SOURCE: Pearsall, Derek. “Lydgate as Innovator.” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 53, no. 1 (March 1992): 5-22.

[In the following essay, Pearsall argues that while Lydgate had a conventional attitude, he was a poetic innovator. Pearsall contends that Lydgate asserted the status of English as a competent literary language and invented new kinds of English poem while he was writing in response to commissions of various kinds.]

To offer to write on Lydgate as an innovator may seem at first sight a rash undertaking, especially since it is a view of his poetic achievement apparently quite contrary to the views I myself have put forward in the past.¹ My argument has always been that Lydgate's importance and his claim on our attention is his representative and noninnovatory medievalness, and that there is little point in blaming him for not being what he had no ambition to be. Critics have customarily enjoyed belaboring Lydgate for the awfulness of his poetry, and indeed, though it is not as awful as it is sometimes made out to be, it is hard to find a succession of more than a few lines that can be read aloud without embarrassment. But scholars who have had no desire to grind this particular literary axe, or to sink it into Lydgate's head, and who are not interested in adding their sarcastic contribution to the mythology of awfulness, have often found Lydgate a marvellously useful writer, in whom medieval preoccupations, themes, and conventions are represented in full without the complicating intermediacy of genius, individuality, or even, sometimes, thought. David Knowles has perhaps a vested monkish interest in finding good things to say about Lydgate,²but Rosemary Woolf, writing the standard account of the medieval English religious lyric, speaks of An Invocation to Seynte Anne (“Erly on morwe”) as showing “Lydgate's characteristic skill in fusing different traditions into a smooth and accomplished whole” and finds an ingenious interweaving of themes and a subtle progression of images in Lydgate's poem The Dolerous Pyte of Crystes Passioun. Elsewhere she catches a “new and impressive” note of “poetic confidence in the statement of a great and moving truth” in A Seying of the Nightingale, which she characterizes as innovatory “in a way that is entirely profitable.”³

For such scholars, Lydgate is valuable and interesting principally as a representative of characteristic medieval ways of seeing, thinking, and writing. The very mechanical nature in which those processes are represented in Lydgate, as well as the immense volume of data that he provides, is itself of value. Lydgate gives us the Middle Ages in slow motion, so to speak; every frame is frozen so that we can be in the position of those nineteenth-century scientists who learned about the mechanics of flight by examining individual frames from films of birds flying. Chaucer is the bird mysteriously and enigmatically in flight. He wrote a General Prologue and is in truth all beginnings. Lydgate is not good at beginnings and always stumbles clumsily over the threshold of his poems; endings are his peculiar strength. The business of the coffin lid and the banging in of the nails brings out the best in him. All his work is a kind of General Epilogue, recapitulating and writing finis to the Middle Ages.

None of this may seem promising for an essay on Lydgate as innovator, and indeed I must admit that when I wrote most recently on Lydgate I characterized him in quite a different way.⁴ What Lydgate did, I argued, was to “medievalise” Chaucer and absorb him “to the official taste of the fifteenth century, by praising and imitating him in ways that were acceptable to that taste” (p. 39). He “encapsulated” Chaucer so that he could be digested without discomfort to the established system, much as a child who has swallowed a sharp-pointed object will be persuaded by its mother to eat a sticky bun, so that the object's passage through the digestive tract may be eased. Chaucer is the sharp-pointed object; Lydgate is the sticky bun.

I argued further that Lydgate's career, poem by poem, was a determined effort not just to emulate Chaucer but to surpass him in each of the major poetic genres he had attempted. The “improvement” generally assumes that two lines are better than one, and three are better still, but the ambition and the presumption are surely there. So the Troy Book is at the very least a much weightier poem than Troilus and Criseyde: it is almost four times as long (30,117 lines as against 8,238); it tells the whole story, from the expedition of the Argonauts to the death of Odysseus, and not just an episode from it; and it returns to the acknowledged Latin authority for the Troy story, the Historia destructionis Troiae of Guido delle Colonne, where Chaucer, though claiming a Latin source, had used a vernacular poem. So too in the Siege of Thebes, which is framed as an additional Canterbury tale, Lydgate gives his version of what he thinks a Canterbury Tale should be, not only long and massively didactic but also interspersed with references to the relation of the progress of the telling to the progress of the pilgrims along the road. Chaucer had never attempted to make allusions of this kind, but Lydgate thought himself the wiser.

A third example of Lydgate's ambitious attempt to build an English poetic tradition by “fortifying” (in Dryden's sense) preliminary structures thrown up by Chaucer is The Fall of Princes.⁵ The immediate model is the Monk's Tale, an eerily appropriate premonition of the Fall that Lydgate obviously did not consider in any way a proleptic satirical comment on what he himself, as a monk, was doing. To him, the Monk's Tale, as a collection of narratives about the falls of the great, had two defects: it was too short, and, as Lydgate found only too commonly with Chaucer, it was unfinished. Lydgate set himself to remedy this, and, whatever else it is, The Fall of Princes is certainly not too short. It is also finished, and that, at 36,365 lines, is no mean feat.

