[In the following essay, Dwyer discusses the unusual features of Lydgate's version of the legend of King Arthur, particularly his raising of the hero to the stars (“stellification”) at the end of the story, and argues that the poet was including scientific and philosophical thought in the Arthurian myth.]

Although medieval readers liked it well, they apparently had it no easier than Thomas Gray in his time or than we have in ours in responding to John Lydgate's mammoth Fall of Princes as a manageable work of art. They tended instead to excerpt set pieces from it and to list in their manuscripts the locations of the better parts in much the same spirit as its twentieth century editor, Henry Bergen, helpfully asterisks the “passages of special interest or charm” in his summary of contents.¹ In a well-known essay of 1760, Gray was at pains to excuse the “long processes” of Lydgate's dilated narratives as circumstantially necessary to the medieval common reader and to the vulgar everywhere: “Tell them a story as you would to a man of wit, it will appear to them as an object seen in the night by a flash of lightning; but when you have placed it in various lights and in various positions, they will come at last to see and feel it as well as others.”² My object in this paper will be to move beyond the frequently discussed prolixity and inorganic structure of the Fall of Princes, or its author's Frühhumanismus,³ to show the internal and external contexts of one of Lydgate's efforts to place a tale in the various lights of myth, science, and philosophy.

Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustriorum (ca. 1358) has been described as a prose history of the crushing blows dealt by Fortune to the most famous figures of biblical and classical history and myth, which seeks to teach the despicable princes of Europe some wisdom and virtue by exhibiting the dreadful consequences of pride, ambition, and sin, or by simply dispensing some healthy doses of recalled misfortune. Around 1400, the work was first translated into French prose by Laurent de Premierfait, who completed a greatly amplified second version in 1409 under the patronage of the magnificent and dissolute Duc de Berri.⁴ During the 1430s Lydgate turned this more popular version into a staggering 36,365 lines of mostly rime royal stanzas for Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Lydgate continued Laurent's process of inflating the work into a universal biographical encyclopedia of moralized tragedies extending from Adam to King John of France, while eliminating such things as his predecessors' censure of clerics and Boccaccio's scorn for magnates.

Derek Pearsall's characterization of the result of Lydgate's effort demands quotation: “Though the theme may often sink under the weight of exempla, and though the mind is continually dragged back to the snail's pace progress of Lydgate's meaning, an aerial view reveals the lineaments of some monstrous Ozymandias-like ruin, the remains of antiquity lying strewn in apparently indiscriminate confusion, out of which emerges, from time to time, a pattern, a vast and dark perspective of human history shot through with splendour and contempt.”⁵ In sober contrast to this lyrical appreciation are the older views of Willard Farnham that “In Lydgate, Boccaccio found a translator and redactor whose humble industry was incapable of working any great poetic transformation in borrowed matter, though his extensions, interpretations, and gratuitous comments often showed a simple, manly independence”⁶ and of John Norton-Smith that “The poet's insights into the concept of Fortune and human motivation are inconsistent and eclectic.”⁷ The bathetic order of these citations brings us back down to the main issue: one man's gratuitous comments or eclectic insights may be another's “various lights and positions,” and a proper assessment will require some closer scrutiny.

Among the tragedies of Laurent's Des Cas des nobles hommes et femmes, Lydgate found a narration of the fall of Arthur, the legendary king of Britain. Outside of his treatment of the story here in the Fall of Princes, Lydgate seems to have taken as little interest as Chaucer in this well-worked medieval matter, but the version of the story that he helped to produce is exceptional even in so vast a body of fiction. Bergen observes that Lydgate seems to have followed Laurent quite closely and, wherever he did not, to have relied on the versions of the Arthurian legend in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace and Layamon, Robert of Gloucester, and the small prose Brut of England.⁸ The unusual features of Lydgate's Arthuriad arise, I hope to show, neither wholly from Boccaccio's adaptation of the matter of Britain to his gloomy moral purpose nor from the contributions of any of these other treatments.

Lydgate's 545-line account begins with a question, “Was euer prince that mihte hymsilf assure / Of Fortune the fauour to restreyne?” (viii, 2661-62) and, after citing Arthur as the wisest and best candidate of his time for producing an affirmative answer, he expands a few lines in Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle (i, 139-42) into five stanzas of descriptive praise for the superlative natural features of Arthur's island realm:

Londene hath shippis be the se to saille,
Bachus at Wynchestre gretli doth auaille,
Worcetre with frutis haboundeth at the fulle,
Herford with beestis, Cotiswold with wolle,
Bathe hote bathes, holsum for medecyne,
York mihti tymber for gret auauntage,
Cornewaile myneres in to myne,
Salisburie beestis ful sauage,
Whete, melk & honi, plente for eueri age,
Kent and Cauntirburi hath gret commodite
Of sondri fishes ther taken in the se.

