SOURCE: Straker, Scott-Morgan. “Deference and Difference Lydgate, Chaucer, and The Siege of Thebes.” The Review of English Studies, New Series 52, no. 205 (2001): 1-21.

[In the following essay, Straker argues that previous critics have overlooked two of Lydgate's references to himself in The Siege of Thebes that reveal his attitude toward Chaucer and his own work as a poet within the current political order.]

The 176-line prologue to John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes is one of the most remarkable acts of literary appropriation in medieval literature: not only does Lydgate adopt the pilgrimage frame of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but he also inserts himself as a character into his precursor's fiction. The prologue begins with Lydgate musing on the month of April, in which Chaucer set his pilgrimage. He then describes how he once chanced to meet Chaucer's band of pilgrims in Canterbury, where he was himself on a pilgrimage, and how Harry Bailly prevailed upon him to join their company for the return journey and to favour them with a tale. The tale Lydgate tells is the tragedy of Edippus, the strife between his sons, and the resulting destruction of Thebes.¹ Despite the potential richness of his intertextual reference, most critics feel that Lydgate's attempt at imitation is hamstrung by his lugubrious mentality. A. C. Spearing states that Lydgate parrots Chaucer's stylistic and rhetorical devices without grasping their complexity, Derek Pearsall finds Lydgate's prologue a laboured exercise in Chaucer's low style ‘in which character simplifies to caricature’, and John M. Ganim concludes that Lydgate was incapable of grasping the implications of his appropriation: ‘In a poet of more quickness and wit, we might take this to be a conscious ploy, an effort to play with our sense of illusion and our complicity in the fiction. Nothing could be further from Lydgate's imagination.’² For modern critics, Lydgate is a fallen poet whose sin of pedantry for ever excludes him from the Eden of canonicity.

I believe that critics have hitherto overlooked an aspect of this prologue that illuminates Lydgate's attitude towards both Chaucer and his own art. Lydgate's appropriation of the Canterbury Tales is not a simple tribute by a well-meaning but incompetent disciple to his inimitable master; rather, it accomplishes two feats of calculated self-authorization. First, the way in which Lydgate portrays both himself and Chaucer's pilgrims distances him from Chaucer's anticlericalism and redeems the authority of the monastic voice. Second, Lydgate imagines an alternative to the poet-patron relationship that shaped most of his artistic output: his monastic identity authorizes him to resist the Host's demand for a specific type of literary artefact while appearing humbly to comply. The prologue therefore anticipates the theme of counsel that pervades the Siege: like the narrative's privileged counsellors, he speaks the unwelcome truth to a figure representing secular authority. What most critics read as a deferential literary exercise is really a manifesto for the poet's relationship to the political order, a relationship that differs from the one implicit in certain of Chaucer's works. However, if Lydgate's self-confidence in the prologue borders on naivety, the rest of the poem articulates a gloomy counter-perspective: the futility of prudent counsel within the narrative limits the power of rhetoric to influence history, undermining Lydgate's entire historiographic project.

No part of the prologue has earned Lydgate more critical contempt than his conflation of attributes belonging to several of Chaucer's pilgrims. Lydgate describes ‘with his pylled nolle ❙ The pardowner, beerdlees al his Chyn, ❙ Glasy-Eyed and face of Cherubyn, ❙ Tellyng a tale to angre with the frere’ (ll. 32-5), whereas in Chaucer's General Prologue the Pardoner has ‘heer as yelow as wex’ (I. 675).³ Moreover, it is the Summoner who has a ‘fyr-reed cherubynnes face’ (I. 624) and who belittles the Friar with his tale. The Summoner also has a ‘pyled berd’ (I. 627), but the ‘pylled nolle’ in Lydgate's description is generally assumed to belong properly to Symkyn from the Reeve's Tale, who has a ‘pyled skulle’ (I. 4306). Critics assume simple error on Lydgate's part;⁴ only John Bowers finds it curious that Lydgate should make such an error when he is sufficiently familiar with Chaucer's works to quote him almost verbatim elsewhere in the Siege of Thebes.⁵ What no critic has yet considered is that Lydgate might have conflated these details deliberately. The composite figure that Lydgate creates is an emblem of Chaucer's degenerate clerics. The Pardoner's greed, deceit, and aberrant sexuality, the Summoner's lechery and belligerence, and the clerical in-fighting enacted in the hostile exchange between Chaucer's Summoner and Friar are combined in an amalgam of all that is reprehensible in the contemporary clergy. Moreover, Symkyn's is not the only ‘pylled nolle’: the Monk's ‘heed was balled, that shoon as any glas’ (I. 198). If Lydgate meant to include the Monk in this rogues' gallery of Chaucerian clerics, then his composite figure also embodies the worldliness and impiety of Chaucer's highest-ranking representative of the institutional Church. Lydgate encapsulates the critique that runs throughout the Canterbury Tales of the degeneracy of both the religious orders and the secular Church. Lydgate's alternative to this degeneracy is unlike Chaucer's: he does not uphold the socially marginal and otherwordly Parson, who derives his authority from his virtuous way of life and not his position in the institutional Church.⁶ Chaucer's most morally admirable cleric does not appear in Lydgate's abbreviated list of the Canterbury pilgrims. Lydgate's strategy is instead to show that the institutional Church is not as morally bankrupt as Chaucer would have it.

Lydgate's emblem of Chaucerian anticlericalism could be a serendipitous accident, but the passage that follows it suggests that it is deliberate. Lydgate urges readers wishing to learn more about this composite pilgrim to read the Canterbury Tales:

Echon ywrite and put in remembraunce
By hym þat was, ȝif I shal not feyne,
Floure of Poetes thorghout al breteyne,
Which sothly hadde most of excellence
In retorike and in eloquence;
Rede his making who list the trouthe fynde,
Which neuer shal appallen in my mynde,
But alwey fressh ben in my memorye.

(ll. 38-45)

Lydgate states that Chaucer's verse will never fade from his memory a dozen lines after conflating at least three pilgrims: surely this ought to be read as an ironic joke indicating Lydgate's complete awareness of what he has just done. The admiration that Lydgate expresses for Chaucer's ‘retorike and … eloquence’ is surely genuine, yet this humorous demonstration of Lydgate's faulty memory also questions the power of Chaucer's rhetoric to put the truth ‘in remembraunce’. These lines may also express a deeper anxiety, namely that Lydgate's very admiration for Chaucer is itself a cause of error, because the way in which Chaucer uses his rhetoric is incompatible with Lydgate's view of what rhetoric is for. For Lydgate, rhetoric is more than mere stylistic ornamentation; it is inseparable from the faculty of moral discernment that determines a work's value: the poet's function is to preserve the moral truth of his source and to emphasize or ‘enlumyn’ it with rhetoric.⁷ Lydgate declares this theory of poetics when he praises Chaucer for recording the pilgrims and their tales accurately,

                                                  forȝeting noght at al,
…
Of eche thyng keping in substaunce
The sentence hool with-oute variaunce,
Voyding the Chaf, sothly for to seyn,
Enlumynyng þe trewe piked greyn
Be crafty writinge of his sawes swete.

(ll. 49-57)

Lydgate's conflation of the pilgrims introduces the self-deprecating humour that characterizes the Siege prologue: as he claims a lesser literary status in Chaucer's shadow, so his act of memory is flawed in comparison with Chaucer's. However, the proverbial separation of the wheat from the chaff suggests that such acts of memory have a moral valence, linking the prologue with the moral deliberations that pervade the Siege of Thebes.⁸ Perhaps Lydgate quotes this proverb because Chaucer also invokes it at the end of the Nun's Priest's Tale (VII. 3443) as a metaphor for interpretation. If so, then it is a pointed reference: whereas Chaucer invites the reader to determine whether there is any ‘moralite’ in his satirical beast-fable (VII. 3438-46), Lydgate states that it is the writer's responsibility to make the ‘sentence’ in his subject-matter manifest. Lydgate invites a moral as well as a literary comparison between himself and Chaucer: he confesses his literary shortcomings, but implies that, when it comes to morals, Chaucer is the one who is deficient.