It is possible to draw from Lydgate's career further examples of his amplifying and improving upon successive Chaucerian models. The Complaint of the Black Knight is evidently modeled on The Book of the Duchess and The Temple of Glass on The House of Fame, and both could be thought, by someone with no understanding of poetry whatsoever, to be more compact, unified, and purposeful than their originals. Lydgate's richly aureate Marian poems have their precedent in Chaucer's ABC poem to the Virgin and in the Invocacio ad Mariam at the beginning of the Prioress's Tale, while the elaborately rhetoricated saints' legends of Albon, Edmund, and others can be traced back to the Man of Law's Tale.

Of course, none of Lydgate's “improvements” can be properly termed “innovation,” normally understood to denote the introduction not merely of new ideas and forms but of good ones. According to this understanding, innovation is desirable change, and it would be hard for us to regard what Lydgate was doing to Chaucer as desirable. However, there is no doubt that he was doing things that had not been done before, just as he was a pioneer in misrepresenting Chaucer as a repository of general moral truth and a fountain of golden eloquence, the two things he usually praises him for. But Lydgate, though he is happy to praise Chaucer for his innovations,⁶ would have been appalled at any idea of himself as an innovator, and I think we shall be obliged to talk about innovation in his poetry as something that happened by accident.

Or at least not quite by accident. What happened is that Lydgate did on a large scale what Chaucer had first hinted at on a small scale and in so doing introduced change by sheer reiteration. It was, for instance, the wide currency and popularity of Lydgate's work and the respect in which it was held, as well as its sheer volume, that helped to advance and consolidate the process that Chaucer had begun: the assertion of the status of English as a competent literary language and the extension of its range. Someone also had to do the work of introducing the many new words that English needed to cope with the vast new range of responsibilities it was taking over from Latin and French, and in an extraordinarily large number of cases it was Lydgate. Reismuller lists eight hundred words first used by Lydgate.⁷ The number is certainly exaggerated, because the New English Dictionary, on which Reismuller based his figures, is restricted in its identification of first occurrences to the limited number of texts available in its day, especially in the earlier volumes; the frequent appearance of Lydgate in first place in its entries is due to nothing more than the comparatively easy accessibility of his longer poems in sixteenth-century printed texts. But even when the list is checked against Hammond's revised list⁸ and the Middle English Dictionary (MED) and whittled down, Lydgate is still credited with having introduced words like abuse (vb.), adjacent, capacity, circumspect, combine (vb.), credulity, delude, depend, disappear, equivalent, and excel, some of them so much part of the English language that we can hardly imagine how it managed without them.

But counting firsts is a crude method of assessing Lydgate's contribution to the language. What is more important is not that he used words first but that he used new and rare words over and over again, embedding them forever in the language. Of twenty-five examples of excel quoted in the MED, for instance, twenty-one are from Lydgate, and so are nine out of ten of adjacent and all five of disappear. Many words, like confidence, are found in isolated or obscure contexts before Lydgate, but it is Lydgate who by constant use gives them currency and permanence. Many words introduced into the language by Chaucer and used just once by him are not used again until Lydgate has established a place for them in the language through reiteration. A search of the MED finds 168 of these words, including familiar ones like casual, circular, continuation, credible, dishonest, examination, existence, femininity, finally, foundation, ignorant, influence, intelligence, introduction, modify, onward, opposition, perverse, refuge, remorse, rigour, and seriously.⁹ One reason that Chaucer's language is so accessible, relatively speaking, is that the linguistic journey back to him has been worn smooth by the labors of his successor, and it is a little ironic that Lydgate is trampled underfoot by admirers flocking back to the older poet along the broad path Lydgate has made so easy to travel.

Most innovation in Lydgate's poetry, however, is not of this kind, nor in any way of the kind we admire in Chaucer, where innovation in theme, subject matter, meter, and technique is the product of imaginative exploration and experimentation. Metrical innovation in Lydgate, if one can call it that, generally results from his failure to understand what Chaucer was doing or from his inability to imitate him successfully. Other kinds of innovation, in theme or style, occur in Lydgate because he did not understand the point of the poetic tradition within which he was working (as in his handling of the allegorical dream vision),¹⁰ or simply because someone asked him to do something that had not been done before.

At this point one might say a word about the attempts of two distinguished Lydgate scholars, Walter Schirmer and Alain Renoir, to promote Lydgate's reputation by representing him as an innovator, specifically as a precursor of Renaissance humanism. Their motive, like that of nearly all who have invested in Lydgate stock by writing a book or, more modestly, an article about him, is to argue that Lydgate is a much better poet than people think. While allowing the possible justice of this claim in relation to what people have thought, I am not much persuaded by the method of argument.

Schirmer, in a study of Lydgate that is excellent in many respects, defines “humanism” very broadly and considers any evidence of reading in classical literature or knowledge of classical mythology to be a sign that Lydgate was forward-looking and “humanistic” (pp. 47, 50, 88, 105, 203). This is a mistake. In the first place, the range of Lydgate's reading in classical literature and mythology is much more limited than his allusions would suggest, and much of it is derived from intermediate medieval sources in encyclopedias, florilegia, and other handbooks; in the second place, his interpretation of his reading and knowledge is entirely traditional, moral-allegorical and nonhumanistic—if anything, more determinedly medieval than that of many of his predecessors.

