haunted hoccleve - the regiment of princes, the troilean intertext, and conversations with the dead

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Haunted Hoccleve?: The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, and Conversations with the Dead Nicholas Perkins The Chaucer Review, Volume 43, Number 2, 2008, pp. 103-139 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/cr.0.0010 For additional information about this article Access Provided by UNIFAL-Uniersidade Federal de Alfenas at 10/31/12 8:07PM GMT http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cr/summary/v043/43.2.perkins.html

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Page 1: Haunted Hoccleve - The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, And Conversations With the Dead

Haunted Hoccleve?: The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext,and Conversations with the Dead

Nicholas Perkins

The Chaucer Review, Volume 43, Number 2, 2008, pp. 103-139 (Article)

Published by Penn State University PressDOI: 10.1353/cr.0.0010

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by UNIFAL-Uniersidade Federal de Alfenas at 10/31/12 8:07PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cr/summary/v043/43.2.perkins.html

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HAUNTED HOCCLEVE? THE REGIMENT OF PRINCES, THE TROILEAN INTERTEXT, AND CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEAD

by Nicholas Perkins

Thomas Hoccleve’s medieval and modern readers have repeatedly been drawn to the relationship between the Privy Seal clerk and his older and more celebrated contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer. Hoccleve, of course, invokes his “maistir” in The Regiment of Princes, and had a picture of Chaucer included in its early copies, drawing attention in the text to the portrait’s representational fidelity and symbolic power.1 Hoccleve’s “canonization” of Chaucer—as a literary progenitor, as a quasi-religious icon, as a model of authoritative advice, and as the founder of a national poetic tradition—have all been the subject of extended discussion, circling around the familiar trope of “father Chaucer,”2 and recently coloring it with a renewed interest in the public, political, and ideo-logical positioning of fifteenth-century vernacular poetry.3 In this essay I shall discuss some Chaucerian borrowings and echoes in The Regiment of Princes, many of which have been overlooked or little discussed in the heat of these wider debates. Hoccleve tells us that

My deere maistir, God his soule qwyte,And fadir, Chaucer, fayn wolde han me taght,But I was dul and lerned lyte or naght.

(2077–79)4

Many readers have willingly accepted Hoccleve’s claim that his poetic legacy from this master and father is, paradoxically, one of lack or absence. Three brief examples will illustrate critical views that still have some currency. Jerome Mitchell’s pioneering book, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century Poetic, questions Hoccleve’s claims to a close personal connection with Chaucer, and states that there are “very few direct allusions to Chaucer in Hoccleve’s verse

THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2008.Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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and almost no indisputable Chaucerian echoes in his diction and phraseology.”5 John Burrow’s 1990 essay on “Chaucer and Hoccleve” does, by contrast, acknowledge Hoccleve’s “immense” debt to Chaucer in certain areas, noting that Hoccleve’s attention to syllable count is one of the most likely legacies of Chaucer’s tutelage; he also suggests that Hoccleve’s understanding of the balance and composition of the long stanza and an “enhanced awareness of the ample potentialities of English verse” are gained from the older poet.6 Nevertheless, Burrow claims “far fewer verbal echoes of Chaucer than one would expect to find in the work of an immediate follower.”7 In a more recent essay discussing Hoccleve’s apparent lack of prominence in the fifteenth-century tradition, John M. Bowers says of Hoccleve’s Regiment that despite its use of a Chaucerian stanza form, “the overall work entirely lacks the Chaucerian characteristics that [later] became most dearly prized.”8 I believe that Hoccleve’s debt to Chaucer is more active, more integral to his style and poetic persona than such assessments allow. In particular, borrowings from Troilus and Criseyde form a powerful undertow to the opening dialogue of Hoccleve’s Regiment. Many critics have underestimated the extent to which Hoccleve adopts the dialogic mode, patterns of speech, and narrative personae in Chaucer’s poem, and reformulates them to poetic and strategic advantage.9 Taking time to read some of those adoptions and adaptations can supplement or modify the roles of dutiful dullness, Oedipal anxiety, or ideological confusion that have often been ascribed to Hoccleve, and, instead, might help us develop a reading through a different lens—that of authorial and narratorial “conversation.” The passages on which I shall focus mostly take the form of conversations in which an older man attempts to counsel and teach a younger one—a scenario that mirrors the relationship between the two poets, as Hoccleve describes it in the Regiment. In addition, Hoccleve draws material from Chaucer’s own experiments in conversational style, especially in the early parts of Troilus and Criseyde. The development of such poetic conversation is, then, itself part of a dialogic process through which Chaucer’s work was read and reformulated by English writers from Usk, Clanvowe, Gower, and Scogan onwards.10 Further, Hoccleve’s absorption of Chaucerian personae and his explicit conjuration of Chaucer’s spirit might encourage us to read these exchanges as conversations with the dead. In the later part of this essay, I shall suggest some implications of Hoccleve’s “dwelling with” the spectral Chaucerian corpus.11

Hoccleve’s Regiment starts with the narrator in bed, deprived of sleep by vexatious “Thoght” (7), and weary of life itself: “My tremblynge herte so greet gastnesse hadde / That my spirites were of my lyf sadde”

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(20–21). He laments the power of Fortune to involve all ranks of society, from royalty downwards, in her constant inconstancy:

Allas, wher is this worldes stablenesse?Heer up, heer doun; heer honour, heer repreef;Now hool, now seek; now bountee, now mescheef.

(47–49)

Escaping from the claustrophobic city into “the feeld” (117), he meets an older man, who attempts to draw him into conversation and con-sole him with Boethian wisdom. This scenario might already begin to remind us of Troilus and Criseyde, in particular the early conversations between Troilus (young, melancholy, and lamenting in his “chambre”)12 and Pandarus (older, worldly wise, and offering consolation). Indeed, as long ago as 1968 Mary Ruth Pryor noted that “the character of the beggar may owe something to that of Chaucer’s Pandarus, although he remains a more shadowy figure.”13 More recently, in a rich discussion of the Regiment’s capacity for threat as well as flattery, Sarah Tolmie has suggested Pandarus as “the most important precursor of the old man,” especially in his role as a go-between or “baude” (Regiment, 547).14 Here is the moment when Hoccleve encounters the Old Man:

He stirte unto me and seide, “Sleepstow, man?Awake!” and gan me shake wondir faste,And with a sigh I answerde atte laste:

“A, who is there?” “I,” quod this olde greye,“Am heer,” and he me tolde the manereHow he spak to me, as yee herde me seye.“O man,” quod I, “for Crystes love deere,If that thow wilt aght doon at my prayeere,As go thy way, talke to me no more;Thy wordes alle annoyen me ful sore.

“Voide fro me, me list no conpaignie.Encresse nat my greef, I have ynow.”“My sone, hast thow good lust thy sorwe dryeAnd mayst releeved be? What man art thow?Wirke aftir me: it shal be for thy prow.Thow nart but yong and hast but litil seen,And ful seelde is that yong folk wyse been.”

(131–47)

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This scene is clearly indebted to Book I of Troilus and Criseyde, where Pandarus finds Troilus lamenting, shouts at him to “awake,” and later shakes him. As can be seen from the parallels cited in the Appendix, Chaucer takes time to build up a pattern of awakenings and responses, which Hoccleve distills into a characteristically charged, compressed exchange. Pandarus’s “wonderlich” call and later shaking of Troilus have been transferred to Hoccleve’s Old Man, who “gan me shake won-dir faste”; Hoccleve’s “sigh” recalls Troilus, who “syken wonder soore”; and even Hoccleve’s rhymes “no more” and “ful sore” echo Troilus’s “crye namore” and “thi lore.” In addition, there are close parallels in Hoccleve’s “for Crystes love deere,” “at my prayeere,” and “go thy way, talke to me no more” with Troilus’s initial rejection of Pandarus. Indeed, this passage as a whole is a prime example of how skillfully Hoccleve exploits the potential of the rhyme royal stanza that Chaucer developed in Troilus and Criseyde : using enjambment to quicken the pace of the exchange (135–36); creating expec tation between stanzas (133–34); varying the rhythm through interjections and speaker cues (134–35, 137); introducing metrical variety, for example by using inver-sion in the first foot (141, 145) and a broken-backed line (139); using exclamations, short demotic phrases and colloquialisms (137, 143); and generating proverbial force in the final couplet of a stanza—here in the Old Man’s put-down of Hoccleve’s youthful naivete, which paral-lels Pandarus’s claim that he can help Troilus through his own greater experience (146–47).15

I have included the Old Man’s reply in the passage quoted above because Hoccleve’s Chaucerian “location” here is possibly deepened by a small but close analogue to the Canterbury Tales in the Old Man’s ques-tion “What man art thow?,” which of course recalls the Host’s question to Chaucer’s own withdrawn—and melancholy?—authorial persona just before the tale of Sir Thopas:

“What man artow?” quod he;“Thou lookest as thou woldest fynde an hare,For evere upon the ground I se thee stare.”