(viii, 2685-95)

Bochas and Lydgate mention the precious British stone whose imbibed powder will reveal broken chastity, the white “perlis founde in muskel shelles,” and, “to speke of worthyness,” how King Arthur passed all kings in martial prowess. Arthur's virtues, his accession, imperial conquests, and founding of the Round Table are quickly surveyed, allowing the poet to pass on to the theme that structures the next eighteen stanzas: “Statutis set be vertuous ordenaunce, / Vndir proffessioun of marcial gouernaunce” (2736-37).

Lydgate describes in detail these statutes which represent the highest affirmations of the effort of chivalric society to assure justice and mercy in the world. These statutes require the knights to remain always armed (except at rest), defend all rightful quarrels, help the weaker party, resist tyrants, protect the rights of widows, maidens, children, and Holy Church:

For comoun proffit, as chose champiouns,
Pro republica defendyng ther contre,

(viii, 2759-60)

bury dead soldiers, deliver prisoners, accept the challenge of strange knights, record their deeds, attend the “scoole of marcial doctrine,” truly report upon oath everything to their registrars, and be prepared to defend all with their lives in court.

This account, then, establishes the prosperity from which Arthur falls only partly on his personal estate and seems more concerned to show that the whole natural world of ancient Britain and its best human institutions, along with its greatest monarch, will fail to survive the strokes of Fortune. Arthur is a sun in a system about to come under the veil:

Yit was ther neuer seyn so briht a sonne,
The someres day in the mydday speere
So fresshli shyne, but sum skies donne
Mihte percas courtyne his bemys cleere;
Oft it fallith, whan Fortune makth best cheere
And falsli smylith in hir double weede,
Folk seyn expert, than is she most to dreede.

(viii, 2857-63)

In the next thirty-four stanzas Lydgate and his sources turn to a straightforward narration of the eclipsing of the light of knighthood in Britain. The account largely follows Geoffrey of Monmouth in its description of Arthur's victory over Frolle of France, the great parliament held afterwards at Caerleon, and Arthur's answer to the demand for tribute presented by the twelve senators of Rome: “Ye haue no title, ye nor your cite, / Ageyne the Bretouns, which euer haue stonde free” (2988-89).

In taking ship at Southampton and leaving his “cousin” Mordred behind as regent, Arthur commits his only hamartia or tragic mistake. Mordred is “vntrusti & vnstable, / And, at a preef, fals & deceyuable,” a tool of the evil principle abroad in the melancholy Christian cosmos. While Arthur is successfully prosecuting his campaign against the Romans and their Saracen allies, Mordred, fraudulently trading on that British lust for freedom, “Brouht al Breteyne into rebellioun.”

After describing Arthur's landing at Sandwich where Gawain and Anguisel are slain, his shutting of the gates of London against Mordred, and the latter's flight to Cornwall where they both are slain in a last great battle, Lydgate concludes the main body of his poem with a partly novel account of Arthur's end. Arthur is borne on a litter to Avalon where, “as seid Gaufrid recordeth be scripture,” he rides with his knights and lives in Fairye. Before discounting “this errour,” which he says is still believed by Britons who follow Merlin in thinking that Arthur will return to reign again, Lydgate adds a stanza of his own,

Thus of Breteyne translatid was þe sunne
Vp to the riche sterri briht dongoun,—
Astronomeeres weel reherse kunne,—
Callid Arthuris constellacioun,
Wher he sit crownid in the heuenly mansioun
Amyd the paleis of stonis cristallyne,
Told among Cristen first of þe worthi nyne.

(VIII, 3102-08)

I will return to a consideration of this unusual stanza after a sketch of the remaining parts of Lydgate's little Arthuriad. The poet translates part of his source as five stanzas of an envoy of the kind requested by his patron (II, 145-54), darkly warning princes of treasonous relations and reinvoking the image of Arthur as “cheef sonne of Brutis Albioun,”

Hid vndir flours, a serpent cast poisoun,
Briht siluir scaled, damageth the dragoun;
Ech werm sum parti tarageth of his brood.
And what mor pereilous than vnkynde blood?
Noble Princis, on Arthour remembryng,
Deemeth the day of Phebus goyng doun:
Al is nat gold that is cleer shynyng

(VIII, 3154-60)

And Lydgate finally ends with a sonorous “Exclamacioun Ageyn Men þat been Vnkynde to þeir Kynrede,” in six stanzas of his own invention that recall again “the sunne eclipsyng of Brutis Albioun,”

The liht of noblesse þat shon thoruh al Breteyne
Be fals Modred was dirkid off his bemys;
The monarchie departid was on tweyne,
That stood first oon with his marcial stremys.
But aftirward the brihtnesse of his lemys
Drouh to declyn be fals deuisioun,
Which hath destroied ful many a regioun.

