SOURCE: Spearing, A. C. “Lydgate's Canterbury Tale: The Siege of Thebes and Fifteenth Century Chaucerianism.” In Fifteenth Century Studies: Recent Essays, edited by Robert F. Yeager, pp. 333-64. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984.

[In the following essay, Spearing examines the nature of Lydgate's attitude towards and indebtedness to his great contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer in The Siege of Thebes and goes on to identify the shortcomings and merits of the work.]

Poetic history, in the book's argument, is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.

That sentence forms the second paragraph of the introduction to Harold Bloom's provocative book The Anxiety of Influence.¹ Bloom's argument is of great assistance in thinking about English literature in the fifteenth century. If he is right in identifying poetic history with poetic influence, then the fifteenth century is the first age in which it is possible to speak of the history of English poetry. Before then, as N. F. Blake has noted, texts in English “seem to appear quite fortuitously without past or future; they are not part of a native vernacular tradition.” Later writers are not usually aware of the work of earlier writers; where they are aware of it, they do not see it as the property of individual precursors; they may incorporate parts of it in their own writing by adaptation or modernization, but without intending to produce recognizable quotation or allusion.²

With Chaucer, however, came a crucial change. As early as The House of Fame, under the impact of his reading of Dante, we find evidence in his work of a new sense of the possibility that writing in English might lay claim to inspiration and survival.³ But of greater importance is that later passage, near the end of Troilus and Criseyde, in which he dismisses his work to posterity. His thought here may have originated in a sense of what he was doing in this longest and grandest of his narratives that shaped itself only as he actually wrote the poem. As the leaves of manuscript accumulated on his desk, I imagine that it came home to Chaucer with new force that he had created not merely an entertainment for transient courtly performance, but, in the fullest sense of the word, a book—a book, possessing something of the potentiality for permanence that had hitherto been associated only with Latin writing, one that might continue to exist in a future that he could only dimly envisage. And so he wrote:

Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye,
Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye,
So sende myght to make in som comedye!
But litel bok, no makyng thow n'envie,
But subgit be to alle poesye;
And kis the steppes, where as thow seest pace
Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge.
And red wherso thow be, or elles songe,
That thow be understonde, God I biseche!

(V. 1786-98)

Probably no earlier writer in English had referred to his own work by either of the grand titles of “tragedye” or “comedye”; indeed, except for Chaucer's own use of the word tragedye shortly before this in his translation of Boethius, perhaps neither word had previously been used in English at all. I suppose too that no earlier writer in English had related his work to “poesye” as Chaucer does here—poesye, as opposed to the native word makyng, evidently meaning classical literature, all that is represented by the catalogue “Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.” Though strongly influenced by Dante (from whom the catalogue probably derives), Chaucer is doing something quite new in this stanza: he is inventing the conception of a history of literature in which a work in English may have a place, however modest, alongside the great writers of the classical past.⁴ His book is “litel,” to be sure, and it is to be subject to its precursors, to kiss the footsteps of the classics; but for all that it can be mentioned in the same breath as Virgil, Ovid, and the rest.⁵

In one stanza, then, Chaucer relates his book to the past; in the next he relates it to the future, and once more with a new conception of the possibilities for writing in English. Unlike Latin, the English language is for Chaucer diverse in its dialectal forms and in its spelling, so it will be difficult for an English poem to hold its shape against the errors of scribes. But Chaucer does imagine a future in which his book will go on being copied, even though miswritten and mismetered. Unable to foresee the invention of printing, what he imagines is a future of continued scribal copying and textual corruption; yet to do that was an astonishing act of imagination for a medieval English writer, who would normally think of his work as serving the purposes of entertainment or instruction only for the present: what Chaucer is doing in this stanza is virtually to invent the possibility of a history of English poetry. His fifteenth-century imitators looked back to him, we know, as “maister deere and fadir reverent”;⁶ and we have learned to discard the cliché of Chaucer as “the father of English poetry,” because we are aware that there was poetry of major importance in English many centuries before Chaucer. But Chaucer surely was the father of English literary history: the first English poet to conceive of his work as an addition, however humble, to the great monuments of the classical past and as continuing to exist in a future over which he would have no control.

Chaucer then invented the idea of a poetic history for English: yet he rejected as far as possible the influence of existing English literature on his own work. There was no question of recovering the names and works of his English precursors, and he left it to his successors to enact the history he had invented. In the generations of English poetry, Chaucer established himself as the first father—for example, by using the lists of his own compositions which he gives in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women, in The Man of Law's Prologue, and at the end of The Canterbury Tales (the first such lists in English) as a means of marking out as his own property a certain area of poetic achievement. To his successors it would appear that, as father, he made possible their very existence as English poets, and yet that, as his successors, they inevitably came too late. Chaucer had done too much: the extraordinarily varied body of work he left behind seemed coextensive with what was possible for English poetry, so that it could be felt that his death “Despoiled hath this land of the swetnesse / Of rethorik.”⁷ A sense of inadequacy when confronted with Chaucer's achievement was common enough among fifteenth-century poets. John Walton, for example, introducing his verse translation of Boethius, writes:

To Chaucer, that is floure of rethoryk
In Englisshe tong and excellent poete,
This wot I wel, no thing may I do lyk,
Though so that I of makynge entyrmete.(8)

And John Lydgate, in his Flower of Courtesy, laments that

We may assay for to countrefete
His gaye style, but it wyl not be.(9)

Such passages are example of the rhetorical topos of modesty, but there is no reason to dismiss them as merely that. They appear to support Bloom's argument that poetic influence is accompanied by anxiety, though not his assumption that Shakespeare and his predecessors belonged to “the giant age before the flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic consciousness.”¹⁰ The beginnings of English poetic history in the fifteenth century really do seem to be marked by anxiety of influence.

The example of Chaucerian influence to be considered here is, nevertheless, one of those least marked by overt anxiety.¹¹ Lydgate's Siege of Thebes was consciously and carefully composed as an addition to The Canterbury Tales. A major advantage of Chaucer as precursor was that so much of his work was left incomplete. It might not be possible for successors to contemplate matching his overall achievement or even to discover a literary field which he had not already appropriated, but some of the fields he had made his own were at least so large that he had not had time to finish ploughing them. Bloom, borrowing a term from Lacan, defines one type of poetic influence as “tessera or the link,” in which “the later poet provides what his imagination tells him would complete the otherwise ‘truncated’ precursor poem and poet.”¹²The Canterbury Tales is or appears to be genuinely truncated. The most yawning gap, if we can take the Host's proposals in the General Prologue as Chaucer's plan for the whole work, is the absence of any tales for the homeward journey. It is this gap that The Siege of Thebes is designed to fill, or rather to begin filling, since it is offered only as the first tale of the first day of the work's missing second half. In his prologue Lydgate recalls the tale-telling of The Canterbury Tales, following Chaucer in treating the pilgrimage as a real event of which the latter was merely “Chief registrer” (line 48).¹³ He explains that, visiting Canterbury, “The holy seynt pleynly to visite, / Aftere siknesse my vowes to aquyte” (lines 71-72), he happened by chance to take lodgings in the very same inn as Chaucer's pilgrims. There he was accosted by “her governour, the Host” (line 79) and invited to join them for supper and for the return journey next morning, when he would be obliged to join the tale-telling competition. He agreed and was called on to tell the first tale, and The Siege of Thebes is the outcome.

