SOURCE: Watkins, John. “‘Wrastling for this world’: Wyatt and the Tudor Canonization of Chaucer.” In Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, edited by Theresa M. Krier, pp. 21-39. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.

[In the essay below, Watkins investigates the many levels on which Wyatt's works engaged Chaucer's.]

For more than four hundred years, critics have honored Wyatt as the first representative of an English Renaissance conceived as an absolute break with the Middle Ages. Surrey eulogized him as the “hand … / That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit,” and Puttenham later canonized him with Surrey as one of the “two chieftains” of a new poetic generation that “greatly pollished our rude & homely maner of vulgar Poesie from that it had been before.”¹ Twentieth-century American critics have taken up this once nationalistically driven championship of Wyatt's originality. Thomas Greene hails him as the first English poet to respond fully to the Petrarchan “anguish of temporality” and historical distance.² Stephen Greenblatt ranks Wyatt with More, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare as a quintessentially Renaissance intellectual who exemplifies “an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process.”³ Yet in the years following the publication of Greene's Light in Troy and Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning, British critics have taken a more skeptical view of Wyatt's alleged turn against the medieval past. As Dennis Kay, Helen Cooper, and A. C. Spearing have argued, Wyatt's vocabulary and thematic concerns arise from direct intertextual dialogue with Chaucer.⁴Troilus and Criseyde, for instance, explored the conflict between “truth” and “newfangledness” well over a century before Wyatt's complaints about a world devoid of “steadfastness.”

While I want to build on Kay, Cooper, and Spearing's case against the Renaissance as an absolute departure from the medieval past, I also want to resist an aspect of their work that relies on the same humanist hermeneutics that authorized the myth of a European Renaissance in the first place. All three critics present Wyatt's relationship to Chaucer as an encounter between two autonomous personalities presiding over a fixed canon of texts. I will argue instead that Wyatt's poetry engages Chaucer's through factional conditions in which such autonomy was not an option. Neither Wyatt nor the Chaucer whom he reveres achieved the steadfastness of a stable, fully integrated subjectivity isolated from historical process. Since the acts of reading, collecting, excerpting, imitating, echoing, and above all editing Chaucer's texts were politically driven, Henry VIII's court confronted Wyatt with not one model of Chaucerian authority but several. Instead of providing the basis for one stable, poetic identity, this factionalization of Chaucer amplified Wyatt's characteristic restlessness and self-division.

As the son of a Yorkshireman knighted for service to Henry VII, Wyatt owed his fortune, lands, and title to the Tudors.⁵ Throughout his career, however, alliances with courtiers destined to fall from Tudor favor threatened to sever him from the king, the source of his aristocratic identity. Wyatt's predicament was that of many Tudor new creations: his entire social standing depended on his unswerving loyalty to a notoriously fickle and unpredictable regime. When Wyatt's career seemed shakiest, his writing turned nostalgically toward the steadfastness of the Chaucerian past. But during the 1530s and 1540s, when Wyatt produced most of his lyric poetry, Chaucer was less steadfast than he seemed. Tudor readers confronted Chaucer in everything from isolated lines embedded in poems by other people to manuscripts and miscellanies of dubious textual reliability, to Caxton's printed editions of individual works, and to William Thynne's 1532 edition of Chaucer's complete Works, an edition notorious for its canonization of works written long after Chaucer's death.⁶ By embodying divergent notions of what an author was, each of these formats carried a different political valence: the more they contributed to a laureate identity for Chaucer as a spokesman for transhistorical English values, the more they contributed to Henrician nationalism.

Before I analyze Wyatt's recreations of Chaucer, I want to inspect these rival disseminations of Chaucer's works throughout the early Tudor literary system. Two volumes, William Thynne's Works and the Devonshire manuscript, a handwritten miscellany by various authors that circulated among Henry VIII's courtiers, represent strikingly antithetical poles in Chaucer's cultural reception.⁷ In producing a standardized Chaucer, Thynne supported the same Tudor drift toward centralization and autocracy that manifested itself in the suppression of feudal rights, the dissolution of the monasteries, the anathematization of the papacy, and other repudiations of the medieval past. According to Thynne's son Francis, editing Chaucer was central to Henry VIII's imperialism: “[M]y father hadde to have Chaucers Woorkes rightlye to be published. For the performance whereof, my father … had comissione to serche all the liberaries of England for Chaucers Workes, so that oute of all the Abbies of this Realme (whiche reserved anye monumentes thereof) he was fully furnished with a multitude of Bookes.”⁸

Taken at face value as a response to Henry's love for Chaucer, Thynne's antiquarianism might suggest a purely nostalgic retreat from contemporary politics. But his tour of abbey libraries strikingly resembles another instance of state-financed scholarship, undertaken at almost the same time, whose goals were explicitly political. Twice during the crisis over the royal divorce, Henry commissioned scholars to examine both national and foreign libraries, bookshops, and monasteries for evidence proving first the invalidity of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and later his sovereignty over English ecclesiastical matters.⁹

At our historical distance, the tales, ballades, dream visions, and romances that were the objects of Thynne's search might seem unrelated to the patristic, scholastic, and rabbinical commentaries, decretals, and law texts examined by the commissioners. But the dedication of Thynne's 1532 edition by Sir Brian Tuke to Henry VIII underscores the political nature of Thynne's project. Thynne was first moved to edit Chaucer “by a certayne inclynacion & zele / whiche I haue to here of any thyng soundyng to the laude and honour of this your noble realme.”¹⁰ Editing Chaucer becomes part of what Richard Helgerson calls the “writing of England,” the creation of a distinctly English cultural identity.¹¹ Modeled on European editions of Virgil's Opera, Thynne's massive folio volume endowed Chaucer with a canonical identity as a native, Gothic laureate.