(VIII, 3193-99)

Lydgate's morte darthur has not received much attention either from Lydgate scholars or from Arthurians.⁹ One useful consideration of it is William Matthews's which characterizes Lydgate's version as “a sentimental tragedy in which Fortune, jealous of Arthur's virtue and glory, strikes at him through an envious emperor and an unnatural blood relation, the treacherous Mordred.”¹⁰ Boccaccio and Lydgate thus follow the chronicle tradition rather than the romance development of the adulterous courtly love of Lancelot and Guenevere as a cause of the downfall of Arthur's world. The type of story here in which a “hero suffers a reversal that proceeds from the inconstancy of this world, and for which he himself is in no way responsible,” is said to derive from the definition of tragedy that Chaucer's Monk found in the Consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius and rendered as a certain story,

Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee,
And is yfallen out of heigh degree
Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly.(11)

Matthews was concerned to show that this simple principle of universal inconstancy was compromised in most medieval tragedies of this melodramatic type, as it is here in Lydgate, by the action of human wickedness in grievously injuring human innocence. And, of course, Matthews's main point was that, by contrast, the alliterative Morte Arthure was another, grander kind of tragedy entirely. But Lydgate was merely following his sources in accumulating these various views of tragedy, beginning with the simplest fatalism,

For tragedie, as poetes spesephie,
Gynneth with joie, eendith with aduersite;
From hih estate men cast in low degre.

(V, 3120-22)

Elsewhere in the Fall, as Derek Pearsall points out, “the concept of Fortune is retributive: Fortune in this sense is only a name men give to the punishment of vice, and Lydgate develops this more philosophical, Boethian concept at length in the Prologue to Book II”:

For fals Fortune, which turneth as a ball,
Off vnwar chaunges thouh men hir wheel atwite,
It is nat she that pryncis gaff the fall,
But vicious lyuyng, pleynli to endite.

(II, 43-46)

For God above has sovereignty. “There are other cases where neither concept of Fortune, fatalistic nor retributive, is relevant, and where death, being to some extent admirable,” as a consequence of individual stoic heroism, “provides no moral lesson.”¹² The story of Oetes, in fact, echoes a bit of Arthur's end by concluding with his successful restoration, at which Lydgate can only remark, “Thus ay is sorwe medlid with gladness” (I, 2406). The issue I would like to pursue further is the effect of Lydgate's compromising the clear de casibus genre of the story of Arthur, as he found it in Laurent's Boccaccio, with his own idealization of Arthur culminating in the startling stanza on the king's translation to the rich, starry-bright mansion in the palace crystalline, instead of leaving things well enough alone.

Over several centuries, a variety of endings had been contrived for Arthur during the evolution of his romance; the most celebrated being his translation to Avalon, the Celtic Elysium, and prophesied return,¹³ which Lydgate is content to call an error. Others had said that Arthur is still asleep with his warriors in a cave, that he is the Wild Huntsman of the Storm-myth, that he was turned into a bird, and that he killed the Cath Paluc.¹⁴ Additionally, in the chronicles he is carried to Glastonbury, to Salerno, to Mount Etna, to the antipodes, or to the earthly paradise.¹⁵ But no poet, to my knowledge, raised him to the stars until John Lydgate, who did so in spite of his sources and the apparent irrelevance and possible harm to his theme.¹⁶ To appreciate this new light cast on Arthur, we must look first at the encyclopedias and then pursue, in another sense that Pearsall intended, his suggestion that we are dealing here with a “more philosophical, Boethian concept.”