One purpose of the Siege prologue is to extol the ‘Floure of Poetes thorghout al breteyne’ (l. 40), to portray Chaucer's verse as the foundation of all subsequent literary enterprises in English. However, Lydgate also shows it to be an unstable foundation, one that he sets out to reinforce with his moral vision of history and secular politics. This is not the view taken by most critics who discuss Chaucer's status in the eyes of fifteenth-century poets.⁹ They argue that subsequent writers consider Chaucer to be the first English auctor, who bequeathed to his literary heirs both fitting subject-matter and the language in which to express it. This inheritance ultimately proved disabling because of Chaucer's inimitability: with the possible exception of Henryson, fifteenth-century poets could only imitate Chaucer in the futile hope of producing an occasional echo of his greatness. To substantiate this position, critics hunt for Chaucerian allusions in fifteenth-century verse and cite the posture of overawed deference that Chaucer's would-be successors adopt. Both Hoccleve in the Regement of Princes and Lydgate in the Troy Book portray themselves as unworthy disciples, and even Skelton, unaccustomed to humility, singles Chaucer out from other English literary luminaries for unequivocal praise.¹⁰ However, should such gestures of self-abasement ever be taken at face value?¹¹ I shall argue that Lydgate establishes his authority as much by distancing himself from Chaucer's dubious morality as by associating himself with Chaucer's vernacular poetic. Another purpose of the Siege prologue is to establish sententiousness as the primary criterion by which literature is to be judged, and to call Chaucer's sententiousness into question.

Lydgate states that Chaucer's greatness lies in his mastery of literary form, awarding him ‘pris, honure and glorye ❙ Of wel seyinge first in oure language’ (ll. 46-7); however, Lydgate's lexicon renders his praise of Chaucer ambiguous. Chaucer's status in the eyes of many fifteenth-century readers depended on his reputation for sententious utterance:¹² accordingly, Lydgate declares that Chaucer fills the Canterbury Tales ‘With many prouerbe diuers and vnkouth ❙ Be rehersaile of his Sugrid mouth’ (ll. 51-2). Lydgate appears to state that many of Chaucer's sayings have become proverbial. A proverb is a familiar truth, belonging to a traditional body of popular wisdom, whose authority derives from its very familiarity; if a saying is ‘vnkouth’, how can it be a proverb? The phrase ‘Sugrid mouth’ is equivocal: Middle English sugred can have various meanings, from ‘eloquent or pleasing’ to ‘pleasant or sweet for deceptive purposes, deceitfully agreeable, beguiling’.¹³ This latter sense is attested in Lydgate's other works: in the Troy Book, Anthenor persuades the Trojans, who are unaware that he intends to betray Troy to the Greeks, to sue for peace ‘with sugred wordis swete, ❙ Makyng þe bawme outward for to flete ❙ Of rethorik and of elloquence’ (IV. 5201-3).¹⁴ The very traits for which Chaucer is praised are sinister in the treacherous Anthenor: the speaker's moral rectitude determines the valence of his rhetoric. Lydgate also praises Chaucer for the ‘crafty writinge of his sawes swete’ (l. 57); the MED defines crafty as ‘skilful, clever, learned’, but also as ‘sly, cunning, tricky, deceitful’.¹⁵ The moral ambiguity surrounding terms denoting poetic excellence argues against reading Lydgate's commemoration of Chaucer as uncomplicated praise. Lydgate confines Chaucer's excellence to literary form; however, if the value of rhetoric lies in the speaker's morality, this excellence is not good in itself. Lydgate's tribute to Chaucer immediately follows his conflation of Chaucer's immoral clerics, which I suggest is a self-deprecating joke; I now submit that it serves a polemical purpose as well. Lydgate attributes the confusion to Chaucer, stating that the hybrid pilgrim he describes can be found in the Canterbury Tales ‘as opynly the storie can ȝow lere, ❙ word for word’ (ll. 36-7). Perhaps Lydgate is obliquely suggesting that while he is guilty of conflating Chaucer's pilgrims, Chaucer is guilty of collapsing the entire clergy into uniform degeneracy. Lydgate uses his self-portrait in the Siege prologue to restore moral authority to one section of the institutional Church.

Lydgate's self-portrait carefully inverts Chaucer's description of Piers the Monk in the General Prologue.¹⁶ Piers rides a ‘hors in greet estaat’ (I. 203), with ornamental tack: ‘whan he rood, men myghte his brydel heere ❙ Gynglen in a whistlynge wynd als cleere ❙ And eek as loude as dooth the chapel belle’ (I. 169-71). Conversely, Lydgate rides ‘a palfrey slender, long and lene’ whose ‘rusty brydel’ has ‘nieþer boos ne belle’ (ll. 74-5, 85). Piers is magnificently garbed, wearing ‘sleves purfiled at the hond ❙ With grys, and that the finest in the lond’ and fastening his hood with a golden pin decorated with a love-knot (I. 193-7). Lydgate's garb is more humble: the Host comments on his ‘wonder thred-bar hood’ (l. 90). Lydgate also wears ‘a Cope of blak and not of grene’ (l. 73). Green is the colour of huntsmen:¹⁷ Lydgate's sombre dress further distinguishes him from Chaucer's Monk, who notoriously ‘lovede venerie’ (I. 166).¹⁸ He also lacks Piers's wealth, his impecunity attested by the ‘voyde male’ that his servant carries before him (l. 76). Chaucer's Monk is a robust man in good health: he is ‘a lord ful fat and in good poynt’ and ‘nat pale as a forpyned goost’ (I. 200, 205). Conversely, Lydgate's illness leaves him ‘pale al deuoyde of blood’ (l. 89), and the Host says of his appearance ‘To ben a Monk Sclender is ȝoure koyse; ❙ Ye han be seke, I dar myn hede assure, ❙ Or late fed in a feynt pasture’ (ll. 102-4). Piers prefers to dine on the rich and aristocratic dish of roast swan (I. 206), whereas the Host prescribes for the convalescent Lydgate a medicinal diet of red fennel, anise, cumin, and coriander seed, and urges him to prevent colic by breaking wind freely (ll. 112-18). In the prologue to Chaucer's Monk's Tale, Harry Bailly asks Piers whether his name is ‘daun John, ❙ Or daun Thomas, or elles daun Albon’ (VII. 1929-30). In a corresponding passage that surely cannot be coincidental, Lydgate substitutes Chaucer's Monk's name for his own when the Host asks if he is called ‘daun Pers, ❙ Daun Domynyk, Dan Godfrey or Clement’ (ll. 82-3).

