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Henpecked Husbands, Unruly Wives, And Royal Authority In Lydgate's Mumming At Hertford Nicole Nolan Sidhu John Lydgate's Mumming at Hertford is a performance piece of some 250 lines in which a group of henpecked husbands appear before the king to complain of their shrewish wives. It is one of the shorter pieces in Lydgate's oeuvre and probably was not well known amongst his contemporaries since it survives only in a single manuscript.1 In spite of its brevity and obscurity, the piece has drawn considerable praise from modern Lydgate critics. In his 1970 book on Lydgate, Derek Pearsall calls it one of the poet's "unexpected triumphs."2 Similarly, Walter F. Schirmer's 1961 study of Lydgate asserts that the Mumming at Hertford "reveals a talent for humour and satire to which [Lydgate] all too rarely gave expression."3 The basis of these critics' approval is primarily aesthetic, consisting of admiration (and some surprise) at Lydgate's ability to create good comedy, an accomplishment they attribute to the influence of Chaucer.4 Recent years have seen a flowering of Lydgate studies and, once again, the Mumming at Hertford has emerged as an object of interest. In her 2005 book—the first full-length study of Lydgate to appear in twenty years—Maura Nolan credits the Mumming at Hertford with a serious artistic purpose, arguing that it is deeply concerned with the genres of tragedy and comedy. Like Pearsall and Schirmer, Nolan observes the piece's numerous debts to Chaucer. She, however, does not read these as a lesser light's imitation of a comic genius, but rather as markers by which Lydgate signals his critique of Chaucer's tragic and comic modes.5 In spite of critics' interest in the Mumming at Hertford, and in spite of the widespread recognition of its roots in gender comedy, no one has yet considered it carefully in the context of the medieval gender comedy tradition, which runs from the Old French fabliaux of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through Chaucer in the late fourteenth century, and into a variety of fifteenth-century English lyrics, performances, and tales. While scholars have noted Lydgate's debts to the genre, particularly to the gender comedy of Chaucer, they have not inquired into the particulars of [End Page 431] his appropriations (that is, what Lydgate alters about gender comedy and what he retains) as much as they do when considering Lydgate's use of other sources, like classical epic or medieval romance.6 While Nolan's insistence upon reading the Mumming at Hertford as an expression of Lydgate's own agenda provides a welcome correction to previous scholars' assumptions that the piece is merely a simple-minded appropriation of antifeminist comedy, she does not sufficiently place her reading of the Mumming at Hertford in the context of medieval gender comedy. Instead, she chooses to read it according to Lydgate's definition of classical comedy in the Troy Book, a genre that he and other writers did not necessarily identify with medieval gender comedy. Lydgate's definition of comedy in the Troy Book never links it to the medieval storytelling tradition of unruly women and their depredations, nor does Chaucer himself call fabliau-inspired tales like the Reeve's Tale and the Miller's Tale "comedy," but refers to them instead as "harlotrye" (I 3184).7 Also missing from scholars' evaluations of the Mumming at Hertford is a consideration of its gender politics. In spite of the fact that the piece is explicitly and consistently concerned with marriage and the behavior of husbands and wives, scholars have resisted the notion that it has any interest whatsoever in gender relations. Pearsall concludes that antifeminism functions more as a rhetorical model for Lydgate than as any comment on gender: "What Lydgate actually thought of women is irrelevant; I doubt whether he thought much about them at all."8 Some thirty-five years later, Nolan makes a similar claim, declaring of the Mumming at Hertford that "the disguising's real subject is neither gender nor women," but rather genre.9 It is the argument of this article that both the gender politics of the Mumming at Hertford...
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