(VII 695–97)16

Each of these textual patrons, then, provokes a moment of self-scrutiny and self-definition at the point where the authorial persona is prepar-ing to develop his public voice. Just after the first explicit reference to Chaucer, whose name is invoked at the same time that Hoccleve’s is revealed (“Hoccleve, sone? . . . Thow were aqweyntid with Chaucer, par-dee” [1865, 1867]), the Old Man presses the case for Hoccleve to relieve

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his financial problems by composing a book of advice for Prince Henry in the expectation of reward:

“Althogh thow seye that thow in LatynNe in Frensshe neithir canst but smal endyte,In Englissh tonge canstow wel afyn.”“Fadir, therof can I eek but a lyte.”“Yee, straw! Let be! Thy penne take and wryteAs thow canst.”

(1870–75)

In Troilus and Criseyde Pandarus similarly encourages the lovers to put pen to paper in order to further their desires. As the Appendix shows, the pas-sage above is comparable to lines from Book V of Troilus, which use the same—albeit standard—rhymes: write / endite / lite. The encouragement is expressed in similar terms too: “thow canst wel endite” says Pandarus to Troilus; the Old Man says “canst but smal endite,” then “canstow wel afyn.” These Chaucerian reminiscences form a group towards the end of the Regiment’s Dialogue with some other echoes, such as the lines

“Swich thyng translate and unto his hynesse,As humblely as that thow canst, presente.Do thus, my sone.” “Fadir, I assente.”

(1951–53)

These lines are paralleled in situation, wording, and rhyme with pas-sages of Troilus, as when Pandarus tells Troilus in Book I that he must address his own powerful lord, the God of Love, to ask forgiveness for previously scorning lovers:

“Thus sey with al thyn herte in good entente.”Quod Troilus, “A, lord! I me consente.”

(I, 935–36)

These allusions and analogues help to establish Troilus and Criseyde as a particularly suggestive intertext to the Regiment ’s Dialogue. In the Appendix, I note numerous other echoes and parallels with Troilus and other of Chaucer’s works, some of them already cited piecemeal by Hoccleve editors and critics. By describing Chaucer’s poem as an intertext to the Regiment, I am stopping short of claiming some powerful genealogy by which Troilus and Criseyde unlocks meaning in Hoccleve’s poem.17 Neither is Oedipal struggle or Bloomian anxiety of influence

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entirely satisfactory as a theoretical model for Hoccleve’s relation to Chaucer here, although Chaucer’s status as a “strong” author whom later writers creatively misread is powerfully descriptive of many four-teenth- and fifteenth-century texts.18 One alternative to a reading based around paternity and inheritance might be the poststructuralist intertext,19 but I want to position my own reading both as more and less “authorial” than these positions allow. Hoccleve’s textual rela-tionship with Chaucer is a mixture of knowing debt and unknowing absorption—part strategic, part happenstance—while his shaping of conversational patterns also opens a series of imaginative doors to other genres and philosophical traditions that the Regiment and its readers can explore. This mingling of authorial direction and unplanned or unac-knowledged resonance is, I believe, vital to the Regiment’s suggestive power, which eludes or overflows the categories of mirror for princes, complaint, propaganda, autobiography, consolation, or begging poem, that might be applied to it.

One mapping of comparable terrain that, I believe, can help us by marking contours both at psychological and ideological levels is Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx (Specters of Marx). In it, Derrida reflects on the pressures that Marx as a powerful, prior author places on ways of think-ing and writing in the twentieth century—what Derrida describes as a “hauntology” of the spectral figure’s continuing presence/absence. In one of his most openly politically engaged works, Derrida argues that the triumphalism greeting the apparent demise of communist regimes in the late 1980s fails to conceal the complex and sometimes contradic-tory responses to which an invocation of Marx still gives rise. The energy expended on declaring the death of Marxism implicitly acknowledges its troubling, excessive potential to return:

At bottom, the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back; in the future, said the powers of old Europe in the last century, it must not incarnate itself, either publicly or in secret. In the future, we hear everywhere today, it must not re-incarnate itself; it must not be allowed to come back since it is past.20

At the same time as describing this anxious speech act which declares the death of the very thing whose return one fears, Derrida explores a wider practice of “spectrality,” viewing Marx’s own fascination with the spectral through the prism of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and espe-cially Hamlet, which had a powerful influence on Marx’s own imaginative frameworks. The cursed legacy and the revenant father are still embed-ded in this model, then, but while aware of the anxiety about paternity

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that Bloom’s work powerfully raises, Derrida’s imagining of the rela-tionship with the threatening yet fecund specter leaves more space for an ambivalently productive summoning up of the dead, as well as performative reaffirmation of their demise. Recent work by Helen Swift on responses to Jean de Meun in the French Roman de la Rose tradition shows how fruitful this approach might be for examining late-medieval responses to powerful authors. Swift adapts from Derrida what she terms a “spectropoetics” which can summon up, argue with, and challenge the authority of Jean de Meun—as happens, for example, in the fifteenth-century Champion des dames by Martin Le Franc.21 I shall return to some implications of this approach for the relations between dead and living authors that Hoccleve’s Regiment allows for, but, before that, I should like briefly to discuss three linked areas of the poem where an aware-ness of the Troilean intertext can, I think, enrich our reading: Boethian dialogue; diseased language; and gendered subjects.

We saw above that the Old Man’s encouragement to Hoccleve to start writing has an analogue in Troilus and Criseyde. Troilus’s impulse to write letters and compose songs as a result of his love, or hope, or despair, provides a complex precedent for Hoccleve’s narrator, whose initial private complaining and linguistic impotence turn to more public and profitable (though not unproblematic) enditing.22 That pattern of self-regarding complaint, followed by educative or reflective dialogue, also brings another text into play: Boethius’s De consolatio Philosophiae, which likewise places its author-persona at the mercy of Fortune, Death, and elegiac introspection in the opening metrum:

Venit enim properata malis inopina senectusEt dolor aetatem iussit inesse suam.Intempestivi funduntur vertice caniEt tremit effeto corpore laxa cutis.Mors hominum felix quae se nec dulcibus annis Inserit et maestis saepe vocata venit.Eheu quam surda miseros avertitur aureEt flentes oculos claudere saeva negat.Dum levibus male fida bonis fortuna faveret,Paene caput tristis merserat hora meum.Nunc quia fallacem mutavit nubila vultum,Protrahit ingratas impia vita moras.Quid me felicem totiens iactastis amici?Qui cecidit, stabili non erat ille gradu.23

White hairs upon my crown untimely came,And trembling wrinkles sag on my spent frame.

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Death finds no welcome in contented life,But is oft summoned when distress is rife.Alas, Death turns deaf ears to my sad cries,And cruel, will not close my weeping eyes.While fickle Fortune transient goods did show,One bitter hour could almost bring me low;Now she’s put on her clouded, treacherous gaze,My impious life spins out unwanted days.Why did you harp, my friends, on my renown?My steps were insecure; I tumbled down.24

This first poem in the Consolation is a telling precursor to Hoccleve’s lamenting narrator at the start of the Regiment, hovering between life and death and bemoaning treacherous Fortune. The first gloss that normally occurs in Regiment manuscripts is indeed from the Consolation, though from the more detailed discussion of Fortune in Book II, prosa 4: “Boicius de consolatione: Maximum genus infortunii est fuisse felicem” (The worst kind of misfortune is to have once been happy), a passage also cited in Troilus, III, 1625–28. The Consolation of Philosophy holds a powerful intertextual relation to the Regiment and to Troilus ; it haunts both English texts’ imagination of melancholy suffering and therapeutic dialogue, with a speaking voice both textually and biographically at the border of death. Returning to Troilus and Criseyde through Hoccleve’s shared Boethianism might also reinforce the Boethian affiliations and forms of Chaucer’s poem, especially the prosimetrum effect in Book I of Troilus and Criseyde, with its heightened lyric moments followed by more “prosaic” advisory dialogue and exegesis.

