepe when þou slayn worþes?” (199-200). Moreover, Jonah ‘slides into sleep’ on another occasion: after Jonah expresses his hubristic and inconsiderate wish that God had not spared the Ninevites,

Here, Jonah’s immoral state, at this moment in which God must teach him another lesson, is marked by a lexical collocation that recurs in the Gawain-poet’s other investigations of the relation between sleep and morally questionable behaviour.

The Gawain-poet embellishes his description of the aftermath of Belshazzar’s feast in Cleanness to include a depiction of sleep not found in his sources, thereby furthering his didactic (de)construction of his characters’ ethical identity. The Gawain-poet’s narrative of Belshazzar’s downfall is an expanded version of the end of Daniel 5,¹⁰ which does not mention sleep itself but simply states, “eadem nocte interfectus est Balthasar rex Chaldeus” [“on that night Balshazzar, king of the Chaldeans, was killed”].¹¹ The model courtesy of Cleanness’s previous four acts of mealtime hospitality is juxtaposed with the debauchery and sacrilege of Belshazzar’s orgy in the poem’s fifth and final exemplum.¹² When Belshazzar and his retinue are to be divinely punished for their socially and spiritually improper conduct during feasting, they are slain, appropriately, during the sleep that is produced by (and continues) their lack of courteous self-control:

This mention of “segges slepande” (and the associated ‘slipping’ or cowardly escape they would otherwise have sought) is the only instance of sleep in Cleanness. Here, at the climax of the poem, sleep is deployed to make the characters’ moral state – their intertwined social and spiritual failures – legible in a way that resonates with the other poems in Cotton Nero A.x.

In SGGK, sleep figures most famously in Gawain’s bedside dalliances; however, the first instance of ‘slepe’ in the poem in fact relates to conduct during a feast. When Bertilak arrives at Arthur’s court and asks for the governor, he is greeted initially by a “swoghe sylence” (243):

While Nicholls proposes that the court keeps quiet to comply with the etiquette demanded by their hierarchical society,¹³ this literal reading seems more accommodating towards courtesy and the characters who habitually exemplify it than the text invites. The poet’s comment that the courtiers are silent “not al for doute / But sum for cortaysye” surely has ironic overtones; the poet may be indulgent towards their failure to respond with courteous speech, but nonetheless goes out of his way to emphasize that this is to be interpreted as a failure – particularly by remarking that they all fall silent as though they had slipped into sleep. Sleep, as the antithesis of proper conduct in the mealtime setting, symbolizes this silence’s behavioural ambiguities, suggesting either that the courtiers are not perfectly courteous, or that courtesy alone is not always a sufficient code of conduct for a chivalric society – or, perhaps, both.

Elsewhere in SGGK, the poet again uses sleep to hint at ways in which courtesy risks sliding into uncourageous inaction. When Lady Bertilak approaches Gawain’s bed at Hautdesert, he is drowsing – “as in slomeryng he slode” (1182) – and then pretends to be fully asleep (1190). More significant for our purposes than the exact shade of grey with which Gawain’s otherwise-spotless character is sullied in the bedside encounters – by the hints of his sloth and lust, and the concomitant acceptance of the girdle – is the fact that the poem manifests a degree of anxiety and disapproval about these situations. Nicholls, contending that Gawain is constrained to stay in his bed by his traveller’s fatigue and courteous obedience to his host, focuses on Gawain’s restraint and courtesy.¹⁴ However, the poem focuses more on Gawain’s deceitful pretence of being asleep because he does not know what else to do when confronted with the Lady than on his recovery from exhaustion. Putter perceptively observes that this pretence demonstrates Gawain’s “awareness of the intricate realities of social interaction”;¹⁵ yet Gawain, by initially choosing sleep-like inactivity, also allows the ensuing morally precarious situation to occur and sets a spatial and behavioural precedent for the subsequent mornings. Seeming to sleep, in hall and bedchamber, produces results which seem to resemble courtesy, reminding the reader that courtesy is not merely an outward show of self-restraint: it ought to correspond to inward virtue rather than to abstention from action. Sleep defines a boundary between courtesy and passivity in SGGK, offering a meditation upon when, and by what, politeness ought to be tempered in pursuit of virtuous conduct.

In Pearl, sleep again involves both physical and figurative boundaries. When the narrator explains that he “slode vpon a slepyng-sla3te / On þat precios perle withouten spot” (59-60), we perceive a different kind of sleep: a contemplative sleep that, as Spearing has observed, has positive spiritual connotations.¹⁶ However, in Pearl, sleep is also used to illustrate the dreamer’s improper conduct. When the narrator is punished for trying to cross the river, the poet tells us that the narrator’s hubris results in the end of not just his vision but also of his sleep (1170-71): in seeking to cross one boundary, he is instead redirected across another. Thus, as in the other three poems (though with different complexities), sleep in Pearl reads as an ethical event. While Spearing further notes the dreamer’s failure to adequately “respond to and understand his visionary experience” and his initial tendency towards “treating a person as if she were a thing”, he does not view the dreamer’s act of falling asleep as itself dubious.¹⁷ Yet the dreamer is ‘out of measure’, since his sleep-inducing excessive grieving represents a lack of both spiritual and social decorum. Significantly, the poet describes the transition to the dream as ‘sliding into sleep’, marking the unstable ethical state of the narrator’s doctrinally and socially inappropriate mourning.