Schirmer makes a more emphatic claim in relation to The Fall of Princes, which he characterizes as “the first work in English to reproduce the heroic ideal of antiquity and to represent the heroes of classical legend and history in a dignified manner, without reinterpreting them in the light of Christian and chivalrous principles” (p. 207). He describes how Lydgate “praises the ancients' heroism and steadfastness, without any Christian bias … speaks favourably of [Lucrece's] suicide” (p. 215), and “shows an understanding for profane heroism that is astonishing in a medieval cleric” (p. 216). Schirmer's enthusiasm for lost causes is admirable, but it should be made clear that whatever admiration for antique virtues is expressed in the Fall is taken over somnambulistically by Lydgate from his source (Laurent de Premierfait's French translation of Boccaccio's De casibus), and that there is no independent movement, in his translation, toward Renaissance attitudes. It is “Bochas” who provides the philosophical variety of the work, including the half-articulate admiration for Roman attitudes, and Lydgate simply follows where he is led. Where he makes any change, it is when some favorite moral or Christian commonplace is directly threatened, and then Lydgate shows himself in his true medieval colors by treating heroism, or pagan stoicism in the face of adversity, with derision.¹¹ In this way he turns backward rather than forward, reencapsulating the protohumanism of Boccaccio within a hermetically sealed medievalism.

It is true that Humphrey of Gloucester, who had the ambitions if not the tastes of a humanist book collector, tried to encourage Lydgate in new directions, and there are passages in the Fall on books and writing and on the Italian poets that seem to be directly inspired by the desire to please Gloucester and by the loan of books from his library. On one occasion, Humphrey was more insistent. Lydgate, alluding to the story of Lucrece (Fall, 2.978), excused himself from retelling it on the grounds that he did not wish to compete with Chaucer; Humphrey, however, gave him a copy of the Declamatio of Lucretia by Coluccio Salutati, the famous Italian humanist and friend of Petrarch, and urged him to translate it. Lydgate, without suppressing the earlier passage in which he had promised not to speak of Lucrece, wearily obliged, translating the piece at considerable length and faithfully copying out the unmedieval remarks about suicide. In book 3, when Lydgate comes to Lucrece again, this time in her proper place in Bocaccio's procession of unfortunates, he follows Bochas through the whole of her complaint once more (Fall, 3.978), even though, as he admits, he has done it once already. To Humphrey, it must have been like trying to reverse the direction of a driverless steamroller.¹²

Renoir does not make Schirmer's mistake about The Fall of Princes, which he sees as allowing us to say no more than that “the attitude detectable in his [Lydgate's] later works is of the kind that might have led the way to the humanists at the end of the century.”¹³ Renoir's own mistake is with the Siege of Thebes, in which he finds Lydgate making changes in the narrative “to improve its attitude toward classical antiquity” (p. 121), and which he thinks of as expressing “a somewhat unmediaeval attitude toward classical antiquity” (p. 126). He calls it “a French mediaeval romance translated into an English Renaissance epic” (p. 135). Everything that Renoir describes as indicative of these changes in attitude is, it must be said, profoundly commonplace in a wide variety of medieval writing.

Renoir also makes some unguarded remarks, in his chapter “The Paragon of Animals” (pp. 74-94),¹⁴ about Lydgate's representation of women, which he sees as providing us with “a particularly workable means of assessing his position in regard to the intrinsic dignity of man” (p. 76), that well-known preoccupation of Renaissance humanism. Lydgate, he finds, objects to “the practice of evaluating women as a category rather than as individual human beings” (p. 87) and is strong in his belief that “every human being has a right to be regarded as a separate entity” (p. 93). In sum, “Lydgate's attitude toward individual human beings, far from being strictly mediaeval, was somewhat akin to that which we have been taught to seek in Renaissance humanism” (p. 94). It is hard to take a grip on arguments that are based on such vague notions, but argument is in any case hardly necessary: everything that Lydgate says, everywhere, about women, and about men, can be demonstrated in detail to be part of a systematic body of medieval commonplaces.

It is not in these searches for the precursor of the Renaissance, then, that Lydgate the innovator will be found, and my readers may feel, after such prolonged stalling, that there is nothing in prospect likely to be found. However, there are three areas of poetic activity where it seems to me that Lydgate does introduce innovations.

There has been some talk recently of an early fifteenth-century “Lancastrian poetics,” in the service of which writers would be encouraged to stress the emergence of a new and splendid English national poetic tradition and to glorify Chaucer as the father of this poetry.¹⁵ The Lancastrian kings would be represented as the patrons and guardians of this tradition and would be the beneficiaries of whatever nationalistic loyalties it encouraged. In this policy, as later in more straightforward kinds of political propaganda, it was early recognized that Lydgate might be serviceable, and his first major work, the Troy Book, was commissioned by the Prince of Wales in 1412 as a way of celebrating the newly acquired capacities of the English language as well as the heroes of the past. Henry authorized the translation, Lydgate says,

By-cause he wolde that to hyȝe and lowe
The noble story openly wer knowe
In oure tonge, aboute in every age,
And y-writen as wel in oure langage
As in latyn and frensche it is.