The Old Man’s attempt to encourage Hoccleve to talk about his troubles (line 232 onwards, for example) develops a series of Boethian arguments for therapeutic speech. One Regiment manuscript (Cambridge University Library MS Gg.vi.17, fol. 5r) emphasizes this influence by glossing the Old Man’s exemplum of the beggar who needs to speak out to gain relief (248–59) with a quotation from Consolation, Book I, prosa 4: “si medicum expectas oportet vt vulnus detegas” (If you are looking for a cure, you need to uncover the wound), words then paraphrased by the Old Man in lines 260–63. Pandarus uses the same passage of Boethius to draw Troilus out in Troilus, I, 857–58.25 Hoccleve would no doubt have known the Consolation independently, but Chaucer’s translation of Boethian consolation into the sphere of romance narrative and of English dialogue exemplifies the enabling effect that Troilus and Criseyde seems to have had on Hoccleve’s poem, allowing him to develop elements of complaint, melancholy, and male-to-male conversation in the more overtly political and personal environment that the Regiment fosters.

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In her discussion of the Regiment ’s Dialogue, Tolmie characterizes Hoccleve’s Old Man as a financial/sexual procurer in the mold of Pandarus:

Chaucer’s Pandarus offers a model of specious and unavail-ing Boethian consolation in an amatory context that Hoccleve reconfigures into a political one. This transition implies that the relationship between poet and prince is, structurally, an erotic one, formed of mutual desire.26

That sense of movement from the amatory to the political is important (shadowing the movement from private lament to public engagement), and the interplay between those fields is also something that Thomas Usk exploits in his own Boethian/Troilean text, The Testament of Love.27 I would temper, though, the idea that the Boethian dialogue is “specious and una-vailing,” a reading shared to an extent by James Simpson’s essay on the Regiment, where he contrasts what he sees as a self-absorbed or passive Boethianism with an active, engaged Aristotelian politics in the Regiment proper.28 I believe that the Boethian framework itself has more political potential than this suggests, and in fact Philosophy’s first move—to ban-ish the elegiac muses (“meretriculas” [sluts], in Philosophy’s words)29 from Boethius’s bedside, and awaken his senses from the lethargy of complaint and longing for death into an active scrutiny of the self—is precisely a turn away from “unavailing” inwardness, and toward the gov-ernance of the self and mind.30 As a similarly divided, ghostly presence, someone haunting his own text, Hoccleve can reflect on the rotten state not only of his own body and fortune, but that of the realm, initially via the dangerously uncontrolled figure of “bisy thoght” (270), later through private dialogue with the Old Man, and finally in public address to Prince Henry.31

The possibilities and dangers of dialogic revelation are colored by the use that Chaucer and Hoccleve make of Boethian medical imagery. I have already discussed the passage about uncovering a wound, common to all three texts, but this is just the most obvious example of a discourse that is woven throughout the Regiment ’s dialogue and the Troilus–Pandarus conversations. Images of wounding, the doctor or “leche” (for example Regiment, 162, and Troilus, II, 571), healing and “hoolness” (Regiment, 166, and Troilus, I, 961), and therapeutic, confessional speech as the antidote for melancholy are rich poetic sources for both English portrayals of an ailing protagonist in a diseased body politic. In Troilus and Criseyde, of course, Troilus’s sickness is joined to the fate of Troy as a whole, on both literal and figurative levels. In the Regiment, too, metaphors of the body crucially bind together Hoccleve’s personal and public narratives, though

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in the very different trajectory that the Regiment takes, the Old Man’s encouragement to speak out, voiced in the open field, is deliberately to be “overheard” by Prince Henry, whereas Troilus’s revelations to Pandarus, made within the walls of his chamber, must be kept out of the public eye.32 Triangulating the relationship, then, between Boethius, Troilus, and the Regiment —allowing the texts to haunt one another—can, I think, help to nuance our sense of how those traditions are being put to use in differing English contexts and genres.

After singing her own lament on Boethius’s enervated state, Philosophy questions him: “‘Tune ille es,’ ait, ‘qui nostro quondam lacte nutritus nostris educatus alimentis in virilis animi robur evaseras?’” (“Tell me,” she asked, “are you the man whom once I nurtured with my milk and reared on my solid food until your mind attained full maturity?”33) (I, pr. 2). She soon recognizes that he “is suffering from a loss of energy” (lethargum patitur) and has “forgotten for the moment who he is”34 (Sui paulisper oblitus est) (I. pr. 2). Part of her task, then, is to repair his divided self and reawaken the manliness that Philosophy nurtured through her earlier maternal care. This passage has a powerful relation both to Troilus (of whom Pandarus asks “What! Slombrestow as in a litar-gie?” [I, 730; and see also I, 960–61]), and to Hoccleve’s sleep walking narrator, whose wits “fer goon hem to pleye” (105). The Boethian/Troilean suggestion of an unmanly, “feminized” or infantilized figure also resonates in the Regiment, since Hoccleve frequently connects his poverty and melancholy to images of sexual lack.35 Questioning him about the underlying reasons for his grief, the Old Man earlier links Hoccleve’s symptoms with three potential causes—wealth, poverty, and unrequited love:

“Now, goode sone, telle on thy grevance:What is thy cause of thoght in special?Haast thow of worldly goodes habundanceAnd carist how that it ykept be shal?Or art thow needy and hast nat but smal,And thristist sore a ryche man to be?Or lovest hire that nat loveth thee?”

(232–38)

Charles Blyth suggests Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, 746–48 and 1140–43, as a parallel for this part of the Regiment.36 There are certainly similari-ties between these passages in which a prospective counselor attempts to draw out a melancholy interlocutor. Perhaps the most suggestive parallel between the Book of the Duchess and the Regiment as a whole, though, is in

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the opening figure of the insomniac, melancholy poet-narrator, facing death:

For I have felynge in nothyng,But as yt were a mased thyng,Alway in poynt to falle a-doun;For sorwful ymaginaciounYs alway hooly in my mynde.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And I ne may, ne nyght ne morwe,Slepe; and thus melancolyeAnd drede I have for to dye.

(BD, 11–15, 22–24)

The Chaucerian narrator’s choice of a book to “rede and drive the night away” (49) is echoed by Hoccleve’s imagined role for his own text (Regiment, 2141), and Blyth cites certain other possible parallels and echoes (noted in my Appendix). This earlier Chaucerian dialogue relating to desire and loss does indeed provide an intriguing precedent for Hoccleve’s textual persona, dwelling on Fortune and communicating with the dead, and it enriches our reading of the Regiment’s Dialogue.37 The parallels, however, are neither close enough nor consistent enough to make large claims about the Regiment’s relationship to the Book of the Duchess, and the difference in form (octosyllabic couplets as opposed to rhyme royal stanzas) also limits the potential for verbal and intertextual resonances to develop. In the context of the earlier Troilean resonances, the Old Man’s suspicion that Hoccleve is lovelorn also chimes with Troilus and Criseyde : in effect, the Old Man raises the possibility that Hoccleve is a kind of Troilus, whose addled state is brought on by unrequited love. The question is soon subsumed into the Old Man’s warnings against “bisy thoght” and the dangers of heresy, channeling us away from love as the cause of Hoccleve’s melancholy (and thus, generically, away from romance or love vision), but the connections between poverty, sickness, and desire to speak to and for the royal body allow a tantalizing relationship between the poems to continue.38 Indeed, the Old Man’s comments on heresy echo the melancholy lover’s danger-ous questioning of Fate and the gods in the pagan context of Troilus and Criseyde, as when Troilus speaks through Boethius to voice his confusion in Book IV of Chaucer’s poem.39 In the Regiment the prospect that Hoccleve’s “thoght lurkynge thee withynne” (274) might lead to heresy and despair is raised only to be countered, but it nevertheless leaves an uncomfortable trace on the progress of the Dialogue. The Old Man, then, suspects that Hoccleve’s lack of “governance” (266) could be the result of love or lust

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(in the advice section of the poem, lustful desire is explicitly seen as a dan-ger to the integrity of the body politic). He later questions Hoccleve about his sex life, outlawing “lust for lust oonly” (1592). Aligning sex with that other generative and self-defining activity, writing, the Old Man echoes Troilus and Criseyde by warning Hoccleve’s alter ego that “Th’entente is al; be waar ay of folie” (1596; compare Troilus, V, 1630: “Th’entente is al, and nat the lettres space”).