In attaching to The Canterbury Tales a story told by a pilgrim not belonging to the original group that set off from the Tabard, Lydgate is already imitating Chaucer.¹⁴ It will be recalled that “At Boghtoun under Blee” (VIII 556) Chaucer's pilgrims had been overtaken by “A man that clothed was in clothes blake” (VIII 557), and that his unexpected arrival led to the telling of an additional tale. It seems clear that Lydgate, also dressed in the black garb appropriate to his religious order (Siege, line 73), is a figure parallel to the Canon. Lydgate says that he was accompanied by “My man to-forn with a voide male” (line 76),¹⁵ and he seems to have arrived at this detail by combining two elements from The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue: the Canon is also accompanied by “his yeman” (VIII 562), and we are told, in a couplet that a careless reader might well relate to the servant rather than the master, that “A male tweyfoold on his croper lay; / It semed that he caried lite array” (VIII 566-67).¹⁶ One further indication that Lydgate may have had the Canon's Yeoman's Prologue as his model for attaching The Siege of Thebes to The Canterbury Tales occurs when he makes the Host assert that none dare refuse to obey his command to tell a tale, “Knyght nor knave, chanon, prest, ne nonne” (Siege, line 137).

A far more important connection of the Siege with the Tales lies in its relationship with The Knight's Tale. This is, of course, the first tale of the outward journey, and immediately follows the General Prologue; The Siege of Thebes is presented as the first tale of the homeward journey, and is given a prologue manifestly modelled in style on the opening of the General Prologue. Appropriately, then, the Siege is intimately linked with The Knight's Tale in subject matter. It “completes” Chaucer's first tale by recounting the earlier stages of the Theban legend, to which there are so many allusions in its predecessor, and it ends by taking us up to the beginning of The Knight's Tale, “as my mayster Chaucer list endite” (Siege, line 4501), with the appeal of the Theban widows to Theseus. In the two hundred or so lines of narrative from the assembly of the widows, “alle in clothes blake” (line 4417)—symmetrically matching the teller of the prologue “In a cope of blak” (line 73)—I count allusions to no fewer than thirty separate lines occurring in The Knight's Tale 1878-1010. Evidently Lydgate now had a manuscript of the Tale in front of him, and as he constructs a mosaic of his own from Chaucer's words and phrases, his part of the Theban story merges into that of his master. Lydgate may have persuaded himself that not only The Canterbury Tales as a whole but also The Knight's Tale was “truncated”: he would have found some warrant for this in the Knight's sharp abridgment of his story at its very beginning, and his modest excuse that

I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere,
And wayke been the oxen in my plough.
The remenant of the tale is long ynough.

(I 886-88)¹⁷

Whatever Lydgate's real opinion, on this one occasion he summoned up courage to use “tessera or the link” as a means of seizing back, or at least reinfiltrating, some of the ground already occupied by his poetic father. The surprising absence of Chaucer himself from the company of pilgrims that Lydgate encounters at Canterbury is worth notice: the implicit claim of the Siege is that in it Lydgate becomes the father whose place he usurps.

The purpose of what follows will be to examine the nature of Lydgate's Chaucerianism in The Siege of Thebes, while at the same time attempting to identify the merit of the later poet's work. Lydgate, in common with other fifteenth-century Chaucerians, sees the essence of Chaucer's achievement as consisting in the eloquence by which he first raised the English language to the level of a rhetorical high style. It was for this that he had praised him in the Troy Book:

Noble Galfride, poete of Breteyne,
Amonge oure Englisch that made first to reyne
The gold dewe-dropis of rethorik so fyne,
Oure rude langage only t'enlumyne.(18)

He praises him in similar terms in the first passage of The Siege of Thebes that alludes to Chaucer:

… hym that was, yif I shal not feyne,
Floure of poetes thorghout al Breteyne,
Which sothly hadde most of excellence
In rethorike and in eloquence.

(lines 39-42)

(This very passage, which identifies Chaucer without naming him, at once illustrates the rhetorical figure of circumlocutio and, by omitting the name, provides a verbal equivalent to Chaucer's physical absence from the company in Lydgate's poem.) Before offering a more detailed account of this ventriloquially produced Chaucerian eloquence, I must note that it would be an error to suppose that it is merely a matter of verbal style. For Lydgate, as evidently for Chaucer, genuine eloquence was a matter of high meaning as well as high style, or perhaps it would be better to say that elevated thought and feeling could be seen as one component of high style.¹⁹ Thus he goes on to praise Chaucer for faithfully recording all the pilgrims' tales,

Be rehersaile of his sugrid mouth,
Of eche thyng keping in substaunce
The sentence hool withoute variance,
Voyding the chaf, sothly for to seyn,
Enlumynyng the trewe piked greyn
Be crafty writinge of his sawes swete.

(lines 52-58)

The Siege of Thebes tells a story and Lydgate may have had as deep and as unjustified a contempt as some twentieth-century critics for the mere art of storytelling; but it converts that story into eloquence not just by applying to it the “gold dewe-dropis of rethorik so fyne” but also by extracting from it a fruitful moral doctrine. The actual relation between narrative and moral generalization in Chaucer is more complex than Lydgate grasped; but for him doubtless nothing could be more unquestionably Chaucerian than, for example, to copy the verbal and moral eloquence of a stanza near the end of Troilus and Criseyde in some lines near the end of the Siege:

Lo her, the fyn of contek and debat,
Lo her, the myght of Mars, the froward sterre;
Lo, what it is for-to gynne a werre.

(lines 4628-30)²⁰

Robert W. Ayers, in one of the few substantial published studies of the Siege, rightly emphasizes that Lydgate's purpose was “to teach some moral and political lessons.” However, when he goes on to speak of the “moral—and thus extraliterary—relevance and application” of the Siege, he draws a distinction that I believe Lydgate would have thought false.²¹ On the other hand, it must be admitted that the same distinction often holds good of Lydgate's practice in the Siege. The literary and the moral harmonize subtly in genuine Chaucerian eloquence; but in Lydgate, as we shall see, each is developed and indeed exaggerated on its own terms, and the result is sometimes painful or odd discord.

I turn first to the verbal aspects of the style of The Siege of Thebes. The Chaucerian high style which Lydgate aims to reproduce is that not only of The Knight's Tale but also of other courtly poems of Chaucer's maturity, and especially of the two that with The Knight's Tale form a group of what may be called “classical romances,” Troilus and Criseyde and The Franklin's Tale. In all three poems Boccaccio is the source for an imaginative re-creation of the classical past; Boethius is the source for philosophical speculations that are generally compatible with Christianity yet can appropriately be attributed to pagan characters; and a high style is used that mediates between the native tongue and the classical eloquence of Latin poetry. A single example will show how Lydgate can move outside The Knight's Tale to imitate such effects. Amphiorax, the Greek high priest or “bishop,” disappears with his chariot into the earth in the final battle at Thebes. This is an incident referred to in Troilus and Criseyde (II 104-05), but Lydgate chooses to describe it in lines adapted from a quite different context in The Franklin's Tale. Compare the following—

For he ful lowe is discendid doun
Into the dirk and blake regyoun
Wher that Pluto is crownyd and ystallyd
With his quene, Proserpina i-callyd

(Siege, lines 4041-44)

—with the passage in which Chaucer's Aurelius begs Apollo to intercede with Lucina, the moon-goddess, in her role as Proserpina:

Prey hire to synken every rok adoun
Into hir owene dirke regioun
Under the ground, ther Pluto dwelleth inne.

(V 1073-75)

Lydgate's circumlocutio (for the underworld, or hell) elevates the stylistic level and at the same time has an elegant appropriateness to the pagan subject-matter. (it would be more elegant still if Lydgate had not already asserted, with an unChaucerian pious vehemence, that “thus the devel for his old outrages, / Lich his decert, paied hym his wages” [lines 4039-40]—a characteristic example of discord between rhetoric and moralism.)

