John Lydgate

Derek Pearsall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429582387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Originally published in 1970, John Lydgate sets out to restore a sense of perspective to the work of Lydgate, not by attributing a spurious modernity as a precursor of the Renaissance, but by accepting the fact that he is fundamentally medieval. The book analyses Lydgate's background in literary tradition and compares this with Chaucer's work. The book looks at Lydgate as a professional craftsman and examines how his work adapted to the demands and occasions of his age. Without over-valuing the poetry, this approach makes it possible to discriminate with increased objectivity between the more and less worthwhile and to distinguish the unexpectedly large number of poems in which craftsman-like competence rises to rhetorical artistry of a high order. In accepting Lydgate as the epitome of his age, the book also provides a diagram of the medieval poetic mind in its basic form and suggests the usefulness of Lydgate as a source book for the understanding of medieval literature.

CHAPTER ONE

John Lydgate: The Critical Approach

John Lydgate achieved an extraordinary pre-eminence in his own day. His origins were comparatively humble, and his life as a monk may seem to some an unlikely training-ground for a secular poet, yet by 1412 he was being commissioned by the Prince of Wales, later Henry V, to translate the story of Troy into English. In 1431 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, commissioned the translation of Boccaccio’s De Casibus Illustrium Virorum which was completed eight years later as the Fall of Princes. These were tasks of magnitude and high seriousness, and were regarded as such by the poet, his patron and his public, and though we may have our reservations about Henry’s literary tastes, those of Humphrey are not usually held in question. Among his other noble patrons, Lydgate could count Henry VI, Queen Katherine, the earl of Salisbury, the earl of Warwick and the countess of Shrewsbury. He was, in fact if not in name, official court-poet, and a request for a poem to exalt the pedigree of Henry VI as king of France came to him as naturally as a request for a poem on his coronation. Sumptuous presentation copies of the major works were prepared, many of them splendidly illuminated, and more modest versions found their way into the homes of the gentry, where they were treasured as prize possessions and passed on as bequests and dowries.

This might seem of less significance were it not also true that his works were widely read, universally admired and assiduously imitated. The history of English poetry, and of much Scottish poetry too,¹ in the fifteenth century is as much the record of Lydgate’s influence as of Chaucer’s.² His contemporaries and successors—Benedict Burgh, George Ashby, Osbern Bokenham, John Metham, Henry Bradshaw, Stephen Hawes, as well as the Scots, Dunbar, Douglas and Lyndsay³— all acknowledge their debt in a series of fulsome tributes, and his name is linked with those of Gower and Chaucer in a conventional triad of praise. English poetry may have needed such a pantheon, and some of the eulogy seems automatic and conventional, but the persistence of the tradition is remarkable. By some, it is clear, Lydgate was actually considered superior to Chaucer, by Hawes, for instance, who, in his remembrance of English poets at the end of his account of Rhetoric in the Pastime of Pleasure, devotes 2 lines to Gower, 19 to Chaucer and 63 to Lydgate.⁴ We are told, what is more, that Hawes knew much of Lydgate by heart, and would recite long extracts from his work to Henry VII.⁵

The invention of printing gives us further evidence of the high regard in which Lydgate was held. Caxton printed Horse, Goose and Sheep three times, the Churl and the Bird twice, and the Temple of Glass and the Life of Our Lady once each, while Wynkyn de Worde printed the Temple of Glass three times, and the Churl and the Bird, Horse, Goose and Sheep, the Complaint of the Black Knight and the Siege of Thebes once each. These are not Lydgate’s longest poems, but later Pynson undertook the Troy Book and two prints of the Fall of Princes, as well as shorter poems. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Lydgate seems to have been much in demand: the Fall was reprinted in 1554 and 1558, and the Troy Book in 1555. The Siege of Thebes, of course, because of its ‘Canterbury prologue’, continued to be printed, as Lydgate’s, in the collected editions of Chaucer until 1687. Poets of the sixteenth century (George Cavendish and Alexander Barclay amongst others) were still acknowledging and demonstrating their debt to Lydgate, and a work as popular and influential as the Mirror for Magistrates was frankly conceived as a continuation of the Fall of Princes. Shakespeare’s history-plays, through the Mirror and the chronicle-plays, thus bear the imprint of Lydgate’s medievalism, as Troilus and Cressida does of the Troy Book.

Few discordant voices were raised among this chorus of acclaim, though Skelton, in a context of general approbation, has his doubts about Lydgate’s style:

Chaucer, that famus clerke,

His termes were not darke,

But plesaunt, easy, and playne;

No worde he wrote in vayne.