That phrase from Troilus comes in Criseyde’s “straunge” (V, 1632) let-ter to Troilus, but it also has a general, proverbial force, so I do not want to make too much of its appearance here; Hoccleve’s use of it is as likely to be an unconscious reminiscence, or a shared use of a commonplace, as a deliberate adoption of Criseyde’s voice. Its appearance does, how-ever, press the wider question of Hoccleve’s relation to gendered roles. Does the Troilean and Boethian intertext contribute to a “feminized” Hocclevean persona? Hoccleve’s treatment of gender has become the subject of greater scrutiny recently. His playfully ironic gestures to the superiority of women in the final section of the Regiment, his complex reworking of Christine de Pisan in The Letter of Cupid, and his invocation of a threatening female audience in the Series, followed by the suffer-ing and sinful female protagonists in its later narratives, have provoked diverse readings.40 Recently, R. F. Yeager has proposed that Hoccleve’s personification of a female Death in the Regiment, 2080–2107, opens a window onto a gendered politics in the poem, seeking to promote a virile Chaucerian masculinity against the perceived effeteness of the courts both of Richard II and Henry IV. Yeager’s claim that the menacing Lady Death must be resisted by an explicitly manly rhetoric that co-opts Chaucer as its lineal guarantor is certainly thought-provoking, though his argument is weakened by claiming that this instance of Death as female is unique to the Regiment.41 By contrast, Andrew Lynch has argued that the “unusually active personality effect” in several of Hoccleve’s poems helps to establish a “clerkly counter-discourse to the norms of chivalric masculinity,” especially in Hoccleve’s admissions of cowardice; his “comi-cally impaired” indulgence in drinking, flirting, and profligate spending; and his garrulous speech.42 This approach is closer to Catherine Batt’s nuanced account of Hoccleve’s negotiations of gender, which draws attention to the shifting affiliations and subject-positions in his poetry.43 While it is plausible that Hoccleve wishes to promote a manly Chaucerian heritage that encompasses Chaucer’s “hy vertu” (1971) and orthodox piety in the Regiment, Hoccleve’s own textual persona is, I would argue, much less secure, exploiting at various moments poses such as melan-choly incapacity, clerkly admonition, and female unruliness.44

Nor is Hoccleve the only figure to shift roles in the Dialogue. The Old Man’s warning that in marital sex “Th’entente is al” appears to place

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him as an upholder of traditional morality, in contrast to Pandarus’s compromised position as Criseyde’s uncle and Troilus’s praeceptor amoris. Both, however, claim that though they might appear foolish, they should be listened to (Regiment, 400–417, and Troilus, I, 624–30; see Appendix), and the Old Man later has a confessional speech describing his own sinful youth:

“Whan I was yong, I was ful rechelees,Prowd, nyce, and riotous for the maistrie,And among othir, consciencelees.By that sette I nat the worth of a flie;And of hem hauntid I the conpaignieThat wente on pilgrimage to taverne,Which before unthrift berith the lanterne.

There offred I wel more than my tythe,And withdrow Holy Chirche his duetee.”

(610–18)

With its “conpaignie” that goes “on pilgrimage to taverne,” this passage echoes both the Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman B.5, where Glutton and his friends attend the tavern in a grotesque parody of the mass.45 Aside from these local reminiscences, however, the Old Man’s confes-sional history has a precursor in Pandarus, whose previous experience of “excesse” (I, 626) pressurizes the narrative of Troilus and Criseyde. At this point, the Old Man speaks from a persona close to the Hoccleve of the Male Regle, one whose earlier sinfulness has caused his poverty, but whose acknowledgment of past wrong provides the occasion for turning confession into complaint, advice, or petition.46 It is, of course, a pattern that is repeated in the Regiment itself, with Hoccleve plotting a move from melancholy outsider to (precariously) authoritative counselor. Other doppelgänger abound: does the paternal Old Man stand in for a nearly absent Henry IV, or for “father” Chaucer? Is Hoccleve, then, a shadow of Prince Henry in the Dialogue? How does Hoccleve’s personal lack of governance map onto the political body that he anatomizes in the Regiment proper?47 These multiplied relationships, split or doubled personae, and ventriloquized speakers may be read both through the symptoms of Hoccleve’s melancholy, and also through the poem’s drive to speculate, that is, to coin a currency of advice/money. Hoccleve claims, of course, that advice such as Aristotle’s (and, by implication, his own) is “wel bet than gold in cofre” (2040), and he later tells the story of John of Canace, who tricks his greedy relatives by staging his ownership of borrowed money, living off their self-interested generosity,

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and leaving them a chest containing not a hoard of coins, but an advi-sory text from beyond the grave. The equally profligate Hoccleve, at the margins of death and with a text of advice to offer, is also trying an alchemist’s trick of turning paper into gold, and he explicitly aligns himself with John of Canace’s predicament.48 Marx, in Derrida’s spectral reading, identifies a similar conjuring trick in the money economy and its discontents:

In his wild imaginings, in his nocturnal delirium (Hirngespinst), the miser, the hoarder, the speculator becomes a martyr to exchange-value. He now refrains from exchange because he dreams of a pure exchange. . . . The hoarder behaves then like an alchemist (alchimistisch), speculating on ghosts, the “elixir of life,” the “phi-losophers’ stone.”49

Both Hoccleve and John of Canace are presented as the opposite of the miser: the “fool large” (4361), the spendthrift, borrowing others’ cap-ital and voices in order to speculate, to invent a value for their text and life. And in the Regiment, as various readers have suggested, Chaucer is represented as a kind of gold standard in which Hoccleve can invest, can bring to life in order to shore up his own poetic resources. Yeager thus remarks on a “revivified” Chaucer in the Regiment, and on the portrait in MS Harley 4866 with its accompanying stanza (4992–98) making a “claim to virtual double identity” with Chaucer; James Simpson likewise com-ments that “the function of the portrait in the Hoccleve manuscript is indeed, on the face of it, to bring Chaucer back to a life of sorts,” and he later notes that Hoccleve “is clearly using Chaucer as a name with which to conjure.”50 One strand of imagery that I should like to emphasize in this passage and the accompanying portrait is the dual sense of rhetori-cal invention and generative value with which Hoccleve invests Chaucer, and which he by implication inhabits through Chaucer’s textual/spectral presence. Chaucer is the “firste fyndere of our fair langage” (4978), and Hoccleve’s stated aim is to allow those who have “lost thoght and mynde” (4997) of him, to “ageyn him fynde” (4998).51 The idea of Chaucer is here reminiscent of the mental faculties that had deserted Hoccleve early in the poem, when the Old Man tells him

“I fond thee soul and thy wittes echoneFer fro thee fled and disparpled ful wyde.”

(208–9)

Here an act of recollection is also called for, to “fynde” the Chaucer who has been “lost.” But Chaucer’s own status as “fyndere,” and Hoccleve’s

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prayer to the Virgin that his love should be allowed to “floure and fructifie” (4991), allow for another level of meaning: Chaucer the “fyndere” is also an inventor, and it is his rhetorical inventio that grants him ongoing value. By fynde [ing] Chaucer, Hoccleve is also rhetorically inventing Chaucer (and by extension, himself) as a textual and valuable presence, and he is hoping that, unlike at the opening of the poem, when “thoght lurkynge . . . withynne” (274) was an uncontrolled, debili-tating disease or incubus, giving rise to illegitimate “thoghtful” (81) off-spring, the renewed Chaucerian corpus will breed productive thoughts:

Whan a thyng depeynt isOr entaillid, if men take of it heede,Thoght of the liknesse it wole in hem breede.

(5003–5)

The situation is not stable, for soon after pouring his verbal resources into this high point of Chaucerian presence and surplus value, Hoccleve is reminding Prince Henry of his own dearth and empti-ness, paradoxically through deictic attention to the physical book he is composing:

More othir thyng wolde I fayn speke and toucheHeere in this book, but swich is my dulnesse,For that al voide and empty is my pouche,That al my lust is qweynt with hevynesse,And hevy spirit commandith stilnesse.

(5013–17)

In this passage of the Regiment, as elsewhere in Hoccleve’s writing, it is almost impossible to set the line between strategic (in)direction and confessional revelation; between the anxiety of influence and the pointed deployment of a literary trope. Here I think it is revealing to turn again to Derrida’s exploration of the ambiguity of the spectral prior author, which he approaches through the multivalence of the French word conjuration, and its English and German cognates. Derrida dwells on the “forever errant surplus value” that the word produces in the meanings that it gathers up:

1. Conjuration signifies, on the one hand, “conjuration” (its English homonym) which itself designates two things at once:a. On the one hand, the conspiracy (Verschwörung in German) of those who promise solemnly, sometimes secretly, by swearing together an oath (Schwur) to struggle against a superior power. . . .