The extent to which Lydgate's verbal eloquence in The Siege of Thebes can be considered as authentically Chaucerian is extremely difficult to determine, for two reasons in particular. One is that the more he imitates Chaucer, the less, in one sense, he is like Chaucer, who was not after all imitating himself. Further, it is hard to decide how far Lydgate intended his adaptations of specific Chaucer passages to be recognized as such. Did he hope to be the Chaucer of his time, or to practice a recognizably secondary art, one of skillful allusion to familiar sources? There is perhaps no simple answer to this question. Blake urges that in general “fifteenth-century writers who … wanted to imitate Chaucer went in for a Chaucerian style rather than for deliberate echoes of his poems,” but in the case of the Siege, a poem manifestly designed as a counterpart to The Knight's Tale, it seems likely that Lydgate would have expected his audience to recognize at least some echoes of Chaucer's work.²² At times, no doubt, his aim is no more than to create a generally Chaucerian texture by weaving together fragments from different passages in Chaucer. Thus his description of the army Adrastus gathers to assist Polymytes begins as follows:

Ther men may see many straunge guyses
Of armyng newe and uncouth devyses,
Every man after his fantasye.

(lines 2661-63)

These lines largely consist of words and phrases from two different arming scenes in The Knight's Tale, the first describing the knights gathered by Palamon (I 2118-89), the second describing the preparations on the morning of the tournament (I 2491-2536). Guyses, newe, and Every … after his come from the first; Ther … may see, uncouth, and devyses from the second. At other times Lydgate is challenging comparison with Chaucer passages that he must surely expect us to remember, as in the imitation in the Siege's opening lines of the opening of The Canterbury Tales, or the imitation at Siege 4565-4602 of Chaucer's showpiece occupatio on Arcite's funeral rites (I 2919-66). The Siege of Thebes is poised somewhat uneasily between being simply another Canterbury tale, comparable with Chaucer's, and being an acknowledged pastiche of the master's methods.

The second difficulty is that the Chaucer Lydgate copied was the Chaucer he saw, a poet different in many ways from the Chaucer we see. In particular, Chaucer, “the firste that ever enluminede owre langage with flowres of rethorike and of elloquence” (as Lydgate himself put it), was responsible for the beginnings of a tradition of eloquence which runs centrally through English poetry at least down to the nineteenth century.²³ We therefore take for granted, as normal features of literary English, stylistic features that in Lydgate's time were admirable innovations, deserving to be copied for their own sake. There are perhaps four chief aspects of poetic style in which, alongside Chaucer's continuing use of many phrases from popular English verse, his “classical romances” and other mature courtly works break sharply with the Middle English poetry of his predecessors. These are the predominance of Latinate diction; the use of highly complex syntactical structures, often accompanied by an artificial word order, on the model of Latin poetry; a general concern for local beauty of thought and sound; and the substitution of figurative for literal and straightforward modes of expression. These are precisely the aspects of Chaucer's verbal style that Lydgate most persistently copies and in some cases exaggerates; and indeed one of the unexpected uses of his work is to enable us to recognize a dimension of Chaucer's achievement that time has flattened. I will consider each of the four aspects separately.

The Latinate or “aureate” diction of fifteenth-century poetry has been much discussed and needs little further comment.²⁴ However many or few Latinate words Chaucer actually added to the English language, it seems likely that he added many to English poetry, and Lydgate followed in his footsteps. It has been pointed out that many such words introduced by Lydgate have now become “so much part of the English language that we can hardly imagine how it managed without them.”²⁵ An example from The Siege of Thebes which shows Lydgate as an authentic Chaucerian, using Chaucer in the way in which Chaucer used earlier nonpoetic writings, occurs in a chronographia which itself imitates a common Chaucerian device:²⁶

Whan Phebus passyd was merydyen
And fro the south westward gan hym drawe,
His gylte tressys to bathen in the wawe.

(lines 4256-58)

In Chaucer, merydyen is used only in scientific prose; Lydgate creatively transfers it to the idiom of classically inspired poetic circumlocution.²⁷ “Aureate diction,” however, is not an especially noticeable feature of the style of the Siege.

The ambitious clumsiness of Lydgate's attempts at complex Chaucerian syntax has also been discussed elsewhere, with the opening of the Siege as a salient example.²⁸ This is another chronographia, plainly composed in imitation of what is now perhaps the most famous passage in Chaucer, the opening sentence of The Canterbury Tales.²⁹ We scarcely notice the syntactic complexity or unEnglish word order of Chaucer's opening sentence, even though it is extended over eighteen lines by a whole series of adverbial clauses of time, each compound in structure and many containing further subordinate clauses. Lydgate's opening sentence, like Chaucer's, begins with Whan … and proceeds through a series of adverbial clauses of time; and the intention is doubtless that we should wait eagerly for the long-deferred main clause. If we do, our wait is long, for Lydgate takes a subsequent whan—

The tyme in soth whan Canterbury talys
Complet and told at many sondry stage
Of estatis in the pilgrimage

(lines 18-20)

—as a cue to embark on a rambling sketch of Chaucer's poem and an eulogy of Chaucer. This does eventually, it is true, return to “the tyme that thei deden mete” (line 58), but the sentence peters out at last, about line 65, without ever having achieved a main clause at all.

The syntax of The Siege of Thebes is by no means always as inept as in this extraordinary opening. Indeed, even that is mildly pleasing in its soporific way: Lydgate has learned mellifluousness from Chaucer if not syntactical power, and he jogs gently and vaguely along, with an irregularity of meter that seems unobtrusively natural and not inappropriate to a slow-moving procession of pilgrims. Again, there are times when Lydgate puts his meandering diffuseness to expressive purposes with surprising dramatic power. When Tydeus goes to Thebes on Polymytes' behalf to persuade Ethyocles to keep his agreement to share the kingship, he begins with a lengthy profession of brevity that catches well the note of diplomatic negotiation:

‘Sir,’ quod he, ‘unto your worthynesse
My purpoos is breefly to expresse
Th'effecte only, as in sentement,
Of the massage why that I am sent.
It were in veyn longe processe forto make,
But of my mater the verrey ground to take,
In eschewyng of prolixité,
And voyde away al superfluyté,
Sith youre-silf best ought to understond
The cause fully that we han on hond,
And ek conceyve th'entent of my menynge,
Of rightwisnesse longgyng to a kynge.

(lines 1901-12)

When Ethyocles answers, “Dyssimulyng under colour feyned” (line 1958), his slow-moving indirection admirably suggests hypocrisy (lines 1965-92), with feigned astonishment gradually giving way to the threat that such a request

… were no token as of brotherhede,
But a signe rather of hatrede,
To interrupte my possessioun
Of this litil pore regioun.

(lines 1989-92)

But in general, when Lydgate aims at Chaucerian grandeur by means of hypotaxis, his style lacks the firm logical underpinning that it needs and that could be triumphantly achieved by later Chaucerians such as Gavin Douglas.

Local beauty of thought and sound is again something we take entirely for granted as a characteristic of English poetry: it reaches its culmination perhaps in late-Victorian poets such as Swinburne, in whom indeed it achieves an autonomy against which much twentieth-century poetry has reacted harshly. Yet before Chaucer this was not so: the beauty of poems such as Havelok or Sir Orfeo derives from the larger contours of narrative, not from the concentrated effect of single lines or phrases.³⁰ Pearsall notes how ‘Often it seems that a particular cadence in Chaucer's verse has stuck in Lydgate's mind, so that he keeps coming back to it, trying to catch it himself;”³¹ and Lydgate and other early disciples clearly recognized and attempted to imitate this new musicality, in which the garment of eloquence seems scarcely distinguishable from the body of sense. Thus we find in Hoccleve such lines as “My well, adew! farwell, my good fortune!” or “Excesse at bord hath layd his knyf with me.”³² Lydgate has been criticized for his failure to grasp Chaucerian metrics, but The Siege of Thebes is full of lines in which beauty of sound matches elegance of sense. I give two examples, chosen at random—“Thy byrth and blood ar bothe two unwist” (line 494) and “Wrong, wrouht of olde, newly to amende” (line 3700)—and then stop short, for the alternative would be a critical analysis of the whole poem.

