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Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait

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SOURCE: Carlson, David R. “Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait.” Huntington Library Quarterly 54, no. 4 (1991): 283-300.

[In the essay below, Carlson argues for the authenticity of the Chaucer portrait Hoccleve commissioned for his Regement of Princes. In Carlson's view, Hoccleve promoted his relationship with Chaucer, an earlier recipient of royal favor, as a part of his petition for patronage, and contends that the portrait would only be effective if it were a true likeness.]

Of the numerous images proposed as representations of Chaucer in early manuscript illuminations, one portrait type has some claim to be a “true portraiture of Geffrey Chaucer”:1 the Ellesmere-Hoccleve type. It occurs earliest in the miniature of Chaucer as one of the Canterbury pilgrims in the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, now in the Huntington Library and probably made c. 1400-1410;2 and it recurs soon thereafter as an illustration to a passage about Chaucer in a number of copies of Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes (figs. 1-2). Some reason for believing this Ellesmere-Hoccleve portrait type to be a true-to-life image of Chaucer may lie in the relations between the Ellesmere miniature and the miniature that recurs in the Hoccleve manuscripts; the best reason, however, resides in the peculiarities of the material and literary context in which the type occurs with Hoccleve's writing.

The issue of the truth of the Ellesmere-Hoccleve portrait type is bound up with the issue of Hoccleve's relations with Chaucer, specifically, the nature of Hoccleve's interest in Chaucer's likeness. Briefly, it was to Hoccleve's advantage to see to it that any portrait he put about with his Regiment of Princes really looked like Chaucer. Hoccleve's poem is a versified Fürstenspiegel, written in 1411 for Prince Henry of Monmouth, later Henry V, and published by Hoccleve in a series of presentation copies, the production of which he supervised;3 the publication's purpose was to elicit patronage. Along with other claims to familiarity with Chaucer put forward in the poem, to circulate a portrait of Chaucer with it would serve Hoccleve's purpose of linking himself with a poet who stood high in the esteem of his targeted audience; but the effectiveness of this device depended on its being recognizably a true portrait of Chaucer. In other words, Hoccleve's celebration of Chaucer in the Regiment of Princes, including his incorporation of Chaucer's portrait into authorized presentation copies of the poem, was not disinterested; it was not simply praise due a praiseworthy fellow-poet. Like others, Hoccleve was trying to use an image of Chaucer to advance his own interests; in light of the context in which Hoccleve's Chaucer portrait has been transmitted, this effort to use Chaucer's reputation serves to confirm the truth of the portrait type.

If the miniature in the Ellesmere manuscript is a true image of Chaucer, evidence of its veracity must come from elsewhere. As with the miniatures of the other pilgrims,4 the Chaucer miniature may do a good job of showing what Chaucer the pilgrim should have looked like; but its success in capturing the notorious persona is not by itself evidence that it does a similarly good job of capturing the appearance of Chaucer the bureaucrat cum poet.5 It may or it may not do so; the occurrence of the image as a representation of a fictional character, however, precludes resolution of the question of verisimilitude on the basis of the Ellesmere miniature alone. The Ellesmere miniature is disproportionate: the figure's upper body is too large for the legs associated with it and the horse which it surmounts (i.e., too large for those parts of the illustration unique to it); and this disproportion has been taken as evidence that the Ellesmere miniature's depiction of Chaucer, or at least its depiction of Chaucer from the waist up, was copied, not altogether satisfactorily, from something else. This evidence for copying, however, is not in itself necessarily evidence that the image is verisimilar, since the nature of the hypothetical model from which the Ellesmere miniature could have been copied remains a matter for conjecture. The model probably cannot have been one of the occurrences of the Hoccleve portrait, all of which apparently postdate the Ellesmere manuscript's production. A panel portrait, for which Chaucer sat while alive, has been hypothesized but, in the absence of access to this hypothetical model and of an understanding of how and why it came to be made, speculation about its implications for the nature of the Ellesmere miniature remains speculation. Most importantly, the motive for the copying which produced the Ellesmere miniature also remains a matter for conjecture. The hypothetical model may have been copied because it was believed or known to show a Chaucer recognizable to persons who had been his familiars; on the other hand, it may have been copied simply because it was available.6