For later writers like Camden and Drayton, antiquarian enterprises like Thynne's often had a distinctly counter-monarchical implication, the establishment of an English national identity apart from the Crown.¹² Thynne's project, by contrast, contributed directly to the centralization of the Tudor state by casting Chaucer as a champion of the King against the conflicting claims of Church and nobility. Although the 1532 edition appeared two years before the proclamation of the royal supremacy and the suspension of annate payments decisively ended Henry's subordination to Rome, the Tudors had been restricting baronial prerogatives since the late fifteenth century.¹³ Thynne reinforced this power shift away from a potentially rebellious aristocracy by including poems like “To the King's Most Noble Grace” and “To the Lordes and Knightes of the Garter,” which seem to have been written by Hoccleve to support Henry V's suppression of the Oldcastle rebellion.¹⁴ By attributing these expressions of stridently Lancastrian royalism to Chaucer, Thynne established a Chaucerian, laureate sanction for Henry VIII's campaigns against heresy and rebellion.

By dismissing the apocryphal additions to the Chaucerian canon as typical expressions of sixteenth-century Protestantism, literary historians have overlooked the political context in which they came to be identified as Chaucer's. With works like the “Plowman's Tale” and “Jack Upland,” the 1542 Thynne and other post-Reformation editions of Chaucer reject Catholicism not just for doctrinal errors but for its usurpation of royal prerogatives:

Kings and lordes shuld lordship han …
Christ, for us that shedde his blood,
                    Bad his preestes no maystership have.

(“Plowman's Tale,” 1119-21)¹⁵

The Chaucer produced by sixteenth-century editors as the fountain of all subsequent English poetry championed the royal supremacy in the larger context of Tudor centralization.

Inspired by a commitment to the realm as the King's absolute possession, Thynne's editions of Chaucer erased crucial aspects of England's medieval past. They do so not only by canonizing anticlerical satires but also by altering the means of textual production. While works like the “Plowman's Tale” reinforced the efforts of Henrician antiquarians to discover precedents for the King's struggle against Rome, the printed format of Thynne's editions eliminated the haphazardness of medieval manuscript transmission.¹⁶ Collection, collation, and authorized publication became the textual correlatives of bureaucratic centralization. In a very literal way, Thynne's project challenged medieval property rights. Thynne's commission to ransack the abbey libraries anticipates the abbeys' dissolution less than ten years later. Appropriating manuscripts that might bolster an Erastian religious policy marked an early stage of the Crown's complete appropriation of monastic wealth. By 1532, Chaucer was no longer the possession of aristocrats and religious houses fortunate enough to own an individual manuscript. Under royal authorization, his collected corpus was now the property of a national readership.

Yet Thynne's version of Chaucer and the absolutist politics in which it participated were not uncontested. In 1536, Lord Thomas Howard defied the Tudor ambition to control aristocratic bloodlines by marrying Henry's niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, without his permission.¹⁷ After Henry imprisoned the couple in the tower, they exchanged several lyrics still preserved in the Devonshire manuscript, a collection of miscellaneous poems by several court authors. The exchange culminates in Howard's rime royal complaint against the cruelty of their fate:

O very lord, O loue, O god, alas!
                    That knowest best myn hert + al my thowght,
What shall my sorowful lyfe donne in thys case
                    Iff I forgo that I so dere haue bought
                                        Syns ye and me haue fully brought
                    Into your grace and both our hertes sealed
                    Howe may ye suffer, alas, yt be repealed(18)

As scholars have often noted, this lyric is Howard's best poem because he stole it from Troilus's lament to fortune in Book IV, lines 288-329, of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. The blank spaces indicate deletions of Criseyde's name, and a later stanza updates Chaucer's original grammar by substituting “Why wyld thow not” for the by then archaic phrase “Why nyltow fleen.” With such editing, Howard appropriated Troilus's fictional complaint as an expression of his own suffering under a tyrannical king. For members of his class, the transformation of Chaucerian narrative into anonymous lyrics could serve as a code for expressing aristocratic resistance to Henry.¹⁹

Scholars have dismissed these transformations of Chaucerian narratives into Tudor lyrics as testimony to an insufficiently developed understanding of linguistic and stylistic anachronism.²⁰ Yet the appearance of the same poem—or parts of the same poem—in Thynne's editions and in the Devonshire manuscript signals a conflict between two constructions of Chaucer. The magisterial Chaucer of the printed editions bolstered the Henrician notion of England as an empire grounded in the king's authority. By contrast, the unacknowledged Chaucer excerpted in the manuscript miscellanies spoke for an aristocracy whose prerogatives diminished in direct proportion to the Crown's aggregation of power. The “facts” of Chaucer's biography as it evolved throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could corroborate either authorial identity. By establishing a precedent for England's opposition to Rome, the common view of Chaucer as “a right Wicleuian” abetted Henry's nationalization of the Church.²¹ But the equally common view of him as a knight who had spent time in the Tower—a view enhanced by the attribution to him of Thomas Usk's Testament of Love—linked him to disenfranchised and imprisoned aristocrats like Thomas Howard and Thomas Wyatt.²²

Scholars have long acknowledged the Devonshire manuscript as one of the more authoritative sources for over eighty poems in Wyatt's canon.²³ But in addressing the question of Chaucer's influence on Wyatt, scholars have overlooked what the poets' proximity in the same manuscript suggests about their relationship. As I will argue, it indicates an ambivalence toward the Tudor dissemination of Chaucer that complements Wyatt's ambivalence toward the dissemination of power throughout Tudor society. Certain biographical evidence might suggest Wyatt's predisposition to embrace the pro-royal, proto-Protestant Chaucer canonized by Thynne. Unlike the Howards, Wyatt's family were members of a newly arrived Tudor aristocracy. Thomas Wyatt himself was a committed partisan of Thomas Cromwell, the man who most embodied the drive toward government centralization that curtailed the power of the older, feudal nobility.²⁴ Wyatt had several direct connections with those responsible for the Tudor “centralization” of Chaucer. His early translation of Plutarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae was published around 1527 by Richard Pynson, a printer whose three-part edition of Chaucer published the previous year anticipated Thynne's attempt to establish and codify the canon.

