Medieval "Twitterature"

Tweeting the Rose I: Medieval "Twitterature"

A phenomenon of recent times has been the sudden resurrection of a number of historical figures who have felt the need to defy the logic of the grave in order to thrust themselves into the manic sphere of social media. King Cnut (@CantusRex), Geoffrey Chaucer (@LeVostreGC), John Lydgate (@Monk_of_Bury) and Eleanor of Aquitaine (@LaReineAlienor) are regularly tweeting, offering segments of their wisdom or comments on 21st-century events, all in under 140 characters. The potential for comedy and social commentary these digital zombies offer has not gone unremarked, and the British Broadcasting Corporation recently produced a short series on its Radio 4 entitled ‘History Retweeted’, which humorously explored events such as the moon landings and the Tudor premiere of Romeo and Juliet through the imagined tweets of participants and onlookers. But, while the BBC contented itself with pretending to use Twitter in the traditional medium of radio, they did not go as far as tweeting the content of their show. The revivified figures referenced above present a more direct engagement with the rhizomorphic arena of Twitter. By inhabiting, or puppeteering their adopted personalities, those conducting the business of Twitter through their famous avatars are molding a creative or educational act to the confines and possibilities of the platform. There are questions of choice inherent in how to break the wisdom of a medieval king into ‘bite-sized’ chunks, as well as the timing of communications, who to follow, what to retweet – all these functions feed into the making of a character and their dialogue. Ventriloquizing historical figures can be contrasted with another mechanism of bringing the past into the digital present: tweeting literature. In some cases this is done through the resurrected author figure, for example @Monk_of_Bury is tweeting as John Lydgate, sending out the Fall of Princes line by line into the digital sphere interspersed with fictional comments on his contemporaries. In other cases writers decide not to hide behind historical avatars; an excellent example is Elaine Treharne’s (@ETreharne) recent précis of Beowulf into 100 pithy tweets, which themselves are modeled on Anglo-Saxon verse techniques, such as heavy alliteration and kennings.

In tweeting a piece of literature a number of parameters must be decided: should one keep the original wording and language or update for a modern audience? Should the limitations of 140 character segments dictate the overall length? Indeed, why even are we doing this and for whom? Treharne’s Beowulf caught the imagination of a number of followers, who enjoyed her pacey summary, which, despite its curtailing of the original, retained much of the muscular vitality of the Old English. But, it proved an enlightening exercise for Treharne herself, refocusing her understanding of the work:

For me, it was a worthwhile exercise, forcing me back to the Old English to try and capture, in the shortest possible length, what I thought were the essential components of the poem... I quickly understood, too, how much this is a poem of two halves: after Beowulf's return to Hygelac, the poem really does shift stylistically.

The writer behind the Lydgate account explains the choice to tweet him in his entirety and from his perspective:

Part of the decision also comes from the end that I'm trying to serve in the project: Lydgate has a very dead voice in English medieval circles. He's the one we still (lovingly or not) mock as didactic and boring. Chaucer's lively and fun (and so is the Chaucer twitter account). But, I wanted to see how different it was to experience Lydgate from the inside – or the illusion of being inside, since of course I'm not him and I'm still importing my readings and opinions of him.

In rendering the Romance of the Rose for Twitter we decided to limit ourselves for now to Guillaume de Lorris’s original poem of around 4,000 lines. The lengthy continuation by Jean de Meun (some 16,000 further lines) not only has a distinctly different voice, but its size meant that tackling a translation and reduction was not feasible at this point. We retained the first-person voice of Guillaume de Lorris’s original in order to retain the poem’s internal coherence and because a number of commentators have suggested that the different characters who speak in the narrative can be seen as aspects of the narrator’s psyche (although the speeches of the characters in the Garden of Delight will be rendered as such). Our objective is more concerned with an interest in the narrative than the authorial persona, as such we decided to tweet in the capacity of the Roman de la Rose Digital Library rather than as Lorris himself. Furthermore, we wished to distinguish the fictive invention of the allegorical dream scenario from the historical persona (however much Lorris may insist on the veracity of the dream!). By rendering the poem in modern English and limiting the length to 250 tweets (each tweet being usually 2 rhyming couplets) we hope to bring the Rose to a wider English-speaking audience. The poem already has a certain level of popularity amongst medievalists (it inspired much poetry and debate from the late medieval and early era and is, therefore an object of interest for scholars), and several full English translations exist already so we needed our tweeted version to do something different, and potentially welcome in a new audience to explore Lorris’s dream world. The choice to translate and shorten provided the opportunity to work with a poet – to re-imagine the Rose rather than merely summarize it. How we negotiated the poetic constraints of the production will be discussed in subsequent pages.