Evidence for the truth of the Ellesmere miniature could come from the Hoccleve portrait. If the Hoccleve portrait is verisimilar, the Ellesmere must also be; for the best—and crucial—occurrence of the Hoccleve portrait, that in the British Library manuscript Harley 4866, is too like the Ellesmere miniature for the two of them to be altogether unrelated.7 Three occurrences of the Hoccleve portrait survive, in a pair of British Library manuscripts, Harley 4866 and Royal 17.D.vi, and in a former Phillips manuscript, now in Philadelphia at the Rosenbach Foundation, MS. 1083/30.8 In addition, two other manuscripts at the British Library, Arundel 38 and Harley 4826, probably once incorporated instances of the portrait, but from them it appears to have been subsequently excised. Whereas Harley 4826 is a late miscellany, incorporating writings of Lydgate as well as Hoccleve's Regiment, and probably made after 1450, this Arundel manuscript is an important, early copy, evidently one of the original presentation copies.9 Of the extant miniatures, that in the Rosenbach manuscript is either a very late (possibly eighteenth-century) forgery or a derivative, very close copy of the Harley 4866 miniature, still less interesting because occurring in a second-, or subsequent, generation copy of Hoccleve's poem, probably made sometime after his death or at least significantly later than the copies the production of which Hoccleve supervised; and the miniature in the Royal manuscript is evidently a late, degenerate derivative from an earlier instance, likewise occurring in a second-, or subsequent, generation copy of the poem.10 The miniature in Harley 4866 is therefore the only one of the extant miniatures that matters for my purpose here, but less because of its artistic qualities—though in this regard it far excels the Royal miniature—than because of the pedigree and affiliations of the manuscript in which it occurs.

The manuscript Harley 4866 is one of the presentation copies, probably executed to Hoccleve's orders, for Edward, Duke of York, a cousin of Henry IV, or for John, Duke of Bedford, a younger brother of Prince Henry.11 In addition, the mis-en-page and program of decoration of Harley 4866 are so like those of Arundel 38, another of the first-generation presentation copies of the poem that Hoccleve had made, as to indicate that the two manuscripts were manufactured by the same group or interrelated groups of workers to the same orders;12 and the Arundel manuscript is either the presentation copy for the poem's dedicatee Prince Henry or a close copy, for some other highly placed benefactor, of the manuscript made for Henry.13 The miniature showing Hoccleve presenting his work to the prince, which is found in the Arundel manuscript, has been excised from the Harley manuscript, and the portrait of Chaucer, which is found in the Harley manuscript, has been excised from the Arundel manuscript; otherwise, where they can be compared, the manuscripts are so like one another as to suggest that the Chaucer miniature formerly in the Arundel manuscript was indifferent from that still extant in the Harley manuscript, and may have been the work of the same artist. In other words, the Harley miniature can be believed to be practically the same as the miniature that would have been seen by the dedicatee of Hoccleve's poem, Prince Henry; and Prince Henry, not to mention other potential benefactors who would have seen presentation copies of the poem, was in a position to judge the veracity of an image of Chaucer.14

None of the early images of Chaucer circulated in manuscript is a free-standing, independent portrait. Their significance as portraits depends entirely on the literary contexts in which they occur. The early images show individuals or groups, making typical legible gestures or interacting in typical legible ways. The miniature in the Canterbury Tales manuscript Lansdowne 851, for example, shows a man reading a book; the better-known frontispiece to the Corpus Christi, Cambridge, copy of the Troilus and Criseyde shows a speaker speaking and an audience attending; the Ellesmere miniature shows a Canterbury pilgrim pointing; and so on.15 It is only by reference to the bibliographic and textual situations in which these early, dependent images occur that the figures depicted in them can be read as representing Chaucer at all. The images accompany his writings; the gestures that the figures make are ones Chaucer might have made, and the relations are ones he could be imagined to have entered; therefore, the figures are Chaucer, but only in a special, limited sense. The representations of him in the early, dependent images are limited strictly to representing Chaucer in terms of what he purportedly did—read books, spoke to assembled companies, went on pilgrimage to Canterbury, and so on; but not in terms of a characteristic, distinctive physiognomy. Because of their dependence on their textual situations, the early images need not have been ambitious to show, and in most cases almost certainly did not attempt to show, how Chaucer had really looked.

If the Hoccleve miniature were a free-standing, independent portrait, or were like an independent portrait, in the sense that it had as its only reason for being “the depiction of the individual in his own character,”16 it would be reasonable to suppose—on the basis of such a hypothetical portrait's participation in a vivid tradition of verisimilar portraiture—that it was a true image. There was no such tradition circa 1400, and so to imagine the Hoccleve miniature to be, or to be like, an independent portrait is to imagine it beyond what was artistically plausible at the moment.17 The Hoccleve miniature is dependent, however, like the other early images of Chaucer. It is largely without the sort of iconographic marking that in other instances helps identify figures; the man shown in the Hoccleve miniature has a pen case around his neck, a sign of literacy, and beads in one hand, a sign of piety; and he is fat, a characteristic of the Chaucerian persona that may be no more than a sign of the persona's companionable worldliness.18 What indicates that the figure is Chaucer is the passage adjacent to it, asserting that it is Chaucer's likeness:

Although his lyfe be queynt, the resemblaunce
Of him hath in me so fressh lyflynesse,
That, to putte othir men in remembraunce
Of his persone, I have heere his lyknesse
Do make, to this ende in sothfastnesse,
That they that have of him lest thought and mynde,
By this peynture may ageyn him fynde.