(Prologue, ll. 111-15)

By the time Lydgate finished the Troy Book, in 1420, Agincourt had been fought and won, France had been conquered, and peace between the two countries and the union of the two crowns was in prospect. Lydgate very properly alludes to these developments in the Epilogue to the Troy Book (5.3399-3458), and his next major work, the Siege of Thebes, though not specifically commissioned, may be regarded as a celebration of Henry's warriorlike prowess (in the person of Tydeus) and of his success in bringing about final peace with France. The Epilogue to Thebes closes on a note of hope, prophesying peace and concord between realms, “Pees and quyet, concord and unyte” (l. 4703), in words strikingly reminiscent of the terms of the Treaty of Troyes (1420): “Item, ut Concordia, Pax, et Tranquillitas inter praedicta Franciae et Angliae Regna perpetuo futuris temporibus observentur.”¹⁶ Troyes was Henry V's supreme achievement: peace, the union of England and France through his marriage with Katherine, and the designation of their issue as monarch of both countries. It was to be a hollow achievement because of Henry's early death, but in 1422 Troyes still seemed to be the fulfillment of the whole historical teaching of the Thebes story.

Whether Lydgate was aware of all this when he started to write Thebes it is hard to say, but it is extremely unlikely that his motives in writing were those attributed to him by Renoir. “The story of the war between Thebes and Argos,” he says, “not only offered countless opportunities for pointedly relevant advice on the conduct of royalty in time of war, but could also be fashioned into an oversized exemplum to be foisted upon the dashing and reckless young King who had led the English at Agincourt” (p. 113). This, apart from its very odd picture of Henry V, is simply not how things happen. Insignificant monks with a taste for advancement do not “foist” things upon those who have the power to make things very disagreeable to any who displease them; they write what they know will be acceptable. Peace with France was now royal policy, and long poems demonstrative of the disadvantages of prolonged war between neighboring states were now acceptable.

The role here of Lydgate as a Lancastrian apologist is a new role for an English poet. General exhortation to kings to rule well and not to be tyrants is not unusual, and even Chaucer offers a few toothless examples of the genre. But Lydgate is arguably the first English poet, or at least the first poet writing in English, to fashion his poems as instruments of royal policy. Later, in the years when dissension between warring factions threatened the stability of the monarchy, Lydgate incorporated much on the evils of civil war into his poetry, especially The Fall of Princes (“Kyngdamys devyded may no while endure” [1.3822]), and also wrote a prose treatise, The Serpent of Division, probably soon after the death of Henry V in 1422, in which he uses the civil war of Caesar and Pompey as a warning against internecine strife. This of course is advice that his patrons wanted to receive and had intimated to him that he might give, but it is still significantly different from the poetry of protest and the general complaints about government oppression that one mostly finds “political poetry” in English to consist of up to Lydgate's time.¹⁷ This is as true of the English poems of complaint in British Library MS Harley 2253 as it is of Piers Plowman and Mum and Sothsegger. Gower of course had made himself into a spokesman for the Lancastrian usurpation, but this was in his Latin poem of the Cronica tripertita and in the shorter Latin poems appended to the Confessio amantis in some “authorised” manuscripts, and not in the English poem itself. He speaks out more fully and directly in the English poem addressed to Henry IV, In Praise of Peace. But, as often, Lydgate was doing for the first time systematically and on a large scale in English what had been done only sporadically and on a small scale in English before.

In the 1420s Lydgate was even more closely involved with the court as a royal propagandist. When he was in France in 1426-27, he made a translation, at the earl of Warwick's request, of the pedigree of Henry VI that Laurence Calot, the king's secretary in France, had drawn up for the duke of Bedford. The rule of Bedford as regent in France, after the death of Henry V in 1422, was never more than grudgingly accepted, and it was thought that an impressive-looking genealogical tree, demonstrating Henry VI's claim to the throne of France, would comfort his new subjects. This does not seem a very bright idea, and it was even less of a bright idea to have Lydgate translate the accompanying verses. But he did it, and The Title and Pedigree of Henry VI (MacCracken, pt. 2, p. 613) was certainly something new in English poetry.

When Henry VI was crowned in 1429, Lydgate was recruited to provide a number of poems for the occasion and especially to celebrate the union of the two crowns of England and France in the person of Henry VI. There was a Roundel and a Ballade on the coronation and also verses to accompany the “soteltes” at the coronation banquet. The soteltes were ingeniously designed to emphasize the theme of union—one, for instance, showed the young king brought in in coat armor between St. Edward and St. Louis, another showed him kneeling before St. George, St. Denys, and the Virgin—and Lydgate composed verses to be written on scrolls and tablets beside them and read out, presumably, when the course was brought in (MacCracken, pt. 2, p. 623). The food itself was not without significance, if we are to judge by the “Custade Rooial with a leparde of golde sittyng theryn” or the “Flampayne poudred with lepardis and floure de lices of golde.”