By portraying himself as Piers's opposite in every way, Lydgate implies that he is free from Piers's besetting sin, which one critic identifies as acedia.¹⁹ This spiritual condition, to which monks were held to be particularly susceptible, gives rise to a number of infractions. It causes a physical restlessness, making monks reluctant to remain in the cloister, like the ‘outridere’ Piers (I. 166). It also produces an aversion to study: Piers declines to ‘studie and make hymselven wood, ❙ Upon a book in cloystre alwey to poure’ (I. 184-5). Conversely, the fruits of Lydgate's study are apparent in his many learned references; he also portrays himself reading a portable breviary as he rides (l. 162). Acedia also gives rise to disobedience: Piers scorns the rule of his order (I. 173-88), whereas Lydgate emphasizes his obedience to the Host's command to tell a tale (ll. 172-4). Most important, acedia bespeaks a lack of spiritual consolation, an alienation from God that can lead to despair.²⁰ Chaucer's Monk is a parody of everything monks ought to be: his worldliness and his psychological condition deprive him of the moral authority that his tale, which exposes the futility of secular political ambition, presupposes.²¹ By inverting Piers's external characteristics, Lydgate implicitly dissociates himself from Piers's internal disposition. Lydgate's integrity towards his vocation not only proves that he is a better monk than Piers, it also redeems the monastic voice as a vehicle for moral utterance and challenges the anticlerical ideology of his mentor.

The moral authority that Lydgate represents physically in the prologue is exercised didactically throughout his narrative of Thebes; moreover, his combination of the roles of poet and cleric confers upon him an authority that Chaucer cannot share. Nicholas Watson argues that in the Troy Book Lydgate undercuts his praise of Chaucer with the suggestion that Chaucer's sympathy for Criseyde makes him morally untrustworthy: whereas Chaucer transforms the Trojan narrative into an erotic fiction, Lydgate restores its status as history and therefore its moral exemplarity.²² Watson's distinction amounts to a choice between genres: Lydgate prefers the didacticism of his Latin historiographic source to the moral ambiguity of his courtly vernacular source. However, he also derives poetic authority from a different affiliation, one that is not generic but vocational. The comparison that Lydgate invites between Chaucer and himself rests on the distinction between form and substance: Chaucer is rhetorically superlative, but is not a dependable guide to the moral state of the contemporary clergy. The relationship between form and substance is a central concern of the Siege of Thebes. It operates formally at the level of narrative structure, which alternates between plot advancement and moral exposition; for example, the preparations for war made by the Argive king Adrastus occasion a lesson on a king's need for generosity (ll. 2671-736). It also animates the didactic content of Lydgate's poem, which largely concerns the giving and taking of counsel: flatterers are condemned as those who privilege ‘wordes smoth’ over the ‘soth’ (ll. 1793-4). Again, the value of rhetoric depends upon the moral disposition of its speaker. The distinction between form and substance also enables Lydgate to contrast poets with clerics: his portrayal of Chaucer associates poets with rhetorical skill, whereas clerics, such as the bishop Amphiorax who prophesies the disastrous outcome of the Greeks' war with Thebes, have a monopoly on truth. Throughout the Siege, Lydgate demonstrates that these two vocations produce a socially beneficial effect only when they are exercised in concert.

Amphiorax's inability to dissuade the Greek leaders from attacking Thebes demonstrates the inadequacy of truth alone: because he does not tell them what they want to hear, Amphiorax's words earn him only scorn (ll. 2877-988). Amphiorax's failure is discursive. His speech-acts are invariably ineffective: foreseeing his death if he helps the Greeks, he commands his wife to conceal his whereabouts, but she immediately betrays him to the Greeks (ll. 2819-66). Similarly, the Greeks' unwillingness to heed him means that ‘al his hegh prudence ❙ … was holden but folye’ (ll. 2967-70).²³ If Amphiorax's truthfulness is useless without persuasive rhetoric, then rhetoric that does not clearly indicate truth is equally unhelpful. The greatest exponent of rhetorical art in the Thebes narrative is Amphioun, founder of Thebes: his music and ‘wordes swete’ cause all neighbouring peoples to give him their willing obedience (ll. 186-243), enabling him to build Thebes ‘by his elloquence ❙ Mor than of Pride or of violence’ (ll. 287-8).²⁴ However, Lydgate juxtaposes this myth with a story of prior, less serene origins, describing how Cadmus first claimed sovereignty over Thebes, only to be expelled ‘Be the knyghthode of this Amphioun’ (ll. 293-310). Amphioun's regime of unconstrained obedience is premissed upon violent dispossession, which is a more fitting precursor to the disputed sovereignty that sparks the rest of the Siege's narrative.²⁵ Lydgate shows that poets are to blame for this confusion over the origin of Thebes. The Cadmus story is told by ‘expositours, ❙ Groundyng hem vpon olde auctours’ (ll. 293-4), whereas the story of Amphioun is taken from Boccaccio, whom Lydgate later identifies as the foremost poet in Italy after Petrarch (ll. 3541-3). Lydgate describes Boccaccio's narration with an oxymoron that encapsulates the problem of relying on poets for a record of events: ‘as Bochas list to specifie, ❙ Cler expownyng this derke poysye’ (ll. 213-14). Lydgate declines to resolve this confusion for his readers, but indicates that resolution is possible: his readers may learn ‘by Informacioun ❙ Cleerly the pith and exposicioun ❙ Of this mater, as clerkes can ȝou telle’ (ll. 317-19). The clerical and poetic vocations are interdependent: clerics require the eloquence of poets to persuade an audience of their truth, but clerical authority is necessary to reveal the truth cloaked within ‘derke poysye’. Some critics have argued that monasticism ruins Lydgate's poetry;²⁶ conversely, Lydgate considers it his greatest strength, because it alone gives him an authority with which Chaucer cannot compete. As both poet and cleric, Lydgate portrays himself as uniquely qualified to lay before his audience both the history of Thebes's fall and the moral significance that this narrative contains.

Lydgate's discursive authority is no sooner established than it is pressed into service by the Host's demand for a tale. The Harry Bailly that we meet in Lydgate's prologue is not altogether like his Chaucerian counterpart: Lydgate describes him as ‘ful of wynde and bost, ❙ Lich to a man wonder sterne and fers’ (ll. 81-2); his speech is crass, for example in his indelicate medical advice (ll. 110-16); and his conduct is overbearing when he commands Lydgate to speak (ll. 158-61). Moreover, Lydgate's Host is interested in only one type of tale:

But preche not of non holynesse!
Gynne some tale of myrth or of gladnesse,
And nodde not with thyn heuy bekke!
Telle vs some thyng that draweþ to effecte
Only of Ioye! make no lenger lette!

(ll. 167-71)

Nothing in Lydgate's portrayal of the Host contradicts Chaucer: Chaucer's Host addresses the Nun's Priest ‘with rude speche and boold’ (VII. 2808), and bids certain pilgrims—for example the Clerk (IV. 9) and Chaucer (VII. 706)—to tell merry tales. However, in making Harry Bailly a coarse champion of mirth Lydgate ignores the versatility of Chaucer's Host, who also speaks graciously and enjoys sententiousness.²⁷ The speech of Lydgate's Host is unlike the other types of discourse that Lydgate distinguishes in the Siege: his vulgarity shows none of the rhetoric expected of poets, and his preference of mirth to holiness rejects clerical moralism. The Host belongs to a third category of speaker, one that is an apparent threat to the clerical poetic that Lydgate labours to establish.

Like Chaucer, Lydgate refers to Harry Bailly as a governour (Canterbury Tales, I. 813; Siege, ll. 79, 181). Elsewhere in the Siege this word has a royal or military connotation: after Laius's death the Thebans are ‘destitut of a governour, ❙ Aȝeynst her foon hauyng no socour ❙ Hem to defende’ (ll. 757-9), and they choose Creon as governour after the deaths of Etheocles and Polymyte (l. 3484). Lydgate turns the Host into an emblem: just as the composite pilgrim symbolizes Chaucer's anticlericalism, so the Host symbolizes secular authority at its most overbearing. In interpreting the Host in this way, Lydgate responds to an etymological cue given to him by Chaucer: a ‘bailey’ or bailiff is a governor, a frequently unpopular official who oversees the management of estates and the execution of justice on behalf of his lord.²⁸ Whereas the authority of Chaucer's Host is frequently challenged, for example by the Miller's drunken outburst (I. 3120-35), Lydgate's Host dominates the pilgrims with tyrannical authority. He tells Lydgate that the price of joining his band of pilgrims is absolute submission to the tale-telling game:

Thow shalt be bounde to a newe lawe,
Att goyng oute of Canterbury toune,
And leyn a-side thy professioun
…
For non so proude that dar me denye,
Knyght nor knaue Chanon prest ne nonne,
To telle a tale pleynly as thei konne,
Whan I assigne and se tyme opportune.