(4992-98)19

The claim that the image and these words make together—that the author of these lines knew what Chaucer looked like—figures in Hoccleve's work, a work of which the picture itself thus becomes part, as one element, perhaps the crucial element, in an effort to solicit royal patronage. Hoccleve was evidently concerned, intermittently if not constantly in the Regiment of Princes, to establish himself in the perception of Prince Henry and other highly placed potential benefactors as a poetic follower of Chaucer, and as an especially privileged one, by virtue of an ostensive intimacy between himself and the dead poet, because Hoccleve seems to have imagined that he could benefit himself materially by causing Henry and others to see him in light of such a connection. Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes is fundamentally a petition:20 an entreaty for patronage, both explicit and implicit in the poem's autobiographical prologue and the envoys that circulated with it, as well as within the body of the poem, its ostensibly disinterested collocation of counsels for Prince Henry.

In the prologue, Hoccleve voices a number of distinct complaints—the physical damage his nearly twenty-four years' service in the Office of the Privy Seal has caused him (988-1029; cf. 801-5); his failure to gain a benefice from his service (1401-2, 1447-53, 1485-91); being constantly cheated of his fees (1492-1550); the negligence of lords he has served (1793-95)—but the prologue is chiefly a lamentation on his poverty, focused on two kinds of problems, repeatedly averred. His present income is inadequate, Hoccleve asserts, because the six marks he has beyond his annuity is too little (932ff., 974-75, 1214-18, 1224-25) and his annuity of twenty marks is paid him too irregularly (820-31). Second, his future seems to him likely to be even more impoverished because of an increased difficulty about collecting his dues that he expects will come once he is compelled by age to retire from court to his “pore cote” (831-40, 948-53).21 Hoccleve's interlocutor, a sapient Old Man he chances to meet after a night of sleepless agonizing over his financial situation, summarizes for him these points of worry:

In schort, this is of thi grief enchesoun:
Of thin annuitee, the paiement,
Whiche for thi long servyse is thi guerdoun,
Thou dredest, whan thou art from court absent,
Schal be restreyned, syn thou now present
Unnethes mayst it gete, it is so streit;
Thus understode I, sone, thi conceit;
For of thi liflode is it the substaunce.

(1779-86)

Hoccleve is uncommonly frank about the motives of his work; faced with such circumstances, he would even bribe the Old Man in exchange for a solution to his problems: “Wisseth me how to gete a golden salve; / And what I have, I wele it with yow halve” (1245-46). The Old Man proposes that Hoccleve petition his prince, simply and straightforwardly, for the “golden salve” he needs:

… now, syn thou me toldist
My lord the prince is good lord the to,
No maistri is it for the, if thou woldist
To be releeved; wost thou what to do?
Writte to hym a goodly tale or two,
On which he may desporten hym by nyghte,
And his fre grace schal upon the lighte

(1898-1904)

Adjacent passages amplifying the Old Man's proposal render the flatteringly nebulous “fre grace” of this one less ambiguous: Prince Henry, whom Hoccleve claims “is my good gracious lord” (1836), “may be salve unto thin indigence,” says the Old Man (1834); “To hym pursue, and thi releef purchace” (1848):

Compleyne unto his excellent noblesse,
As I have herd the unto me compleyne;
And but he qwenche thi grete hevynesse,
My tonge take, and slitte in peeces tweyne.

(1849-52)22

By its prologue, the Regiment of Princes represents itself to Prince Henry as the execution of this plan for Hoccleve's material betterment; and the body of the poem reiterates the petition of the prologue in various ways. The tenth through the thirteenth of the poem's fifteen didactic sections, comprising various injunctions against niggardliness and suasions to “largesse,” recall Hoccleve's particular needs constantly, by means of generalities about annuities, for example, as well as direct reference:23

Now, if that ye graunten by your patente
To your servauntes a yeerly guerdoun,
Crist scheelde that your wil or your entente
Be sette to maken a restriccioun
Of paiement; for that condicioun
Exileth the peples benevolence,
And kyndeleth hate undir prive scilence.

(4789-95)

My yeerly guerdoun, myn annuite,
That was me graunted for my long labour,
Is al behynde, I may naght payed be,
Whiche causeth me to lyven in langour.
O liberal prince! ensample of honour!
Unto your grace lyke it to promoote
Mi poore estat, and to my woo beth boote!

(4383-89)

Elsewhere, for example, justice is defined as offering “to the nedy … releve in hevynesse” (2472-76); and charity is lauded, inter alia, as what proves “that we disciples ben of God almyghty” (3607). A recurrent theme is the prince's obligation to “help him that wel doth” (2940): “as the men disserven, so be fre” (4128); or, in a passage that recalls the descriptions in the prologue of Hoccleve's long, debilitating service, he equates neglect of him with murder and threatens the prince with retribution for it:

He that his flesche dispendith, and his blood,
Mi lorde, in your service, him yiftes bede;
There is largesse mesurable good;
A kyng so bounde is, he moot doo so nede;
Service unquyt and murdre, it is no drede,
As clerkes writen, and disheritaunce,
Bifore almighty God auxen vengeaunce.