To begin on the scientific level, there is, of course, a star called Arthur. Lydgate is making poetic use, here as elsewhere, of a bit of medieval English folk-etymology that confused the Latin name of the principal star in the constellation Bootes, Arcturus, with the more familiar name Arthurus. The name was extended to the whole constellation of Boötes, to the group of seven prominent stars in the nearby constellation of Ursa Major, and to that whole constellation. All of these usages are to be seen in John Trevisa's translation (ca. 1398) of the popular medieval encyclopedia of natural history De Proprietatibus Rerum by the Franciscan Bartholomaeus Anglicus:

Arthurus is a signe made of vii sterres sette in the lyne þ at hyghte Axis & gooth abowte in himselfe, as Ysydre saith. The cercle of thyse vii sterres, for it gooth aboute as a wayne is callid amonge Latyns Septentrio & Septentriones also, and is comynly callyd in Englisshe Charlemayns Wayne, gooth not downe; for thyse vii sterres ben ful nighe to the pole that is the highest sterre; and the same sercle highte Artophilax, for it folowyth a sygne that hyghte Ursa. Olde men callyd the same cercle somtyme Boetem, for it is nyghe a sygne that hyghte the Wayne and is a sygne that many men beholde and is arayed wyth many sterres, among the whyche is the sygne Arthurus that is properly a sterre sette behynde the tayle of the sygne that hyght Ursa Maior, the more bere. And therefore al that constellacion Arthurus hath that name of that sterre as Ysidre sayth … Amonge alle the hyghe cercles, the cercle of Arthurus is hyghest, for it is nexte to the pole and shewith moost hym to mennes syghte and is seen euery tyme of the nyghte, but yf it happe that it be lette by mystes other clowdes sette bytwene hym and the syghte. Amonge the mydle sterres of Actos fallyth downe as it were a dragon, other a fleenge sterre, in lyknesse of lyghtenynge and is called Draco a[s] Mercianus sayth, and shynyth in his comynge wyth spranklyng bemes many in wynter and bytokenyth and sygnefyeth stronge froste on water and on erthe as Mercianus sayth.¹⁷

Some of these usages were added by Lydgate directly to the account in the Troy Book of Philoctetes' navigation:

For mariners that be discrete and sage,
And lyke expert be of their lodmanage,
By straunge costes for to sayle ferre,
Gynne their course only by the sterre
Whiche that Arthur compasseth enuiron,
The whiche cercle and constellacioun
Ycalled is the cercle Artophilax.
Who knoweth it nedeth no more to axe.

(I, 687-94)¹⁸

But can we stop here? Of the many details that a literary magpie like Lydgate might have attached to a narrative about Arthur, dozens seem as called for as this wilful stellification. Pearsall has wittily observed that starting a poem is “Lydgate's particular nightmare, when the infinity of possible things to be said presses upon him unbearably” (p. 58), but here in ending a poem, Lydgate abandons all convenient precedents. In acknowledging this independence, we are justified, I think, in examining the philosophical as well as the scientific sources of light that these added details cast on the poetic history of Arthur's fall and ascent.

The star Arcturus is prominent also in two poems of the Consolatio. In “O stelliferi conditor orbis” (I, m. 5), Boethius uses it as a metonym for winter, “the seedes that the sterre that hight Arcturus saugh, ben waxen heye cornes whan the sterre Syrius eschaufeth them,” in a poetic complaint against Fortune: “O thow makere of the wheel that bereth the sterres … Why suffrestow that slydynge Fortune turneth so grete entrechaungynges of thynges; so that … folk of wikkide maneres sitten in heie chayers … We men. that ben nought a foul partie, but a fair partie of so greet a werk, we ben turmented in this see of fortune.” The poem “Si quis Arcturi sidera” (IV, m. 5) makes the star an object of desirable knowledge and raises an image familiar in Lydgate. I switch from Chaucer's version to the attractive verse translation by Lydgate's contemporary, John Walton, who replaced Trevisa as house-translator for the Berkeley family.¹⁹

He þat ne knoweth not þe causes why,
Ne for what skill it is in full certeyne,
Þat ilke starre Arcturus goth so nyhe
Mevynge aboute þe poole souereyne;
And why Boetes resteth nought his weyne …
It is no dowte he schal be stonyed sone
As of þe lawe of hyhe heuene bright …
And if þis clowdy errour passeþ hem fro
So þat þey may þe verray causes see,
They schall not seme merveillous to be.

(IV, m. 5)

Herbert G. Wright cites the frequent appearance of the “repeated image of the sun eclipsed by cloud, mist or rain, as a symbol for the overthrow of power or the swallowing up of fame in the shadows of oblivion. The numerous passages in which this imagery appears leave no doubt that Lydgate was drawing on his own experience of ‘wattri shours’.”²⁰ But the equally frequent appearance of similar topoi in Boethius raises the doubt again as to whether Lydgate was looking out his window or at his book.

