King Robert as the Illiterate Fool in Robert of Cisyle

This paper is about Robert of Cisyle, a late fourteenth-century English romance wherein the eponymous proud Sicilian king who, after deriding the Latin Magnificat verse that God may put down the mighty and exalt the humble, finds himself deposed and forcibly transformed into the court fool by an angel usurper until he fully repents and sheds his excessive pride. The first of the main interests that I would like to explore in this paper is with the significance of the confrontational moment between Robert and the unnamed clerk in regard to translating the Latin deposuit potentes lines of the Lucan Magnificat into the vernacular tongue of the king. The deliberate textual deployment where Robert is depicted to have no literacy in Latin works to propose that he has no rationality, unlike the Latinate translator-clerk, and he is an irrational creature like dogs and apes by whom he will be assisted after his downfall. My second interest, in deep connection with this first one, lies in imagining the reactions of the Ricardian and post-Ricardian English audiences towards the rendering of Robert as illiterate and his drastic descent to the level of the court fool and of animals. Although the major story is set in Sicily and Rome with no definite indication of time, Robert, who features as a young, prideful, volatile, and illiterate king, becoming deposed, albeit temporarily, may have been felt very closely, though in different sentiments and veins, by the English audiences, who had experienced or could remember the social and dynastic turmoil that England had had to see, surely including the 1381 Rising and the deposition of Richard II in 1399. This cultural and affective tie that Robert potentially built with the medieval English readership could be one viable explanation of the high popularity that the romance is believed to have enjoyed.