(4173-79)24

The Regiment also, if less directly, puts some of its case for Hoccleve's preferment on the grounds that he is a good, potentially useful poet, and in this it may have been successful. M. C. Seymour has suggested, on the evidence of Hoccleve's subsequent poetic output, that the poem's publication at court resulted in his becoming for a time “an acknowledged quasi-official writer of verse on political occasions.”25 In its prologue and envoys, the Regiment is often affectedly modest about Hoccleve's accomplishments: the poem's envoy to Prince Henry describes it as “all naked … of eloquence” (5443), for example; Hoccleve has only “smal konyng,” “withal so treewe an herte” (2066-67);

… I am no thyng fourmeel;
My yonge konyng may no hyer reche,
Mi wit is also slipir as an eel;
But how I speke, algate I mene weel.

(1983-86)26

Such remarks need be seen for the typical captationes benevolentiae they are, to be read here, as in other occurrences of the topos, as attempts to elicit a sympathetic, positive response to the writing, while also asserting an intention to do good.27

Notwithstanding his protestations to the contrary (and in fact complemented by them) Hoccleve's implicit claim in the Regiment that he is a good and useful poet rests in large measure on the more specific claims the poem puts forward to being Chaucerian, to being like the work of a poet who had previously enjoyed royal support. It is not now possible to document a connection between Chaucer's literary labors and the extensive preferments that came to him from his various noble and royal benefactors, in the form of the several annuities and remunerative (if still demanding) offices, with their associated emoluments and perquisites, that he acquired in the course of his forty-year career of dedicated, competent service. The life-records that make clear the extent of Chaucer's success at attracting such preferment to himself omit to make mention of his poetry writing.28 Nevertheless, the facts were that Chaucer had risen high in the favor of England's most rich and powerful, and that he had written poetry addressed to them, at times poetry that could be believed to have been commissioned, in effect, by the likes of John of Gaunt.29 That Chaucer had both accomplished much as a poet and stood high in noble and royal esteem provides grounds for the inference that his writing had in fact brought him material returns, if not immediately and directly then at least indirectly, by way of a generally enhanced standing in court circles that was later translated into preferment.

As a consequence of his literary and material successes, Chaucer should have seemed an especially useful forebear to those later English writers who were ambitious for their own preferment; and the evidence of the first fifty (at least) of Caroline Spurgeon's five hundred years of Chaucer criticism and allusion is that English-language poets of the early fifteenth century did find it expedient to hitch their own work to the wagon of Chaucer's success.30 Among late fourteenth-century English poets, William Langland was one of Chaucer's nearest rivals for the esteem of the reading public, as measured, albeit imprecisely, in terms of surviving manuscripts.31 But while the earliest allusions to Langland's writings occur in the revolutionary propaganda of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt,32 the earliest allusions to Chaucer's writings occur in the works of poets who, like him, already enjoyed standing at court or who, like Hoccleve, were hoping for advancement. Langland—a writer rather different from Chaucer, one who, for example, represented himself as living in penury—had no literary afterlife to speak of, until he was reinvented as a proto-reformer by Robert Crowley in the middle of the sixteenth century;33 on the other hand, Chaucer's name and work were celebrated persistently, throughout the fifteenth century. As John Burrow remarked, long since, this “rapid spread of Chaucer's reputation cannot be ascribed simply to the force of his genius.”34

Hoccleve did not invent the topic of praise for Chaucer that was to recur so frequently in writings of the Chaucerian strand of fifteenth-century English literary achievement. Hoccleve may have known Chaucer, as he claims; and his situation was sufficiently like that of Chaucer—another government servant given to writing poetry—to suggest the topic to him. In any case, Hoccleve, like others, seems to have imagined that his chances of coming to enjoy a Chaucer-like material success would be increased if he could produce Chaucerian writing, writing that his audience might be persuaded to see as descended from and like that of Geoffrey Chaucer; he seems to have imagined that establishing links between himself and Chaucer, the nearer the better, could benefit him.35

In the Regiment of Princes, Hoccleve repeatedly puts forward the claim that Chaucer had been his “master” in matters poetical. The claim is not only that a knowledge of Chaucer's work informed his own writing, though this point Hoccleve does establish by the broadly Chaucerian qualities of his verse36 and by the appreciations of Chaucer's particular excellences built into the poem's three substantial eulogies of the dead poet (1958-74, 2077-2107, 4978-5012): Hoccleve perceives in Chaucer a “flour of eloquence,” a “mirour of fructuous entendement” … “universel … in science,” and “excellent prudence” (1962-65); he compares him to Tully in “swetnesse of rethorik,” Aristotle “in philosophie,” and Vergil “in poesie” (2084-89); he was “the firste fyndere of our faire langage” (4978); and so on. Most to the point, Hoccleve also claims that he had known Chaucer; and, furthermore, in no doubt purposefully ambiguous passages, he suggests that Chaucer had personally taken in hand his instruction in poetry. A remark of the Old Man implies that Hoccleve already enjoys a reputation for a personal association with Chaucer: hearing Hoccleve's name, he responds, “Sone, I have herd, or this, men speke of the: / Thou were aqueynted with Caucher, pardee” (1866-67). Hoccleve will admit to him, as if apologetically, that “I wont was han consail and reed” of “the honour of englyssh tonge” (1959-60):

Mi dere maistir—God his soule quyte!—
And fadir, Chaucer, fayn wolde han me taght;
But I was dul, and lerned lite or naght.