And when þis cloude was clensid from myn eye
I was anon restored to my sight;
Right as when cloudes clippynge in þe skye
The sonne is let to lem adoun hys light,
And reyne cloudes maken a maner nyght,
But when a north wynd chaseth hem away
Þe sonne begynneth to schewe his bemes bright
And as it were bringeþ aȝen þe day.

(I, m. 3)

What makes such images characteristically Boethian and relevant to Lydgate's Arthur is, I suggest, the cyclic reappearance of the sun to the instructed soul, free at last among the stars. Meter 1 of Book IV is most apt. It is about the liberated mind's ascent: “The speere of eyre he passeth all aboue, / Behynde hys bak he seeth þe cloudes houe,” to the starred places and the spheres of the seven planets, “And with the sonne his wey he ioyneth euene,” passing Saturn, “this sotill mynde made a knyght of god,” and higher still to the bright Judge, “stedfast evire in oo degre”;

… and in þis place right
I þynke to abyden and to dwelle.”
And if þe lust to casten down þi sight
Into þis foule derke erthely selle,
Behalden myght þou þere tyrantes felle,
Wiche þat of wrecches ben i-dred full wyde,
Out of þis lond exiled for theire pryde.

(IV, m. 1)

Both the beatific ascent and that last glance down at the permanent misery below are formal parts of the Neoplatonic vision, as Troilus knows.

Lydgate's direct knowledge of Boethius and of the Consolatio Philosophiae in particular is problematical. In the Troy Book, he draws on common knowledge in his impressive lament that no one could half describe the Trojans' grief for Troilus:

Certis not Boys, þat hadde swiche renoun,
With drery wordis to be-wepe and crye
In compleynynge to philosophie,
Þoruȝ his boke accusynge ay fortune,
Þat seld or nouȝt can in oon contune—
She is so ful of transmutacioun.

(IV, 3008-13)

Pearsall refers the expression, in the Temple of Glass (1250-56), of the idea that a thing, in this case love's joy, can only be defined by its contrary to Troilus, the Roman de la Rose, and “ultimately to Boethius” (IV, pr. 2), and so also with at least one other rhetorical ploy. And he notes that a copy of Trevet's commentary on the Consolatio existed, along with Bartholomaeus, among the books at Bury just before the dissolution.²¹ But there is other, more curious evidence. In the Fall of Princes, Lydgate immediately precedes his tale of Arthur with a narration of the tragedy of Boethius and his father-in-law Symmachus, greatly abbreviated from the versions in Boccaccio and Laurent. The story is told so briefly that there is some doubt whether he either knew or cared anything about Boethius:

Bot touchying Boys, as bookis specefie,
Wrot dyuers bookis of philosophie,
Of the Trynite mateers þat wer dyuyne,
Martired for Crist & callid Seueryne.

(VIII, 2657-60)

Bergen sums it up speculatively, “Lydgate's knowledge of Boethius as a philosopher, if fully expressed in lines 2658-59, does not seem to have been very profound. He must have known something about Chaucer's translation of the De Consolatione Philosophiae, for he mentions it (I, 291), yet he may never have read it. Perhaps he was in too much of a hurry to begin his chapter on Arthur.”²² Such psychological conjectures invite psychological rebuttals, but for a time I will refrain.

What I think can be shown is that certain features of the tragedy of Arthur as recreated by Lydgate give the story a richer significance arising out of their potential association with Boethius. The philosophical light thus played on the matter of romance reconstructed into tragedy presumably would have caused few problems of interpretation to the Gothic audience of, say, the Teseida and the Filostrato and their English redactions, although conflicting notions of unity do not cease to nag us.²³ Beyond similarities of imagery, there are parallel exempla, themes, and architecture relating Lydgate's Arthur to the Consolatio, as well as to encyclopedias like Bartholomew's.

First, for instance, there is the Golden Age. I have already cited that opening passage of the tragedy that looked at Britain's first age as blest with material plenty and simplicity. It recalls the classic passage in Book II, m. 5, of the Consolatio, “Felix nimium prior aetas,” whose rediscovery, as Harry Levin observes, started something: “During the seven hundred and fifty years between the memory-haunted Boethius and the forward-looking Jean de Meun, the golden age might be said to have gone underground.”²⁴ Chaucer not only translated the passage, he worked it into his poem “The Former Age” which depicts a virtuously austere world whose abandonment in the name of technology condemns man to the miseries of history.²⁵ Boccaccio closes the seventh book of his De Casibus, in part, with a mention of the golden world, and in expanding upon this model, Laurent had gone beyond the praise of prehistoric innocence and critique of gluttony to include some satire contrasting the early Christian church and the lack of corruption in its ministers with his own time.²⁶ Lydgate alters all of this and adds twelve stanzas much influenced by Chaucer, beyond whom he goes with his own verses on the chivalric defenders of the church. This remarkable passage directly links his conception of the Golden Age with the world of Arthur:

