The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Dame Sirith
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| Text name: | Dame Sirith |
| Alternative names: | Dame Siriȝ; Dame Siriz; As I came by an way Of one I herde say; The weeping dog |
| Content: | A clerk named Wilekin makes advances towards a married woman, called Margery. She rejects him. Wilekin begs an old woman, Dame Sirith, to help him win Margery's love. Dame Sirith goes to Margery with a dog, which she made weep with spices. Margery is tricked into believing that the weeping dog presented to her was once Dame Sirith's daughter, a lady in circumstances similar to hers. Dame Sirith claims that she had been transformed into a dog by her suitor because she had refused to yield to his overtures of love. Scared, Margery asks Dame Sirith to find Wilekin. When Dame Sirith returns with Wilekin, he is enthusiastically received by Margery. The theme of the metamorphosis of a dog can be traced back to India. It is also a common theme worldwide - similar stories are known in Latin, in the vernaculars of France, Spain, Germany, Iceland, as well as in Greek, Hebrew, Syrian, Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit. The plot follows in its general outline the oriental version of the Book of Sindibaad and is also closely related to the Greek Syntipas. For a comprehensive list of comparable texts and their relation to the Middle English poem, see McKnight (1913: xxi-xxxvii). The poem Dame Sirith is the earliest fabliau in English, the only Middle English fabliau outside of Chaucer and the earliest substantial play or proto-drama with a secular theme. A fabliau features middle-class, non-aristocratic life (a merchant, wife, clerk), illicit sex relations, trickery and obscene, bawdy humor (e.g. ll. 240-241 And loke þat þou hire tille / And strek out hire þes 'and make sure that you plough her / and stretch out her thighs'), a fair degree of realism such as localized actions or named characters (e.g. ll. 77-78 the feire of Botolfston / In Lincolneschire 'the fair of Boston / in Lincolnshire'). The reason why only one fabliau from that period survives may lie in moralistic objections as shown by frequent complaints about this genre (e.g. Chaucer's apology to The Miller's Tale). The text includes a huge amount of dialogue; more than 400 of the 450 lines are conversation. Furthermore, the last six lines by Dame Sirith read like an epilogue. Letters placed in the margin indicate a change of speaker in the text. These are Testator (T), Clericus (C), Uxor (U) and Femina (F), representing the narrator, Wilekin, Margery and Dame Siriþ respectively. Perhaps the poem was written for oral presentation. The poet may have read the different roles in a variety of voices and used various props. Even though there are no stage directions, the text may thus be regarded as proto-dramatic rather than narrative in nature. In fact, it has been suggested that the text is a rendering or translation of an earlier secular drama (e.g. Wright 1844: 1). |
| Genre/subjects: | fabliau, burlesque, comic bourgois tale, humor |
| Dialect of original composition: | Southern, East-Midlands The immediate exemplar of the surviving manuscript witness probably came from the northern East-Midlands (Laing 2000: 557-64, 569). "Ten Brink assigns the original work to the Southeast, to Kent or Sussex. Brandl, on the other hand, assigns it to the Southwest Midland. A close examination of the existing form of the text reveals a mixture of forms from different dialects. [...] Along with [...] Southern forms appear a number of non-Southern features. [...] The Dame Siriz in its present form is based on an East Midland original, and retains forms peculiar to that dialect. It was probably composed, however, by a resident of the South, and the manuscript, written at Worcester, was probably written by a scribe belonging to the Southwest" (McKnight 1913: xxxix-xli). The current form of the poem derives "from an East Midland MS., the original being probably Southern" (Wells 1916: 178). |
| Date of original composition: | 1260-1282 The latest possible manuscript date, 1282, provides the terminus ante quem for the composition of the text. The poem was probably composed considerably earlier than 1282 because "the antiquated language of the poem, whose Romance element is confined to about 35 directly borrowed words, of which there are only 5 verbs, is placed, in its vocabulary and forms, immediately next to the oldest surviving [Middle English] texts" [translated from German original] (Mätzner 1867: 105). The poem may originate from "1275-1300" (Dunn & Byrnes 1990: 174). The text was "composed (or rather translated) in the latter part of the thirteenth century" (Wright 1844: 1). |
| Suggested date: | 1270 |
| PCMEP period: | 2a (1250-1350) |
| Versification: | two-line, aa, and six-line, aabccb "The versification is not uniform. The first 132 verses are in the tail-rime stanza [...] [aabccb]. Then follow 16 verses in couplets. During the remainder of the poem the tail-rime stanza and the couplet alternate irregularly" (McKnight 1913: xli) |
| Index of ME Verse: | 342 (IMEV), 342 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 594 |