(2077-79)37

The Hoccleve portrait of Chaucer is put forward in this context, of Hoccleve's efforts to insinuate into the minds of his royal and noble audience an idea of his intimacy with Chaucer, as part of his effort to elicit benefaction. Hoccleve's tactical need to establish the idea of such a relationship between himself and Chaucer should confirm the truth of the image of Chaucer he put in circulation with the poem. Hoccleve was petitioning for patronage, in some measure on the basis of the quality of the poetic service he had provided and could provide; he sought to base his claim for the quality of his poetic service in some measure on the claim that his work was Chaucerian; this claim that his poetry was Chaucerian was in turn based in some measure on his claim to have known Chaucer, not only through his writing but also personally; and he bases his claim to have known Chaucer personally in some measure on a claim to know what Chaucer had looked like. In the end, Hoccleve's petition for patronage comes to rest in part on the demonstration of a knowledge of Chaucer's appearance that his lines about it and the portrait miniature adjacent to them must make. Henry and the others with whom Hoccleve needed to establish the claim that Chaucer was his master were in a position to verify the knowledge of Chaucer's appearance to which Hoccleve pretends, since Chaucer would have been known by sight among them; consequently, it would have cost Hoccleve if the image of Chaucer he offered his prospective patrons failed to show Chaucer as he had been known to them.

No doubt some measure of wishful thinking—of a naive sort, or of the cynical variety characteristic, for example, of the various sixteenth-century printer-publishers who sought to market editions of Chaucer by claiming to offer ever more accurate pictures of his life and work38—has been and is invested in any belief that the Ellesmere-Hoccleve type shows the poet's true image. On the other hand, another sort of wishful thinking—the romantic notion that poetry's place is some realm of the imagination rather than the material world39—may have tended to occlude Hoccleve's interest in the veracity of the portrait he caused to be circulated. The evidence of the material world—specifically, that Hoccleve had reason to believe he could profit from promulgating a true image of Chaucer with his poem—suggests that the Ellesmere-Hoccleve type may be Chaucer's “true portraiture” after all, wishful thinking or no.

Notes

  1. The phrase is used in a 1598 portrait engraving of Chaucer, in the first Speght edition of the works (STC 5077-79), to describe an image derived from the Ellesmere-Hoccleve type; see Arthur M. Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, pt. 1, The Tudor Period (Cambridge, 1952), 286-89 and pl. 121. The best comprehensive treatment of Chaucer portraiture remains that of M. H. Spielman, The Portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer Society, 2d ser., 31 (London, 1900); see also Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (1925; rpt., New York, 1965), 13-27; Roger Sherman Loomis, A Mirror of Chaucer's World (Princeton, 1965), figs. 1-6 and 68; and Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits (London, 1969), 1:46-48; and, on particular portraits, Margaret Rickert, “Illuminations,” in John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales (Chicago, 1940), 1:583-90; George M. Lam and Warren H. Smith, “George Vertue's Contributions to Chaucerian Iconography,” Modern Language Quarterly, 5 (1944): 303-22; Reginald Call, “The Plimpton Chaucer and Other Problems of Chaucer Portraiture,” Speculum, 22 (1947): 135-44; Hilton Kelliher, “The Historiated Initial in the Devonshire Chaucer,” Notes and Queries, 222 (1977): 197; David Piper, “The Chesterfield House Library Portraits,” in Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn, ed. René Wellek and Alvaro Ribeiro (Oxford, 1979), 186; Michael Seymour, “Manuscript Portraits of Chaucer and Hoccleve,” Burlington Magazine, 124, no. 955 (October 1982): 618-23; and R. F. Yeager, “British Library Additional MS. 5141: An Unnoticed Chaucer Vita,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 14 (1984): 261-81.

  2. On the Ellesmere manuscript, see Manly and Rickert, Text of the Canterbury Tales, 1:148-59; Margaret Rickert, “Illuminations,” 587-90; and Herbert C. Schulz, The Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (San Marino, 1966).

  3. For the 1411 date of the Regiment of Princes, see Seymour, Selections from Hoccleve (Oxford, 1981), 114-15; and for Hoccleve's role in the production of presentation copies of the poem, see Seymour, “The Manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes,” Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 4 (1974): 255-56, and Selections, 114.

  4. See Edwin Ford Piper, “The Miniatures of the Ellesmere Chaucer,” Philological Quarterly, 3 (1924): 241-56; Loomis, Mirror, figs. 80-101; or Schulz, The Ellesmere Manuscript, 3-4.