But despite these circumstances that would seem to encourage Wyatt's loyalty to Henry VIII and to the Tudor Chaucer, he was repeatedly at odds with Henry's government. In 1536, he was imprisoned with several other men implicated in Anne Boleyn's fall and escaped execution largely through Cromwell's intervention.²⁵ Cromwell's own fall in 1540 led Wyatt into even graver danger. The more Wyatt found himself on the margins of royal favor, the more he joined aristocratic writers like Thomas Howard in appropriating Chaucer as an oppositional voice. Rather than favoring the anticlerical works that Thynne foregrounded in support of Henry VIII's struggle against the Church, Wyatt turned to Troilus and Criseyde, the Knight's Tale, and such Boethian lyrics as “Fortune,” “Truth,” and “Lak of Stedfastnesse.” By adopting this Chaucer's Boethian complaints about humanity's plight before an inscrutable destiny, Wyatt identified himself with the other Devonshire manuscript writers in their coded resistance to Henry. Yet as I will argue, as much as Wyatt strove to incorporate this Chaucer's Boethian vision into his own poetry, the social structures that might once have supported an actual abandonment of worldly commitments no longer existed. Instead of withdrawing from the frenzy of political careerism, Wyatt embraced it with renewed, though often desperate, confidence. As a Tudor new creation, he had no other place to turn. This lack contrasts markedly with what we know of Chaucer himself. Chaucer could espouse a policy of Boethian withdrawal because he had multiple social identities: as the son of a vintner, member of the royal household, and controller of the customs on wool, he resisted exclusive identity with any single social class or political faction. When his association with the King's party became a liability in the 1380s, for instance, he distanced himself from the court and retreated into the comparative safety of county politics as a justice with the commission of the peace for Kent.²⁶ As the scion of a well-established English family, Thomas Howard enjoyed a membership in the provincial aristocracy that was independent of his status as a Henrician courtier. By contrast, Wyatt owed everything to the Tudors. He might affect the contemptus mundi stance of more established aristocrats, but he could hardly renounce the court on which his identity depended.

Probably around the time of the Boleyn crisis, Wyatt modeled his poem “If thou wilt mighty be” on Chaucer's “Truth,” or “Balade de Bon Conseyl.” Both Wyatt's poem and its Chaucerian precedent consist of three rime royal stanzas paraphrasing passages from Boethius's Consolatio about the instability of human affairs. The envoy appended to Chaucer's poem in one manuscript suggests that he wrote it to console his friend Philip de la Vache for losses suffered during the Appellant crisis. Throughout the poem, Chaucer urges his auditor to renounce the world's vain pursuits and rest in a redemptive, ultimately transcendent truth:

Flee fro the prees and dwelle with sothfastnesse;
Suffyce unto thy thing, though it be smal,
For hord hath hate, and climbing tikelnesse,
Prees hath envye, and wele blent overal.
Savour no more than thee bihove shal,
Reule wel thyself that other folk canst rede,
And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede.

(1-7)²⁷

The insistent imperatives and the final refrain suggest a confidence in the gospel of withdrawal and self-sufficiency supported by experience as well as by Boethian authority. As Paul Strohm has argued, withdrawal was Chaucer's central survival strategy during the factional crises of the 1380s.²⁸ Just when his once advantageous association with the King's affinity might have led him to a disaster like Thomas Usk's, he severed his London ties to Richard II by leaving his position at the Custom House and his house over Aldgate and by strengthening his more neutral county associations with Kent.

Although Wyatt repeatedly echoed Chaucer's Boethian counsels, he never fully heeded them. Throughout his career, he broke his resolutions to flee from the press of courtly preoccupations almost as soon as he made them.²⁹ Immediately after his release from prison in 1536, he reenacted Chaucer's Kentish retreat by returning to his family seat at Allington and becoming the Knight of the Shire of Kent.³⁰ But within six months, he accepted an appointment as ambassador to the imperial court of Charles V. He returned to Kent and to his estranged wife once more after the disaster of 1541.³¹ But by the middle of 1542, rumors circulated that he was about to become vice admiral of a fleet sailing against France. In October of that year, Henry dispatched him to escort the imperial ambassador from Cornwall to London. By riding in such haste that he contracted a fever and died en route, Wyatt gave his life in service to the King.

The inability to separate himself definitively from the court that defeated Wyatt's biographical attempts at Boethian resignation manifests itself even in his most conspicuously Chaucerian literary imitations. His revision of Chaucer's ballade narrows the call to absolute withdrawal from the world to less comprehensive counsels against lasciviousness and greed:

If thou wilt mighty be, flee from the rage
Of cruell wyll, and see thou kepe thee free
From the foule yoke of sensuall bondage …

(1-3)³²

Wyatt replaces Chaucer's opening imperatives with conditional verbs signaling persistent enthusiasm for secular advancement. Whereas Chaucer's imagined audience consisted of courtiers longing for centers of stability set apart from the “tikelnesse” of courtly ambition, Wyatt addresses those longing to be “mighty.” In the course of his poem, he reverses Chaucer's argument by urging his readers to abandon lust precisely to advance their careers.