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b. “Conjuration” signifies, on the other hand, the magical incantation designed to evoke, to bring forth the voice, to convoke a charm or spirit.52

After tracking a path for such meanings back through Marx to Shakespeare and then to Marx’s spectralizing of the money economy as itself a form of counterfeiting, Derrida returns to Marx’s struggle to fend off his own specters:

2. For “conjuration” means, on the other hand, “conjurement” (Beschwörung), namely, the magical exorcism that, on the con-trary, tends to expulse the evil spirit which would have been called up or convoked (OED: “the exorcising of spirits by invoca-tion,” “the exercise of magical or occult influence”).53

Hoccleve’s conjuration of Chaucer indeed arises as part of a compact between his alter ego and the Old Man, an agreement to write in the face of personal haunting, political anxiety, and the death of Chaucer. As Tolmie suggests, the identity of the Old Man melts back into that of Hoccleve himself at the end of the Dialogue, while Hoccleve’s textual presence, his chance to make a name for himself, is also, as we have seen, closely linked to the conjuration of Chaucer’s name in the Dialogue. That conjuration is imbued with fears of death, violence, and mortality, but the projected “vertu” (1971) of Chaucer (and, here, Gower) fends off Death for a while, an act of conjurement that allows the specter of the Old Man to sink out of sight, and enables Hoccleve to clear his mind of the “restlees bysynesse” (1) that had dominated the Dialogue.

One of the most striking characteristics of Chaucer’s poetry, which subsequent writers recreated to varying effect, is a self-deprecating authorial persona that promotes open-ended relationships between text, literary tradition, and audience—a persona that in Hoccleve’s hands becomes more urgent and autobiographical, one might say more Langlandian. A famous instance of this bookish reflection in Chaucer comes towards the end of Troilus and Criseyde :

But litel book, no makyng thow n’envie,But subgit be to alle poesye;And kis the steppes where as thow seest paceVirgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.

(V, 1789–92)

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Hoccleve appears to mimic, or even outdo Chaucer’s modesty topos in the Prologue to the Regiment proper, where he introduces his three Latin sources and claims:

For thogh I to the steppes clergialOf thise clerkes thre nat may atteyne,Yit for to putte in prees my conceit smal,Good wil me artith take on me the peyne.

(2150–53)54

Chaucer’s envoy, of course, goes on to ask of scribes and readers that “non myswrite the, / Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge” (V, 1795–96). The envoy form, in its incorporation of the modesty formula and claim to value, makes important demands on its readers, extending into the text’s afterlife (a busy one in the case of Troilus and Criseyde), and writing the author into that process.

At the end of the Regiment, Hoccleve returns to the possibilities for reflection and framing opened up by Chaucer’s “Go, litel bok” envoy (V, 1786); indeed, Hoccleve’s sensitivity to the “textualness” of his own writing makes the envoy an ideal vehicle for his combination of authorial anxiety and challenge—here suggested in the way that he asks and then answers his own question about the poem’s “har-dynesse”; in his own creation of and then reliance on the prince’s “humble pacience”; and in the immediate qualification of the text’s rhetorical nakedness to its having a plain (and thus honest and trust-worthy) “kirtil”:55

O litil book, who gaf thee hardynesseThy wordes to pronounce in the presenceOf kynges ympe and princes worthynesse,Syn thow al nakid art of eloquence?And why approchist thow his excellenceUnclothid sauf thy kirtil bare also?I am right seur his humble pacienceThee geveth hardynesse to do so.

(5440–47)

In this stanza, the first line’s question is echoed and answered in the last lines, completing a miniature circle of auto-authorizing, and draw-ing the princely reader into that circle as a “pacien[t]” reader. It is a

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process of connecting text, author, and reader that Hoccleve seems also to explore in the autumnal opening of his Series:

Aftir þat heruest inned had hise sheues,And that the broun sesoun of MihelmesseWas come, and gan the trees robbe of her leues,That grene had ben and in lusty freisshenesse,And hem into colour of 3elownesseHad died and doun throwen vndirfoote,That chaunge sanke into myn herte roote.

(Series, 1–7)56

Several readers have drawn attention to a possible echo of the Canterbury Tales here, replaying Chaucer’s springtime opening in a minor key in that move from “Whan that Aprill” to “Aftir þat heruest.”57 Another metaphor that colors this opening is the image of literary production as harvest, as in Chaucer’s Prologue to the Legend of Good Women:

For wel I wot that ye han her-bifornOf makyng ropen, and lad awey the corn,And I come after, glenyng here and there,And am ful glad yf I may fynde an ereOf any goodly word that ye han left.

(F 73–77)

Hoccleve’s opening to the Series, with its belatedness, its reworking of the harvest image, and its personal involvement (Hoccleve becomes another plant who is affected [perced, perhaps?] to the “roote”), might almost be read as a lament for the passing of Chaucer’s textual “licour.” The decline and fall of the leaves from “freisshnesse” paradoxically “fre-isshly brou3te . . . to my remembrance / That stablenesse in this worlde is ther noon” (Series, 8–9), in another Hocclevean shift from dearth to surplus, that is, from loss to memory and composition, initiating the Series’ poetic project of calling to mind Hoccleve’s textual self, via a proc-ess of recollection, dialogue, and compilation.58

For Hoccleve, then, Chaucer’s sometimes painful absence, sometimes revenant presence, work at these multiple levels, as a contributor to anxiety or lack, but also as an impetus to the development of Hoccleve’s own poetic identity, along with the comparable explorations of persona and authorial presence that Hoccleve encountered in Langland and Gower. If Hoccleve is haunted, then the ghost of father Chaucer is “gen-tle” as well as forbidding, and that wider textual hauntology proposed

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in Derrida’s reading of Marx can also provide a model for the shady intertextual relations between the Regiment and Troilus and Criseyde as they inhabit overlapping spaces, each changed by the other’s presence, and each spending time with the dying author, divided self, and thera-peutic dialogue of De consolatione Philosophiae ; in these texts, the spectral author certainly “(re)pays us a visit.”59

St Hugh’s College, University of OxfordOxford, United Kingdom([email protected])

APPENDIX

Chaucerian Parallels, Echoes, and Shared Proverbs in The Regiment of Princes

This appendix does not claim to be exhaustive, nor do I believe that every one of these parallels or echoes is a conscious reminiscence of Chaucer by Hoccleve; some are no doubt due to unconscious absorp-tion or simply a shared literary milieu. (Proverbial phrases are keyed to B. J. Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500 [Cambridge, Mass., 1968].) I discuss some of the most compelling parallels in the preceding article. I have also brought together here scattered references in editions and discussions of the poem, in order to inform debates around the extent and nature of Hoccleve’s poetic relationship with Chaucer’s works. I have divided the parallels into two groups: those relating to Troilus and Criseyde and those relating to other of Chaucer’s works. I use the abbreviations for Chaucer’s works listed in The Riverside Chaucer.

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A. T

he R

egim

ent o

f Pri

nces

and

Tro

ilus

and

Cri

seyd

e

The

Reg

imen

t of P

rinc

esT

roilu

s an

d C

rise

yde

15–7

0: F

ortu

ne

atta

cks

rich

an

d po

or

An

d h

ow in

boo

kes

thus

wri

ten

I f

ynde

,“T

he

wer

ste

kyn

de o

f w

recc

hid

nes

se is

A

man

to

han

bee

n w

elef

ul o

r th

is.”

(54

–56)

Usu

ally

glo

ssed

: “B

oeci

us d

e co

nso

lati

one

Philo

soph

iae;

max

imum

gen

us in

fort

unii

est f

uiss

e fe

licem

, &c.

” (B

oeth

ius,

The

Con

sola

tion

of

Philo

soph

y: T

he

wor

st k

ind

of m

isfo

rtun

e is

to h

ave

once

bee

n h

appy

, etc

.)

Woo

st t

how

nat

wel

th

at F

ortu

ne

is c

omun

eTo

eve

ri m

aner

e w

igh

t in

som

deg

ree?

(I,

843

–44;

W

hit

ing

F 52

4)

For

of f

ortu

nes

sh

arpe

adv

ersi

tee

Th

e w

orst

e ky

nde

of

info

rtun

e is

th

is,

A m

an t

o h

an b

en in

pro

sper

itee

,A

nd

it r

emem

bren

wh

an it

pas

sed

is. (

III,

162

5–28

;

Wh

itin

g I

41)

Wh

an t

o th

e th

ogh

tful

wig

ht

is t

old

a ta

le,

He

hee

rith

it a

s th

ogh

he

then

nes

wer

e (9

9–10

0)T

ho

wor

des

and

tho

wom

man

yssh

e th

ynge

s,Sh

e h

erde

hem

rig

ht

as t

hou

gh s

he

then

nes

wer

e (I

V, 6

94–

95

; cf.