  5. The distinction between the person and the persona is commonly credited to E. Talbot Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” PMLA, 69 (1954): 928-36.

  6. The disproportion and the conclusion to be drawn from it are remarked by Margaret Rickert, “Illuminations,” 587-88; Schulz, The Ellesmere Manuscript, 3; Seymour, “Manuscript Portraits,” 618 and 621; and Jeanne E. Krochalis, “Hoccleve's Chaucer Portrait,” Chaucer Review, 21 (1986): 244 n. 15. The panel-portrait hypothesis is tendered by Seymour, Selections, 124, and “Manuscript Portraits,” 618; cf. Krochalis, “Hoccleve's Chaucer Portrait,” 244 n. 15. If Thomas Chaucer had something to do with the production of the Ellesmere manuscript, his involvement would seem to improve the odds that the Ellesmere miniature is a true portrait. Nothing beyond the speculations of Manly and Rickert (see Text of the Canterbury Tales, 1:159) has been advanced in support of this theory, however, except the remarks of John M. Bowers, “Chaucer & Son: The Business of Lancastrian Poetry” (Southeastern Medieval Association Conference, Raleigh, N. C., USA, 28 September 1990).

  7. Cf. Margaret Rickert, “Illuminations,” 588-90; and Seymour, Selections, 124. In “Manuscript Portraits,” Seymour suggests that the Ellesmere manuscript and the two Hoccleve manuscripts Arundel 38 and Harley 4866 “were illuminated in one atelier in London or Westminster” (618); cf. Seymour, Selections, 124, and A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London, 1978), 203 and n. 106. The likelihood of this sort of relation among the three manuscripts is increased by the evidence, adduced by Doyle and Parkes, that Hoccleve and the copyist of the Ellesmere manuscript both contributed to the manufacture of a manuscript of Gower's Confessio Amantis, now Cambridge, Trinity College, R.III.2 (“The Production of Copies,” esp. 170-74, 182-85, and 198-203); Hoccleve is linked, professionally, by the mediation of this copyist, to those who produced the Ellesmere manuscript's illumination. Cf. John M. Bowers, “Hoccleve's Huntington Holographs: The First ‘Collected Poems’ in English,” Fifteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1989): 29-30. Charles L. Kuhn, in “Herman Scheere and English Illumination of the Early Fifteenth Century,” Art Bulletin, 22 (1940): 155; and Gereth M. Spriggs, in “Unnoticed Bodleian Manuscripts Illuminated by Herman Scheere and his School,” Bodleian Library Record, 7 (1964): 195, would associate the artist of Arundel 38 with the workshop of Herman Scheere.

  8. See esp. Seymour, “Manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regiment,” 258, and his descriptions of the three manuscripts, 269, 272-73, and 292; and cf. Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic (Urbana, 1968), 110-15.

  9. On these manuscripts and their relations with the others, see Seymour, “Manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regiment,” 263-64 and 268-69; D. C. Greetham, “Normalisation of Accidentals in Middle English Texts: The Paradox of Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in Bibliography, 38 (1985): 123 n. 5; Marcia Smith Marzec, “Scribal Emendation in Some Later Manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes,” Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, n.s., 1 (1987): esp. 41-42; and Greetham, “Challenges of Theory and Practice in the Editing of Hoccleve's Regement of Princes,” in Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 1987), 65-67, where a stemma representing the textual tradition of the Regiment is printed.

  10. See esp. Seymour, “Manuscript Portraits,” 621 and n. 8; and on the Rosenbach portrait, see also Krochalis, “Hoccleve's Chaucer Portrait,” 642 n. 2.

  11. Envoys by Hoccleve addressing copies of the Regiment to each of these persons, though not transmitted by any extant manuscripts of the Regiment, are preserved in the holograph miscellany of Hoccleve's shorter poems, San Marino, Huntington Library, HM 111 (ed. Seymour, Selections, 55-57); the missing first and final leaves of Harley 4866 probably contained one or the other of these envoys and perhaps some armorial indication of the identity of the manuscript's intended recipient; see Seymour, “Manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regiment,” 269. The nature of these two envoys has been the subject of some controversy. Thorlac Turville-Petre, in “‘Maistir Massy’,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 26 (1975): 129-33, identifies the “Massy” named in the Bedford envoy and the “Picard” named in the York envoy as financial officers in the households of the respective lords, and characterizes the Bedford envoy as a begging poem. David Farley-Hills, in a letter in Review of English Studies, n.s., 26 (1975): 451, and Clifford Peterson, in “Hoccleve, the Old Hall Manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x., and the Pearl-Poet,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 28 (1977): 48-55, demur. Albeit that they are not as direct as the other poems of Hoccleve characterized by Mitchell as “begging poems” (Thomas Hoccleve, 33-34), no doubt these envoys, like the Regiment's envoy to Prince Henry, are, at least by virtue of their circulation with presentation copies of the Regiment, as Mitchell says, “poems of indirect solicitation” (33).

  12. See Seymour, “Manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regiment,”, where he describes Harley 4866 as “an almost exact replica of MS. Arundel 38 (269).”