(ll. 132-9)

Yet deny the Host is just what Lydgate does, and his ability to resist this imperious command derives from his monastic identity. When Lydgate's Host lists the estates subject to his control he leaves an important gap, one that Lydgate fills in his act of self-naming: ‘I answerde my name was Lydgate, ❙ Monk of Bery’ (ll. 92-3).²⁹ Far from laying aside his profession, Lydgate exploits a genre characteristic of monastic textual culture, historiography. Far from submitting to the tyranny of mirth, Lydgate recounts the irreducibly unmerry fall of Thebes. Lois Ebin argues that Lydgate classifies the Theban narrative as a merry tale in order to extend Chaucer's debate over the meaning of mirth.³⁰ On the contrary, the aggressive tragedy of Lydgate's tale in no way meets the Host's demand for a tale ‘that draweþ to effecte ❙ Only of Ioie’. Lydgate establishes an opposition between the Host and his fictional persona that enables Lydgate both to test his authority and to demonstrate that his rhetoric has more integrity than the ‘wordes smoth’ of flatterers. His feigned acquiescence in the Host's command (ll. 172-4) conceals his rejection of an externally imposed literary standard. This is the final and fundamental purpose of the Siege prologue.

Lydgate's portrayal of the Host is clearly influenced by Chaucer's Clerk's prologue: Chaucer's Host demands a ‘myrie tale’, and bids the Clerk, ‘precheth nat, as freres doon at Lente ❙ To make us for oure olde synnes wepe’ (IV. 9-14). This prologue and the tale that it prefaces serve as a model in more ways than this: here too a poet has his narrator extol a literary precursor, in this case Petrarch, and here too the narrator's tale criticizes aspects of his precursor's ideology.³¹ Moreover, Chaucer's Clerk also resists the Host while seeming to comply: the Host also commands the Clerk to lay aside his profession, saying, ‘Youre termes, youre colours, and youre figures, ❙ Keepe hem in stoor til so be ye endite ❙ Heigh style, as whan that men to kynges write’ (IV. 16-18). The Clerk proceeds to speak in rhyme royal, and his tale is not the ‘murie thyng of aventures’ that the Host requests (IV. 15), but a political fable of extreme cruelty and pathos. This evidence of Lydgate's debt to Chaucer seems to undermine my argument that the Siege prologue is more than a slavish tribute. However, it is one thing to establish that Lydgate expresses himself through a tissue of allusions to Chaucer, but quite another to explain why. Critical orthodoxy accounts for the Chaucerian imitations that fill Lydgate's œuvre as attempts to earn prestige.³² Spearing goes further, claiming that Lydgate can only authorize himself by replacing Chaucer in his own literary creation, symbolically killing his ‘Father Chaucer’ even as Oedipus literally kills his father in the Theban narrative.³³ This interpretation fails to explain why Lydgate should feel such a need for authorization: Lydgate's disingenuous protestations of inadequacy must not blind us to the fact that he earned the approbation of the most socially exalted patrons of literature in England. By the time he wrote the Siege of Thebes there can have been few more prestigious living poets: the commissions that he received throughout the 1410s from Henry V attest to his exalted status, and throughout the 1420s he enjoyed the patronage of some of the most influential people in the kingdom, including Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, the dowager queen Katherine, Thomas Montacute, earl of Salisbury, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (and two of his wives), and Henry VI.³⁴ It is difficult to imagine how much more authority Lydgate could have wanted, or how imitating Chaucer could have conferred it upon him.

While Spearing interprets the prologue psychologically, Lee Patterson offers a historical explanation. He reads Lydgate's Host not just as an emblem of secular authority, but as an allegorical representation of Henry V himself: Lydgate's resistance to the Host becomes a veiled censure of Henry's proposed reform of the Benedictine order in 1421.³⁵ I find this identification implausible, not least because such censure would require astonishing temerity from a poet who is otherwise so diplomatic.³⁶ Patterson's association of Lydgate's prologue with Henry's reform seems arbitrary: after all, the Host commands Lydgate not to mend his ways but to ‘leyn a-side thy professioun’ (132), and his rejection of ‘holynesse’ hardly qualifies him to represent a king publicly committed to restoring the rigour of the Benedictine Rule. Moreover, Patterson makes an assumption about the poem's date that is by no means indisputable. On the basis of internal evidence, most critics date the poem between 1420 and 1422;³⁷ however, some argue convincingly that the poem should be dated after the death of Henry V.³⁸ Henry's premature death removed the impetus for his Benedictine reform and thus obviated the need for resistance, so if Lydgate's poem postdates Henry's death then Patterson's argument is robbed of its force. Patterson provides a historical occasion that is too specific for the evidence to support, when the prologue's literary occasion stands perfectly well on its own. Lydgate's comic encounter with the Host expresses covert resistance to the secular authority that provides the occasion for his poetic utterance and yet seeks to constrain its form: it dramatizes the conflict between poet and patron.

The Siege of Thebes appears to be Lydgate's only major work undertaken without a commission.³⁹ Freed for once from the need to adapt his literary agenda to the demands of a powerful aristocrat, Lydgate seized the opportunity to reflect upon his relationship with his patrons. The Siege prologue epitomizes Lydgate's career: the demanding governour Harry Bailly is not unlike the powerful men for whom Lydgate wrote so much of his work, and with whom his dealings were not always harmonious. The incompatibility of the Host's desire for mirth with Lydgate's meditation on history represents an impasse that Lydgate must have encountered frequently. The Troy Book provides an example of this impasse: its prologue suggests that Henry V expected a commemoration of feats of arms (ll. 69-118), an expectation that Lydgate's monumental exemplum of the futility of war can only have disappointed. Lydgate's solution to this impasse in the Siege prologue is one of resistance through capitulation: he submits to the necessity of speaking on command, but having obtained a platform he speaks a text of his own choosing. This is fantasy, a response available only in a literary world freed from the realities of economics and power, and one that can rarely have been possible for Lydgate outside his imagination. The Siege prologue does not attest to a perpetual but doomed effort to emerge from Chaucer's shadow: he confidently lays claim to Chaucer's vernacular achievement with his manipulation of the Canterbury Tales, adds to his precursor's eloquence the moral authority of the monastic order, whose integrity he redeems, and creates a literary persona that becomes his strongest weapon in the struggle between poet and patron. The prologue to the Siege of Thebes is no mere exercise in comic imitation but a declaration of discursive autonomy: Lydgate knows what his patrons need to hear better than they do.

