Black Arrow the Renowned Author Robert Louis

¶ … Black Arrow

The renowned author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Black Arrow in 1888. Set in England during the 15th-century Wars of the Roses, this swash-buckling historical novel by the author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped tells the story of young Dick Shelton. It was written in not the language of his time, but the language of the setting he wished to portray.

Although this medieval romance is one of Stevenson's minor adventure stories, still it has been very popular as a coming of age novel. Its key character is immature young noble Richard Shelton, who learns that his guardian is in fact an evil man who murdered Richard's father and who intends to attain wealth by constantly changing sides in the Wars of the Roses. Being a guardian entails that when a noble heir is orphaned, his revenues until he came of age are in the hands of his liege lord, or such guardian; furthermore, the guardian is also commonly settled the tax payable on coming of age or marriage. These rights were the subject of lucrative trade in medieval England, and were one of the crown's major sources of income.

The main impediment to a modern reader, in The Black Arrow and the major reason it is less well-known than, Treasure Island, is the elaborate medieval language used in the dialogue. This is something that has progressively been subdued in historical novels during the twentieth century, until now they are usually written with characters who speak relatively everyday modern English. This is due to a change in thinking; it is now considered better to suitably reproduce what it felt like to be alive at the time the novel is set than to attempt to literally reconstruct it. A modern reader will respond in a different way to the kind of language used here from the way their medieval equivalent would have done to hearing it spoken. Of course, there was regional and class-based demarcations between individuals when people traveled less widely; this would be particularly difficult to copy, even for a specialist in dialect development.

Writers like Stevenson did not try to find perfect dialects with reference to the related areas instead they gave their characters dialogue based on a romanticized account of the formal speeches in medieval poetry - at least as inauthentic as modern usage.