  13. See esp. Kate Harris, “The Patron of British Library MS. Arundel 38,” Notes and Queries, 229 (1984): 462-63.

  14. Cf. Krochalis, “Hoccleve's Chaucer Portrait,” 240; Prince Henry himself would have been thirteen at the time of Chaucer's death, if Chaucer in fact died in 1400.

  15. On the Lansdowne miniature, see Margaret Rickert, “Illuminations,” 584-85, Seymour, “Manuscript Portraits,” 621, and Krochalis, “Hoccleve's Chaucer Portrait,” 637; it is reproduced in Seymour, “Manuscript Portraits,” fig. 42, and in Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, vol. 2, fig. 82. On the Troilus frontispiece, see esp. Elizabeth Salter, “The ‘Troilus Frontispiece’,” in Troilus and Criseyde: A Facsimile of Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS. 61 (Cambridge, 1978), 15-23, a volume which includes a color reproduction of the painting; Derek Pearsall, “The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer's Audience,” Yearbook of English Studies, 7 (1977): 68-74; and Seymour, “Manuscript Portraits,” 622, and his review of the facsimile volume, in The Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982): 190-91.

  16. John Pope-Hennessy's definition of “portraiture,” in The Portrait in the Renaissance (New York, 1966), xi.

  17. But cf. Janet Backhouse, “Illuminated Manuscripts and the Early Development of the Portrait Miniature,” in Early Tudor England: Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge, Conn., 1989), where she remarks: “realistic portraits from the life were increasingly favoured in manuscript contexts from the late fourteenth century onwards, in parallel with the development of the true portrait on a larger scale. Illuminators in England at the beginning of the fifteenth century seem to have been very much attracted by the challenge of representing human features, and lifelike but anonymous faces appear in the initials and margins of several of the finest manuscripts of the period, including the Bedford Psalter and Hours, the Hours of Elizabeth the Queen, and the Sherborne Missal” (2).

  18. Chaucer, or “Chaucer,” alludes to his corpulence in the House of Fame, 574 and 660; the prologue to Sir Thopas, Canterbury Tales, 7:700-702; the envoy to Scogan, 27-31; and “Merciles Beaute,” 27.

  19. Quotations from and references to the Regiment, most often made only within the body of the paper, are taken from Hoccleve's Works, vol. 3, ed. F. J. Furnivall, The Regement of Princes, EETS es 72 (London, 1897). In quoting this edition, I replace thorn with th, yogh with y, modernize the distributions of u and v, and modernize word divisions.

  20. By use of this term, I mean to refer to J. A. Burrow's papers “The Poet as Petitioner,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 3 (1981): 61-75, and “Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages: The Case of Thomas Hoccleve,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 68 (1982): 389-412, esp. 407-11, where he argues: “The image of himself that [Hoccleve] projects in his poetry is determined most of all by the harsh requirements of survival in the treacherous world of the court” (407). See also Larry Scanlon, “The King's Two Voices: Narrative and Power in Hoccleve's Regement of Princes,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley, 1990), 227-42, esp. 230-33, on the consequences of Hoccleve's amalgamation of the begging poem and the Fürstenspiegel in a single work: “The begging poem postulates a royal voluntas that acts entirely at its own pleasure, and thus stands as a striking counterpoise to the didactic presumptions of the Fürstenspiegel, which posits a king who relies on counsel” (230).

  21. The substantive basis of these complaints is established by Malcom Richardson in “Hoccleve in his Social Context,” Chaucer Review, 20 (1986): 313-22. Essentially the same evidence was reviewed by A. Compton Reeves in “Thomas Hoccleve, Bureaucrat,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s., 5 (1974): 201-14; but Reeves came to a rather less charitable conclusion: “The evidence for the financial rewards of [Hoccleve's] career suggests that he had an adequate and comfortable income, quite enough to satisfy his needs. If he were truly poor, it was because of his own prodigality, not meager earnings. There can, however, be no denial of the worry and insecurity that came from the unsure and irregular payments of the poet's annuity” (209). In other words, although Hoccleve's annuities were not paid at all for long periods and, when they were paid, were frequently less than they should have been (as Reeves himself shows), still, according to Reeves, Hoccleve's problem was not poverty or material insecurity but only his own feckless malcontent.

  22. Cf. 1874-76: “Thi penne take, and write / As thou canst, and thi sorowe tourne schal / Into gladnesse.”

  23. Cf. Burrow, “Autobiographical Poetry,” 408 and n. 5.

  24. Cf. 4670-76: “liberalitee” and “largesse” “bothe moot in hir conseytes chue / Where is good yeve, and where to eschue, / The persone, and the somme, and cause why: / What they yeven, yeve it vertuously.”

  25. Seymour, Selections, xiii; cf. xvi-xvii.

  26. Cf. 2152-55: “Yit, for to putte in prees my conceyte small, / Goode wille me arteth take on me the peyne; / But sore in me quappeth every veyne, / So dredefull am I of myne ignoraunce.”