I have suggested that Lydgate's resistance superficially resembles that of Chaucer's Clerk, but on a fundamental level Lydgate's political strategy is the opposite of Chaucer's. Chaucer invariably transposes political questions into a domestic context. For example, Chaucer's Tale of Melibee advocates the political morality that is usual in Mirrors for Princes, but applies it not to a king's governance of his realm but to an individual man's relationship with his neighbours. The domestic relationship between the irascible Melibee and his conciliatory wife Prudence is a metaphor for the process of moral reform whereby a male actant subdues his passions, embraces the Cardinal Virtues, and thereby transforms social relations predicated upon violence and vengeance into amity. However, Melibee's continued propensity for making bad decisions (e.g. VII. 1834) shows that this reforming process is ongoing; the actual advice that Prudence gives, which is necessarily circumstantial, is therefore less important than the relationship in which it is given. This relationship is one of voluntary submission to authority, in which public negotiations are modelled on domestic ones: Prudence, although wiser than her husband, submits to his patriarchal monopoly over action, and Melibee submits to his wife's counsel, which causes his foes to submit to his judgement. Chaucer's Clerk's Tale has similar recourse to domestic relations. The initial relationship between Walter and his subjects is one of mutual suspicion and coercion (they compel Walter to marry and he compels them to accept his choice of a wife, IV. 71-189), but Grisilde's ordeal creates a political harmony that is portrayed domestically (Walter's offspring marry well and experience no strife with their spouses, and power is transferred smoothly to the next generation, IV. 1128-41). Grisilde is a stand-in for Walter's subjects in a political fable that advocates passive submission to authority. Her social status is entirely dependent on his pleasure, which she earns through utter compliance with his irrational desire. Although this compliance initially causes her to lose everything that she had gained, the tale's fabulous conclusion sees her get it all back when her submissiveness transforms Walter's cruelty into benevolence. The political aspirations of Walter's subjects, namely that he should marry and produce an heir, can only be fulfilled domestically, through a wife's submission to patriarchal tyranny.⁴⁰ The household models the state, making the submissiveness advocated by these tales applicable to all readers, not just to princes.

In Lydgate's work the movement is in the opposite direction: domestic crises require political resolutions. The best example of this in the Siege is when Isiphile, to whom King Lygurgus's infant son has been entrusted, momentarily abandons her charge to lead the parched Greek army to water. In her absence the child is killed by a serpent; fearing Lygurgus's wrath, Isiphile begs the Greeks to intercede for her. The Argive king Adrastus with ‘prudent speche’ reminds Lygurgus that death is inevitable and that what the gods send must be endured with patience, and asks him to spare Isiphile; Lygurgus assents, and after the Greeks slay the offending serpent the matter is laid to rest (ll. 3019-509). What begins as a single family's bereavement leads to a pact of friendship between two kings, and a lesson in both the proper relation between justice and mercy and the correct attitude for a king to adopt towards irresistible fate.⁴¹ Modern readers are accustomed to think of Chaucer as a more incisive and intellectually daring poet than Lydgate, yet in political terms Lydgate is the more audacious. Chaucer's tendency is everywhere to depoliticize, to avoid imposing limits on the exercise of power or questioning its legitimacy by viewing power relations in the politically uncontentious sphere of the household. By focusing rather on the relations between husbands and wives than between lords and subjects, he broaches a subject of intense cultural debate, but one that is unlikely to get him executed.⁴² Conversely, Lydgate makes the political implications of his narratives overt. This limits the relevance of his advice: whereas Chaucer's focus on gender relations is of universal appeal, the political lessons in the Siege, such as the need for lords to exercise liberality (ll. 2688-722), apply chiefly to the nobles who commissioned most of Lydgate's historiographic works. Although Lydgate speaks primarily to those who embody secular authority, he does not display the unconditional submission that Chaucer advocates. Where the resistance offered by Chaucer's Clerk is purely formal, refusing to challenge Walter's tyranny in political terms, Lydgate's resistance to the Host is fundamental to his treatment of counsel throughout the Siege of Thebes. The poet-patron relationship established in the prologue not only authorizes Lydgate to speak his poem, it also governs the relationship between kings and counsellors.

Counsel-taking scenes occur at crucial junctures in the Siege's narrative, and the narrator distinguishes good counsellors from bad ones by a simple criterion: the former are old and wise, whereas the latter are young and inexperienced.⁴³ The importance of counsel is most apparent at two narrative turning-points when the protagonists must choose between making peace or persisting in their bellicose (and doomed) course. The first occurs when Adrastus contemplates supporting Polymyte against Etheocles (ll. 2788-997), and the second follows the Greeks' arrival at Thebes, when the Thebans debate whether to risk a siege or sue for peace (ll. 3610-725). On both occasions the counsellors who are experienced in warfare urge a peaceful settlement while the younger hotheads prefer to fight, causing the narrator to denounce the follies to which youth is prone (ll. 2941-64). The counsellors whom the narrative privileges most are both old: among the Thebans there is the ‘olde Quene’ Jocasta, who in this version of the story survives the death of Edippus to try to reconcile her warring sons (ll. 3626-948), while the Argives have the bishop Amphiorax, ‘A man, in soth, of olde antiquite / And most acceptid of auctorite’, whose magic and ‘grete experience’ foretell the disaster that will result from the attack upon Thebes (ll. 2794-831).

Amphiorax is in many ways a surrogate for Lydgate: both are mature, clerical, and pacifist. The respect for age that the narrator demonstrates casts a detail of the prologue's composite pilgrim in a new light, the beardless chin and ‘face of Cherubyn’ (ll. 33-4) that are characteristic of youth. Not only does this pilgrim symbolize greed, deceit, impiety, and malice, but he also partakes of the folly of youthful counsellors, who throughout the poem urge kings towards violent and disastrous action. An otherwise extraneous detail of the prologue now appears significant: when the Host asks the narrator to introduce himself, he states that he is ‘nyȝ fyfty ȝere of age’ (l. 93). Lydgate perhaps cannot rival Amphiorax's ‘olde antiquite’, but he is nevertheless old enough to ally himself with the poem's voices of experience. Lydgate's poetic persona and Amphiorax are further united by their integrity, which leads them to oppose their secular patrons. Lydgate is commanded to speak by Harry Bailly, but chooses to tell a tale contrary to his governour's preference. Amphiorax is similarly commanded to advise Adrastus, although he goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid counselling him because he foresees the war's fatal result (ll. 2819-68). Nevertheless, when forced to speak, Amphiorax tells the Greeks the last thing they want to hear: they hope by his wisdom to ‘eschewe al aduersite / Possible to falle as in her Iourne’ (ll. 2885-6), but Amphiorax advises them to abandon their plan altogether. Through its resemblance to the poem's most privileged counsellor, Lydgate's poetic persona emerges as a repository not only of literary authority, but also of political wisdom.

The prologue's confident optimism cannot survive the fall of Thebes. Both Amphiorax and Jocasta are ignored by those they advise, and Amphiorax fails to escape the death that he predicts: the poem's prudent counsellors cannot alter history's fatal course any more than Lydgate can influence the politics of his real-life patrons. The failure of these counsellors raises an important question: does it represent for Lydgate a purely local lapse of a political strategy that is otherwise worth extolling, or does it altogether undermine the power of counsel to redeem politics? The Cardinal Virtue of prudence is the basis of Lydgate's ethical system: it involves the exercise of reason over time in the linked activities of remembering the past, understanding the present, and foreseeing the future.⁴⁴ It is an indispensable virtue for both rulers and counsellors, and provides the strongest validation for mature counsel: ‘The olde, prudent in al his gouernaunce, / Ful longe a-forn maketh purueaunce’ (ll. 2959-60). Prudence is also essential to Lydgate's vocation of poet-historiographer because it governs both the correct remembrance of the past and the favourable reception of political advice in the present. In the Troy Book Lydgate makes it clear that Cassandra's failure to dissuade the Trojans from making war is a failure of prudence: self-restraint is a necessary aspect of prudence, and because Cassandra cannot control her emotions, she cannot control the response of others.⁴⁵ Unlike Cassandra, Lydgate is alert to the need to control his audience's response to his act of political advice, the Troy Book itself; he does this in part through the technique, widespread in specular literature, of imagining a recipient who already perfectly embodies the virtue of prudence that he seeks to instil (e.g. V. 3376-86). The need to exercise prudence thus unites Lydgate with the powerful magnates who form his primary audience.