| Wells: | 2.20 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Sirith |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | McKnight, George H. 1913. Middle English Humorous Tales in Verse. Boston and London: Heath. 1-20. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 86 (SC 1687), ff. 165r-168r |
| Online manuscript description: | LAEME Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 57) Summary catalogue of Western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, no. 1687 |
| Manuscript dialect: | West-Midlands The manuscript language has been localized to Gloucestershire or Worcestershire (McIntosh et al. 1986: 197). Support for the view that the manuscript is from the West-Midlands is also provided by external evidence surrounding a kalendar of saints from the diocese of Worcester, the occurrence of the place names Ridmerley and Pendock, and references to three Worcestershire families (Brown 1932, Miller 1963, Tschann and Parkes 1996, Laing 2000). LAEME localizes the manuscript more specifically to "Redmarley D’Abitot, N[orth]W[est] Glouc[ester]s[hire]" (LAEME item 2002). The large amount of language mixture between the dialects of the scribe, the immediate examplar and the original composition has resulted in the exclusion of the text from the LAEME corpus. McKnight (1913: xxxix, xl) and Wells (1916: 178) concur with the localization of the scribe in the (South) West-Midlands. |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiii-ex The manuscript has been dated to 1272–1282 based on a list of kings on f. 205v ending with Edward I, who ruled from 1272, and the Roman numeral .x., interpeted as the tenth year of his reign, 1282 (Tschann & Parkes 1996: xxxvi–xxxvii). The online version of the Middle English Dictionary lists the manuscript date as "?a1300." With respect to the text Dame Sirith specifically, scholars have suggested manuscript dates such "between 1272 and 1283" (McKnight 1913: xxxix, xli) or "1275-1300" (Dunn and Byrnes 1990: 174). |
About the file:
| File name: | M2a.DameSirith |
| ID: | DameSirith,w.x.y.z: w=page, x=line, y=token, z=Speaker: {[Wilkin], [Margery], [DameSirith], [Narrator]} The poem largely consists of a dialogue between the three main protagonists and a narrator. The speaker of every token is indicated as the speaker of the ID. The French title does not have a line count or speaker but includes instead "Title" and "NoSpeaker" |
| Word count: | 2,539 |
| Token count: | 342 |
| Line count: | 450 |
Other:
| General notes: | The syntax of the poem seems to be relatively natural and colloquial. There is little poetic licensing distorting word order patterns. The poem may be closer to a drama than any other text available from the period 1250-1300. The text has frequently been discussed and published, for example in Wright (1844: 1-12), Mätzner (1867: 103-113), Zupitza (1904: 131-138), McKnight (1913: 1-20) or Dunn & Byrnes (1990: 174-187). For a comprehensive list of available editions, consult the (Digital) Index of Middle English Verse. There is a fragmentary poem, Interludium de Clerico et Puella, which is similar in phrasing and plot to Dame Sirith but was composed about fifty years after it. McKnight prints the Interludium as an appendix to Dame Sirith on pages 21-24 of his edition. |
| Remarks on parses: | The line breaks follow the rhyming scheme as in McKnight's (1913: 1-20) edition. The narrator is not tagged as direct speech but all the other dialogue is. Line 214 presents a particular parsing problem: þat þe to me þis hernde haveþ send 'who you to me this business has sent.' Either the pronoun þe 'thee' or þis hernde 'this business' are the direct object of send. The annotation for þis hernde is a noun phrase adjunct, NP-ADT, meaning "on this business." |
References
Brown, Carleton F. 1932. English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon.
Dunn, Charles W. & Byrnes, Edward T. 19902. Middle English Literature. New York: Routledge.
Laing, Margaret. 2000. 'The Linguistic Stratification of the Middle English Texts in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86. ' Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 101. 523–569.
Mätzner, Eduard A. F. 1867. Altenglische Sprachproben nebst einem Wörterbuche. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. (available online)
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. & Benskin, Michael. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
McKnight, George H. 1913. Middle English Humorous Tales in Verse. Boston and London: Heath. (available online)
Miller, Brian D. H. 1963. 'The Early History of Bodleian Ms. Digby 86.' Annuale medievale 4. 26-56.
Tschann, Judith & Parkes, Malcolm. 1996. Facsimile of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86. EETS s.s.16. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)
Wright, Thomas. 1844. Anecdota Literaria: A collection of short poems in English, Latin and French, illustrative of the Literature and History of England in the Thirteenth Century and more especially of the Condition and Manners of the Different Classes of Society. London: John Russel Smith. (available online)
Zupitza, Julius. 1904.7 Alt- und mittelenglisches Übungsbuch: Zum Gebrauche bei Universitätsvorlesungen und Seminarübungen mit einem Wörterbuche. Wien: Wilhelm Braumüller. (available online)