At a point of particularly close intertextual contact, both poets urge their readers to contemplate humanity's divine origins:

Her is non hoom, her nis but wildernesse:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal!
Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;
Hold the heye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede,
And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede.

(“Truth,” 17-21)

If to be noble and high thy minde be meued
Consider well thy grounde and thy beginnyng,
For he that hath eche starre in heauen fixed,
And geues the Moone her hornes and her eclipsyng:
Alike hath made the noble in his workyng,
So that wretched no way thou may bee
Except foule lust and vice do conquere thee.

(“If thou wilt mighty be,” 8-14)

For Chaucer, the recollection of a heavenly “hoom” discounts this world as a “wildernesse” to be escaped. But for Wyatt, the knowledge of one's “grounde and … beginnyng” in God leads to an antithetical conclusion: the belief that one's innate nobility underwrites the hope of “noble and high” rewards. In Chaucer's cosmos, nothing stands between the miserable uncertainties of this life and God's liberating “trouthe.” Wyatt complicates this model by identifying God as the maker not only of the fixed stars but also of “the Moone her hornes and her eclipsyng.” If his God provides the ground of a static, transcendent truth, he also creates a mutable universe. Instead of liberating one from the “tikelnesse” of court, He ordains the waning, waxing, and eclipsing that typifies the courtier's daily experience.

Wyatt's First Satire, “Myne owne John Poyntz,” links his inability to withdraw from worldly pursuits directly to his unstable social position as a second-generation aristocrat dependent on Tudor favor. Probably written shortly after Anne Boleyn's death and during his rustication at Allington, the poem ostensibly transforms the courtier's disgrace into the provincial aristocrat's self-sufficiency: although Henry banished Wyatt from his presence, Wyatt writes as if he has rejected the court and embraced the countryside in an act of defiant, unconstrained choice.³³ Hunting and hawking on his family estate, he affects the independence of the older, feudal nobility who owed nothing to the Tudors. Yet the poem's setting alone exposes this pretense, since Henry Wyatt had purchased Allington less than fifty years before in his first flush of favor with the newly crowned Henry VII. As Greenblatt notes, “the estate to which the poet retreats from power is the reward for royal service and … the pleasant acres are swelled with confiscated monastic lands.”³⁴ Throughout the poem, Wyatt's persistent fascination with the court reveals the futility of his efforts to imagine a life for himself that is not finally indebted to Tudor influence.

The First Satire stages this confrontation between the independence of the feudal nobility and the servility of the Tudor new creations against a patently Chaucerian backdrop. Although the poem paraphrases a stoic verse epistle that Luigi Alamanni had recently written, its conspicuous recollections of Chaucer's antifactional complaints ground its politics in an English, aristocratic tradition.³⁵ By echoing Chaucer's exhortation to “Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse,” for example, its opening lines identify Wyatt as one who has heeded Chaucer's Boethian counsels and renounced worldly corruption:

Myne owne John Poyntz, since ye delight to know
          The cause why that homeward I me drawe,
          And fle the presse of courtes …

(1-3)

Like Chaucer, Wyatt opposes truth to political intrigue. Boasting of his own incapacity to “torne the worde that from [his] mouthe is gone” (30), he locates the “tikelnesse” that Chaucer associated with political life in general with the specific unreliability of courtly discourse. At the end of the poem, he associates his verbal and moral integrity with the same county where Chaucer himself once fled the court's duplicity. Here “in Kent and Christendome” (100), he can commit himself fully to the Chaucerian values of “treuth” and “sothfastenesse.”

Wyatt's determination to preserve aristocratic integrity leads to a direct citation of Chaucer as the defender of the social order threatened by Henry's centralizing programs. In denying his ability to lie, Wyatt comments explicitly on the relationship between two Canterbury tales:

I am not he suche eloquence to boste,
          To make the crow singing as the swanne …
          Praysse Syr Thopas for a noble tale
          And skorne the story that the knyght tolld.

(43-44, 50-51)

Yet another Chaucerian figure intrudes implicitly on the passage, since the lines echo the Miller's announcement, in the Canterbury Tales, that he knows “a noble tale for the nones, / With which [he] wol now quite the Knyghtes tale” (3126-27). These Chaucerian echoes transform Wyatt's general complaint about flattery and dependence into a more pointed critique of arriviste culture. Both recollected moments, Chaucer the Pilgrim's parody of quest romance in the Tale of Sir Thopas and the Miller's boast that he can match the Knight's performance with an equally “noble tale,” constitute affronts to aristocratic tastes and conventions. Reading the Canterbury Tales as an aristocratic text, Wyatt assumes that Chaucer shows the absurdity of such presumptuous gestures in order to reaffirm traditional social distinctions. Presenting himself as a member of the older nobility, he defends this proper reading of Chaucer against the new aesthetic of the Henrician court. In the presence of a king who regularly imprisoned aristocrats like Howard while advancing base-born men like Cromwell, one loses the ability to make sound aesthetic judgments. Praising Sir Thopas for a “noble tale” becomes the aesthetic correlative of raising the son of a Putney blacksmith to the chancellorship of England.