V, 1

76–7

9)

Pass

e ov

er; w

han

th

is s

torm

y n

ygh

t w

as g

oon

An

d da

y ga

n a

t m

y w

yndo

we

in t

o pr

ye (

113–

14)

An

d Pa

nda

rus,

th

at le

dde

hir

e by

th

e la

ppe,

Com

ner

, an

d ga

n in

at

the

curt

yn p

ike.

(II

I, 5

9–60

)

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The

Reg

imen

t of P

rinc

esT

roilu

s an

d C

rise

yde

He

stir

te u

nto

me

and

seid

e, “

Slee

psto

w, m

an?

Aw

ake!

” an

d ga

n m

e sh

ake

won

dir

fast

e,A

nd

wit

h a

sig

h I

an

swer

de a

tte

last

e:

“A, w

ho

is t

her

e?”

“I,”

quo

d th

is o

lde

grey

e,“A

m h

eer,”

an

d h

e m

e to

lde

the

man

ere

How

he

spak

to

me,

as

yee

her

de m

e se

ye.

“O m

an,”

quo

d I,

“fo

r C

ryst

es lo

ve d

eere

, If

th

at t

how

wilt

agh

t do

on a

t m

y pr

ayee

re,

As

go t

hy

way

, tal

ke t

o m

e n

o m

ore;

T

hy

wor

des

alle

an

noy

en m

e fu

l sor

e.

“Voi

de f

ro m

e, m

e lis

t n

o co

npa

ign

ie.

En

cres

se n

at m

y gr

eef,

I h

ave

ynow

.” (

131–

42)

[Pan

daru

s] c

ryde

“A

wak

e!”

ful w

onde

rlic

h an

d sh

arpe

;“W

hat

! Sl

ombr

esto

w a

s in

a li

targ

ie?”

(I,

729

–30)

An

d w

ith

th

at w

ord

he

gan

hym

for

to

shak

e (I

, 869

)

But

nat

hel

es, w

han

he

had

de h

erd

hym

cry

e“A

wak

e!”

he

gan

to

syke

n w

onde

r so

ore,

A

nd

seyd

e, “

Fren

d, t

hou

gh t

hat

I s

tylle

lye,

I

am n

at d

eef.

Now

pee

s, a

nd

crye

nam

ore,

Fo

r I

hav

e h

erd

thi w

orde

s an

d th

i lor

e” (

I, 7

50–5

4)

But

for

th

e lo

ve o

f G

od, a

t m

y pr

eyin

ge,

Go

hen

nes

aw

ey; f

or c

erte

s m

y de

yin

geW

ol t

he

dise

se, a

nd

I m

ot n

edes

dey

e;T

herf

ore

go w

ey, t

her

is n

a m

ore

to s

eye.

(I,

571

–74)

Pluk

ke u

p th

yn h

erte

—I

hop

e I

shal

th

ee c

ure

(161

).I

hop

e of

th

is t

o m

aken

a g

ood

ende

. (I,

973

)

Th

e B

ook

seit

h t

hus

—I

redd

e it

yor

e ag

oon

: “W

o be

to

him

th

at li

st t

o be

en a

llon

e,

For

if h

e fa

lle, h

elp

ne

hat

h h

e n

oon

To r

yse.

” (2

04–7

)

Th

e w

ise

seit

h, “

Wo

hym

th

at is

allo

ne

For,

and

he

falle

, he

hat

h n

on h

elpe

to

ryse

” (I

, 694

–95;

W

hit

ing

W 4

34)

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Page 23: Haunted Hoccleve - The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, And Conversations With the Dead

The

Reg

imen

t of P

rinc

esT

roilu

s an

d C

rise

yde

232–

66: O

ld M

an u

rges

Hoc

clev

e to

spe

ak a

bout

his

mel

anch

oly

[A b

egga

r] n

e le

ttit

h f

or n

o sh

ame

His

har

mes

an

d h

is p

over

t to

byw

reye

To

folk

as

they

goo

n by

him

in th

e w

eye.

(25

0–52

)

Rig

ht

so, i

f th

ee li

st h

ave

a re

med

ie

Of

thyn

an

noy

th

at p

rikk

ith

th

ee s

o sm

erte

,T

he

verr

ay c

ause

of

thyn

hid

mal

adie

T

how

moo

t des

keve

re a

nd te

lle o

ut a

l thy

n he

rte.

(260

–63)

Hid

nat

thi w

o fr

o m

e, b

ut te

lle it

bly

ve. (

I, 59

5)

Th

erfo

re, a

s fr

end,

ful

lich

in m

e as

sure

, A

nd

tel m

e pl

at w

hat

is t

h’e

nch

esou

n

An

d fi

nal

cau

se o

f w

o th

at y

e en

dure

(I,

680

–82)

Th

e be

ste

is t

hat

th

ow t

elle

me

al t

hi w

o;

An

d h

ave

my

trou

the,

but

th

ow it

fyn

de s

oI

be t

hi b

oote

, er

that

it b

e fu

l lon

ge,

To p

iece

s do

me

draw

e an

d si

then

hon

ge!

(I, 8

30–3

3)

For

wh

oso

list

hav

e h

elyn

g of

his

lech

e,

To h

ym b

yhov

eth

fir

st u

nw

re h

is w

own

de. (

I, 8

57–5

8;

Wh

itin

g L

173

)

Un

wys

is h

e th

at b

isy

thog

ht

ne

dred

ith

.In

wh

om t

hat

he

his

mor

tel v

enym

sh

edit

h,

But

if a

vom

yt a

ftir

fol

we

blyv

e,

At

the

port

of

desp

eir

he

may

arr

yve.

(27

0–73

)

God

wol

d I

wer

e ar

yved

in t

he

port

Of

deth

, to

wh

ich

my

sorw

e w

ol m

e le

de!

(I, 5

26–2

7)

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Page 24: Haunted Hoccleve - The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, And Conversations With the Dead

The

Reg

imen

t of P

rinc

esT

roilu

s an

d C

rise

yde

Th

y sa

vour

yit

ful

sm

al is

, as

I tr

owe,

But

or

agh

t lo

nge

I s

hal

th

e so

oth

e kn

owe.

(39

8–99

)T

han

th

ough

t h

e th

us: “

If I

my

tale

en

dite

Aug

ht

har

de, o

r m

ake

a pr

oces

an

y w

hyl

e,Sh

e sh

al n

o sa

vour

hav

e th

erin

but

lite

” (I

I, 2

67–6

9)

407–

13: t

he

Old

Man

cla

ims

that

wis

dom

is c

once

aled

un

der

a po

or a

ppea

ran

ce

An

d lik

ly t

hat

th

ou d

eem

est

for

folie

Is g

rett

er w

ysda

m t

han

th

ow c

anst

esp

ie. (

412–

13)

See

also

610

–749

: Old

Man

’s y

outh

ful e

xces

ses

“Ye,

Tro

ilus,

now

her

ke,”

quo

d Pa

nda

re;

“Th

ough

I b

e n

yce,

it h

appe

th o

ften

so,

Th

at o

on t

hat

exc

esse

dot

h f

ul y

vele

far

eB

y go

od c

oun

seil

kan

kep

e h

is f

ren

d th

erfr

o.I

hav

e m

ysel

f ek

sey

n a

bly

nd

man

goo

Th

er a

s h

e fe

l th

at c

outh

e lo

ken

wid

e;A

foo

l may

ek

a w

is-m

an o

fte

gide

.” (

I, 6

24–3

0; W

hit

ing

F

404)

But

her

e, w

ith

al m

yn h

erte

, I t

he

bise

che

Th

at n

ever

e in

me

thow

dem

e sw

ich

fol

ie (

III,

393

–94)

687f

f.C

ompa

re T

r, V

, 218

–21;

167

4–76

Th

e bl

ynde

man

of

colo

urs

al w

ron

g de

emet

h. (

994)

A b

lyn

d m

an k

an n

at ju

ggen

wel

in h

ewis

. (II

, 21;

Wh

itin

g

M 5

0)

1252

Com

pare

Tr,

IV,

158

6–7;

CT

, I 3

041–

42 (

Wh

itin

g V

43)

Th

’en

ten

te is

al;

be w

aar

ay o

f fo

lie. (

1596

)T

h’e

nte

nte

is a

l, an

d n

at t

he

lett

res

spac

e. (

V, 1

630)

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Page 25: Haunted Hoccleve - The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, And Conversations With the Dead

The

Reg

imen

t of P

rinc

esT

roilu

s an

d C

rise

yde

Styn

tyn

ge c

ause

, th

’eff

ect

styn

tith

eek

(16

60)

[f

requ

entl

y gl

osse

d: “

cess

ante

cau

sa”]

But

ces

se c

ause

, ay

cess

eth

mal

adie

. (II

, 483

; Whi

ting

C

121)

“Alt

hog

h t

how

sey

e th

at t

how

in L

atyn

Ne

in F

ren

ssh

e n

eith

ir c

anst

but

sm

al e

ndy

te,

In E

ngl

issh

ton

ge c

anst

ow w

el a

fyn

.”“F

adir

, th

erof

can

I e

ek b

ut a

lyte

.”“Y

ee, s

traw

! L

et b

e! T

hy

pen

ne

take

an

d w

ryte

As

thow

can

st”

(187

0–75

)

“How

myg

hte

I t

han

don

,” q

uod

Troi

lus,

“To

know

e of

th

is, y

ee, w

ere

it n

ever

e so

lite

?”

