The Columbia History of British Poetry (11 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 43
apparent: "history" and "story" are after all the same word. We do not know if Lydgate thought of his work as translating, versifying, or embellishing, or a combination of all three:
For in metring though ther be ignoraunce,
Yet in the story ye may fynde plesaunce
Touching substaunce of that myn auctour wryt.
                                           (TB.V.34913493)
But he is quite clear about the all-important purpose of it: in the tale one can recognize the instability of Fortune, murder, falsehood, treason, rape, adultery,
As in this boke exaumple ye shal fynde . . .
How al passeth and halt here no sojour,
Wastyng away as doth a somer flour.
                                             (V.35653568)
The truth of the message, the moral, is what matters. One would be hard put to state the moral of
Troilus and Criseyde
. Lydgate articulates and illustrates the truisms admired in his age without the ability to embody them in memorable language. With the exception of his
Life of Our Lady
, where his verse rises to some beautiful ornate effects, the only line of Lydgate that stays in the memory is from a lyric, "All stant on chaunge like a midsommer roose"and his editor suggests that this line is probably proverbial. Lydgate is, in a manner of speaking, the poet of the proverb, the earnest truism offered without Chaucerian irony or any exploration of complexity.
Thomas Hoccleve, a minor government official from 1387 until his death in 1426, grew up in the long shadow cast by Chaucer. His oeuvre is peculiar: some occasional and religious verse; a translation of Christine de Pisan's
L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours
(1399); a semi-serious confessional poem,
La Male Règle
; a version of the
Speculum principis
; and a curious linked sequence of stories known today as the
Series
. Hoccleve is very insecure: he raises his voice in compliment and assent, rather than in Chaucer's tone of amused intimacy, and the occasions he celebrates are much more public. He seems to have aspired to join in the literary game of pretending to defend women, but where Chaucer is too wily to be nailed to a position, Hoccleve merely seems confused. The
Letter of Cupid
can only be seen as an attack on women by the exercise of giant ingenuity, and Hoccleve's pretended fear of women's angry
 
Page 44
response to it in the Series has the air of an all-male joke. In the
Series
, Hoccleve seems to have wanted to imitate Chaucer's first-person narrative frame and literary personality in a linked set of stories. He presents himself as the maligned and misunderstood friend of women who has to defend his innocence constantly (in the model of Chaucer in the Prologue to the
Legend of Good Women
), and as a penniless, mildly dissolute recovered lunatic who cannot persuade his acquaintances of his restored sanity. This persona is sufficiently bizarre to engage much of his modern interest: most of the critical industry has been devoted to diagnosing Hoccleve's mental condition.
Unlike Langland, whose waking madness signifies his alienated authorial status in a corrupt and confusing world and confers on him something of the aura of a holy fool, Hoccleve's real or artistic lapse from sanity is offered as a reason for adhering more closely to the religious and social norms of his day. He translates worthy workssuch as Henry Suso's
How to Learn to Die
in order to settle his wits, and provides careful moralizations for the other two stories in the
Series
. "Freend, I nat medle of matires grete," Hoccleve tells his interlocutor, and shrinks throughout from anything controversial. The rise of Lollardy since Chaucer's death led would-be official court poets into declarations of orthodoxy; it is significant that Hoccleve should explicitly reproach the Lollard Knight, Sir John Oldcastle, for reading Scripture instead of romances and the histories of Troy and Thebes. Hoccleve, like Lydgate, retreats to the moral platitude and safe didacticism. The inviting role of involved court poet needs authority: Hoccleve only wavers between the obscure personal confession and professions of solidarity and partisanship. His lengthiest and most popular work, the
Regement of Princes
(1411), shows him in full retreat into the part of poet as provider of wise truisms; a reminder that Chaucer's
Melibee
was one of his most copied works in the fifteenth century.
An incomplete, anonymous poem of the mid-fifteenth century, the
Court of Sapience
, belongs to the same tradition, though we know nothing at all about its author or setting. It looks back to Chaucer and Lydgate for its style, meter (rime royal) and inspiration, and provides a clear example of self-confident didactic allegory: but its serenity is achieved only by means of divorcing the action entirely from the actual world. Savagery and chaos are explicitly excluded; politics appears only as a learned abstraction. The framing allegory is minimal: the narrator seeks wisdom, falls asleep, dreams of a meeting with the lady Sapi-
 