Fortitudo stood tho in his myht,
Diffendid widwes & cherisshed chastite,
Knyhthod in prowesse gaff out so cler a liht,
Girt with his suerd of trouthe & equyte,
Heeld up the cherch in spiritual dignite,
Punshed heretikes, because attemperaunce
Had in that world hooli the gouernaunce.

(VII, 1174-80)

Boethius's own purpose in calling up the topos of the tempus aureum extended, of course, far beyond the original Hesiodic notion of historical deterioration figured in a sequence of metallic ages to an implicit analogy with Eden and its aftermath. The discursive argument of the Consolatio progressively asserts a somewhat Neoplatonic view of the universe and man's place in it. The two original principles behind that view involve a wholly beneficent Divine Mind, the providential disposer of all things, residing beyond time in changeless eternity, and as a second and related principle, the idea of a World Soul, forming and animating the material universe and extending downward through the successive spheres of increasing corporeality and corruption to stir the human muddle. In the Consolatio, the dramatic cure of its suffering narrator is traced, as the personification of Philosophy, his queenly physician, lifts his mind out of post-lapsarian mutability to higher and higher levels of understanding.

Lydgate's contemporaries imbibed these views partly from Boethius and, with a difference, from St. Augustine.²⁷ A century before Boethius, Augustine had reduced this Neoplatonic scale to its extremes: the doomed and suffering city of human self-absorption and the blessed, eternal realm generated by the love of the elect for God. It was to Augustine that Lydgate turned for a refutation of the pagan error that would have put Roman princes in the heavens. In Book II of the Fall of Princes, Lydgate found a relation of the legend of Romulus, the first king of Rome, which said that at his end, “he was rapt in a cloude, / Hih up in heuene to be stellified.” This provokes the following outburst from the monk:

Loo, heer off paynymys a fals opynyoun,
To Cristes lawe contrarie and odious,
That tirantis sholde for fals oppressioun
Be callid goddis or named glorious.

(II, 4208-11)

The substance and imagery of the next eight stanzas are derived, as Friedrich Brie points out,²⁸ from Augustine's De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, III, ch. 15 and the last book, XXII, ch. 6. Augustine dismisses the legend as fictious flattery,²⁹ and he contrasts the ordinary eclipse of the sun that gave Romulus' noble deeds divinity at his burial with the genuinely miraculous darkening at the crucifixion of Christ. But Augustine's discussion quickly moves on to his grand argument about the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. Though Lydgate's poetry sticks with human circumstance, later, when he comes to tell the cruel history of Alexander, he seems to recall some of Augustine's contempt:

Was he worthi to be deified,
This Alisandre, most double of his corage?
Or was he worthi to be stellified,
This furious prince for his fel outrage?

(IV, 1415-18)

On the other hand, in the same passage in which he dismissed Romulus, Lydgate, perhaps looking forward to his treatment of Arthur, softens the severity of Augustine's view and makes a rare exception of those princes, presumably neither pagan nor heretic, who live for common profit, sustain poor folk, and abjure the pomp of worldly wars. Such life “Shal make hem regne in heuene aboue the sterris” (II, 4228). Nevertheless, even this outside chance will be contrasted in the Fifth Book with all fickle human wishes either to deify or demote the most virtuous princes when Lydgate relates the life of Scipio Nasica:

This day a prince stant in the peeplis grace,
Lik as thei wolde his name deifie
Aboue the sterris in Iubiteris place,
With Mars & Phebus his name to stellifie;
But be to-morwe ther comth a sodeyn skie,
Shewyng ther is a ful feynt surete
Of them that doon for any comounte.

