Criticism
The poem is evidently meant to be humorous, as the weapons are totally unsuited to war; the combatants fight with farm tools on old horses more given to passing wind than battle. The martial seriousness of the men's vows is immediately undermined by comic touches such as the banners made from old hides and a trumpet made of wood, fighting for a dowry of an old horse and a spotted pig. The poem does not explain why some of the warriors are fighting for Tyb's hand in marriage when they currently have wives (who arrive to drag home their injured men in wheelbarrows).
Critics do not agree on the subject of or audience for the parody. The poem may be satirizing knightly conventions such as the jousting tournament, or it may be mocking the country bumpkins who try to imitate these courtly rituals. Or, as with Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, the poet may be making fun of speakers of northern English, who were often stereotyped by southerners as backward.
Read more about this topic: Tournament Of Tottenham
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)