Octavian (romance)
[1] This Middle English version exists in three manuscript copies and in two separate compositions, one of which may have been written by the 14th-century poet Thomas Chestre who also composed Libeaus Desconus and Sir Launfal.
[2] The other two copies are not by Chestre and preserve a version of the poem in regular twelve-line tail rhyme stanzas, a verse structure that was popular in the 14th century in England.
[3] Both poetic compositions condense the Old French romance to about 1800 lines, a third of its original length, and relate “incidents and motifs common in legend, romance and chanson de geste.”[4] The story describes a trauma that unfolds in the household of Octavian, later the Roman Emperor Augustus, whose own mother deceives him into sending his wife and his two newborn sons into exile and likely death.
There are two Middle English versions of this romance represented by these surviving manuscripts, both of which condense the plot of the Old French original to about a third of its length.
On grounds of style, mode of composition and dialect it is believed that the two romances flanking Sir Launfal, including Octavian, may be by the same author.
[15] Of similar length and degree of condensation as the romance found in British Museum MS Cotton Caligula A. ii, this version differs in the structure of its verses and in the way the Old French story is made to unfold in “a more linear sequence.”[16] It is known as the Northern Octavian.
In thanks the Virgin will provide them with a child, she is sure (Octavian became the Roman Emperor Augustus in 27 BC, nearly thirty years before the birth of Christ.
His mother, however, tells him that the children are not his, a malicious lie that she tries to corroborate by bribing a male kitchen servant to enter the empress's bed while she is asleep.
Octavian is taken to the room, sees the boy, kills him at once and holds his severed head in stark accusation before his terrified wife as she wakes from sleep.
Wandering alone in the forest, the empress (she is given no name in this romance) lies tired and exhausted at a spring one evening and falls asleep.
She assumes that she is being punished for her sins and undertakes to journey to the Holy Land, so she travels to the Aegean Sea and takes a ship bound for Jerusalem.
They all arrive in Jerusalem where the King recognises the lady for who she is, names her little boy Octavian and allows her to stay, with her child and her lioness, in wealth and comfort.
This child is soon rescued from the ape's clutches by a knight, who then loses the baby to a gang of outlaws who take the infant to the coast to sell.
On another occasion he shows an inclination to be over-generous rather than drive a hard bargain and Clement despairs, leading to some comical scenes which culminate in Florent's insistence that he should borrow his father's rusty armour to go out to fight against a giant.
Early the next morning, Clement earns his own moment of glory when he rides into the Saracen camp and, through a brave deception, comes away with this horse to give to his son Florent.
It vanquishes the Saracen host and when the fighting is over they all retire to a nearby castle where Octavian reveals his true identity to the Emperor of Rome and presents his mother to him.
The emperor explains what was told to him on that fateful day so long ago, and his mother is sentenced to be burned to death in a brass tub, but conveniently, she takes her own life instead.
Octavian has similarities with the Middle English Breton lays and is imbued, like much of medieval romance, with the characteristics of folktale and myth.
[23] It is also a family romance, and “nurture is a particularly important theme in Octavian's treatment of the family.”[24] But like many other Middle English verse romances, its displays a flexible style during the course of its story,[25] beginning in this case as a tale of suffering and endurance in a similar vein to the 12th-century Latin “Constance saga” from which the 14th century Middle English tale of Emaré and Geoffrey Chaucer's story of Constance derive,[26] but ending in the more heroic vein of a chanson de geste.
[31] Geoffrey Chaucer's heroine Constance, in his Canterbury Tale from the Man of Law, is married to a heathen king and then bundled into a small boat and set adrift on the orders of her mother-in-law, when all about her have been brutally murdered.
[35] Margaret, wife of the king of Aragon in a 14th-century English verse romance Sir Tryamour, is sent into exile, which is intended by the evil steward of her husband's kingdom to end swiftly in death.
[40] Cristobel, in the English romance Sir Eglamour of Artois, has her baby son snatched away by a griffin and delivered stork-like to the King of Israel.
[48] In the Middle English Breton Lay Sir Degaré, the eponymous hero is taken as a baby to the door of a hermitage and brought up by the hermit's sister and her husband, knowing nothing of his royal mother.
[63] Sir Florent performs great feats of heroism in order to woo and finally to seize Marsabelle from the clutches of her father, the Saracen king.
[72] Unlike the Greek tragedies Oedipus Rex and Ion, whose plots also involve a young man brought up without any knowledge of his true origins, these Medieval romances are at heart comedies.