  27. Cf. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1952), 83-85; and D. C. Greetham, “Self-Referential Artifacts: Hoccleve's Persona as a Literary Device,” Modern Philology, 86 (1989): 242-44. For the ramifications of this pose of “dullness” that Hoccleve adopts, see David Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH, 54 (1987): 762-71.

  28. James Root Hulbert, in his 1912 study Chaucer's Official Life (rpt., New York, 1970), puts much weight on this sequestration of the official's activities from the poet's in the evidence (77-91, esp. 79 and 85); cf. the balanced remarks of V. J. Scattergood, “Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London, 1983), esp. 30-32.

  29. For examples: “Lak of Stedfastnesse” addresses Richard II; “The complaint of Chaucer to his Purse” addresses Henry IV; and “Fortune” addresses some unnamed “princes,” most likely the Dukes of Lancaster, York, and Gloucester; the Book of the Duchess was certainly written for John of Gaunt; and the Legend of Good Women appears to have been written for Richard II's Queen Anne, by the suggestion of one of its prologues (F 496-97). On Chaucer's relations with his royal and noble audience, see Elizabeth Salter, “Chaucer and Internationalism,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2 (1980): 71-79, esp. 78-79; and Scattergood, “Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II,” 37-41. The persistence and proliferation, well into the sixteenth century, of rumors that other Chaucerian writings were similarly addressed or occasioned—John Shirley's claim, for example, that the “Complaint of Mars” was made “at the commandement of the renommed and excellent prince my lord the duke John of Lancastre,” or the 1602 Speight edition's claim that “An ABC” was made “at the request of Blanche Duchess of Lancaster”—suggest that Chaucer's esteem continued to rest, in some measure, on his putative royal and aristocratic connections.

  30. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357-1900 (Cambridge, 1925), 1:15ff. The earliest clear attempts to trade on Chaucer's reputation, in the way that Hoccleve does in the Regiment, which happen also to be by persons probably acquainted with Chaucer, seem to me to be those of Thomas Usk, in his Testament of Love (c. 1387), and Henry Scogan, in his “Moral Ballad” (c. 1407), both cited by Spurgeon in Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, 8 and 18-19.

  31. Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins, in Index of Middle English Verse (New York, 1943), list sixty-four known surviving manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, fifty of Piers Plowman, and forty-nine of the Confessio Amantis (737). Such a comparison probably favors Chaucer and Gower over Langland, to the extent that the work of Chaucer and Gower—comparatively “up-market” poets—seems likely to have been copied into deluxe versions, which, by their nature, tend to be better preserved, with greater frequency than the work of Langland.

  32. Ann Hudson, “The Legacy of Piers Plowman,” in A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley, 1988), 251-52.

  33. For Langland's representation of himself as poor, see, e.g., Piers Plowman C VI.1-104. The suggestion that Langland's literary afterlife is of no account is an exaggeration; the fifteenth-century offspring of Piers Plowman include Pierce the Ploughman's Crede, Richard the Redeless, Mum and Sothsegger, and a few less eminent writings. The topic is surveyed by Hudson in “The Legacy of Piers Plowman,” 251-66. Nonetheless, it remains true that, as Ann Middleton has said in her introduction to A Companion to Piers Plowman, “the reception and influence of these two contemporaries,” Chaucer and Langland, “contrasted strikingly from the beginning” (2). On Crowley's role in the reinvention of Langland in the sixteenth century, see John N. King, “Robert Crowley's Editions of Piers Plowman: A Tudor Apocalpyse,” Modern Philology, 73 (1976): 342-52.

  34. Burrow, “The Audience of Piers Plowman,” Anglia, 75 (1957): 377.

  35. Cf. Richardson, “Hoccleve in his Social Context,” 318; and Paul Strohm, “Chaucer's Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the ‘Chaucer Tradition,’” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 4 (1982): 14.

  36. Cf. Seymour, Selections, xxi-xxvii; and Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve, 118-22, esp. 121.

  37. Mitchell, in Thomas Hoccleve, casts doubt on this “supposed friendship” between Hoccleve and Chaucer (115-18); Seymour (Selections, 119) and Burrow (“Autobiographical Poetry,” 397-98) are less skeptical. Whatever the substance underlying Hoccleve's claims in the Regiment, it was in his interest to emphasize and exaggerate the relation. Krochalis, in “Hoccleve's Chaucer Portrait,” in light of Regiment 4999-5012, characterizes Hoccleve's representation of Chaucer as a sort of literary hagiolotry (239-41), his attempt “to secure and sanctify the place of Chaucer and of English poetry itself” (241).

  38. Alice Miskimin's discussion of the sixteenth-century Chaucer makes something of the printer-publisers' venality as a motive for their efforts to augment and improve the Chaucer canon; see The Renaissance Chaucer (New Haven, 1975), 226-61, esp. 239.

  39. The influence of this notion is described by Jerome McGann in The Romantic Ideology (Chicago, 1983).

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