The rhetorical specificity of these entrances to sleep holds implications for the ethical import that they share and that distinguishes them from partially-analoguous representations of sleep in other Middle English poems. In each of the instances from Patience, Cleanness, Pearl, and SGGK discussed above, ‘slide’ or ‘slip’ is the verb that precipitates the characters’ sleep. For the Gawain-poet’s society, these verbs, as synonyms for ‘fall’, could also mean “to fall into sin or evil”, or “to fall into error”;¹⁸ by using signifiers with contemporary semantic connotations of (downward) moral transitions, the poet further highlights sleep’s symbolic potential. These are, of course, alliterative poems; however, it would be difficult to argue that the Gawain-poet was too dull to think of a synonym for ‘slide’, or for ‘sleep’. We will find further evidence that this poetic construction cannot be solely attributed to the compositional demands of the alliterative revival by looking beyond the cases of literary sleep addressed above.

Appropriately, other descriptions of sleep in Cotton Nero A.x do not use this phrasing. When Jonah is in the belly of the whale, he sleeps “As in the bulk of þe bote þer he byfore sleped” (292): despite this connection, Jonah’s sleep here has a more positive spiritual nature than on the earlier occasion, since he has now acknowledged his failings – and the poet accordingly does not figure him as ‘sliding’ into sleep. In addition, real sleep in SGGK does signify on more than the mundane level, but not with the same meanings as the ‘sliding’ instances. When Gawain is journeying through the wilderness, the poet’s comment that “Ner slayn wyth þe slete he sleped in his yrnes / Mo ny3tez þen innoghe” (729-30) demonstrates Gawain’s successful endurance of hardships; later, his troubled sleep the night before his journey to the Green Chapel communicates his trepidation about the coming ordeal, and perhaps also about his recent unethical acceptance of the girdle (1991; 2007). By contrast, the treatment of sleep in The Greene Knight conveys Gawain’s (and this poem’s) lack of interest in his ethical state. In one reduction of the complexities of SGGK, the later poem’s Gawain goes to bed on the night before the encounter at the Green Chapel, “And sleeped there verament / Till morrow itt was day”.¹⁹

Furthermore, the collocation of ‘slide’ or ‘slip’ with ‘sleep’, when occurring in other poems, seems to have been employed primarily for its alliterative utility. In the frequently-alliterating Avowyng of Arthur, Arthur exhausts himself fulfilling his vow to kill the boar, and “Forwerre, slidus he on slepe: / No lengur myghte he wake.”²⁰ This romance’s description of sleep, perhaps contemporary with the works of the Gawain-poet, appears perfunctorily experiential rather than ethical. St Erkenwald’s use of this phrasing does have an ethical import; however, unlike its formal parallels in the Cotton Nero poems, this is not a moral valence to which such a detail contributes. When the people of London look upon the saint in his reopened tomb, they see him

This partial resonance with the works of the Gawain-poet is not surprising, given the two writers’ shared Cheshire milieu. Erkenwald’s figurative construction of sleep, as the poem’s hagiographical affiliations would suggest, stands in a different corner of the term’s semantic field: it was a common belief in the period, as Ruth Morse observes, that a miraculously-preserved corpse (one that could, for instance, appear to be a person merely asleep) connoted sanctity.²² Erkenwald therefore uses sleep to establish the saint’s irreproachable ethical state, rather than to question it.

The dream poems in the Piers Plowman tradition also offer illuminating contrasts. Several of this genre’s shorter poems alliterate on ‘s’ in the line in which the narrator enters sleep, but they neither use ‘slip’ or ‘slide’, nor share the Gawain-poet’s ethical concerns regarding sleepers themselves.²³ Piers Plowman itself, as the other major Ricardian poem in the alliterative mode, treats sleep in ways that do carry moral implications, but without the Gawain-poet’s rhetorical construction. David Johnson, noting that sleep in exegetical and homiletic interpretations could – depending on context and type of sleep – be considered either slothful and sinful or virtuous, concludes on the basis of these interpretive frameworks that Will’s sleep has positive moral qualities.²⁴ Johnson’s view is particularly persuasive when we also take into account the rhetorically specific ways in which Will enters sleep. The word ‘sleep’ in Piers Plowman is rarely part of the alliteration of the lines in which it occurs, and ‘slide’ or ‘slip’, with their connotations of self-propelled but improper movement, are never used to describe the entrance to sleep.²⁵ Instead, Langland tends to place the emphasis on external agency in the causation of the narrator’s sleep: for instance, “I bablede on my bedes þei brou3te me aslepe”, and “reson hadde ruþe on me and rokked me aslepe”.²⁶ Here, Langland highlights the heuristic nature of sleep as a religiously-guided vehicle travelling towards the next vision. Moreover, while Will is infrequently responsible for producing his own state of sleep, on one occasion his contumacious rebuke of Reason makes him, like the dreamer in Pearl, responsible for being propelled out of it (XI.405ff). Will laments losing his sleep because it is a state of spiritual enlightenment: “slepyng hadde I grace / To wite what dowel is, ac wakyng neuere” (XI.408-09).²⁷

Thus, in emphasizing the extent to which the Gawain-poet is alone in deploying his rhetorically specific mode of instructively exploring ethical ambiguities both marginal and central to behavioural ideals, it has not been my intent to claim that sleep is insignificant in other medieval literature. On the contrary, I hope this adumbration of the polysemous subtext of sleep in courtesy books and poetry alike has shown that the role of sleep in the medieval imagination deserves further investigation. In focusing on the moments when sleep enters discourse in Cotton Nero A.x, this paper has emphasized a certain epistemic mode of assessing intersubjective commitments that all four poems have in common. Sleep in these texts does not always or only have negative values; its positive side, as a constructive ethical act, is available in Pearl – but precariously so. Balance is immanent in courtesy, and sleep, in these poems, marks certain (potential) deviations from measured conduct. The Gawain-poet’s interest in the ways in which literary sleep can be read produces a motif of the ethical intertwined with the experiential, of transgressive boundary-crossing that crosses genre boundaries itself in the service of the poems’ fused spiritual and secular codes of conduct.

Megan Leitch

Contents

Next