I turn now to the fourth feature of Chaucer's poetic style, which must detain us for longer. One type of figuration that Lydgate learned from Chaucer is the substitution of learned metaphor for literal statement. This may be illustrated by the instances of circumlocutio quoted above from the Siege: lines 4042-44 meaning “into hell” or lines 4256-58 meaning “when the sun was setting.” Again, one might mention the substitution of “Mercury” and “Mars” in the following passage for “persuasion” and “force,” together with the metonymic use of “harp” and “sword” to represent the special powers of the two gods:

Wherfor me semeth mor is fortunat
Of Mercurye the soote sugred harpe
Than Mars swerd, whetted kene and sharpe.

(lines 272-74)

This passage has a special felicity in its context, because it is the means by which Lydgate returns from a digression about persuasion and force to his original topic of Amphion's employment of the literal harp given him by Mercury to raise up the city of Thebes. One more example is the extended metaphor (or small-scale allegory) Lydgate uses to convey the meaning that the news reached Ethyocles:

But wel wote I the newe fame ran
This mene while with ful swift passage
Unto Thebes of this mariage;
And by report trewe and not yfeyned
The soune therof the erres hath atteyned,
Myn auctour writ, of Ethyocles.

(lines 1674-79)

Such figures seem perfectly normal elements of literary English, but before Chaucer they were not so, and they are used far more frequently by Lydgate than by his master.

Another type of figuration is the use of the various types of mora treated by writers on rhetoric as means of amplification. In a sense these are all “natural” devices of eloquence, which can be found in elementary forms even in speech; but Chaucer's widespread and elaborate use of them marked a new departure in English poetic style, and one that deeply impressed his successors. I mentioned above Lydgate's use of occupatio (in theory a means of abbreviation, in practice often used to amplify) at lines 4565-4602 in emulation of Knight's Tale I 2919-66. A similar case is the following passage about the wedding of Adrastus's daughters:

But to telle all the circumstances
Of justes, revel, and the dyvers daunces,
The feestes riche and the gyftes grete,
The pryvé sighes and the fervent hete
Of lovys folk brennyng as the glede,
And devyses of many sondry wede,
The touches stole and the amerous lookes
By sotyl craft leyd oute lyne and hokes
The jalous folk to traysshen and begyle
In their awayt with many sondry wile—
Al this in soth descryven I ne can.

(lines 1663-73)

This was probably suggested by a series of parallel refusals to describe the details of Cambuskyan's birthday feast in The Squire's Tale. Or there is apostrophatio, “O cruel Mars …” (line 2553), with which Lydgate begins Part III of the Siege.³³ Another mora is circumlocutio, of which some examples have already been given; another is digressio, self-consciously introduced by Lydgate, in the form of digressio ad aliam partem materiae,³⁴ as follows:

But now most I make a digressioun
To telle shortly, as in sentement,
Of thilke knyght that Tydeus hath sent.

(lines 2466-68)

Though it would be tedious and unprofitable to attempt an exhaustive survey of Lydgate's employment of the rhetorical devices he found in Chaucer, I must pause over his use of one means of amplification, and that perhaps the commonest in medieval poetry generally—descriptio. The strongly pictorial quality of much later medieval narrative poetry is well known, and is certainly prominent in The Knight's Tale, with its elaborate descriptions of people and places—above all of the two knights' champions and of the temples of the gods. There is nothing in The Siege of Thebes that corresponds very closely to these lengthy formal descriptiones, but on the other hand Lydgate, to a greater extent perhaps than Chaucer himself, does seem to have had a genuinely pictorial imagination. A typical example of the amplification to which this leads can be found in the scene in which King Adrastus (like the Theseus of Knight's Tale I 1696-1713) finds two knights fighting “Withoute juge her querel to depart” (line 1382). He orders them to stop and reconciles them; and when they disarm, Lydgate's apparent source says that they were provided with “deux manteaulx.”³⁵ In the Siege this becomes:

Tweyne mantels unto hem wer broght,
Frett with peerle and riche stonys, wroght
Of cloth of golde and velvyt cremysyn,
Ful richely furred with hermyn,
To wrap hem inne ageyn the colde morowe,
After the rage of her nyghtes sorwe,
To take her reste til the sonne arise.

(lines 1439-45)

Lydgate imagines not only the luxurious external detail but the comforting warmth of fur in the cold morning that follows the angry night of their combat. A special piquancy is given to the scene by the reversal of the expected association of darkness with cold and light with warmth. Here indeed “pictorial” is far from covering the full range of sensory suggestion evoked. A different kind of descriptive effect occurs at the end of the scene mentioned above, in which Tydeus goes as ambassador to Ethyocles. Ethyocles angrily rejects his proposal; Tydeus defies him on behalf of Polymytes and calls on his lords to accept Polymytes as their king the following year, and then,

As he that list no lenger ther sojourne,
Fro the kyng he gan his face tourne—
Nat astouned, nor in his hert afferde,
But ful proudly leyde hond on his swerde,
And, in despit who that was lief or loth,
A sterne pas thorgh the halle he goth,
Thorgh-out the courte, and manly took his stede,
And out of Thebes faste gan hym spede,
Enhastyng hym til he was at large,
And sped hym forth touard the londe of Arge.

(lines 2113-22)

At this moment of dramatic public action, Lydgate is perfectly in control of his syntax, and he creates a scene in which movement, gesture, facial expression, and even the vague sense of stunned onlookers (“in despit who that was lief or loth”) are coordinated to produce a fine spectacle of heroic dignity.

Lydgate's most remarkable and characteristic descriptive skill depends on the evocation of space, light, and color, often with haunting delicacy, to produce picturesque effects of a kind comparable to those found in some of the masterpieces of late-medieval manuscript illumination.³⁶ One such scene is that in which Polymytes rides away from Thebes after it has been agreed that his brother shall reign first. The solitary journey is a common theme of romance, and its setting here is the wild forest that is the usual background to such knightly wanderings. Here however it is realized in greater detail than usual:

… a forest joynyng to the see, …
Ful of hilles and of hegh mounteyns,
Craggy roches and but fewe playns,
Wonder dredful and lothsom of passage,
And ther-with-al ful of beestis rage.

(lines 1163-68)

As night falls, a great storm blows up, with drenching rain and roaring both from the sea and from the forest beasts:

… the wooful sownes
Of tygres, beres, boores, and lyounes,
Which for refut, hem-silve forto save,
Everich in hast drogh unto his cave.

(lines 1179-82)

Polymytes, however, finds no shelter,

Til it was passed almost mydnyght hour,
A large space that the sterres clere,
The clowdes voyde, in hevene did appere,

(lines 1186-88)

and then he emerges from the forest, finds the city of King Adrastus, and falls asleep outside the palace. I am not sure of the syntactic function of the phrase “A large space,” but its poetic effect is to evoke the opening up of the heavens as the clouds are blown away, and, beyond that, the removal of oppression and the escape into a new freedom of adventure. The landscape and weather evoked by Lydgate surely have some kind of connection—all the more engaging because not clearly defined—with the inner experience of Polymytes, as he passes from the cursed city of Thebes to the welcoming land of Argos.

Dorothy Everett once quoted W. P. Ker's definition of romance as “the name for the sort of imagination that possesses the mystery and spell of everything remote and unattainable,” and went on to deny that the English medieval romances possessed that imaginative quality.³⁷ It seems clear that Lydgate at least did possess it, and to a greater degree than Chaucer. In other poems, Lydgate's love for picturesque detail can be merely confusing: so it is in allegorical narratives such as The Temple of Glass, where we seek in vain for the larger significance of moonlight or passing clouds.³⁸ But a romance-like historical narrative such as The Siege of Thebes, being exemplary rather than allegorical, can sustain almost any amount of such descriptive elaboration, for there is no generic expectation that every detail must convey some other meaning.

The most powerful of all the descriptiones in the Siege again begins at night. After Tydeus's departure described above, Ethyocles sends a party to ambush him; his first suspicion of them comes when he

Thought he saugh ageyn the mone shyne
Sheldes fressh and plates borned bright,
The which environ casten a gret lyght.