Thus far, I have examined the First Satire as an unambivalent statement of Wyatt's determination to follow his master Chaucer both in a literal flight from court to Kent and in a metaphorical flight back into the stable class distinctions of the medieval past. But the poem itself never achieves the decisive break from the court that it proclaims. Since Wyatt's own family experienced the class mobility that he decries in the appropriated voice of a more established aristocracy, the secure class standing that underwrites his independence from the Crown is a pretense. As Alistair Fox has noted, Wyatt's passing complaint about the “clogg” that “doeth hang yet at [his] hele” (86) threatens to expose his Kentish retreat as house arrest rather than a freely chosen withdrawal from politics.³⁶ At such moments, Wyatt's apparently heartfelt assertions of the country's moral superiority to the court start looking like conventions cloaking the fact of an imposed rustication that he hopes will soon be reversed. Despite the poem's advocacy of hunting and hawking, the court remains its central preoccupation. Paradoxically, Wyatt's persistent fascination with the court invites an antithetical interpretation of his satire as an advertisement for further royal service. Unlike the flatterers whom he satirizes, Wyatt can be trusted to speak his mind and to advise the king or carry out his commands in all honesty.

Wyatt grounds the ambivalences of a poem that both renounces the court and hints at reembracing it in a confrontation between divergent Chaucerian subtexts. Whereas the social stratification of The Canterbury Tales and the Christian stoicism of the Boethian lyrics support his retreat into aristocratic self-sufficiency, Troilus and Criseyde questions its feasibility. In boasting of his Kentish independence, Wyatt echoes one of Criseyde's internal monologues that foregrounds anxieties about the irresistibility of overmastering social and political circumstances:

I am myn owene womman, wel at ese—
I thank it God—as after myn estat,
Right yong, and stonde unteyd in lusty leese.

(Troilus and Criseyde, II.750-52)

No man doeth marke where so I ride or goo;
In lusty lees at libertie I walke.

(“Myne owne John Poyntz,” 83-84)

Criseyde speaks the first passage in deciding whether she should consider Troilus's overtures. As a widow, she enjoys a social and emotional independence that she would surrender in binding herself to another man. Editors do not agree on what Chaucer meant by the phrase “in lusty leese.” While some gloss it as a description of Criseyde walking “freely in pleasant meadows,” others read it as an assurance that she was “not tied in love's leash.”³⁷ On the surface, Wyatt seems to take it in the first sence, as an image of rustic independence free from the corruptions of courtly convention. Walking unmarked by any man on his own ancestral estate, he identifies himself with Criseyde in a moment of proud, almost defiant autonomy. His apparent rejection of the alternative meaning of the phrase might even be biographically overdetermined: having renounced both the court and its pervasive sexual politics, he walks emphatically not in “lusty lees” defined as erotic subservience.

Yet in achieving this cross-gendered intertextual identification with Criseyde, Wyatt signals his eventual surrender to Henrician authority. Although many fourteenth-century widows enjoyed lasting social and economic independence, Criseyde does not. For her as for the Wife of Bath, widowhood turns out to be a transitional phase before an eventual resubmission to patriarchy. As her failure to remain her “owene womman, wel at ese” and living apart from men becomes a prototype of Wyatt's failure to live apart from Tudor favor, the social dynamics of gender and patronage intersect in a master narrative of emasculation. Wyatt's return to the Kentish lands that are his by patrimonial right might be read as a gesture of hypermasculine, aristocratic autonomy. But his dependence on the Crown renders him a second Criseyde who betrays his avowed convictions: he is no more capable of living without the King than she is capable of living without a Troilus or a Diomedes. Women under patriarchy and courtiers under tyranny are equally “sliding of corage.” Both suffer the irresolution for which Chaucer explicitly condemns Criseyde and for which Wyatt implicitly condemns himself in poems like “Who so list to hounte.”

Witnessing Henry VIII's treatment of Margaret Douglas and other unfortunate ladies of court may have heightened Wyatt's identification with female characters incapable of resisting destiny. Critics have often noted how recollections of Anne Boleyn's tragedy in particular figure in his most bitter attacks on the court.³⁸ In my final section, I want to examine how her death contributes to Wyatt's sense of alienation from a feudal past that is tragically irrecoverable. One of the Chaucerian texts that most haunts his poetry emphasizes the power of certain privileged women to assuage rather than to suffer tyrannical wrath. The Knight's Tale joins the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women and the Wife of Bath's Tale in depicting queens or other high-ranking women who successfully intercede for men under royal sentence. As Paul Strohm and David Wallace have argued, this topos of queenly intercession figured as significantly in late medieval courtly practice as in Chaucerian fiction.³⁹ In actual historical experience, queenly intercession might have been part of an elaborate ruse that ultimately heightened the king's power; a king who pardoned offenders too quickly would merit less awe than one who accorded mercy only when pressed by his queen's willingness to humiliate herself in pleading for a subject's life. But from the perspective of the subject in question, it mattered little whether the queen's pleading was grounded in genuine concern for his life or in absolutist theatrics. In either event, he owed his escape to a convention of queenly intercession.

By the time Wyatt turned to Chaucer's poetry for consolation in his struggle against tyranny, the Tudor aggregation of political authority would deprive the queen of her time-honored right to question the Crown's judgments. The last instance of queenly intercession along medieval lines that I know of occurs in a letter from Francesco Chieregato, the papal nuncio at the court of the twenty-five-year-old Henry VIII, to Vigo de Campo San Pietro. Following a riot against London's foreign population on May 1, 1517, Henry set out to punish the participants as severely and conspicuously as possible. But in pleasing the ambassadors and other foreigners whom the mob had outraged, he risked appearing as a tyrant to his own people. Catherine of Aragon solved his dilemma by taking on the role of intercessor for four hundred rioters sentenced to die:

There remained some 400 prisoners whom the King had destined in like manner for the gallows, but whom our most serene and most compassionate Queen with tears in her eyes and on her bended knees, obtained their pardon from his Majesty, the act of grace being performed with great ceremony.⁴⁰

Since Catherine was herself a foreigner, she could plead for the rioters without seeming sympathetic to their xenophobia. As a Spaniard living in London, she could pose as a representative of the outraged “strangers” themselves, in proclaiming that justice had been fulfilled and that it was now time for pardon and reconciliation.

