By Maura Nolan
Throughout the 15th century John Lydgate used to be the main well-known poet in England, filling commissions for the court docket, the aristocracy, and the guilds. He wrote for an elite London readership that used to be traditionally very small, yet that observed itself as dominating the cultural lifetime of the country. therefore the recent literary types and modes built via Lydgate and his contemporaries contributed to shaping the improvement of English public tradition within the 15th century. Maura Nolan provides a massive re-interpretation of Lydgate's paintings and of his valuable position within the constructing literary tradition of his time.
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Sample text
The turn to Chaucer, then, is dictated not only by Lydgate’s sense of Chaucer’s greater authority than Laurent, but also by the demand of the narrative for a weighty (and well-attested) conclusion. Lydgate’s treatment of his sources in Serpent thus reveals twin aims; he seeks both to moralize the story of Caesar and to legitimize that moralized narrative by invoking a variety of authorities. To this end, he assembles the raw material of the story from several sources, and arrays the latter under a new set of rubrics, the names of figures who, in his opinion, will lend his story the proper air of historical gravitas.
But his Caesar is a more complex and opaque figure, both a power-hungry tyrant and a tragic hero, both the cause of division in Rome and a murder victim. This ambiguity, I argue, has a double origin. On the one hand, it is produced by the deep political and cultural ambiguities at hand when Lydgate wrote the text shortly after the death of Henry V. On the other, it is an effect of Lydgate’s own writerly practices, his obsessive attention to his multiple source texts and his complex relationship to the literary authority of both his Latin and vernacular predecessors.
Like the ‘‘Disguising at London,’’ the Hertford text is highly allusive, replete with explicit references to the Wife of Bath and Griselda as well as more subtle gestures toward figures such as Goodlief, Harry Bailley’s wife; it is a deeply serious answer to Chaucer’s use of the comic as a response to the tragic after the Monk’s Tale. The very fact that Lydgate would choose a public performance for such an elaborate poetic endeavor testifies to the extent of his desire to bring Chaucerian poetics into a broader sphere.