(lines 2168-70)

They attack; Tydeus kills all but one, but is left

Hym-silf yhurt and ywounded kene,
Thurgh his harneys bledyng on the grene.

(lines 2221-22)

The implied contrast between blood and grass, red and green, becomes a leitmotiv in what follows. He rides away, weak with loss of blood, till he comes to a great castle, once more glimpsed by moonlight:

Conveyed thider be clernesse of the ston,
That be nyght ageyn the moone shon,
On heghe toures with creates marcyal.

(lines 2271-73)

The castle has “joyneaunt almost to the wal” (line 2274) a garden “lich a paradys” (line 2280)—a configuration juxtaposing two opposite aspects of aristocratic life, repeated from The Knight's Tale (I 1056-61). Within the paradisal garden, amid grass and flowers, the wounded knight lets his horse wander, and lies asleep, dreaming, on the ground.

Ther he lay til the larke song
With notes newe hegh up in the ayr,
The glade morowe rody and right fayr,
Phebus also castyng up his bemes,
The heghe hylles gilte with his stremes,
The sylver dewe upon the herbes rounde;
Ther Tydeus lay upon the grounde
At the uprist of the shene sunne,
And stoundemele his grene woundes runne
Round about, that the soyl was depeynt
Of the grene with the rede meynt.

(lines 2296-2306)

In this brilliantly pictorial scene, we find not only the pathetic contrast, common enough in heroic poetry, between an idyllic natural setting and human suffering, but an actual mingling of the two in the mingling of green with red on the ground. Lydgate has already mentioned “grene gras” (line 2288) and “herbes grene, whit, and red” (line 2290); now “green” wounds drip with red blood which stains green grass. The material Lydgate is using is supplied, of course, by literary tradition rather than by observation of life, but it undergoes an imaginative transformation which constantly provides surprises. For example, “painting” is a term used by Chaucer in The Franklin's Tale, in describing a paradisal garden, to refer metaphorically to the seasonal adornment of the earth:

… May hadde peynted with his softe shoures
This gardyn ful of leves and of floures.

(V 907-08)

In Lydgate's passage, the similar metaphorical use of gilte (line 2300) predisposes us to interpret depeynt (line 2305) in this sense, yet the line which follows indicates that depeynt here has its other metaphorical sense of “smeared (with blood).”³⁹ As the two senses fuse, the Monk of Bury brings us surprisingly close to the horrifying sensory acuteness of Marlowe's “Besmeared with blood that makes a dainty show.”⁴⁰

Before leaving the subject of Lydgate's poetic style, I must mention two other topics which deserve fuller discussion, but which I can touch on here only briefly. First, though Lydgate is aiming at a Chaucerian high style, he rightly recognizes that in Chaucer himself stylistic level is not governed by a rigid decorum. Thus, not only does he attempt in his prologue to match the low style of many of Chaucer's link passages (Pearsall writes well of Lydgate's “clumsy playfulness” here⁴¹), but he also imitates successfully in the main body of the poem those sharp turns into dismissive derision which may shock the reader of The Knight's Tale. Thus:

But lete his brother blowen in an horn
Wher that hym lyst, or pypen in a red

(Siege, lines 1790-91)

clearly derives from The Knight's Tale:

That oon of you, al be hym looth or lief,
He moot go pipen in an yvy leef,

(I 1837-38)

daringly fortified by “Absolon may blowe the bukkes horn” (Miller's Tale I 3387). Second, it is difficult to tell how far Lydgate grasped the ironic aspects of Chaucer's narratorial technique, a difficulty redoubled if we feel doubt (as I think we should) as to how securely we grasp them ourselves. At times it would appear that he misses the shimmer of irony that surrounds Chaucer's use of traditional narratorial devices such as the profession of ignorance. Thus Chaucer's

But wheither that she children hadde or noon,
I rede it naught, therfore I late it goon

(Troilus I 132-33)

(shocking us by provoking speculation about Criseyde's earlier life and responsibilities) reappears as

And whether that he had a wif or noon,
I fynde not, and therfor lat it goon

(Siege, lines 465-66)

(referring to Oedipus's foster-father, and apparently without any special significance). Yet at other times Lydgate's professions of ignorance are unmistakably intended ironically, as when he concludes his account of how Tydeus and Polymytes fell in love with Adrastus's daughters by writing:

Withoute tarying to bedde streght they gon.
Touchyng her reste, wher that thei slepte or non,
Demeth ye lovers, that in such maner thing
B'experience han fully knowlecchyng,
For it is nat declared in my boke.

(lines 1501-05)

Here of course the situation is more straightforward, and it must have been an easy step from Chaucer's pose of uncourtly inexperience in love to the inexperience appropriate to Lydgate's role as monk. Lydgate's Chaucerianism does extend to narratorial irony, but, on the whole, only of simple kinds.

I remarked above that it would be an error to draw a sharp distinction between the literary and the moral, at least so far as Lydgate's likely intentions in The Siege of Thebes are concerned. Many of the most striking rhetorical devices—digressio, apostrophatio, sententia, and so on—are employed to expound and generalize the meaning of his story as much as to elevate its style. That meaning is directed especially to rulers: Ayers has observed that Lydgate's purpose in the Siege was “to provide an historical ‘mirror’ wherein kings and governors particularly might observe the social effects of their actions,”⁴² and his message to them is that they must rule mercifully and lovingly, and that resort to warfare is likely to lead to disastrous consequences for all: “Lo, what it is for-to gynne a werre” (line 4630). He ends his poem with a passage, possibly reflecting the Treaty of Troyes, in which he prays to Christ to send peace to this life as well as salvation in the next. Lydgate may well have seen himself as a true Chaucerian in this moral aspect of his poem. He will have remembered that in Troilus and Criseyde, if not in The Knight's Tale, a pagan story is given an explicitly Christian ending. He must have noted the importance of kingship in The Knight's Tale, as personified in Theseus, the virtuous but fallible pagan prince. He may well have thought that the Tale implied, if it did not state, that the resort to arms as a means of settling political and personal problems must lead to disaster, as in Theseus's well-meaning destruction of Thebes when he took it by assault, “And rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter” (I 990), and his equally well-meaning organization of the tournament which ends in the gruesome death of Arcite. In these ways Lydgate may well have persuaded himself that he was “completing” his predecessor's “truncated” work, not just by supplying the absent beginnings of the narrative of Thebes, but by making explicit a moral significance that was left implicit by Chaucer, and that demanded clarification. Many recent interpreters of The Knight's Tale have in fact adopted similar attitudes, though they have not gone so far as to write poems to complete it, and would probably not wish to think of themselves as twentieth-century Lydgates.

In fact, Lydgate has performed upon Chaucer one of those acts of “misreading or misprision” that Bloom sees as necessary in the relation of poets to their precursors.⁴³ It is true that Chaucer is not centrally a celebrator of martial heroism, and that The Knight's Tale does not flinch from horror in its depiction of Mars and his influence over men—“The toun destroyed, ther was no thyng laft” (I 2016). But the Tale presents the aggressive instinct as being, like the erotic, an inevitable part of human nature, as productive of genuine chivalric splendor, and as capable of being controlled by justice, pitee, and brotherly love. Thus, for all its sombreness and its questioning philosophical scope, The Knight's Tale can still be thought of as a chivalric romance. The Siege of Thebes cannot, for Lydgate's opposition to the very substance of romance, the proof of worth by chivalric adventure, is so strong and explicit as to be destructive of the form in which he is writing. When Palamon and Arcite fight together in the grove near Athens, Theseus is humorously critical of their motives—“Now looketh, is nat that an heigh folye?” (I 1798)—but in the parallel scene of the encounter between Polymytes and Tydeus the narrator himself is far more absolute in his criticism:

And thus thies knyghtes, pompous and ellat,
For litil cause fillen at debat;
And as they ranne to-gider on horsbak
Everich on other first his spere brak;
And after that, ful surquedous of pride,
With sharpe swerdes they to-gyder ryde,
Ful yrously, thise myghty champiouns,
In her fury lik tygres or lyouns.