Shortly over a decade later, such a scene would have been impossible. In the drive toward Tudor absolutism, the Crown could no longer accept so much as the fiction of a challenge to its authority, even from someone as close as to the monarch as a spouse. During Catherine's last months as queen, Henry's dynastic and imperial ambitions placed her in the unprecedented position of having to plead for herself. With Anne Boleyn's subsequent tragedy, the woman who held the traditional office of intercessor suffered herself the ultimate demonstration of royal justice. In an earlier period, a gentleman like Sir Thomas Wyatt might have found a refuge from the king's wrath in the queen's intercession. But in 1536, his intimacy with a queen suspected of multiple adulteries was the source of his danger. Significantly, the intercessor who saved him was Thomas Cromwell—a man who owed his position entirely to the King's favor—rather than a queen who derived her authority in part from her own noble blood. Yet in the vortex of Henrician politics, no intercessor held a very secure tenure. When Cromwell's own fall led to Wyatt's second disgrace in 1541, Catherine Howard stepped in to save him in a surprise return to the older model of queenly intercession. Yet less than a year later, Catherine herself died on the block and Wyatt received several offices that had belonged to her paramour Thomas Culpepper.⁴¹

A sonnet that Wyatt wrote sometime after the disasters of 1536 measures the contemporary collapse of the queen's intercessory office against memories of the medieval, Chaucerian past epitomized by the Knight's Tale:

You that in love finde lucke and habundance
          And live in lust and joyful jolitie,
          Arrise for shame! do away your sluggardie!
          Arise, I say, do May some obseruance!
Let me in bed lye dreming in mischaunce;
          Let me remembre the happs most vnhappy
          That me betide in May most commonly,
          As oon whome love list litil to avaunce.

(1-8)

Wyatt constructs this poem, which overtly thematizes the act of recollection, around recollections of several Chaucerian passages. As R. A. Rebholz has noted, the sonnet echoes “The Complaint unto Pity,” Troilus and Criseyde, and The Canterbury Tales.⁴² Yet this general allusiveness coalesces in a conspicuous imitation of the passage immediately preceding Palamon and Arcite's first glimpse of Emilye one May morning in the Knight's Tale:

She was arisen and al redy dight,
For May wole have no slogardie anyght.
The sesoun priketh every gentil herte,
And maketh it out of his slep to sterte,
And seith “Arys, and do thyn observaunce.”

(Knight's Tale, 1041-45)

The subtext offers Wyatt a compelling image of erotic and political alienation. He identifies with Palamon and Arcite, confined in a tyrant's tower and condemned to watch others enjoying the May rites from which they are excluded. Despite May's proscriptions of “slogardie anyght,” neither Wyatt nor the Theban heroes can obey her summons. Just as the Thebans' imprisonment separates them from Emilye, political circumstances precluded a relationship with Anne Boleyn and would later separate Wyatt from Elizabeth Darrell.⁴³

The Knight's Tale provides Wyatt a principle for organizing his “happs most vnhappy” into a coherent pattern, the belief that his “natiuitie / Mischaunced was with the ruler of the May.” Every major event in Palamon and Arcite's lives occurs in May. Wyatt's May experiences, like Arcite's, are unambiguously hostile. In May 1534, he found himself imprisoned in the Fleet for brawling. While imprisoned in the Tower in May 1536, he seems to have watched Anne Boleyn's execution from his cell.⁴⁴ In his Maytide sonnet, the spectacle of her execution takes the place of Palamon and Arcite's first glimpse of Emilye. When Wyatt looked out from what Chaucer had called the “grete tour, that was so thikke and stroong, / Which of the castel was the chief dongeoun” (Knight's Tale, 1056-57), he did not fall in love at first sight but witnessed the final agony of the woman he probably loved. Although we can only speculate about the intensity of his feelings for Anne as a private person, his dominant Chaucerian subtext underscores the significance to him of her death as a public figure. When Palamon and Arcite look “thurgh a wyndow, thikke of many a barre / Of iren greet” (Knight's Tale, 1075-76), they see not only a private woman whom they will love but also the Duke's sister-in-law who will join Hippolyta in interceding for their lives when Theseus sentences them to death. By the time Wyatt was imprisoned on suspicion of capital crimes, Henry VIII had stripped Anne Boleyn of her public dignities. In her last moments, she provided Wyatt not hope in the possibility of royal lenience but a witness to the severity of royal vengeance.⁴⁵

No editor has ever detected a Chaucerian source for the most plaintive poem that Wyatt seems to have written in response to Anne's death, “Who lyst his welthe and eas Retayne.” With its counsels against social and political ambition, the poem's opening stanza loosely imitates Seneca's Phaedra, which also provides the ominous Latin refrain, circa Regna tonat.⁴⁶ But despite this primary debt to Seneca, Wyatt recalls the Boethianism of such conspicuously Chaucerian works as “If thou wilt mighty be” and “Myne owne John Poyntz.” Wyatt draws closer to Chaucer's counsel against the “press” of temporal concerns here than anywhere else in his canon. Finding no comfort on earth, he follows Chaucer's Boethian precedent in resorting instead to the transcendent virtues of fidelity and truth.

