Lydgate Rewrites Chaucer:

Abstract

John Lydgate, the prolific fifteenth-century poet and monk, completed his Siege of Thebes in the early 1420s. The poem recounts in some 4,700 lines “the matter of Thebes,” the bitter fight between Eteocles and Polynices, sons of Oedipus, for control of the city. Lydgate frames the Siege as a continuation of the Canterbury Tales in which a fictionalized version of the poet meets up with Chaucer's pilgrims and agrees to participate in Harry Bailey's storytelling contest. The prologue to the Siege begins with a pastiche of Chaucer's famous chronographia, complete with references to the zodiac, April showers, and tender, budding plants.For most of the twentieth century, scholars dismissed Lydgate's opening gambit as a clumsy and syntactically confused imitation of a superior Chaucerian original. Derek Pearsall quips, for example, that the “notorious” sentence leaves the reader “staggering with exhaustion,” although he claims that the poem's failure derives from Lydgate's methodical mode of poetic imitation rather than from “drooling incompetence.”1 Others attempt to explain the perceived shortcomings of the prologue and the narrative that follows in terms of Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence, suggesting that Lydgate's deficiencies result from an inability to exorcise the restless ghost of his literary father.2 In the last decade or so, however, we have moved away from the idea that Lydgate always and inevitably fails to live up to the standards of his putative master, and the Siege prologue, like other works of Lydgate, has now been favorably reassessed.3 Scott-Morgan Straker challenges the view of Lydgate as a graceless versifier, in part by showing that the poet's alterations of Chaucer's General Prologue are “calculated acts of self-authorization,” while James Simpson argues that the Siege is an “intelligent commentary” on Chaucer's Knight's Tale rather than a feeble rival.4 Phillipa Hardman has mounted the most comprehensive defense of the Siege prologue and of Lydgate's syntax in general, insisting that Lydgate's poetry seems unwieldy only by the standards of modern literary tastes and editorial practices. She demonstrates, moreover, that Lydgate purposefully deploys long, periodic sentences like the one that opens the Siege “in order to encompass all the preliminary material in a single, loosely constructed past-time unit before commencing the new narrative action.”5 All of this recent work on the Siege of Thebes makes clear that Lydgate's deviations from a Chaucerian paradigm are matters not of ineptitude but of poetic strategy.We may no longer dismiss Lydgate as a slavish and often unsuccessful Chaucerian imitator, but more work remains to be done in cataloguing and distinguishing Lydgate's modes of Chaucerian adaptation. In this note I wish to draw attention to another, hitherto unrecognized reimagining of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Lydgate's work. I will demonstrate that the initial stanza of Lydgate's Legend of Dan Joos draws upon the diction and imagery of Chaucer's chronographia, albeit in a more subtle way than the Siege prologue. Recognizing this other Lydgatean version of the chronographia allows us to appreciate the complexity of Lydgate's engagement with Chaucer's poetry and the flexibility with which he assimilates Chaucerian material to his own distinctive aureate style. Although both the Siege prologue and the opening stanza of Dan Joos rework the same Chaucerian source text, the poems are markedly different in subject, tone, and style. In Dan Joos, Lydgate absorbs the natural imagery of the General Prologue into Christian history, recasting Chaucer's description of cyclical death and renewal as a figure of eternal redemption. Lydgate's rewriting of Chaucer in Dan Joos demonstrates the fifteenth-century poet's mastery of his source material as he weaves Chaucerian imagery into an intricate hymn of Marian praise.The Legend of Dan Joos is a Marian miracle poem that survives in two fifteenth-century miscellanies: London, British Library MS Harley 2251, and Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.21. The precise date of the tale's composition is not known. The central portion of the poem tells the story of a pious monk who memorizes and regularly recites five psalms, the first letters of which form the acrostic “MARIA.” When Dan Joos dies, Mary rewards his devotion by causing five beautiful roses to bloom from his corpse. The rose that grows from the monk's mouth bears a golden inscription of the Virgin's name. Lydgate brackets the narrative with a four-stanza invocation to Mary at the beginning of the poem