Gower on Henry IV's Rule: The Endings of the Cronica Tripertita and Its Texts

Abstract

Carlson offers both a account of textual relations among five surviving copies of Cronica Tripertita and some provocative proposals concerning process of its revision. By 1400 or shortly thereafter, Gower probably lost his sight, Carlson points out, and would thus have been unable to proofread each MS as it was copied, but he remained alert, Carlson presumes, to political events of his time, and intervened to update and correct text in key passages. The surviving MSS are thus characterized by both increasing scribal corruption and a series of new and improved authorial readings (212). The bulk of this essay consists of examination of variations among these copies, distinguishing between those that are scribal and more substantive ones that are more likely attributed to poet. From these--and without regard to separate textual history of VC, but equally without regard to of erasure and correction and activities of separate scribes enumerated by Macaulay (Works 4.lix-Ixxi) and Parkes, Patterns of Scribal Activity (see Carlson's note 9 on 213-14)--he constructs a stemma (214), in which he argues that Hatton 92 (Macaulay's H3), though poor [and] carelessly written (219), nonetheless represents [along with Harley 6291, Macaulay's H] earliest state of text in evidence (221). H also contains, however, a unique passage at 1.55-56 that alters characterization of Northumberland in a way that suggests knowledge of his implication in attempts to overthrow Henry in 1403 and 1405 (as Macaulay hints in his note, 4.405). Such a revision must be authorial, Carlson implies (217), though if it was, Gower seems to have forgotten about it when he came to make other changes in text (218-19). The other two most significant revisions suggest to Carlson alteration in Gower's view of Henry that corresponds to shift in his attitude towards Richard that many have detected in revisions of CA. The first includes a small alteration in 3.479 that appears only in C, S, and G that mitigates somewhat characterization of chronicle of Richard's (222). The second is a fuller revision of entire conclusion to poem in which former line occurs (3.478-89) that appears only in G, which allows that Richard had once been a good king, at beginning of his reign (218); which describes poem itself now not just as chronicle of Richard's but as a mirror of world; and which transforms a judgment of Richard into a warning for all kings, that the chronicle of any king's will becomposed by king himself, in his own conduct, such as it will unfold in course of a reign (210). Carlson detects here an incipient withdrawal of support, implicit, by attenuation of praise (ibid.), and he proposes that most likely cause of Gower's change of heart in this, his final revision of poem (233), was Henty's execution of Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, in June of 1405 (234-36). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.1]

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.