The penultimate stanza locates Wyatt's overwhelming alienation from the world in the execution of the one person who might have protected him against factional conspiracy:

The bell towre showed me suche syght
That in my hed stekys day and nyght;
Ther dyd I lerne out of a grate,
Ffor all vaoure, glory or myght,
That yet circa Regna tonat.

(16-20)

Nowhere else does Wyatt so openly recall the circumstances of Anne's death. Probably written at the same time as the sonnet on May's “happs most vnhappy,” this stanza grounds its contempt for the world in yet another cankered recollection of the Knight's Tale. Palamon and Arcite's window “thikke of many a barre / Of iren greet” (Knight's Tale, 1075-76) becomes the “grate” through which Wyatt witnesses the degradation of chivalry itself. Tudor despotism has deprived the world of its ideals. What sticks in the nobleman's mind is not the idealization of a princess as a goddess but the condemnation of a queen for treason, adultery, and incest. As the Chaucerian fiction of queenly intercession yields to the Senecan reality of judicial murder, the only Chaucerian texts that retain their authority are those relegating innocence, truth, and faithfulness to a divine order apart from political experience.

Bitterness, disillusion, cynicism, and anxiety have become the qualities that most typify Wyatt's poetry for twentieth-century readers. In our more hermeneutically self-conscious moments, we attribute these apparently psychologized traits to a social environment that transcends and ultimately produces individual consciousness. Wyatt's restlessness becomes an illusion of interiority, a cultural superstructure arising on the base of Tudor despotism. Yet the base on which Wyatt's tortured interiority arises consists not only of immediate social and political circumstances but of mediating literary artifacts that bear the traces of past as well as present social and political conflict. The fragmentation of Chaucer's sixteenth-century cultural authority among divergent interests provided the channels through which Wyatt gave his internal struggles poetic expression.

Notes

1. Surrey, “W. resteth here, that quick could never rest,” in Howard, Poems, ed. Jones, 27; Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays 2:62-63. Subsequent references to Puttenham are noted by page number within the text.

2. See Greene, Light in Troy, 244.

3. Greenblatt's chapter on Wyatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 2.

4. See Kay, “Wyatt and Chaucer”; Cooper, “Wyatt and Chaucer”; Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, 278-310. For earlier discussion of Wyatt's debt to Chaucer, see Mason, Humanism, and Southall, The Courtly Maker.

5. Muir, Life and Letters, 1-3. Even though the Wyatts had been prominent in West Riding affairs since the reign of Edward III, they were squarely members of the upper gentry rather than the aristocracy. Henry Wyatt was the first Wyatt to achieve prominence, and he owed his elevation entirely to the Tudors.

   Wyatt's arriviste status continued as a handicap even after his death. The longstanding use of Wyatt as a foil for the more refined Earl of Surrey, the scion of an ancient aristocratic family, reflects class biases against a newly created nobility. See Sessions, “Surrey's Wyatt.”

6. For a comprehensive account of Chaucer's Renaissance reception, see Miskimin's Renaissance Chaucer.

7. For an account of Chaucer's editorial history from Caxton to Robinson, see the essays in Editing Chaucer, ed. Ruggiers.

8. Francis Thynne, Animadversions, 6.

9. See Scarisbrick, “Henry VIII and the Vatican Library.”

10. Quoted in Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 79-80.

11. See Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 12-13.

12. See Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 125-31.

13. See Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 199-204; Miller, Henry VIII and the English Nobility.

14. See Skeat's introduction to Chaucerian and Other Pieces, 7:xl-xli.

15. Ploughman's Tale, in Skeat, Chaucerian and Other Pieces, 7:147-90. Line references are cited in the text. For further discussion of tale's aesthetic and political significance as an addition to the Chaucerian canon, see Wawn, “Genesis of ‘The Plowman's Tale’,” and “Chaucer, ‘The Plowman's Tale,’ and Reformation Propaganda.”

16. For further discussion of the transition from manuscript to print culture, see Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, 143-46.

17. I am indebted to Southall's account of the Howard-Douglas affair in “The Devonshire Manuscript.”

18. I include in the text my own transcription of the Devonshire Manuscript, British Museum Additional MS 17492, folio 29.

19. The Devonshire manuscript suggests that such unacknowledged appropriation of Chaucerian materials occurred frequently among Henry's courtiers. See Seaton, “Medieval Poem in the Devonshire Manuscript,” 55-56. Other Tudor manuscripts also incorporate generous amounts of Chaucer. See Kay's discussion of Bodley MS Rawlinson C. 813 in “Wyatt and Chaucer,” 244n.16.

20. See Mason, Humanism, 143-78.

21. John Foxe, Actes and Monumentes (1570), quoted in Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brewer, 1:108.

22. See John Bale, Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Scriptorum … Summarium, 198; John Leland, Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis, 419-26.

23. See Harrier, The Canon; Southall, The Courtly Maker.

24. Muir, Life and Letters, 25-37.

25. Muir, Life and Letters, 27-36.

26. See Strohm, “Politics and Poetics,” 90-97, 106-12; Strohm, Social Chaucer, 10-23; Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 32-39.

27. All references to Chaucer's poetry are to The Riverside Chaucer. Line numbers are cited in the text.

28. Strohm, Social Chaucer, 24-46.

29. Zagorin links Wyatt's professional resilience to his culture's endemic ambivalence toward the court. See “Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Court of Henry VIII.”