(V, 1832-38)

The modification of Augustine's view contra paganos, along with Lydgate's ability to find any virtue and interest in pagans generally, as well as his distrust of the mob, are more consonant with the patrician attitudes of Boethius than with those expressed in the City of God, although we need not go so far as to call this humanism.³⁰

One last usage in the Consolatio is relevant to this survey. Boethius' affection for the antique had led him to take a particular rhetorical turn that had significant literary consequences for medieval writers, including Lydgate. I refer to the exemplary and allegorical use of heroic figures of Greek mythology. In the Neoplatonic view and its Augustinian adaptation, the earth is very fair and finally false. The wise, or elected, man who understands or intuits these things, having been favored by Fortune and then betrayed by her, will turn his back on the world and aspire to higher things, seeking specifically to share in the Divine Understanding and its repose. To give this discursive argument some concrete exemplification, Boethius and later poets, particularly those of the twelfth century school of Chartres, resorted to novel interpretations of the careers of Ulysses, Orpheus, Hercules, and others.³¹ The lives of all these legendary heroes involved struggle, sacrifice, the loss of loved ones, and, most significantly in the case of Hercules, the achievement of apotheosis: “and he disservide eftsones the hevene to ben the pris of his laste travaile … for the erthe overcomen yeveth the sterres. (This is to seyn, that when that erthly lust is overcomyn, a man is makid worthy to the hevene)” (Robinson, p. 373). Chaucer's translation conveniently adds a gloss that Nicholas Trevet derived from William of Conches, one of the Chartrian allegorists. What Boethius did not say of Hercules, any more than Lydgate did of Arthur, is that the hero understood what it means to the philosopher to overcome the world. Boethius merely says that Hercules' struggle won him a place in heaven.

Stellification is a poetic possibility for the pagan heroes of Boethius as it had not been for Augustine. For the twelfth century poets of Chartres, Bernard Silvester and Alain of Lille, and increasingly for Jean de Hanville and Jean de Meun, this positive aspect of the Boethian argument is countered by a tension, incipient in the verses of Boethius as well, that is created by the suspicion that the human propensity for discord renders man uniquely unable to share in the harmonic order of the universe.³² With the disintegration of that high medieval synthesis famously visible in Dante, we hear poets, and prose writers like Boccaccio, complaining about the fickleness of a contingent world without offering much compensating celebration of the human mind's ability to win over itself and other matter and achieve the stars. I have argued elsewhere that the late medieval French translators of the Consolatio became so engrossed in elaborating the circumstance in its exemplary narratives that the allegorical fruit hinted at by Boethius and heaped up by the Chartrians is seldom reached or even sought.³³ Here, however, I feel that by design or chance, Lydgate's tale of Arthur partially bucks this trend and offers something of the original character of the Boethian exemplum. Furthermore, this is the only instance I can think of in Lydgate that does so.

Elsewhere in the Fall of Princes, some of the actual figures of Boethian fable are mentioned. Indeed, early in his account of Arthur, the king is compared to them: “As Ector hardi, lik Vlixes tretable.” But when Lydgate turns his attention to the full stories of Orpheus and Hercules, Boethius is the farthest thing from his mind. In both tales, a satirical and much-discussed anti-feminist spirit takes over,³⁴ as Orpheus learns about the hell of marriage and finds only his harp translated to the skies, while Hercules is burlesqued for his love of Iole and pitied for his end, “Be sleihte off women dirkid and diffacid” (I, 5516). If I may finally slip in that psychological guess, perhaps it is because there is no whiff of Guenevere in his narration of Arthur that Lydgate could yield to other impulses than comic or elegiac.

Finally, of course, we cannot say for sure why Lydgate assembled the sort of narration about Arthur that he did, but it is clear that his reworking of the legend must be seen in large contexts that work in a variety of ways. There is, for example, his casual predilection for an imagery of obscuring clouds and emerging suns that resonates with comparable Boethian imagery, but there are also more apparently calculated topics that recur with significant variations. In spite of the general formlessness of the Fall of Princes, Lydgate's use of a notion like stellification is clearly modulated through a range of variations extending from outraged Augustinian denial of the possibility in the case of Romulus through the ironically equivocal instance of Scipio Nasica to the celebration of Arthur's apotheosis in a local context that Boccaccio had reserved for lament. Now, Lydgate does see that apotheosis as a reward, denied to the less virtuous—as well as the less Christian and less English—and not a wise and conscious rejection of the world. Yet the world of the Fall is eminently rejectable, and the Envoys do reject it, as it were, from above. It can be suggested, perhaps, that just as Boethius was able to turn the unreflective heroes of Greek myth to Neoplatonic purpose, so does Lydgate's eclectic but not inconsistent narrative partly succeed in shedding the lights of science and philosophy on the British legend of Arthur's fall and in making it thereby analogous to the more meaningful Boethian ascent. By first glancing at a British golden age and the perfection of chivalric society, Lydgate made necessary their dissolution and abandonment when the treachery and cloudy evanescence of that world was finally revealed, and he could finish by setting Arthur to smiling in the stars with Troilus.