Also Johnn Lydgate

Wryteth after an hyer rate;

It is dyffuse to fynde

The sentence of his mynde,

Yet wryteth he in his kynd,

No man that can amend

Those maters that he hath pende;

Yet some men fynde a faute,

And say he wryteth to haute.⁶

It is interesting, in the light of later censure, that Skelton should single out for criticism two obvious defects in Lydgate’s style—the diffuseness of his syntax and the ostentation of his vocabulary—and yet still have room to admire his achievement as a whole. His attitude in the Garland of Laurel is similar. There he meets Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate arm-in-arm at the end of a procession of famous poets. Each addresses a tribute to him, Lydgate speaking in a shrewd parody of his own style, using words like regraciatory and prothonatory.⁷ There might be another dig later on, when Occupacion has a whole stanza in reply to Skelton’s ‘Tell me one thing’, and the content of the whole stanza is ‘Yes?’⁸

But Lydgate’s journey down the stream of reputation continued smooth until the late sixteenth century, when the difficulty of his language caused him to fall into obscurity. Chaucer suffered a similar fate: the list of ‘hard words’ in Speght’s collected edition of 1602 sounds a kind of knell, and classicising commentators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries speak with patronising disdain of the roughness of his language and versification, parroting the cry of ‘Matter, but no art’ or, as one writer puts it, ‘solid sense’ but ‘mouldy words’.⁹ Similar comments had already been made about Lydgate in 1586, as we may gather from some lines appended on the fly-leaf of a late fifteenth century manuscript of the Troy Book, MS. Rawlinson poet. 144:

Owld Inglishe bookes, wher they be Ryme, or prose,

Shew littell artte, and matter suett disclose,

For Ignorance did knowlege then obscure

And wilye witts, mad darknes long Indure,

For proffe, but mark the substance of this book

In wiche this mownk such paynes hath undertook.¹⁰

Unlike Chaucer, Lydgate never recovered from this fall into obscurity. Gray had some kind and thoughtful things to say about him in the eighteenth century, but Ritson’s outburst of dyspeptic anti-clericalism in his Bibliographia poetica of 1802 (‘this voluminous, prosaick and driveling monk’) seems to have put paid to the possibility of any cool and discriminating consideration of Lydgate’s work, and in modern times strings of literary historians have vied with each other to heap ridicule upon his head. Various salvage operations have been mounted in recent years, but the discrepancy between Lydgate’s general reputation in his own day, and his general reputation now, remains as startling as ever. The student of literature senses a challenge to his understanding here, the need to find some explanation of this strange state of affairs which will not be the product simply of five hundred years of accumulated ignorance.

Certain things should be admitted straightaway. One is that Lydgate is unusually prolific. Something like 145,000 lines of verse are attributed to him, twice as much as Shakespeare, three times as much as Chaucer, and there can be no sense in which this works to his advantage. No one who wrote so much can be anything but a hack, we may think, and protect ourselves from what looks like an unrewarding task by simply dismissing the man and his work as unworthy of our attention. This is a defensive reaction, and an easy one, offering plentiful opportunity for witty gibes at the poet’s expense. Behind it, however, lie a whole series of unreasoned assumptions about the nature of poetry. Poetry, it is assumed, is the distillation of experience, the precious record of moments of heightened perception, moments which can, possibly, be induced in the act of poetic creation, but which are bound to be rare. There is only so much heightened perception to go round, and a handful of exquisite lyrics or a slim volume of verse are the best guarantee that a poet has had some share in it. This fastidious notion of poetry, which partially accounts for its valetudinarian state now, may be sharply contrasted with the rude health of the medieval, indeed pre-Romantic view that poetry is different only in form and style, not in kind, from other forms of discourse. Poetry must therefore be much more comprehensively defined for the Middle Ages, and for Lydgate, whom I shall take in this book to be himself a comprehensive definition of the Middle Ages. Lydgate’s work includes very little that would nowadays be accommodated in poetic form, perhaps only ‘a handful of lyrics’. For the modern equivalents of other poems, we should have to look in history-books, encyclopaedias, the Complete Family Doctor, devotional manuals, books of etiquette, souvenir programmes, collections of maxims. Above all—and this is the significant point — we should have to look in the novel, the modern ‘hold-all’. The immense bulk of Lydgate’s work, therefore, is in itself significant, apart from its physically deterrent quality, only as a mark of changing fashions and attitudes to poetry.

Having said this, one is of course aware of the limitations of this kind of historical relativism. The historical approach, in this case the attempt to understand a much wider concept of poetry in the fifteenth century, is no more than an approach. It offers an explanation of literature in the light of history, but not as history; and the explanation only serves to prepare the mind for understanding. Lydgate’s vast output is a historically explicable phenomenon, but it remains true that, although all of his poems engage our interest (as the ways of a man with words in poetry always command interest), some of them are more interesting than others, not because they are more ‘poetic’, but because they deal with subjects that are intrinsic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Frontispiece
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Preface
• Author’s Note
• 1 John Lydgate: The Critical Approach
• 2 The Monastic Background
• 3 Chaucer and the Literary Background
• 4 The Courtly Poems
• 5 Troy and Thebes
• 6 Laureate Lydgate
• 7 Fables and Didactic Poems
• 8 The Fall of Princes
• 9 Lydgate’s Religious Poetry
• 10 Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index