30. For discussion of Wyatt's final months, see Muir, Life and Letters, 211-13; Zagorin, “Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Court of Henry VIII,” 135.

31. Wyatt had been charged with treason in connection with Cromwell's fall; Catherine Howard had interceded on his behalf, with the result that Henry pardoned him. Although Wyatt maintained his innocence, he was not legally acquitted of the charges.

32. All references to Wyatt's poetry are to Muir and Thomson's edition of Collected Poems. Line numbers are cited in the text.

33. For discussion of the poem's date, see Muir, Life and Letters, 251; Rebholz, ed., Complete Poems, 437-39.

34. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 132. Although I am indebted to Greenblatt's analysis of the poem's concern with steadfastness as a response to the turbulence of Henrician politics, I emphasize its Chaucerian underpinnings to resist his insistence that “there is in the early modern period a change in the intellectual, social, psychological, and aesthetic structures that govern the generation of identities” (1). Several medievalists have challenged this canonization of the Renaissance as an originary moment in the history of subjectivity. See especially Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History and Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists.”

35. See Fox's discussion of Wyatt's relationship to Alamanni in Poetry and Politics, 270-72.

36. Fox, Politics and Literature, 272.

37. Donaldson opts for “in love's leash” (Chaucer's Poetry, 614); Shoaf prefers “in pleasant pasture” (Troilus and Criseyde, 74). After noting that editors have traditionally preferred “in pleasant pasture,” Riverside Chaucer concedes that Donaldson has a better case (1034).

38. See Fox, Politics and Literature, 267-68; Zagorin, “Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Court of Henry VIII,” 130-32.

39. See Strohm, Hochon's Arrow, 95-119; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 363-76.

40. Brown, ed., Calendar of State Papers, 2:887.

41. See Muir, Life and Letters, 211.

42. See Rebholz's edition of Complete Poems, 361-62.

43. See Muir's discussion of Wyatt's separations from Elizabeth Darrell in Life and Letters, 84-87; see also Fox, Poetry and Politics, 273-77; 281.

44. See Fox, Politics and Literature, 267.

45. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, offers a complementary discussion of the poem's elegiac relationship to the medieval past and concludes that for Wyatt, “the Chaucerian tradition, well though he obviously knows it, is no longer valid” (281-82).

46. Rebholz notes the Senecan source in Complete Poems, 424.

Bibliography

I. Texts

Bale, John. Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Scriptorum … Summarium. London, 1548.

Brewer, D. S. Chaucer: The Critical Heritage. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Brown, Rawdon, ed. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, 1509-1519. London, 1867.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader, ed. E. Talbot Donaldson. New York: Ronald Press, 1958.

———. The Riverside Chaucer. 3d ed., general ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

———. Troilus and Criseyde, ed. R. A. Shoaf. East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1989.

———. The Works, 1532 (ed. William Thynne), with supplementary material from the editions of 1542, 1561, 1598, and 1602, ed. D. S. Brewer. London: Scolar Press, 1969; rpt. 1976.

Howard, Henry, Lord Surrey. Poems, ed. Emrys Jones. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.

Leland, John. Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis. 1545. Rpt. Oxford, 1709.

Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. In Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith, vol. 2.

Skeat, Walter W., ed. Chaucerian and Other Pieces, Being a Supplement to the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. 7 vols. Oxford, 1894-97.

Smith, G. Gregory, ed. Elizabethan Critical Essays. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904.

Spurgeon, Caroline. Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357-1900. New York: Russel and Russel, 1960.

Thynne, Francis. Animadversions upon the Annotations and Corrections to Some Imperfections of Chaucer's Works (1598), ed. F. J. Furnivall, with a preface by G. H. Kingsley. Early English Text Society. London: Humphrey Milford, 1875.

Wyatt, Sir Thomas. Collected Poems, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969.

———. The Complete Poems, ed. A. Rebholz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

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Cooper, Helen. “Wyatt and Chaucer: A Reappraisal.” Leeds Studies in English 13 (1982): 104-23.

Fox, Alastair. Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Greene, Thomas. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Harrier, R. C. The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.

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Kay, Dennis. “Wyatt and Chaucer: They Flee from Me Revisited.” Huntington Library Quarterly 47 (1984): 211-25.

Lerer, Seth. Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Mason, H. A. Humanism in the Early Tudor Period. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959.

Miller, Helen. Henry VIII and the English Nobility. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.

Miskimin, Alice. The Renaissance Chaucer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.

Muir, Kenneth. The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1963.

Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Ruggiers, Paul, ed. Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1984.

Scarisbrick, J. J. “Henry VIII and the Vatican Library.” Bibliothèque d'humanisme et rénaissance 24 (1962): 211-16.

Seaton, Ethel. “Medieval Poems in the Devonshire Manuscript.” Review of English Studies 7 (1956): 55-56.

Southall, Raymond. The Courtly Maker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.

———. “The Devonshire Manuscript Collection of Early Tudor Poetry, 1532-41.” Review of English Studies 15 (1964): 142-50.

Spearing, A. C. Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.

Strohm, Paul. Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

———. “Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s.” In Literary Practice and Social Change, ed. Patterson, q.v., 83-112.

———. Social Chaucer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Watkins, John. The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Wawn, Andrew N. “Chaucer, The Plowman's Tale, and Reformation Propaganda: The Testimonies of Thomas Godfray and I Playne Piers.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 56 (1973): 174-93.

———. “The Genesis of The Plowman's Tale.” Review of English Studies 2 (1972): 21-40.

Zagorin, Perez. “Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Court of Henry VIII: The Courtier's Ambivalence.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993): 113-41.