(lines 1349-56)

Although Tydeus is described, apparently admiringly, as “Lich Mars hymsilf, in stiel y-armed bright” (line 1882), Jocasta later has a lengthy speech attempting to persuade Ethyocles not to take up arms against Polymytes, in which, in effect, she argues against the part played by Mars in chivalric life:

And it is foly be short avisement
To putte a strif in Martys jugement;
For hard it is, whan a juge is wood,
To tret aforn hym with-out loos of blood;
And yif we put our mater hool in Marte,
Which with the swerd his lawes doth coarte,
Than may hit happe, wher ye be glad or loth,
Thow and thy brother shal repente both,
And many a-nother that is her present,
Of youre trespas that ben innocent;
And many thousand in cas shal compleyn
          For the debat only of yow tweyn,
          And for your strif shal fynde ful unsoote.

(lines 3661-73)⁴⁴

In part Lydgate, as a monk, is simply ignorant of and bored with the details of soldiership—after the passage quoted above in which he begins to imitate the arming scenes from The Knight's Tale, he breaks off abruptly, declining to “specifie” any further such “derk” matters (lines 2664, 2668)—but above all he strongly disapproves of human aggressiveness.

In this matter and in others, Lydgate resorts quickly and frequently to Christian moralization of his narrative. He opens Part III with an indignant address to “cruel Mars” (line 2553) and goes on to trace back the destruction of Thebes to that “ynfeccioun called Orygynal” (line 2565), which is the source of all the evils of life. The passage itself is finely eloquent, but, in a very unChaucerian way, it closes too quickly the fundamental issues of the story by means of this utterly comprehensive explanation. The rapid resort to moralization is seen at its worst in Lydgate's treatment of the Oedipus story. This begins, charmingly enough, by being accommodated to the conventions of romance. Oedipus kills Laius unwittingly in a tournament; the Sphinx is one of many monsters inhabiting “a wylde and a waast contré” (line 611), placed there “I suppose by enchauntement” (line 626). Then, however, the Sphinx's riddle is posed in such diffusely simple terms as to deprive it of all enigmatic force, and Oedipus's answer is equally tediously drawn out: both suggest that Lydgate was determined not to let his audience's imaginations wander. Finally, the significance of Oedipus's incestuous marriage is reduced to a series of trite moral lessons. Incest “is neither feire ne good, / Nor acceptable” to God (lines 787-88), and always leads to evil consequences, as is shown by the exemplum of Herod's marriage to his brother's wife and the subsequent slaying of John the Baptist:

Therfor I rede every man take hede,
Wherso he be prynce, lorde, or kyng,
That he be war t'eschewe such weddyng.

(lines 802-04)

After the dreadful conclusion with Oedipus's self-blinding, Lydgate tells us what we are to learn:

For which shortly to man and child I rede
To be wel war and to taken hede
Of kyndely right and of conscience
To do honur and due reverence
To fader and moder, of what estat thei be,
Or certeyn ellis they shul nevere the.

(lines 1019-24)

He continues in this strain for another nineteen lines. It would be difficult to imagine a more inept explanation of one of the most haunting myths of Western man; indeed, Lydgate's only tribute to its power is to be found in his determination to defuse it.

Lydgate's treatment of the Oedipus story is an extreme but not untypical example of his “misreading” of Chaucer's greatest imaginative achievement in The Knight's Tale. In this poem above all, though also to a lesser extent in his other “classical romances,” Chaucer, guided by his reading of Boccaccio, attempted with extraordinary success to reimagine a classical pagan culture in its own terms, as possessing its own integrity, its own world-view—a culture imaginable because it had much in common with that of medieval Christianity, but interesting because it was also crucially different. Here the “high style” in which, also under Italian influence, Chaucer attempted to produce a vernacular equivalent to the classical eloquence of Latin is of crucial importance; for it enabled him to overcome, at least partly and intermittently, what Panofsky called the “law of disjunction” governing the medieval arts. As he put it,

medieval art and, to a somewhat lesser extent, medieval literature, consistently separated classical form from classical subject matter: Madonnas or patriarchs could borrow their appearance from classical statues or reliefs while the classical gods or heroes appeared in the guise of medieval knights and scholars, and it was left to the Renaissance to reintegrate what the Middle Ages had set asunder.

Panofsky went on to argue that,

Looking back at the pagan world from a quasi-historical point of view much as the Renaissance artists looked at the visible world from a perspective point of view, and projecting this image onto an ideal projection plane, the Renaissance humanists learned to think of classical civilization as a totality.⁴⁵

That, I believe, is what Chaucer was at least feeling his way toward doing in his “classical romances”; and in his attempt to interpret the pagan world as an autonomous totality the part played by Boethius is of special importance. The De Consolatione Philosophiae, compatible with Christianity and yet excluding the truths known only through the Christian revelation, provided Chaucer with a way of thought that a Christian poet could appropriately attribute to pagan characters. In The Knight's Tale the highest interpretation of events from within the poem is in Boethian, not specifically Christian, terms, and indeed Theseus's references in his final speech to the “grace” of Jupiter, though noble, are in fact erroneous so far as the Saturnine world of his poem is concerned.⁴⁶

It was precisely this achievement of the historical imagination, so remarkable in an English poet of the fourteenth century, that most of Chaucer's followers, and certainly Lydgate, were least able to grasp and develop.⁴⁷ The reasons for this inability doubtless lie not only in their individual capacities but at a deeper level in the culture of fifteenth-century England; whatever they were, the consequence was a retreat from Chaucer's most original achievement by the very poets who most saw themselves as his descendants. Ultimately, the work of creating an English Renaissance, begun by Chaucer because he was able to respond so intelligently to his reading in Italian, was virtually abandoned, and had to be recommenced in the sixteenth century.

Boethius, so effective a mediator in The Knight's Tale between pagan story and Christian narrator, is absent from The Siege of Thebes, and there pagan and Christian grind jarringly against each other.⁴⁸ Lydgate's only way of avoiding friction between them is an unChaucerian resort to allegory: pagan myth is reinterpreted to produce religious or moral meaning, whereas Chaucer's tendency is always to allow classical myth and legend their own value as narrative.⁴⁹ As we have seen, Lydgate allegorizes the story of Amphion, a “derke poesye” (line 214) interpreted in accordance with Boccaccio's De Genealogia Deorum to mean that Amphion built Thebes by means of the persuasive power of “rethorik” (line 219). Later Lydgate explains that Martianus Capella's De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii treats symbolically of the union of wisdom with eloquence (lines 837-44), a piece of information not supplied by Chaucer in the passage from The Merchant's Tale (IV 1732-35) from which Lydgate is borrowing.

Lydgate, however, does not attempt to allegorize his whole story, only to make it point a Christian moral; and here serious problems arise. He has learned something from Chaucer's willingness to imagine a pagan past on its own terms, but he lacks either the imagination or the courage to follow him all the way, especially in the crucial matter of pagan religion.⁵⁰ The result is a tendency to hover between the normal medievalization of classical antiquity and a fascinated horror with what he imagines it to have been in itself. Terdymus, chosen by the Greeks to succeed Amphiorax as high priest, can be described as “a bisshop mytred in his stalle” (line 4186) when he is “confermed and stallyd in his se” (line 4189), though the rites are performed before him “in many uncouth wyse” (line 4187). Horror is expressed most strikingly in relation to the death of his predecessor Amphiorax—

Lo her, the mede of ydolatrie,
Of rytys old and of fals mawmetrye!
Lo, what avayllen incantaciounis
Of exorcismes and conjurisouns?
What stood hym stede his nigromancye,
Calculacioun or astronomye?
What vaylled hym the hevenly manciouns,
Diverse aspectis or constellaciouns?
The ende is nat but sorowe and meschaunce
Of hem that setten her outre affiaunce
In swiche werkes supersticious
Or trist on hem: he is ungracious

(lines 407-58)

—and earlier in relation to Oedipus's resort to the oracle of Apollo:

And with-in a spirit ful unclene,
Be fraude only and false collusioun,
Answere gaf to every questioun,
Bryngyng the puple in ful gret errour
Such as to hym dyden fals honour
Be rytys used in the olde dawes
Aftere custome of paganysmes lawes.