“Now

sey

stow

wis

ly,”

quo

d th

is P

anda

rus;

“M

y re

d is

th

is: s

yn t

how

kan

st w

el e

ndi

te,

Th

at h

asti

ly a

lett

re t

how

hir

e w

rite

” (V

, 128

9–93

)

“Sw

ich

thyn

g tr

ansl

ate

and

unto

his

hyn

esse

, A

s h

umbl

ely

as t

hat

th

ow c

anst

, pre

sen

te.

Do

thus

, my

son

e.”

“Fad

ir, I

ass

ente

.” (

1951

–53)

“Thu

s se

y w

ith a

l thy

n he

rte

in g

ood

ente

nte.

”Q

uod

Troi

lus,

“A

, lor

d! I

me

con

sen

te”

(I, 9

35–3

6)

Do

that

I s

eye,

an

d la

t m

e th

erw

ith

gon

(II

, 105

2)

Quo

d Tr

oilu

s, “

Dep

ardi

eux,

ich

ass

ente

!” (

II, 1

058)

With

her

te a

s tr

embl

yng

as th

e le

ef o

f asp

(19

54)

Rig

ht

as a

n a

spes

leef

sh

e ga

n t

o qu

ake

(III

, 120

0)

(See

als

o L

GW

, 264

8; S

umT

, III

166

7; W

hit

ing

A 2

16.)

CR43.2_01Perkins.indd 126CR43.2_01Perkins.indd 126 9/6/08 11:04:26 AM9/6/08 11:04:26 AM

Page 26: Haunted Hoccleve - The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, And Conversations With the Dead

The

Reg

imen

t of P

rinc

esT

roilu

s an

d C

rise

yde

Rec

ordy

ng

in m

y m

ynde

th

e le

ssou

nT

hat

he

me

yaf,

I h

oom

to

met

e w

ente

. (20

10–1

1)

I to

ok c

orag

e, a

nd

wh

yles

it w

as h

oot,

Un

to m

y lo

rd t

he

Prin

ce t

hus

I w

root

(20

15–1

6;

com

pare

Wh

itin

g I

60)

Lay

al t

his

men

e w

hile

Tro

ilus,

R

ecor

dyn

g h

is le

sson

in t

his

man

ere

(III

, 50–

51)

An

d as

I a

m a

vyse

d so

deyn

ly,

So w

ol I

tel

le y

ow, w

hil

it is

hoo

t. (I

V, 1

262–

63)

Nat

hel

ees,

sw

ich

as

is m

y sm

al k

onn

ynge

,W

ith

als

o tr

eew

e an

her

te, I

wol

e it

out

e (2

066–

67)

An

d I,

em

fort

h m

y co

nn

yng

and

my

mig

ht,

Hav

e an

d ay

sh

al, h

ow s

ore

that

me

smer

te,

Ben

to

yow

tre

we

and

hoo

l wit

h a

l myn

her

te (

III,

999

1001

)

Th

e st

eppe

s of

Vir

gile

in p

oesi

eT

how

fol

wed

ist

eek.

(20

89–9

0)B

ut s

ubgi

t be

to

alle

poe

sye;

A

nd

kis

the

step

pes

wh

ere

as t

how

see

st p

ace

Vir

gile

, Ovi

de, O

mer

, Luc

an, a

nd

Stac

e. (

V, 1

790–

92)

2091

Com

pare

Tr,

IV,

279

For

thog

h I

to

the

step

pes

cler

gial

Of

this

e cl

erke

s th

re n

at m

ay a

ttey

ne

(215

0–51

)A

nd

kis

the

step

pes

wh

ere

as t

how

see

st p

ace

Vir

gile

, Oui

de, O

mer

, Luc

an, a

nd

Stac

e. (

V, 1

791–

92)

3134

Tr, I

I, 1

461

(com

pare

Wh

itin

g L

301

)

4223

Com

pare

Tr,

III

, 616

5448

–51

Com

pare

Tr,

V, 1

863–

64

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Page 27: Haunted Hoccleve - The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, And Conversations With the Dead

B. S

ugge

sted

Par

alle

ls a

nd E

choe

s be

twee

n th

e R

egim

ent a

nd O

ther

Wor

ks b

y C

hauc

er

The

Reg

imen

t of P

rinc

esC

hauc

er

[Th

ogh

t] M

y m

azid

hee

d sl

eepl

ees

han

of

kon

nyn

geA

nd

wit

des

poill

id (

110–

11)

For

I h

ave

fely

nge

in n

oth

yng,

B

ut a

s yt

wer

e a

mas

ed t

hyn

g,

Alw

ay in

poy

nt

to f

alle

a-d

oun

(B

D, 1

1–13

)

Pass

e ov

er; w

han

th

is s

torm

y n

ygh

t w

as g

oon

(11

3)Pa

sse

we

over

un

till

eft

(BD

, 41)

I ro

os m

e up

, for

boo

te f

ond

I n

oon

In m

yn u

nre

sty

bed

len

ger

to ly

e. (

115–

16)

An

d ye

t m

y bo

ote

is n

ever

th

e n

er (

BD

, 38)

By

that

I w

alki

d h

adde

a c

erte

yn t

yme,

Wer

e it

an

hou

r I

not

, or

mor

e or

less

e,A

poo

re o

ld h

oor

man

cam

wal

kyn

ge b

y m

e,

An

d se

ide,

“G

ood

day,

sir

e, a

nd

God

yow

ble

sse!

” B

ut I

no

wor

d, f

or m

y se

ekly

dis

tres

seFo

rbad

myn

ere

s us

en h

ir o

ffic

e (1

20–2

5)

I st

alke

d ev

en u

nto

hys

bak

,A

nd

ther

e I

stoo

d as

sti

lle a

s ou

ght,

Th

at, s

oth

to

saye

, he

saw

me

nou

ght;

For-

wh

y h

e h

eng

his

hed

ado

un,

An

d w

ith

a d

edly

sor

wfu

l sou

n

He

mad

e of

rym

ten

ver

s or

tw

elve

O

f a

com

pley

nte

to

hym

selv

e (B

D, 4

58–6

4)

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Page 28: Haunted Hoccleve - The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, And Conversations With the Dead

The

Reg

imen

t of P

rinc

esC

hauc

er

Old

Man

’s a

ttem

pt t

o co

unse

l Hoc

clev

eB

ut, s

ir, o

o th

yng

wol

ye

her

e?

Mr

thyn

keth

in g

ret

soro

we

I yo

w s

ee;

But

cer

tes,

sir

e, y

if t

hat

yee

W

olde

oug

ht

disc

ure

me

your

e w

oo,

I w

olde

, as

wys

God

hel

pe m

e so

o,

Am

ende

hyt

, yif

I k

an o

r m

ay.

Ye m

owe

prev

e h

yt b

e as

say;

Fo

r, by

my

trou

the,

to

mak

e yo

w h

ool

I w

ol d

o al

my

pow

er h

ool.

An

d te

lleth

me

of y

our

sorw

es s

mer

te;

Para

unte

r h

yt m

ay e

se y

oure

her

te,

Th

at s

emet

h f

ul s

ek u

nde

r yo

ur s

yde.

(B

D, 5

46–5

7)

He

stir

te u

nto

me

and

seid

e, “

Slee

psto

w, m

an?

Aw

ake!

” an

d ga

n m

e sh

ake

won

dir

fast

e,

An

d w

ith

a s

igh

I a

nsw

erde

att

e la

ste:

“A, w

ho

is t

her

e?”

“I,”

quo

d th

is o

lde

grey

e,“A

m h

eer”

(13

1–35

)

Th

is m

essa

ger

com

fle

ynge

fas

te

An

d cr

ied,

“O

, how

! A

wak

e an

oon

!”

Hit

was

for

nog

ht;

ther

e h

erde

hym

non

. “A

wak

e!”

quod

he,

“w

hoo

ys

lyth

th

ere?