After his coronation at Westminster, Henry VI was taken to France, where he was crowned in Paris amid scenes of great apathy. Determined to erase the memory of this fiasco, the authorities arranged a great triumphal entry for the young king on his return to London on 21 February 1432. Lydgate was one of the organizers of the series of elaborate allegorical tableaux set up at seven stations to welcome the seven-year-old king back in triumph, expressing the hopes and joys of his subjects, with all kinds of exhortations to wisdom and virtue. No one was readier with such exhortations than Lydgate; he not only helped organize the pageant but also wrote it up in what one can only call a long verse souvenir program (King Henry's Triumphal Entry into London [MacCracken, pt. 2, p. 630]). The poem is the usual inflated verbiage, but the occasion is an important one and anticipates the pageant theater of the streets that was so important in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and so valuable a part of Tudor ceremonial and royal propaganda. Again, Lydgate was the first in the field.

There was a second and related poetic activity in which Lydgate's services were engaged on behalf of Lancastrian policy, and the form it took is suggested by some remarks of the late John Norton-Smith, in the appendix on aureate diction at the end of his excellent edition of selections from Lydgate's poetry.¹⁸ It is generally assumed that Lydgate did not write much poetry while he was being trained for the monastic profession (he was ordained priest in 1397), and that his poetic career began in earnest when he was studying at Gloucester Hall, the Benedictine house in Oxford, during the early 1400s (he was certainly there in 1406-8). At Oxford he met Edmund Lacy, who went on to a distinguished ecclesiastical career as dean of the Royal Chapel at Windsor (1414-17) and bishop of Exeter (from 1420). He also came to the notice of the young Prince of Wales, who wrote a letter to the abbot and chapter of Bury St. Edmund's saying what good reports of Dan John Lydgate he had heard from Richard Courtney, chancellor of Oxford University (1406-8), and asking them to give further leave to the said John to continue his studies at Oxford.¹⁹ Lydgate's bookish disposition, and his readiness to turn out large numbers of rhyming lines of approximately equal length on virtually any subject, may have suggested to the prince and his advisors that he might be useful in a number of promotional roles, cultural, political, and religious. Norton-Smith draws attention to John Shirley's rubrics to three of Lydgate's religious poems that testify to a link between Lydgate, Lacy, and Prince Henry and suggest “a common interest in liturgical composition” (p. 195). The rubrics are as follows:

1. “And folowing begynnethe a devoute salme of the sautier which Lydegate daun Johan translated in the Chapell at Wyndesore at the request of the dean whyles the kyng was at evensonge.”
2. “Here begyneth verses of the sauter whiche that kynge Herry the V. whom god assoyle by gret devocion usyd in his chappell at his hyȝe masses by-twene the levacion and the concecracion of the sacrament, translatid by the Monke Lydegat dan John.”
3. “Loo my freendes here beginnethe the translacyoune out of Latyne in-to Englisshe of Gloriosa dicta sunt de te, & c. translated by Lidegate daun John the Munk of Bury at thinstaunce of the Busschop of Excestre in wyse of Balade.”²⁰

Norton-Smith concludes, “Henry V and Lacy may well have been the main forces in shaping the direction and style of Lydgate's religious verse” (p. 195).

This suggestion may, I think, be taken a little further. Henry V's role in encouraging Lydgate in a deeply traditional and ostentatiously liturgical kind of religious verse composition may be associated with his well-known determination, during his reign, to uphold orthodoxy and eradicate Lollardy. Henry made a determined effort to reform the Benedictine order and summoned a great chapter of the black monks to London in 1421, to which he delivered a series of articles and proposals.²¹ Henry was a man of genuine piety, but he was also a skillful enough monarch to know how important to the stability of the royal government was a strong and undivided church closely integrated in the machinery of that government. The great Benedictine abbeys were among the most powerful and conservative elements in the church hierarchy and generally reliable supporters of the Crown, but their support was of less value if their own house was in disorder. Henry V was also a fierce persecutor of the Lollards. Lollardy was perceived not only as a heresy but as a form of sedition and treason and therefore a dangerous threat to both church and state. It remained a potential threat throughout the fifteenth century, long after the execution of Sir John Oldcastle in 1417;²² it was also, perhaps, a threat that was convenient to exaggerate at moments of political crisis in order to rally support to king and church.

There is evidence in plenty of Lydgate's readiness to celebrate the Lancastrian dynasty as persecutors of the Lollards and upholders of orthodoxy. A Defence of Holy Church is a powerful piece of anti-Lollard propaganda, probably written soon after Henry became king in 1413, at a time when there were serious Lollard uprisings in London. In it Lydgate uses the history of Israel, embattled among its enemies, as the image of Holy Church besieged by heresy. He emphasizes the threat to the church's wealth and endowments:

O prudent prynce, thynke what her entent is,
Who falsely the Hooly Churche accuse,
For thay hemsilff the riches wolden use.(23)

He emphasizes too the manner in which the church's ceremonies and liturgical music are likewise threatened by the Lollard demand for the simplification of the liturgy. The church, he says,

Constreyned was, and almost at the prikk
Talefft hir song of holy notis trewe,
And on the salwys olde, foule and thikk
To hang hir orgnes that were entuned newe.