Page 45
ence, who then expounds to him all of the various subdepartments of wisdom available to man. The first and most effective book describes the crucial role of divine wisdom in the restoration of humanity through the Incarnation and redemption: it takes the form of a retelling of the traditional story of the daughters of God, Truth, Justice, Mercy, and Peace (from Psalm 85, Vulgate Psalm 84) who quarrel bitterly over the appropriateness of forgiving mankind for the original sin. Only the intervention of divine wisdom, Sapience herself, is able to solve the hopeless dilemma of the celestial relations between Justice and Mercy; and she recounts this tale as her greatest triumph. The poet has selected from a variety of Latin sources the fundamental units of his story, but he combines them with a moving and dramatic skill to produce an effect completely different from Langland.
The poet of the
Court
introduces the daughters at a different moment in sacred history, before the Incarnation, not after the Crucifixion; his rendering focuses on the arguments and the miraculous solution. The daughters first appear arguing their case before the throne of God: Mercy in bitter grief pleading for wretched man, Truth and Justice stating in measured terms the case for his continuing punishment, Peace insisting that she cannot live with discord, until Mercy collapses into a swoon at the impasse. Peace feels her "case" is lost; she delivers a magnificent valedictory speech to all the powers of heaven as she departs into exile. Then the three hierarchies of angels plead for the prisoner, mankind; Sapience offers to solve the dilemma by making the Son of God into man in order to restore his brethren to their former legal status; the angel delivers the message to Mary and the redemption follows. Jesus, on his triumphant return to heaven revives Mercy and restores Peace; the four sisters kiss each other. It is a careful and touching rendering of the bookish and legalistic side of medieval theology; since law was held to be universal, writers took great delight in demonstrating that even the actions of God could be seen as performed in accordance with the dictates of human law, although of course they would have put it the other way round: human law is an imperfect reflection of the law of God, and hence can be used analogically to help us understand the ways of God. The
Court
's poet delights in playing variations on legal systems deployed as images: mankind is a traitor, Jesus wins by right of conquest as well as by purchase; he displays his legal title to man after his triumphant return. As theology, this was already very old-fashioned when the
Court
was written, but as a didac-
 
Page 46
tic vehicle, it is very effective. Allegory here fulfils its traditional function of explaining the abstract in terms of the concrete, without equating the twoand Sapience pauses in her narration to assure her audience that this is allegory, not history.
The same story in Langland is presented entirely differently: his daughters are mysterious figures who approach each other from the four corners of the earth in the darkness that follows the Crucifixion. What the
Court
author tries to express in terms of pathos and detailed argument, Langland presents as mystery and riddle. His Mercy, "a meke thyng with alle," is full of calm confidence and explains to Truth what the light before Hell means; Peace comes "pleyinge" bearing a letter from Love that explains the redemption. Truth and Justice respond with vernacular irritation and Langlandian bad temper, not courtly rhetoric: "Hold thi tonge, Mercy"; "What ravestow?" quod Rightwisnesse; "or thow art right dronke!'' (B.xviii.187). All four sisters then join the audience of the poem to witness Christ's descent into Hell, and his own presentation of the arguments to a diabolic audience. The sisters' dance of reconciliation, the meeting of opposed extremes, is the heart of Langland's experience of God; the poem leads up to and away from precisely this point. In the
Court
, the story of redemption is instead the essential prologue to the rest of the poem which consists of a detailed and very old-fashioned account of the world of learning: first the dreamer is led by Sapience through the natural world where he sees an orderly array of precious stones, animals, trees, and plants, all characterized by their true properties and essential created natures, drawn from the best encyclopedias; then the dreamer arrives at the castle of Sapience, and is shown all human knowledge summed up in the courtyards of Science, Intelligence and Sapience herself, whose court contains the Seven Liberal Arts, the medieval academic curriculum. It is clear that the poet intended to go on to expound the seven major virtues (four cardinal and three theological) and possibly philosophy, but the poem breaks off abruptly. The poet presents all human knowledge and learning as flowing from a divine pattern; the "wyldernes" of this world conceals it, but a diligent seeker can recover it by proper study. The author even recommends suitable books and authors within the poem.
The
Court of Sapience
is the quintessential medieval learned poem. The poet works with assurance within an assured universe between the poles of an incomprehensible God, who may yet be glimpsed through revelation and his works, and the wilderness of sin, which may yet be

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