and a four-stanza address to the reader at the end.Lydgate turns to Chaucer for form and perhaps subject matter. He constructs Dan Joos from twenty Chaucerian (that is, rhyme royal) stanzas. The poem belongs to a popular subgenre of miracle stories known as “The Monk Who Could Learn Only Ave Maria.” Chaucer's Prioress's Tale is another iteration of this type of story, which typically features a protagonist who engages in repetitive prayer to Mary and whose devotion facilitates a miracle.6 In both the Prioress's Tale and Dan Joos, as in a number of other Marian tales, the mouth of the devout protagonist is the locus of the miracle. It is possible, as several scholars have suggested, that Lydgate viewed Dan Joos as an answer to Chaucer's own Marian writings, the Prioress's Tale and An ABC.7 Yet Marian miracle stories were closely associated with monastic writers and compilers, and Bury St. Edmunds, Lydgate's monastery, was involved in the production and collection of a number of miracle tales of this sort.8 Given the appropriateness of the topic for a monastic writer and in light of Lydgate's extensive body of writing on the Virgin, we need not assume that Lydgate chose his subject to engage in literary one-upmanship. Whether or not Lydgate had the Prioress's Tale in mind when he composed Dan Joos, his framing of the poem invites us to compare it to another part of the Canterbury Tales, the General Prologue.We can see how Lydgate simultaneously draws upon and refashions Chaucerian imagery if we consider the famous opening lines of the General Prologue alongside the first stanza of Dan Joos: Whan that Aprill with his shoures sooteThe droghte of March hath perced to the roote,And bathed every veyne in swich licourOf which vertu engendred is the flour;Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breethInspired hath in every holt and heethThe tendre croppes, and the yonge sonneHath in the Ram his half cours yronne.(I 1–8)9O welle of swetnesse, replete in every veyne,That all mankynde preservyd hast from dethe,And all oure joy fro langour dydest restreyneAt thy nativite; O floure of Nazareth,When the Holygost with hys swete brethGan to enspyre the as for hys chosyn placeFor love of man by influence of hys grace.(Dan Joos, lines 1–7)10 The most obvious point of overlap comes at the fifth line of each text. Lydgate's crucial substitution of “the Holygost” for Chaucer's “Zephirus” in these otherwise parallel lines signals the revisionist project of the stanza, namely, overtly to Christianize the natural imagery of the General Prologue. Lydgate metamorphoses other Chaucerian words and phrases in a similar manner. Chaucer's “shoures soote” have become the “welle of swetnesse,” the Virgin herself. In the General Prologue April showers bathe and revivify “every veyne” of the plants and flowers, but in Dan Joos the Virgin needs no such rejuvenation: she is already “replete in every veyne.” The word “replete” signifies Mary's plenitude, but it may also suggest that Mary is “filled (with the Holy Spirit, divine grace).”11 The flower that blooms in Lydgate's poem is no ordinary spring blossom, but the “floure of Nazareth.” Where Chaucer describes the wind inspiring plants, Lydgate describes God inspiring the Virgin. Lydgate's conflation of literal and metaphorical inspiration highlights both the incarnational moment itself, the physical impartation of life into Mary's womb, and the spiritual inspiration or illumination that God offers his followers.David Williams notices that Chaucer's General Prologue makes reference to “the four constitutive elements of life: earth (the dry land), water (Aprill shoures), air (Zephirus), and fire (the yonge sonne).”12 Lydgate likewise invokes these four elements, but he shifts the frame of reference from the natural world to the sphere of divine mysteries: the sweet breath of the Holy Ghost represents air, while Mary is figured as the flower of Nazareth (earth), a sweet spring (water), and, in the eighth line of the poem, a “bryght hevynly sterre” (fire). Lydgate's concern is not with “the elements of life,” but with the elements of eternal life, the workings of the Virgin, and the trinitarian God. Lydgate replaces Chaucer's cycle of seasonal death and rebirth with a linear Christian history in which Christ's redemption defeats death absolutely. According to this conception of the world, Mary is a queen who “by thyne empryse in thys mortall werre/Of oure captyvyte gatest the full vyctory” (lines 10–11). Lydgate absorbs the reader into his narrative of a universal Christian history by substituting the first-person plural “oure” for Chaucer's third-person “they” (I 16).The naturalistic opening to