Studies in the Age of Chaucer

REVIEWS JULIA B0FFEY and JANET COWEN, eds. Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry. Medieval Studies, vol. 5. London: King's College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991. Pp. x, 174. ,£8.75 paper. The genealogy of this volume accounts for most of its disappointments. With their genesis in a series of intercollegiate lectures at the University of London in 1989, the pieces often descend into the chattiness, excessive quotation, and long summaries of contents that typify lectures aimed at British undergraduates. As a final product of the King's College London Computing Centre, the book displays some of the infelicities common to desk-top publishing, such as uneven copyediting, unjustified right-hand margins, and no index. Since the two editors have provided no general introduction, the reader is left to search independently for the book's unifyingstrands, which generally trace lines of indebtedness and claims for originality on behalf of various Chaucerian poets from Clanvowe to Skel­ ton, in no particular order. Pamela M. King's opening piece, "Chaucer, Chaucerians and the Theme of Poetry," proposes that metafictions of aesthetic introspection, particu­ larly The House a/Fame, thematize the creative process by questioning the reliability of the analogous mode, the dream, while Trot/us and Criseyde systematically dismantles the authority of books themselves as sources of reliable knowledge. These strategies of self-reflection and intertextuality are viewed as Chaucer's enduring legacies in The Kingis Quair, that vexing mix of autobiography and poetic echo-chamber in which life and art are rendered indissoluble. The historicalJamesI of Scotlandrepresents himself congruent with a protagonist who is constructed from the materials of his literary culture. As a complement to this piece, Julia Boffey's fine study "Chaucerian Prisoners: The Context of The Kingis Quair'' approaches the poem by looking at imprisonment as a narrative feature in TheKnight's Tale and as a metaphorical image for love in Troilus, then examining patterns of emula­ tion under the added influence of Boethius in the works of Thomas Usk, George Ashby, and Charles d'Orleans. Chaucerian models helped these actual prisoners to formulate their emotional experiences and to represent these interpreted selves as social identities. The striking overlap between powerful textual models and actual lives is probably more than a literary­ historical curiosity, as Boffey concludes (p. 99), but prompts questions 159 SWDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER concerning the social role of Chaucerian poetry at a very deep level in the courtly tradition. Who providedJames I with such a mass of Chaucerian reading material that his mind became saturated with the language? Did the motives of his captors figure in some larger strategy for conditioning the future king of Scotland to Lancastrian cultural values? Revealing evidence probably lies in the identity of theladylovecelebrated in the poem. She was Joan Beaufort, cousin of Thomas Chaucer and ward of her uncle Bishop Henry Beaufort, the noblewoman wedded toJames on the eve of his return to Scotland to take the throne in 1424. In "Madness and Texts: Hoccleve's Series,"James Simpson acknowledges various theoretical initiatives, mainly deconstruction's move to dislodge texts from their historical contexts, in a stimulating study of an authorially linked group of texts that steadily resists such antihistorical readings. As a work whose unifying plot is the account of its own composition, it also resists the destabilization of subject often achieved by Chaucer, since Hoccleve wanted to impress his audience that he himself was stable, that is, he had recovered from his bout with insanity. While the series is convinc­ ingly explicated as a text of "social rehabilitation" in which the poet's identity is intrinsically a "social phenomenon," perhaps Simpson should have made much more of the fact that we know precisely the intended audience of the work: Hoccleve himself copied out a presentation manu­ script, now Durham Cosin manuscript VJll.9, with a concluding envoy addressed to the Countess of Westmoreland, the firstJoan Beaufort, sister of Henry Beaufort and only daughter of Katherine Swynford by John of Gaunt, hence Chaucer's niece. As with The Kingis Quair, probably much more needs to be said about the congruence of the Chaucerian poetic tradition with the patterns of Chaucerian kinship. W...