MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

William Goldman’s 1973 novel The Princess Bride is framed as an abridgement (or, as he dubs it, the “good parts version” [35]) of the Florinese satirical genius S. Morgenstern’s original “classic tale of true love and high adventure” of the same title, a tale which is absolutely saturated with medieval tropes. Throughout the text, Goldman continually interrupts Morgenstern’s narrative, punctuating the tale with his own commentary and explanations for his cuts to the “original” text. Strikingly, this narrative framework is very similar to that of many medieval texts. The most notable parallel is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a poem which Chaucer adapts and re-writes from Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. Throughout his poem, Chaucer continually refers back to his “auctour” and desperately tries to keep his story faithful to that of Boccaccio. Similarly, Goldman interrupts his abridgement and desperately tries to reconcile his own interpretation of the text with that of Morgenstern. Thus, through this employment of a medieval framework, Goldman’s medievalism at once evokes the medieval by means of content, as well as performs the medieval by means of narrative device. The irony of Goldman’s interruptions, however, is that there is no “original text” for him to interrupt – there is no Morgenstern, for both he and his text are inventions of Goldman himself. As a result, Goldman’s novel is not only an anachronistic performance of the medieval, but, vis-à-vis this anachronism, it is simultaneously a metafictional performance of how modern people reconstruct and read the Middle Ages. By at once constructing a “good parts” version of the medieval past, and then criticizing that construction, Goldman not only manages to draw this parallel between the past and the present, the medieval and the modern, but between the medieval anxiety about fiction and the modern act of reading the past.