(ll. 22-25)

The reference is ostensibly metaphorical, but there is a striking reminder here of Henry V's enthusiasm to keep up traditional liturgical practice and of the encouragement his enthusiasm gave not only to Lydgate but also to composers such as John Dunstable in their development of an increasingly elaborate church music.

Elsewhere, Lydgate congratulates Humphrey of Gloucester on his role in the suppression of the Lollard risings of 1431 (Fall, Prologue, ll. 400-413) and has some curious Verses on Cambridge (MacCracken, pt. 2, p. 652) celebrating the foundation of the university in 539 b.c. and declaring Cambridge to be an ancient bastion of religious orthodoxy: “For which by recorde, all clarks seyne the same, / Of heresie Cambridge bare never blame” (ll. 97-98). The contrast with Oxford is not made explicit, but it is obvious.

In addition to encouraging him to write anti-Lollard propaganda (he probably needed little encouragement), Henry V also put the stamp of his approval, as we have seen, on the strictest and most orthodox kind of piety in Lydgate's religious verse compositions, and in particular of that kind of institutional and nonpersonal piety most remote from the popular and political program of the Lollards. A number of scholars have seen in Lydgate's religious poetry, despite its important debts to Chaucer, evidence of an attempt to create a new kind of poetry, marked by its elevated, elaborate, Latinate style. Lois Ebin, in her very useful brief study of Lydgate, speaks of the religious poems as representing an “effort to create a new poetic mode in English.”²⁴ Henry V may well have given some of the incentives for Lydgate to make this effort. His second major commission to Lydgate, after the Troy Book, was The Life of Our Lady, a work of traditional and heavily liturgical affective devotion;²⁵ the writing that he encouraged, and the writing that Lydgate did, here and elsewhere, in the aureate and Latinate style, demonstrates, one may assume, a policy of reasserting a kind of English as remote as possible from the vernacular promulgated in Lollard writings and biblical translation.²⁶ English had replaced French as the literary language of England and was increasingly taking over roles traditionally reserved for Latin, but there were kinds of English more appropriate than the language of the people to the preservation of the clerical monopoly and its state sponsors. “Aureation” in Lydgate may be seen in this light as a political choice as well as a stylistic one.²⁷

Finally, there must be, in an account of Lydgate as innovator, some comment on the quantity of Lydgate's verse that was written in response to commissions of various kinds, nearly always the first of their kind to be given to an English poet. He was, for instance, active in organizing, devising, and writing the texts for a series of seven “mummings” variously put on before the royal court at Christmas and Easter and before the guilds of Mercers and Goldsmiths on their feast days. These are not proper plays but scripts for dumb shows, as their name suggests, but they are the first of their kind, or at least the first we know about, and important ancestors of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masque.²⁸

Lydgate was active in a way no English poet had been before in responding to such commissions and also to requests of all kinds for occasional poems, especially those that were needed to accompany some kind of visual display. He wrote a poem called Bycorne and Chichevache, about the two legendary beasts who feed respectively on patient husbands (very fat) and patient wives (very lean), to go with a painted cloth in a London burgess's house; he wrote The Legend of St. George to accompany some new mural paintings in the guildhall of the Armourers, whose patron saint was St. George; and he wrote seven stanzas on The Sodein Fal of Princes in Oure Dayes (MacCracken, pt. 2, pp. 660-61) to stand beside tapestries representing those princes. In writing about the four English princes who fell suddenly, Lydgate follows the Lancastrian party line without deviating a hair's breadth. Edward II was governed by such advisors as caused his undoing; Thomas, duke of Gloucester, was a great lover of truth, foully murdered; the duke of Ireland was an idle pleasure lover; Richard II was in his time a rich and glorious king, but he allowed himself to be ruled by evil counsel, and “For mys-tretyng lordes of his monarchye, / He feyne was to resigne and in prysone dye” (ll. 13-14). There is much else. In responding, as a sort of uncrowned poet laureate, to the many requests he received for poems, Lydgate was constantly inventing new kinds of English poem, or perhaps rather introducing kinds of poem that had a long history in Latin or French but none in English, like the Dietary, or the book of table manners for boys called Stans puer ad mensam, or the rather nice propemticon, or poem of farewell, that he wrote for Thomas Chaucer on his departure overseas. Much of the activity of innovation was in translating poems from Latin and French.

There can be no other English poet whose poetic career was so dictated by the circumstances of patrons and commissions. Lydgate can hardly ever have written a poem because it had occurred to him independently to do so. Thus, not by his own choice, and much to his and our occasional embarrassment, Lydgate found himself extending the outbuildings of the mansion of English poetry that Chaucer had established. All he knew was how to lay one line beside another, but somehow, accidentally, he invented the English poetic tradition.

Notes

1. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), esp. pp. 18, 298-99; also Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, Routledge History of English Poetry, 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 226-36.