Chaucer's General Prologue is not entirely without Christian overtones, of course. The lush spring landscape that Chaucer describes stimulates not amorous desire, as it does in the Roman de la Rose and similar texts, but the desire for religious pilgrimage. Jane Chance argues, moreover, that the opening lines of the General Prologue demonstrate a “thematic and structural indebtedness … to the hexameral creation of the cosmos and its inhabitants in the book of Genesis.”13 While it is certainly possible to identify such biblical overtones in the General Prologue, Chaucer's most direct sources are works of classical literature and classically themed Italian literature, including Boccaccio's Filocolo and Teseida.14 Furthermore, the idyllic pilgrimage described in the first eighteen lines of Chaucer's text is quickly compromised by the evident corruption of most of the ecclesiastical characters, the pilgrims' petty arguments, and the bawdiness of many of the tales. Indeed, modern readers delight in Chaucer's ironic undercutting of expectations, his exploitation of the tension between the sensuality of the chronographia and the idea of Christian pilgrimage. In Lydgate's poem we find no such tension. Instead, the poet develops the chronographia into a fully realized devotional text.In both the prologue to the Siege and the opening stanza of Dan Joos, Lydgate subjects his source text to the process of aureation, his characteristic practice of ornamenting and amplifying a text. In the Siege prologue, Lydgate appropriates Chaucer's syntax, adapting—and complicating—the periodic “whan … whan … thanne” construction of the first sentence of the General Prologue. Lydgate also uses apposition and amplification to embellish his text. For example, he expands Chaucer's concise zodiacal reference—“the yonge sonne/Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne”—into eleven lines on the cosmos. The accretion of specific detail and the open-ended syntax give the prologue its historical sweep, and, as Hardman notes, draw out the pastiche “until Lydgate the pilgrim has been fully incorporated into the narrative of Chaucer's company.”15The opening stanzas of Dan Joos similarly bear all the typical hallmarks of Lydgate's aureate style, including Latinate diction and syntax and an abundance of appositional noun phrases. Here, however, the Chaucerian material is not hypercontextualized but decontextualized. Lydgate extracts short segments from the chronographia and remakes them into images of the Virgin. To these images he adds a host of additional Marian epithets. Mary is not only the well of sweetness, the flower of Nazareth, and a bright heavenly star—all images suggested by Chaucer's General Prologue, as we have already noticed—but also God's “chosyn place” (line 6), a “benygne Lady” (line 19), and a “refuge and welthe to every creature” (line 24). The apposition here is as functional as the meandering syntax of the Siege prologue. It serves to illuminate different aspects of a divine figure whose ultimate unknowability demands multiple and varied attempts at understanding. The narrative of Dan Joos describes and encourages devout meditation on the Virgin, and at the end of the poem Lydgate explicitly invites his readers to engage in the kind of devotional exercise modeled by the eponymous monk: “And for your poysy these lettres fyve ye take/Of thys name MARIA, oonly for hir sake” (lines 125–26). Taking into account the pedagogical concerns of the poem, we can see that Lydgate's use of apposition provides the reader with a variety of Marian images on which to meditate. As scholars have noticed, moreover, the profusion of rhetorical ornament in Lydgate's religious poems both testifies to the exceptional and ineffable power of the deity and turns language itself into a manifestation of that awesome divine presence. Robert Meyer-Lee, for example, explains that Lydgate's aureate style relies on the conventions of classical, epideictic rhetoric: “The most authentic poem of praise, according to this understanding, evolves from super-mimesis into pure being; it no longer only represents that which it praises, but becomes an instance of the same ideal nature that makes that very object praiseworthy.”16If amplification and aureation serve in the Siege of Thebes prologue to add breadth and texture to the poem's historical setting, the same techniques work in The Legend of Dan Joos to emphasize the timelessness of the poem's subject, Mary. The opening stanzas of Dan Joos transform Chaucerian source material into the kind of ornamented, textual artifact that in Lydgate's view best honors God.

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