(lines 538-44)⁵¹

Lydgate doubtless thought he saw good precedent in Chaucer for such condemnation of paganism as fraudulent and vain: the passage about Amphiorax recalls a passage from Troilus and Criseyde: “Lo here, of payens corsed olde rites, / Lo here, what alle hire goddes may availle” (V 1849-50). That about the oracle is generally reminiscent of the attitude expressed in The Franklin's Tale toward “swiche illusiouns and swiche meschaunces / As hethen folke useden in thilke dayes” (V 1292-93). But the Troilus passage is briefer, comes from a narrator shocked into repugnance by the end of his tale, and modulates at once into a gentler, more wistful attitude toward “the sad story that human history tells”: “Lo here, the forme of olde clerkis speche / In poetrie, if ye hire bokes seche” (V 1854-55).⁵² And the nervous attitude of The Franklin's Tale seems clearly to be associated with its socially and intellectually insecure narrator: we are meant to be amused by the Franklin's anxious insistence. Chaucer was not really worried that his audience might think (or think he thought) that there was some truth in pagan religion; Lydgate, I believe, really was, and there is no possibility of detaching the gratuitous denunciation from the poet himself—its vehemence appears to have had no equivalent in his sources. For all its reverent imitation of Chaucer, The Siege of Thebes is fundamentally unChaucerian in its lack of imaginative openness toward the classical pagan past.⁵³

I began by quoting Harold Bloom, and I return to him for my conclusion. Bloom sees the poetic influence which for him constitutes poetic history in Freudian, Oedipal terms. The literary son feels that his authority is lessened by the imaginative area already occupied by the literary father, and he must, if he is himself a “strong poet” or “major aesthetic consciousness,” adopt one or more of a variety of modes of “misprision or misreading” in order to gain for himself this already occupied space.⁵⁴ Father Chaucer left behind him a reputation for tolerant amiability which Lydgate himself well described:

For he that was gronde of wel-seying
In al his lyf ne hindred no makyng,
My maister Chaucer, that founde ful many spot:
Hym liste nat pinche nor gruche at every blot,
Nor meve hym-silf to parturbe his rest
(I have herde telle), but seide alweie the best,
Suffring goodly of his gentilnes
Ful many thing enbracid with rudnes.

(Troy Book V 3519-26)

The position of such a father must have been especially difficult to usurp: indeed, it might have been better for Chaucer's poetic descendants if he had been a more tyrannical parent, of the kind who stimulates adolescent rebellion in his children. The “strong” way out of the son's relation to him is the kind of respectful repudiation practiced by Robert Henryson from the safe distance of Scotland, beginning with admiration but proceeding to the simple question, “Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?”⁵⁵ But that is rare among the fifteenth-century poets, partly, I suspect, because Chaucer was so undominating a father even of his own works that it was difficult to determine what, if anything, he intended to convey as truth. Lydgate's practice of tessera is more common. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that The Siege of Thebes partly consists of a retelling of the story of Oedipus. It is difficult, perhaps, to see the Monk of Bury as a “major aesthetic consciousness,” engaged in a life-or-death struggle to win authority from his powerful ancestor; but then Oedipus did not know that it was his father whom he had killed. Harold Bloom might argue that in the early part of The Siege of Thebes Lydgate was dramatizing, no doubt unconsciously, precisely the innocent because unknowing destructiveness that he had to engage in himself in order to survive such a powerful yet unassertive father. In order to live as a poet, he had to kill Chaucer, first by removing him silently from among the Canterbury pilgrims, then by casting him in the role of Laius; and in order for him to be able to kill such a “well-saying” and tolerant father, it was essential that he should conceal from himself what he was doing. The truth may be less sensational than such an argument would suggest, but it is undoubtedly true that both the shortcomings and the merits of The Siege of Thebes can best be understood through investigation of Lydgate's intricate and uneasy relation with his precursor.⁵⁶

Notes

1. (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 5. I had supposed that I was the first to see Bloom's theory as applicable to later medieval England, but in 1979 I discovered that Louise Fradenburg, then of the University of Virginia, was thinking along similar lines. I benefited from discussing the matter with her, and may now well have been influenced by her. Since the fifteenth century such problems of influence have been inescapable. For a proposal as to the applicability of Bloom's theory to Boccaccio's influence on Chaucer, see Donald R. Howard, “Fiction and Religion in Boccaccio and Chaucer,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47/2 supplement (June, 1979): 307-28.

2. The English Language in Medieval Literature (London: Dent; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), pp. 14-15 and chap. 1, passim. Blake's argument is of great interest, though in my view he seriously underestimates the difference between the fifteenth century and earlier periods.

3. Lines 518-28, 1091-1109. Chaucer references and quotations are from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).

4. At Inferno 4. 102 Dante is greeted as the sixth in a company of poets of whom the other members are Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Horace. Here and in The Knight's Tale Chaucer suppresses the crucial part played by his reading in Italian as a bridge between the classical past and himself as vernacular poet. Himself the first major source of poetic influence in English, he conceals the influence of Dante and especially of Boccaccio, which made that role possible for him.

5. Cf. the phrase “this lytel laste book” in House of Fame, line 1093. The combination of humility with a new pride in authorship is characteristic of both poems.

6. Thomas Hoccleve, Regement of Princes, line 1961, in Works, ed. F. J. Furnivall, vol. 3, Early English Text Society, ES 72 (London, 1897).

7. Ibid., lines 2084-85.

8. English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey, ed. Eleanor P. Hammond (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1927), p. 42.

9. Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. H. N. MacCracken, vol. 2, Early English Text Society, OS 192 (London, 1934), lines 239-40.

10. Bloom, Anxiety, p. 11.

11. Derek Pearsall (John Lydgate [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970], p. 153) notes the surprising absence of “the usual professions of modesty” from the prologue to The Siege of Thebes and suggests that Lydgate's recent successful completion of the Troy Book had produced in him an “access of confidence.”

12. Bloom, Anxiety, p. 66.

13. I quote The Siege of Thebes from the edition of Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall, Early English Text Society, ES 108, 125 (London 1911, 1930). With this and other medieval texts, I have normalized spelling (þ, ȝ, i/j, u/v) and repunctuated according to modern usage. The reference to Chaucer in the notes of the EETS edition are helpful but by no means exhaustive; in the present paper, wherever possible, I have taken my material from parallels not noted by Erdmann and Ekwall. I have deliberately not attempted to relate the Siege to its source, because the specific redaction of the Roman de Thébes used by Lydgate has not yet been identified. If the assumption is correct that the 1491 Ystoire de Thébes is closely similar to Lydgate's source, then most of the passages I discuss are his own additions.

14. Blake would presumably argue that he was imitating an earlier imitation that formed part of The Canterbury Tales as he had read it: see “The Relationship between the Hengwrt and the Ellesmere Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales,” Essays and Studies, n.s. 32 (1979): 1-18.

15. It is interesting that Pearsall (John Lydgate, p. 66) should class this line among the “touches of revealing description and observation” in the prologue. Like many such touches in Lydgate (and in Chaucer too, of course), its “observation” is of earlier literature.