Lydgate's faith in prudence survives the fall of Troy because his prudent discourse is superior to that of his doomed protagonists: he is distinguished from Cassandra both by his ability to control his rhetoric and, more fundamentally, by his gender. However, in the Siege of Thebes Lydgate multiplies the similarities between his narrative persona and Amphiorax to the point of identity. The comic prologue, in which the Host commands a reluctant Lydgate to tell a tale, foreshadows the more serious moment when Adrastus forcibly extracts counsel from Amphiorax, who knows that speaking will cost him his life (ll. 2877-921). Having compelled Amphiorax to speak, Adrastus compels him into silence again when his advice proves uncongenial: ‘For wherso euer he ment good or ille, ❙ kyng Adrastus bad hym to be stille’ (ll. 3813-14). Lydgate, who resembles Amphiorax in so many other ways, must be aware that he too will be silenced if he fails to meet the demands of a patron who is not a mere part of his fiction. After Amphiorax's prudent counsel earns him only scorn, Lydgate asks gloomily,

For thogh Plato and wise Socrates,
Moral Senek and Diogenes,
Albumasar and prudent Tholomee,
And Tullius that hadde souereynte
whylom in rome as of elloquence:
Thogh all thise, shortly in sentence,
were a-lyve most konnyng and experte,
And no man list her counsel to aduerte,
Nor of her sawes forto taken hede,
What myght availle and it cam to need?
For wher prudence can fynde no socour
And prouidence haueth no favour,
Farwel wisdam farwel discrecioun,
For lakke only of supportacioun.

(ll. 2971-84)

All moral and intellectual attainments, even the cherished attributes of prudence and rhetorical skill, founder on the perverse wilfulness of a single king.⁴⁶

Amphiorax's spectacular demise before the walls of Thebes (ll. 4023-32) manifests the futility as much of Lydgate's prudence as the bishop's. Simpson argues that affirmation and negation exist in the Siege in unresolved opposition: ‘Lydgate promotes the virtue of prudence only to underline the unpropitious historical circumstances that must constrain its confidence’.⁴⁷ I favour a less tentative conclusion: Amphiorax's death signals Lydgate's rejection of the Ciceronian poetic that has hitherto animated his historiography, the belief that the poet's prudent rhetoric can influence the conduct of his powerful patrons. Lydgate constructs his discursive authority by contrasting his poetic voice with Chaucer's, and his rejection of that authority is marked by a return to Chaucer. After Amphiorax's death the narrator condemns the pagan learning that failed to save him in lines that echo the palinode of Troilus and Criseyde:

lo here the mede of ydolatrie,
Of Rytys old and of fals mawmetrye.
lo what auayllen Incantaciouns
Of exorsismes and coniurisouns.

(ll. 4047-50; cf. Troilus and Criseyde, V. 1849-55)

These lines serve the same purpose for Lydgate as they do for Chaucer, rejecting the ideology on which his poem is based. Whereas Chaucer challenges the reader to decide whether the pagan erotic ethos he so vividly constructs is nothing more than ‘payens corsed olde rites’ (V. 1853), Lydgate unambiguously confesses the inadequacy of the human intellect to control the outcome of history, undermining the validity of his entire historiographic project. The Troy Book's conclusion also mimics that of Troilus and Criseyde, exposing the vanity of worldly pursuits and advocating faith in Christ (cf. Troy Book, V. 3544-92; Troilus and Criseyde, V. 1814-69); however, despite the failure of prudence within the Troy Book's narrative, Lydgate still hopes at the poem's conclusion that if his prudence will not persuade his royal patron to pursue peace, the fear of God's judgement will.⁴⁸ When Lydgate uses a similar strategy at the end of the Siege of Thebes (ll. 4660-716), the effect is altogether bleaker. This ending is an imitation of an imitation, but even the qualified optimism of the Troy Book is no longer possible for Lydgate, presumably because the Troy Book's pacifist appeal produced no discernible effect upon the warlike Henry V. The final lines of the Siege articulate not, as its editors claim, an optimistic hope that a specific military victory will eliminate violence, but rather the despairing recognition that earthly kings will never act prudently or embrace peace, so it is futile to instruct them. Lydgate's invocation of God here serves not to benefit the polity by reforming its king, but to offer individuals hope of escape from a world in which corporate action is irretrievably corrupted by covetousness and ambition.

My discussion of Lydgate's attitude towards Chaucer in the Siege of Thebes yields some predictable results. There has never been any doubt that Lydgate is a more didactic poet than Chaucer, so it comes as no surprise that he establishes sententiousness as the primary criterion for literature and shows himself to be more sententious than Chaucer. It is equally unsurprising that he should embrace his monastic vocation, redeeming the moral integrity of his order from Chaucer's thoroughgoing satire of Piers and using his monastic identity to gain an advantage in his life-long competition with Chaucer. However, the contrast between the two poets' politics is perhaps less familiar. We are accustomed to think of Chaucer as innovative, ahead of his time, perhaps even the first English poet to escape the confines of medieval culture.⁴⁹ It therefore seems natural to view him as politically radical, as do critics like Dinshaw and Wallace, who assert his criticism of such repressive cultural edifices as patriarchy. Conversely, we are repeatedly told that Lydgate exemplifies ‘non-innovatory medievalness’, embracing medieval attitudes and conventions and resisting new influences such as Italian humanism.⁵⁰ His mentality seems indicative of political conservatism. My reading of the attitude these poets adopt towards political authority suggests the contrary: Chaucer habitually depoliticizes his subject-matter and portrays submission to coercive power, whereas Lydgate's historiographic works embrace their implications for contemporary politics and resist the demands of erring secular lords. This distinction should not be taken as a pretext to condemn Chaucer as reactionary: it stems as much from the poets' social circumstances as their intellectual outlooks. Chaucer was a civil servant who spent his life at court, for whom earning the displeasure of his social superiors was a constant and potentially mortal danger, whereas Lydgate was a monk, defended by the institutional authority of the Benedictine order. From this more secure vantage-point he could construct a poetic that sought morally to admonish his aristocratic readers, a prospect that Chaucer could never have entertained, even had he wished to do so. The Siege of Thebes, which ultimately despairs of reforming the politically consequential, represents a setback for Lydgate's poetic. Much of his subsequent poetic output during the 1420s consisted of short, occasional pieces commissioned by the upholders of the Lancastrian Dual Monarchy to commemorate contemporary events.⁵¹ It was nearly a decade before Lydgate returned to historiographic verse narrative in the Fall of Princes, a work in which several readers detect a noteworthy lack of political criticism.⁵² Perhaps Lydgate found that distinguishing himself from Chaucer by adopting a more confrontational politics carried a high price.

Notes

1. On the basis of internal and manuscript evidence, J. Simpson argues that the poem should be entitled the Destruction of Thebes: ‘“Dysemol daies and Fatal houres”: Lydgate's Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer's Knight's Tale’, in H. Cooper and S. Mapstone (edd.), The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford, 1997), 15; nevertheless, I retain the more familiar title under which the work is published.