2. The Religious Orders in England, vol. 2, The End of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 273-75. “If it counts for anything that several of his autobiographical and occasional, as well as some of his religious poems can be read with interest and even with pleasure, then Lydgate may be placed, if not among the great, yet among those who deserve recognition. Regarded not as a poet but as a type, Lydgate is a true child of his age. … his religious poems have a note of genuine piety and sincerity” (p. 275).

3. The calculated understatement of this last phrase is characteristically Woolfian. See The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), pp. 296 (Invocation), 201 (Dolerous Pyte), 233 (A Seying). The first two poems are in Henry Noble MacCracken, ed., The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, pt. 1, eets, es, 107 (1911), pp. 130, 250, and the third in Otto Glauning, ed., Lydgate's Minor Poems: The Two Nightingale Poems, eets, es, 80 (1900), p. 16 (A Seying is the one of these two poems still accepted as Lydgate's). For further appreciative comments by Woolf on Lydgate, see pp. 270, 282, 298, 344, 349. Knowles and Woolf are of course not alone among modern scholars in trying to give a more balanced view of Lydgate's poetry; for an expert discussion of recent Lydgate scholarship, from several points of view, see A. S. G. Edwards, “Lydgate Scholarship: Progress and Prospects,” in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984), pp. 29-47.

4. “Chaucer and Lydgate,” in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 39-53.

5. Reference is here made to the edition of Henry Bergen, eets, es, 121-24 (1924-28). For Dryden, see The Preface to the Fables (1700), where, referring to his practice in translating Chaucer, he says, “The words are given up as a post not to be defended in our poet, because he wanted the modern art of fortifying.”

6. “Noble Galfride, poete of Breteyne, / Amonge oure englisch that made first to reyne / The gold dewe-dropis of rethorik so fyne” (Troy Book, 2.4697-99); “Floure of Poetes thorghout al breteyne … / To whom be 3ove pris, honure and glorye / Of wel seyinge first in oure language” (Siege of Thebes, ll. 40, 46-7). The Troy Book is quoted from the edition of Henry Bergen, eets, es, 97, 103, 106, 126 (1906-20), and the Siege of Thebes from the edition by A. Erdmann and E. Ekwall, eets, es, 108, 125 (1911, 1920). In quotations from Lydgate throughout this article, thorn is represented as th, and u/v according to modern usage.

7. Romanische Lehnwörter (Erstbelege) bei Lydgate: Ein Beitrag zur Lexikographie des Englischen im 15. Jahrhundert, Münchner Beiträge zur Romanischen und Englischen Philologie, Heft 48 (Leipzig, 1911).

8. See Eleanor P. Hammond, English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1927), p. 87; also Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the Fifteenth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (London: Methuen, 1961; first published in German as John Lydgate: Ein Kulturbild aus dem 15. Jahrhundert [Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1952]), p. 74.

9. This search has been conducted by Christopher Cannon, a Ph.D. student at Harvard who is working on the formation of pre-Chaucerian literary English. I am grateful to him for making this information available to me.

10. In writing of The Temple of Glass, which C. S. Lewis admired for its innovatory portrayal of a “real” love affair (The Allegory of Love [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936], p. 241), A. C. Spearing points to a number of ways in which Lydgate “shows a failure to grasp what is really happening in fourteenth-century dream poems.” Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 173. For a similarly innovatory misunderstanding on Lydgate's part of the function of allegory in The Complaint of the Black Knight, see Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 91.

11. Lydgate had a Chaucerian model for this, of course, in the final stanzas of Troilus and Criseyde. For a detailed refutation of Schirmer's arguments in relation to the Fall, see Pearsall, John Lydgate, pp. 241-43. Schirmer's own ideas were much influenced by the pioneering essay of Friedrich Brie, “Mittelalter und Antike bei Lydgate,” Englische Studien, 64 (1929): 261-301, which he cites in his note at p. 207.

12. For this episode in the making of the Fall, see Eleanor P. Hammond, “Lydgate and Coluccio Salutati,” Modern Philology, 25 (1927): 49-57; also Hammond, “Poet and Patron in the Fall of Princes,” Anglia, 38 (1920): 121-36.

13. The Poetry of John Lydgate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 73.

14. This chapter is largely reprinted from Renoir's earlier essay “Attitudes to Women in Lydgate's Poetry,” English Studies, 42 (1961): 1-14. A. S. G. Edwards takes Renoir briefly to task in “A Note on Lydgate's Attitude to Women,” English Studies, 51 (1970): 436-37.

15. It is possible to see Chaucer himself as an early practitioner of this Lancastrian poetics, when he made his contribution to what Paul Strohm calls the “textualization of Henry's claim” to the throne in his Complaint to His Purse. “Saving the Appearances: Chaucer's Purse and the Fabrication of the Lancastrian Claim,” in Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Medieval Studies at Minnesota, 4 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 21-40. Those who have contributed to the discussion of a possible Lancastrian poetics include John M. Bowers, “The House of Chaucer and Son: The Business of Lancastrian Canon Formation,” Medieval Perspectives, Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Southeastern Medieval Association, 1990 (Richmond: Eastern Kentucky University, 1992), pp. 135-43; John H. Fisher, The Importance of Chaucer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), chap. 1; Lee Patterson, “Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate,” in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). (I am grateful to John Bowers for letting me see his paper in advance of publication and to Lee Patterson for letting me have advance publication information for what I know at the moment as a characteristically challenging talk.) For an earlier study of Lydgate as a Lancastrian propagandist, see J. W. McKenna, “Henry VI of England and the Dual Monarchy: Aspects of Royal Political Propaganda,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28 (1965): 145-62. See also the discussion in Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), pp. 187-90.