16. Hammond (English Verse, p. 417) notes the specific parallel between Siege, line 76, and Canon's Yeoman's Prologue 566-67, but without suggesting any more general similarity in the two scenes. The errors in Lydgate's recollections of The Canterbury Tales in the prologue to the Siege, such as the utter confusion of Miller, Pardoner, and Summoner in lines 32-35, indicate that he was indeed a careless reader of Chaucer.

17. Alain Renoir (The Poetry of John Lydgate [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967], p. 113) notes that Lydgate has a passage imitating this near the end of the Troy Book (V 2927-31). It is at least possible that Lydgate also had in mind to supply the “geste / Of the siege of Thebes” read to Criseyde and her ladies at Troilus II 81-84.

18. Ed. H. Bergen, Part 1, Early English Text Society, ES 97 (London, 1906) II 4697-4700.

19. Compare the continuation of the first passage from Hoccleve quoted above:

    O maister deere and fadir reverent!
    Mi maister Chaucer, flour of eloquence,
    Mirour of fructuous entendement.

20. Cf. Troilus and Criseyde V 1849-55. Pearsall (John Lydgate, p. 53) notes that “Again and again, he echoes this sequence,” and quotes an example from Troy Book III 4224-26.

21. “Medieval History, Moral Purpose, and the Structure of Lydgate's Siege of Thebes,” PMLA 73 (1958): 463-74; see especially pp. 463, 468.

22. Blake, English Language, p. 32.

23. The Serpent of Division, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken (London: Frowde; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1911), p. 65.

24. E. g., John C. Mendenhall, Aureate Terms (Lancaster, Pa.: Wickersham, 1919); Elfriede Tilgner, Die ‘Aureate Terms’ als Stilelement bei Lydgate (Berlin: E. Eberling, 1936); John Norton-Smith, ed., John Lydgate: Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 192-95.

25. Pearsall, John Lydgate, pp. 50-51.

26. Compare Troilus V 8: “The gold-ytressed Phebus heighe on-lofte” and V 1107-09:

    The laurer-crowned Phebus, with his heete,
    Gan, in his course ay upward as he wente,
    To warmen of the est see the wawes weete.

    But Chaucer does not arrive at the beautiful image of Apollo bathing his golden hair in the sea.

27. Astrolabe II. 39, 7, etc. Chaucer begins the adaptation to poetic purposes at Squire's Tale V 263: “Phebus hath laft the angle meridional.” Compare Chaucer's own transfer of orizonte from scientific (Astrolabe, prologue 9, etc.) to poetic contexts (Troilus V 276; Merchant's Tale IV 1797, alongside ark diurne, latitude, and hemysperie; Franklin's Tale V 1017).

28. E.g., Hammond, English Verse, p. 415; Pearsall, John Lydgate, pp. 58-59.

29. An opening was doubtless felt to be a specially appropriate place for a display of rhetorical skill: compare the opening stanza of Troilus and Criseyde, where the subject and verb do not enter until the fifth line. As C. S. Lewis pointed out (The Discarded Image [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964], p. 195), “at no period of the English language would such a sentence have been possible in conversation.”

30. Cf. John A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 43: “This strict subordination of the local and concentrated effect to the demands of a larger context marks the style of Ricardian poetry as essentially a long-poem style.”

31. John Lydgate, p. 52.

32. Complaint, line 267 and Male Regle, line 112, in Hoccleve's Minor Poems, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, ES 61 (London, 1892).

33. The substance of this passage may be influenced, as Erdmann and Ekwall suggest, by Anelida and Arcite, lines 50-53, but its rhetorical form parallels Palamon's “O crueel goddes” (Knight's Tale I 1303).

34. For digressio ad aliam partem materiae see Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Documentum, in Les arts poetiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siecle, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris: Champion, 1926), pp. 274-75, discussed by Eugéne Vinaver, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), I: li-lii. Lydgate appears to have misunderstood Chaucer's use of sentement to mean “personal, inner experience” (e.g., Troilus II 13); here, and in Siege, line 1903, quoted above, as the EETS glossary explains, he used it to mean “substance.”

35. Roman de Edipus, C.iiii, front: quoted in EETS edition, II. 109, note to lines 1430-35.

36. E.g., Le Livre du Cueur d'Amours Espris of René d'Anjou, ed. Franz Unterkircher, trans. Sophie Wilkins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), ff. 2, 12v, 47v, 55; or the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, f. 68v (ed. John Harthan as Books of Hours [New York: Crowell, 1977]).

37. Essays on Middle English Literature, ed. P. M. Kean (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 7, quoting Ker, Epic and Romance (London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 321.

38. Cf. A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 173.

39. Cf. Legend of Good Women, line 875: “How with his blod hirselve gan she peynt.”

40. I Tamburlaine I. i. 80.

41. John Lydgate, p. 66.

42. Robert W. Ayers, “Medieval History, Moral Purpose and the Structure of Lydgate's Siege of Thebes,” PMLA 73 (1958): 467.

43. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 3.

44. Amphiorax too denounces “The wooful wrath and the contrariousté / Of felle Mars in his cruelté (lines 2898-99).

45. Erwin Panofsky, “Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the Renasisance-Dämmerung,” in The Renaissance: Six Essays, ed. Wallace K. Ferguson et al. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 128-29. Panofsky's interpretation is set out more fully in his Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

46. I have argued this case more fully in my edition of The Knight's Tale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 75-78. See also Elizabeth Salter, Chaucer: The Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale (London: Arnold, 1962), pp. 35-36; Robert B. Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 98-99; and J. D. Burnley, Chaucer's Language and the Philosophers' Tradition (Ipswich: Boydell Press, 1979), pp. 79-80.

47. Henryson in The Testament of Cresseid may well be an exception; this, significantly, is a poem which owes almost as much to The Knight's Tale as it does to Troilus and Criseyde, as I have argued in Criticism and Medieval Poetry, 2nd ed. (London: Arnold, 1972), pp. 174-76.

48. Ayers writes (“Medieval History,” p. 465) that “The moral and philosophical framework outlined by Lydgate in the almost countless moral passages of the poem appears to be essentially Boethian in character.” Perhaps this is so, if one generalizes sufficiently, but I find nothing specifically reminiscent of Boethius in The Siege of Thebes.

49. The most obvious instance is the absence of allegorizing comment from The Legend of Good Women.

50. Cf. the discussion of Lydgate's knowledge and appreciation of antiquity in C. David Benson, “The Ancient World in John Lydgate's Troy Book,” American Benedictine Review, 24 (1973): 299-312.

51. Renoir's argument that in this passage among others Lydgate “presents classical antiquity in a much more appealing light” than in his source (The Poetry of John Lydgate, pp. 119, 121-23) seems to me quite unconvincing, even if we could be sure that his source was identical with the extant Roman de Edipus. For a similar denunciation by Lydgate of pagan superstition, see Troy Book I 909-11 (cited by Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 131).

52. Quoted from the brilliant analysis of this stanza by E. Talbot Donaldson, “The Ending of Troilus,” in his Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 98-99.

53. It will be seen that my emphasis is quite different from that of Renoir, who finds in the Siege and other later works of Lydgate “a somewhat unmediaeval attitude towards classical antiquity,” an attitude which approaches that of “Renaissance humanism” (The Poetry of John Lydgate, p. 126). He even sums up the Siege as “a French mediaeval romance translated into an English Renaissance epic” (p. 135). Renoir, in my view, sees the Siege in a false perspective through not considering the nature of its relationship to Chaucer's work.

54. Bloom, Anxiety, p. 6.

55. The Testament of Cresseid, line 64, in The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

56. This essay was completed in 1981, before the publication of the important book by A. J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge and Totowa, N. J.: D. S. Brewer and Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), which throws valuable light on some of the issues raised here. It also antedates my article, “Chaucerian Authority and Inheritance,” in Literature in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. Pieor Boitani and Anna Torti (Gunter Narr Verlag and D. S. Brewer, Tübingen and Cambridge, 1983), which is concerned with some of the same issues.