2. A. C. Spearing, ‘Lydgate's Canterbury Tale: The Siege of Thebes and Fifteenth-Century Chaucerianism’, in R. F. Yeager (ed.), Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays (New Haven, 1984), 39; D. Pearsall, John Lydgate (London, 1970), 153; J. M. Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 104. Other critics who regard the Siege as a retreat from Chaucerian complexity include J. Bowers, ‘The Tale of Beryn and The Siege of Thebes: Alternative Ideas of The Canterbury Tales’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 7 (1985), 23-50; S. Kohl, ‘The Kingis Quair and Lydgate's Siege of Thebes as Imitations of Chaucer's Knight's Tale’, Fifteenth-Century Studies, 2 (1979), 119-34; and T. W. Machan, ‘Textual Authority and the Works of Hoccleve, Lydgate and Henryson’, Viator, 23 (1992), 281-99. Only L. Ebin, ‘Chaucer, Lydgate and the “Myrie Tale”’, Chaucer Review, 13 (1978-9), 316-36, and Simpson, ‘“Dysemol daies”’, read the Siege as an attempt to extend Chaucer's moral engagement with history.

3. Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, ed. A. Erdmann and E. Ekwall, 2 vols., eets es 108, 125 (London, 1911-30), vol. i; The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Boston, Mass., 1987). I omit Erdmann's editorial diacritics and occasionally alter his punctuation.

4. Spearing dismisses him as a careless reader of Chaucer (‘Lydgate's Canterbury Tale’, 337 n.); D. Pearsall, ‘Chaucer and Lydgate’, in R. Morse and B. Windeatt (edd.), Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge, 1990), 49-50, concludes that Lydgate is more interested in amassing a volume of detail than in its correct attribution.

5. Although Bowers also concludes that such details did not ultimately interest Lydgate (‘Alternative Ideas’, 40).

6. For this view of the Parson, see L. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 20 (Cambridge, 1994), 7-12.

7. L. Ebin, ‘Lydgate's Views on Poetry’, Annuale Mediaevale, 18 (1977), 76-105.

8. For an influential reading of the poem's moral exemplarity, see R. W. Ayers, ‘Medieval History, Moral Purpose, and the Structure of Lydgate's Siege of Thebes’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 73 (1958), 463-74. L. Ebin similarly argues that the poem's morality has the political function of assisting the prince in his task of upholding civilization; see her John Lydgate, Twayne's English Authors 407 (Boston, Mass., 1985), 16-19, 52-9, and Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln, Nebr., 1988), 41-8.

9. e.g. D. Pearsall, ‘The English Chaucerians’, in D. S. Brewer (ed.), Chaucer and Chaucerians (London, 1966), 203-22; Pearsall, ‘Chaucer and Lydgate’; A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), 88-110; Machan, ‘Textual Authority’, 281-99; and S. Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton, NJ, 1993).

10. Hoccleve's Works: The Regement of Princes and Fourteen Minor Poems, ed. F. J. Furnivall, eets es 72 (London, 1897), ll. 1958-74, 2077-93; Lydgate's Troy Book, ed. H. Bergen, 4 vols., eets es 97, 103, 106, 126 (London, 1906-35), III. 4234-63; ‘Phyllyp Sparowe’, in J. Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. J. Scattergood (Harmondsworth, 1983), ll. 784-812.

11. D. Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, ELH 54 (1987), 761-99, argues that they should not, and that 15th-cent. poets often invoke their precursors to subvert the concept of poetic authority (pp. 765-7).

12. P. Strohm, ‘Chaucer's Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the “Chaucer Tradition”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 4 (1982), 3-32, argues that Chaucer's 15th-cent. readers preferred his generically stable works that reaffirm traditional values and social relations.

13. H. Kurath et al. (edd.), Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1952-).

14. See also Lydgate's Fall of Princes, ed. H. Bergen, 4 vols., eets es 121-4 (London, 1924-7), IX. 487; The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall, eets es 77, 83, 92 (London, 1899, 1901, 1904), l. 14287; and Secrees of Old Philisoffres, ed. R. Steele, eets es 66 (London, 1894), l. 899.

15. Both senses are attested in Lydgate's writing. The positive sense is intended in the Siege when Amphioun's authority is said to derive from his ‘crafty speche’ (l. 226); however, in the Troy Book the arch-traitor Anthenor ‘Ful craftely’ bribes a priest to deliver the Palladium to the Greeks (IV. 5738).

16. Although Spearing, ‘Lydgate's Canterbury Tale’, 336-7, compares the Siege prologue to Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's prologue: in both a black-clad cleric joins the pilgrimage.

17. Chaucer's Yeoman, a skilled forester, is ‘clad in cote and hood of grene’ (I. 103-10).

18. For the worldly vices of monks that Chaucer satirizes see J. Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 1973), 17-37. Mann argues that Chaucer's satire is not explicit, but can be inferred from the character traits he supplies (e.g. the vice of gluttony, frequently denounced in monks by satirists, can be inferred from Piers's obesity and appetite for roast swan). Lydgate uses the same technique in the prologue, leaving the reader to infer his virtue in comparison with Chaucer's Monk's vice.

19. D. E. Berndt, ‘Monastic Acedia and Chaucer's Characterization of Daun Piers’, Studies in Philology, 68 (1971), 435-50. For a survey of acedia see S. Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill, NC, 1960).

20. Berndt, ‘Monastic Acedia’, 444.

21. P. E. Beichner, ‘Daun Piers, Monk and Business Administrator’, Speculum, 34 (1959), 611-19, observes that Piers's absence from his cloister is not in itself blameworthy, because he is merely doing his job as an outrider. However, Beichner's further attempts to exonerate the Monk are unconvincing. His claims that Piers's irreverent comments about the monastic rule are excerpted from a longer and more respectful conversation (which Beichner presumes to supply) and that Piers's hunting is a public relations exercise undertaken for his monastery's benefit (pp. 614-16) are utterly speculative, and misrepresent Chaucer's text. Note that Beichner does not mention Piers's love-knot: not even he can make this seem anything other than an inappropriate ornament for a monk.

22. N. Watson, ‘Outdoing Chaucer: Lydgate's Troy Book and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid as Competitive Imitations of Troilus and Criseyde’, in K. Pratt (ed.), Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Dr Elspeth Kennedy (Cambridge, 1994), 89-108.

23. Lydgate makes the same point in the Troy Book, in which Cassandra's repeated failure to control her rhetoric causes Priam to ignore her warnings and to imprison her (II. 4190-252, III. 2238-318).

24. Amphioun provides Lydgate with an important historical precedent for his Ciceronian poetics, whereby the civilizing power of rhetoric is an indispensable tool of statecraft: see J. Marotta, ‘Amphion: The Hero as Rhetorician’, Centrepoint, 2 (1977), 63-71; Ebin, John Lydgate, 52-9; Ebin, Illuminator, 41-8; and Simpson, ‘“Dysemol daies”’, 17-20.

25. L. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, Wis., 1991), 47-83, argues that Theban history is characterized by fatal recursion, whereby every attempt to lay the conflicts of the past to rest and start afresh is undermined by a prior origin in internecine bloodshed. Thebes therefore exists as a disabling alternative to the purposive translatio imperii embodied in the Trojan historiographic tradition.

26. Pearsall, John Lydgate, 22-45, 127-51, blames it for what he perceives as Lydgate's mechanical and traditional mentality; see also F. Reufs, ‘Das Naturgefühl bei Lydgate’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 122 (1909), 269-300.

27. L. Patterson, ‘Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate’, in J. N. Cox and L. J. Reynolds (edd.), New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History (Princeton, NJ, 1993), argues that Lydgate's simplification of Harry Bailly's character derives from his strategic simplification of the Canterbury Tales: ‘Chaucer's multivalent Tales are reduced to a uniform frivolity in order to provide a foil for Lydgate's seriousness: it is his difference from Chaucer that establishes Lydgate's identity’ (p. 76). While I agree with this observation, it will become clear that the conclusions I draw from it differ from Patterson's.