16. The relevant paragraph of the Treaty of Troyes is quoted in the edition of Thebes by Erdmann and Ekwall (see n. 6 above), pt. 1, p. vii. Lydgate alludes again to the hopes for peace in a short poem entitled A Praise of Peace, written after Henry V had died: “God sende us pees twen Ynglond and Fraunce.” See Henry Noble MacCracken, ed., The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, pt. 2, eets, os, 192 (1934), p. 785.

17. For discussion of the tradition of political verse in English, with reference to Lydgate passim, see V. J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London: Blandford, 1971).

18. John Lydgate: Poems, Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), pp. 192-95.

19. See M. Dominica Legge, ed., Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions from All Souls MS. 182, Anglo-Norman Text Society, 3 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1941), pp. 411-12; Pearsall, John Lydgate, pp. 29-30.

20. The poems, with their rubrics, appear in MacCracken, pt. 1, pp. 1, 209, 315; the original texts are found in Benedic anima mea domino, Trinity College, Cambridge University, MS. R.3.20; Eight Verses of St. Bernard, British Library, MS Add. 27929; and Gloriosa dicta sunt de te, Trinity College, Cambridge University, MS. R.3.20, respectively.

21. See W. A. Pantin, ed., Chapters of the English Black Monks, 1215-1540, 3 vols., Camden Third Series, 45, 47, 54 (1931-37), ll. 109-34; Knowles, p. 184. The chapter, of course, demurred and delayed, broke up into subcommittees that reported on each article in detail, and eventually produced watered-down proposals to be submitted to the chapter of 1423, by which time Henry V was dead.

22. See Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). In an important reevaluation of the evidence, Hudson argues that Lollardy remained quite powerful as a movement throughout the fifteenth century, and not always underground. Hudson points out that Henry's opposition to Lollardy did not prevent him from making efforts to save his former friend Oldcastle from condemnation; at the time of his accession, indeed, there may have been real uncertainty about his intentions (p. 119). This may have relevance to the composition of A Defence of Holy Church and may remind us that we should not associate Lancastrian poetics too closely with the person of the king. For the association of Lollardy with sedition, see Margaret Aston, “Lollardy and Sedition,” Past and Present, 17 (1960): 1-44; Hudson, pp. 363-64.

23. A Defence of Holy Church, ll. 131-33, quoted from the edition of the poem in Norton-Smith, pp. 30-34.

24. John Lydgate, Twayne's English Authors, 407 (Boston: Hall, 1985), p. 113. In the general argument of her book, Ebin is less successful in convincing me that “in his vision of the poet and in his assumptions about poetry, Lydgate finally departs from his earlier English ‘maisters’” (p. 19). Lydgate's ideas about poetry are rarely new or interesting. If his idea of the poet is of “a craftsman who illuminates and adorns his matter,” and whose effort is to “join wisdom and eloquence to engender goodness and lead man to truth” (pp. iv-v), then he is merely repeating what the Middle Ages was united in saying.

25. Knowledge of an association between The Life of Our Lady and Henry V is based on a scribal rubric in a single manuscript, Durham University Library MS Cosin V.ii.16, which states that the poem was compiled “at the excitacion and styrryng of our worshipfull prince, kyng Harry the fifthe.” See J. Lauritis, R. Klinefelter, and V. Gallagher, eds., The Life of Our Lady, Duquesne Studies, Philological Series (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961), p. 240. There is no internal reference, such as Lydgate customarily makes, to the king's patronage, but he may have thought it inappropriate in such a poem. The Durham manuscript is, it should be said, the best manuscript of the poem.

26. This is one of the themes of an important Ph.D. thesis (1992) by William Bennett of Harvard University, “Interrupting the Word: Mankind and the Politics of the Vernacular.” His argument is that the choice between different kinds of English, aureate and simple, often reflects anxieties created by Lollard appropriation of the vernacular. I am grateful to him for sharing his ideas with me in many conversations.

27. Lydgate's cultivation of aureate language is usually associated with the taste for “florida verborum venustas” in Latin writing of the period; see the article with this title by E. F. Jacob in The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 17 (1933): 264-90. Not all the aureation in Lydgate's poetry is the product of the political purposes I describe, nor is all that has been called aureation properly so called. Properly, aureation refers to the importation of Latin and Latinate terms into English to give an air of dignity and luxury (see Schirmer, pp. 176-77; Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 262). Much of what has been called aureation in Lydgate is actually closest to the long-winded, quasi-legal, diplomatic verbiage of official correspondence in French and Anglo-Norman, in which Lydgate may have been professionally practiced as a royal secretary.

28. On the importance of Lydgate's mummings in the history of drama, see Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300-1660, vol. 1, 1300-1576 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), pp. 191-207.