Notes

1. Henry Bergen (ed.), Lydgate's Fall of Princes, EETS, e.s. 121-24 (1924-27, for 1918-19; rpt. Oxford U. Press, 1967), i, xxiv. Citations from Lydgate give Book and line numbers, from Bergen, Part and page numbers. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). Ch. 8 is on the Fall. Pp. 250-51 note MS extracts.

2. Thomas Gray, “Some Remarks on the Poems of John Lydgate,” in The Works of Thomas Gray, ed. Edmund Gosse (London, 1884; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1968), i, 392.

3. A. S. G. Edwards, “A Lydgate Bibliography, 1928-68,” Bulletin of Bibliography, 27 (1970), 95-98, shows the range of discussion.

4. Bergen, i, xv-xvi.

5. Pearsall, p. 250.

6. Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (U. of California Press, 1936), p. 129.

7. John Lydgate, Poems, ed. J. Norton-Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 127.

8. Bergen, iv, 326.

9. Wilhelm Perzl, Die Arthur-Legende in Lydgate's Fall of Princes; Kritische Neu Ausgabe mit Quellenforschung, Diss. Munich, 1911 (Munich: C. Wolf & Sohn, 1911), K. H. Holtgen, “Konig Arthur und Fortuna,” Anglia, 75 (1957). 35-54. Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (U. of California Press, 1961). Ch. 21 is on the Fall.

10. William Matthews, The Tragedy of Arthur (U. of California Press, 1960), p. 122.

11. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 189.

12. Pearsall, pp. 241-42.

13. James D. Bruce, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance, 2nd ed. (1928; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1958), i, 33.

14. Ibid., p. 34n.

15. Robert H. Fletcher, The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles, Harvard Studies & Notes in Philology & Lit., No. 10 (1906, rpt. New York: Bert Franklin, 1958), p. 289.

16. Concerning this stanza, Perzl's Quellenforschung says only “Von Vers 442-448 finden wir eine der von Lydgate so gerne gebrauchten astronomischen Anspielungen,” p. 89.

17. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Bartholomaeus de proprietatibus rerum, trans. John Trevisa (Westminster: W. de Worde, 1495; rpt. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1939), reel 58. See also the Middle English Dictionary under Artur.

18. Guido delle Colonne, The Auncient historie and onely trewe cronicle of the warres, trans. John Lydgate (London, 1555; rpt. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1944), reel 204.

19. Mark Science, ed., Boethius: De Consolatione Philosophiae Translated by John Walton, EETS, o.s. 170 (Oxford U. Press, 1927).

20. Herbert G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone Press, 1957), p. 19.

21. Pearsall, pp. 111, 114, and 37.

22. Bergen, iv, 326.

23. Eg., John M. Steadman, Disembodied Laughter: Troilus and the Apotheosis Tradition (U. of California Press, 1972) and Theodore Stroud's review article in MP, 72 (1974), 60-70.

24. Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Indiana U. Press, 1969), p. 34.

25. A. V. C. Schmidt, “Chaucer and the Golden Age,” Essays in Criticism 26 (1976), 99-115.

26. Bergin, iv, 287-88.

27. Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de philosophie dans la tradition littéraire (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1967).

28. Friedrich Brie, “Mittelalter und Antike bei Lydgate,” Englische Studien, 64 (1929), 278.

29. “De Romulo viderit adulatio fabulosa, qua perhibetur receptus in caelum.” St. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. George E. McCracken (Harvard U. Press, 1957), i, 320.

30. Pearsall, pp. 15 and 44.

31. Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (Princeton U. Press, 1972), pp. 74-82 and 92-103.

32. Wetherbee, p. 77; Peter Dronke, “L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle,” Studi medievali, 6 (1965), 389-422, and “Boethius, Alanus, and Dante,” Romanische Forschungen, 78 (1968), 119-25. Luigi Alfonsi, “Storia interiore e storia cosmica nella ‘Consolatio’ boeziana,” Convivium, 23 (1955), 513-21.

33. Richard A. Dwyer, Boethian Fictions: Narratives in the Medieval French Versions of the Consolatio Philosophiae, Mediaeval Academy of America Publ. No. 83 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).

34. Edwards, “Special Aspects,” p. 96, and Gray's remark, intended in Lydgate's defense, that, “the frailties of women are now become the favorite theme of conversation among country-gentlemen, fellows of colleges, and the lower clergy,” p. 403.