28. H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions 1150-1400 (Cambridge, 1937), 162-6. Chaucer may have named his Host after an actual Southwark innkeeper named Henry Bayliff (Riverside Chaucer, 825).

29. This gap becomes more apparent when the list of estates is compared with the lines by Chaucer that may have inspired it: the Canon's Yeoman states that alchemy is difficult for any man to learn, ‘al be he monk or frere, ❙ Preest or chanoun’ (VIII. 839-40).

30. Ebin, ‘“Myrie Tale”’, 316-36.

31. D. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 261-98, argues that the Clerk's Tale rejects Petrarch's patriarchal humanism.

32. e.g. Pearsall, ‘Chaucer and Lydgate’.

33. A. C. Spearing, ‘Renaissance Chaucer and Father Chaucer’, English, 34 (1985), 35. Spearing portrays Lydgate as trapped in the condition that Bloom calls tessera, in which a disciple poet completes what he perceives to be a truncated precursor poem. In fact, aspects of all six of Bloom's categories of influence apply to Lydgate: see H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1973), 14-16. Lydgate's appropriation of Chaucer's pilgrimage frame is a complex combination of homage and refutation, and does not seem to me to indicate the stunting of Lydgate's poetic growth by Chaucer's overwhelming status. Rather, it stems from the inevitable ambivalence that one writer feels towards another whose achievement he admires but whose social status and ethical and spiritual framework he does not share. Simpson's treatment of Lydgate's response to Chaucer looks beyond Lydgate's formal debt to Chaucer to consider his rejection of the philosophy underlying the Knight's Tale (‘“Dysemol daies”’).

34. For the networks of patronage to which Lydgate had access, see D. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371-1449): A Bio-bibliography, English Literary Studies (Victoria, 1997). Although Lydgate's patrons came from diverse social backgrounds, his historiographic works apart from the Siege were all commissioned by magnates or kings.

35. Patterson, ‘Making Identities’, 93-5.

36. An example of Lydgate's diplomacy is his poem On Gloucester's Approaching Marriage, in which Lydgate commemorates Humphrey, duke of Gloucester's ill-advised marriage to Jacqueline of Hainault in politically uncontentious terms: see Pearsall, John Lydgate, 165-6.

37. Line 4703 echoes the Treaty of Troyes (1420), and the poem's editors feel that its ending expresses an optimism that must predate the death of Henry V on 31 Aug. 1422 (Siege of Thebes, ii. 9). J. Parr, ‘Astronomical Dating for Some of Lydgate's Poems’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 67 (1952), demonstrates that the astrological opening of the prologue describes a conjunction that occurred on 27 Apr. 1421, but denies that astrological evidence conclusively dates the poem (pp. 255-6).

38. Ayers, ‘Medieval History’, 468; R. S. Allen, ‘The Siege of Thebes: Lydgate's Canterbury Tale’, in J. Boffey and J. Cowen (edd.), Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry (London, 1991), 125-6; and Simpson, ‘“Dysemol daies”’, 15-16, all argue that the Siege fits the political situation following Henry's death better than that of the years 1420-2, with the fraternal strife of Etheocles and Polymyte corresponding to the struggle between John, duke of Bedford and Humphrey, duke of Gloucester to fill the power vacuum left by Henry V. The internal evidence on which the pre-1422 date rests is far from conclusive: the astronomical date might indicate merely when Lydgate conceived the idea for the Canterbury prologue, not when he wrote the poem. Moreover, the Siege's ending is less optimistic than its editors make out: far from celebrating the military triumphs of Henry V, it condemns the fatal politics of this world and expresses a Christian hope for peace in the next.

39. Bowers, ‘Alternative Ideas’, 42.

40. Recent discussions of the Clerk's Tale argue that Chaucer implicitly criticizes the patriarchal ideology of his Petrarcan source by translating the story back into the vernacular, focusing on women's bodily experience and depriving Grisilde of exemplary status (IV. 1142-212): see C. Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison, Wis., 1989), 132-55; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 261-98. Even so, the content of the fable remains unchanged: the benevolence of tyrants is earned through submission. More important, even Chaucer's criticism of the tale turns its back on politics: by urging women not to emulate Grisilde, he confines the tale's significance to individual women's conduct towards their husbands, removing its potential to authorize corporate resistance to political tyranny.

41. Lydgate's Troy Book is rich in political calamities that originate in domestic conflicts or individuals' personal dispositions. For example, Lydgate's treatment of the Judgement of Paris (II. 2369-839) links the renewal of Greco-Trojan hostilities to Paris's desire for sexual gratification.

42. P. Strohm, ‘Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s’, in L. Patterson (ed.), Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530 (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 83-112, argues that Chaucer's reluctance to take sides politically enabled him to survive the turbulent 1380s, where Usk's partisanship cost him his life.

43. This distinction is commonplace: for comparable denunciations of youthful counsellors, see Chaucer's Tale of Melibee, VII. 1162-3, 1198; Mum and the Sothsegger, ed. M. Day and R. Steele, eets os 199 (London, 1936), III. 262; Hoccleve's Regement, ll. 578-665; and V. J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1971), 108-9, 124-5.

44. This definition of prudence derives from Cicero's De inventione 2.53.160 and De officiis 1.5.15-19, 1.43.153-5; it was familiar to late medieval writers through, among other sources, the widely disseminated 12th-cent. compilation Moralium dogma philosophorum. I discuss the importance of prudence to Lydgate more fully in ‘Ethics, Militarism and Gender: John Lydgate's Troy Book as a Political Lesson for Henry V’, Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1998; see also Simpson, ‘“Dysemol daies”’, 18-20.

45. For the link between self-restraint and prudence see Melibee, VII. 974-99; Troy Book, II. 1810-85.

46. Even at this bleakest moment, Lydgate asserts his difference from Chaucer. When Amphiorax is ignored for the last time, Lydgate says, ‘But thilke tyme for al his elloquence ❙ He had in soth but lytyl audience’ (ll. 3811-12), lines that paraphrase the Host's words to the Monk when he and the knight interrupt the Monk's gloomy sequence of tragedies (VII. 2801-2). Unlike Chaucer's Monk, Lydgate does not allow his disquisition on the transience of worldly glory to be curtailed by his secular audience's taste for comedy: even though his textual reflex Amphiorax has been silenced, Lydgate speaks on for over a thousand lines more.

47. “‘Dysemol daies’”, 20.

48. I discuss Lydgate's address to Henry V at the end of the Troy Book in ‘Rivalry and Reciprocity in Lydgate's Troy Book’, New Medieval Literatures, 3 (1999), 119-48.

49. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 13-39, discusses how poets such as Dryden and Blake portray Chaucer as a precursor of the English Renaissance; see also Spearing, ‘Renaissance Chaucer’; Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers.

50. D. Pearsall, ‘Lydgate as Innovator’, Modern Language Quarterly, 53 (1992), 5-13.

51. These works include On Gloucester's Approaching Marriage, The Title and Pedigree of Henry VI, and Henry VI's Triumphal Entry into London; see The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, pt. II: Secular Poems, ed. H. N. MacCracken and M. Sherwood, eets os 192 (London, 1934).

52. Pearsall, John Lydgate, 249-50, notes that Lydgate tones down Boccaccio's condemnation of immoral princes; R. Copeland, ‘Lydgate, Hawes, and the Science of Rhetoric in the Late Middle Ages’, Modern Language Quarterly, 53 (1992), 57-82, claims that in the Fall Lydgate exchanges a rhetoric of moral admonition for one devoted purely to prince-pleasing; and Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 332-4, states that the absence of contemporary exempla from the Fall contrasts with Chaucer's Monk's Tale, and neutralizes the de casibus genre's critical potential.