” (B

D, 1

78–8

1)

“Wh

y sl

epis

t th

ou, w

han

ne

thou

sh

ulde

wak

e?”

Quo

d Sh

ame;

“T

hou

doi

st u

s vy

lan

ye!”

(R

om, 4

008–

9)

CR43.2_01Perkins.indd 129CR43.2_01Perkins.indd 129 9/6/08 11:04:26 AM9/6/08 11:04:26 AM

Page 29: Haunted Hoccleve - The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, And Conversations With the Dead

The

Reg

imen

t of P

rinc

esC

hauc

er

Tho

w d

oost

me

mor

e an

noy

than

that

thow

wee

nest

.G

ood

man

, tho

w w

oost

but

litil

wha

t tho

w m

eene

st.

(1

70, 1

73)

Th

ou w

ost

ful l

ytel

wh

at t

hou

men

est;

I h

ave

lost

mor

e th

an t

how

wen

est.

(BD

, 743

–44)

Now

, goo

de s

one,

tel

le o

n t

hy

grev

ance

:W

hat

is t

hy

caus

e of

th

ogh

t in

spe

cial

?H

aast

th

ow o

f w

orld

ly g

oode

s h

abun

dan

ceA

nd

cari

st h

ow t

hat

it y

kept

be

shal

?O

r ar

t th

ow n

eedy

an

d h

ast

nat

but

sm

al,

An

d th

rist

ist

sore

a r

ych

e m

an t

o be

?O

r lo

vest

hir

e th

at n

at lo

veth

th

ee?

(232

–38)

Goo

d si

r, te

lle m

e al

hoo

ly

In w

hat

wys

e, h

ow, w

hy,

an

d w

her

fore

T

hat

ye

hav

e th

us y

oure

bly

sse

lore

. (B

D, 7

46–4

8)

Nyl

sh

e n

ot lo

ve y

ow?

Ys h

yt s

oo?

Or

hav

e ye

ogh

t do

on a

mys

, T

hat

sh

e h

ath

left

yow

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Notes

For help and advice at various stages in writing this article, I am very grateful to Mishtooni Bose, James Simpson, Tony Spearing, and the editors and anonymous readers for The Chaucer Review. 1. Discussions of the Chaucer portrait include James H. McGregor, “The Iconography of Chaucer in Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principum and the Troilus Frontispiece,” Chaucer Review 11 (1977): 338–50; Jeanne E. Krochalis, “Hoccleve’s Chaucer Portrait,” Chaucer Review 21 (1986): 234–45; David R. Carlson, “Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait,” Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991): 283–300; Derek Pearsall, “Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes : The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation,” Speculum 69 (1994): 386–410, at 402–3; Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park, Pa., 2001), 119–24; and Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s “Regiment of Princes”: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, U.K., 2001), 117–21 and plate 2. 2. See, for example, A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 92–110; Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 298–322; John M. Bowers, “The House of Chaucer & Son: The Business of Lancastrian Canon-Formation,” Medieval Perspectives 6 (1991): 135–43; Ethan Knapp, “Eulogies and Usurpations: Hoccleve and Chaucer Revisited,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 247–73 (a revised version of which also appears in his The Bureaucratic Muse, 107–27). 3. This has been a burgeoning field for some time now. On Hoccleve and Lydgate, see, for example, Lee Patterson, “Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate,” in Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds, eds., New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History (Princeton, 1993), 69–107; Pearsall, “Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes ”; James Simpson, “‘Dysemol dais and fatal houres’: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” in Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone, eds., The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford, 1997), 15–33; Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation (New Haven, 1998); Paul Strohm, “Hoccleve, Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court,” in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, U.K., 1999), 640–61; Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse ; Perkins, Hoccleve’s “Regiment of Princes” ; Scott-Morgan Straker, “Deference and Difference: Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Siege of Thebes,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 52 (2001): 1–21; Nicholas Perkins, “Representing Advice in Lydgate,” in Jenny Stratford, ed., The Lancastrian Court: Proceedings of the 2001 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington, Lincolnshire, 2003), 173–91; Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, U.K., 2005); Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s “Fall of Princes”: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford, 2005); James Simpson and Larry Scanlon, eds., John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (Notre Dame, 2006); Robert Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, U.K., 2007); and Jenni Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, U.K., 2007). 4. Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1999). All quotations of Regiment are taken from this edition and cited by line number in the text. 5. Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century Poetic (Urbana, Ill., 1968), 110–23, at 122. Mitchell was skeptical of Hoccleve’s claims to have known Chaucer well enough to claim him as his “maistir” and “fadir,” and some readers have followed his lead in downplaying their personal connection. However, as John Burrow points out in his invaluable biography, Hoccleve’s claims to have known Chaucer are entirely plausible (J. A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve [Aldershot, 1994], 10). Recent important

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research by Linne Mooney has also brought to light the fact that Hoccleve himself wrote a document dated November 9, 1399, under Henry IV’s Privy Seal, ordering the Exchequer to pay Chaucer ten pounds arrears of the annuity Chaucer was granted under Richard II, and thus confirming the continuation of this annuity under the new regime (Kew, National Archives E 404/15/62). This document strengthens evidence for the personal connection between the two men; see Linne R. Mooney, “Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 293–340. I am very grateful to Professor Mooney for showing me her essay before publication. 6. J. A. Burrow, “Hoccleve and Chaucer,” in Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds., Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge, U.K., 1990), 54–61, at 59. 7. Burrow, “Hoccleve and Chaucer,” 59. Burrow lists a handful of reminiscences from Chaucer’s shorter poems in the Regiment (61n22). 8. John M. Bowers, “Thomas Hoccleve and the Politics of Tradition,” Chaucer Review 36 (2002): 352–69, at 361. 9. An acute reading of Hoccleve’s Male Regle that does take account of its Chaucerian “pre-text” appears in Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, 110–20. 10. See, for example, Paul Strohm, “Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Writers as Readers of Chaucer,” in Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds., Genres, Themes and Images in English Literature, from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century (Tübingen, 1988), 90–104; Marion Turner, “‘Certaynly His Noble Sayenges Can I Not Amende’: Thomas Usk and Troilus and Criseyde,” Chaucer Review 37 (2002): 26–39; John M. Bowers, “Three Readings of the Knight’s Tale : Sir John Clanvowe, Geoffrey Chaucer, and James I of Scotland,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 279–307; Richard Axton, “Gower—Chaucer’s Heir?,” in Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds., Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge, U.K., 1990), 21–38; R. F. Yeager, ed., Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange (Victoria, B.C., 1991); May Newman Hallmundson, “Chaucer’s Circle: Henry Scogan and his Friends,” Medievalia et Humanistica 10 (1981): 129–39. 11. In this sense, “dwelling with” sounds some of the resonances of the Latin word conversatio, which in medieval usage can mean ‘intercourse, association,’ ‘habitation, dwell-ing,’ and ‘manner of life’; see Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (London, 1975–), s.v. conversatio. The root verb, verso, also has a significant amount of play in its meanings, implying both movement (hence ‘twist, turn’), and also the way in which repeated or confined movement suggests stasis (‘dwell, settle, live’). This range is present in the Middle English conversacioun, whose meanings the MED classifies as: 1. ‘manner of living; conduct; behavior’; 2. a) ‘association or communication’; b) ‘mating’; 3. ‘the place where one lives or dwells, whether physically or spiritually; habitat, dwelling place.’ It thus reflects something of the flexible and interdependent relationships that intertextual read-ing can develop. 12. Tr, I, 358. All quotations from Chaucer’s works are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Boston, 1987). 13. Mary Ruth Pryor, “Thomas Hoccleve’s Series : An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V. iii. 9,” Ph.D. diss. (UCLA, 1968), 44. Pryor follows Frederick J. Furnivall’s edition (Hoccleve’s Works III: The Regement of Princes, EETS e.s. 72 [London, 1897]) in misleadingly calling the Old Man a beggar. I do not mean to imply here that Hoccleve presents himself as particularly young in the Regiment (indeed he says that he has lived and worked in the Privy Seal for nearly twenty-four years). However, he describes his interlocutor as a “poore old hoor man” (122), and the Old Man calls him “yong” (146); their relationship thus parallels Tr ’s conversational dynamic. 14. Sarah Tolmie, “The Prive Scilence of Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 281–309, at 294. Tolmie cites two textual parallels and comments that “Pandarus’s description of the fragmentary state of Troilus as ‘he that departed is in everi

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place / [and who] is nowhere hol’ (TC 1. 960–1) could be a description of the Hoccleve narrator” (294n20). 15. Pandarus calls Troilus “thow fol” (I, 618) for keeping quiet about his love-sickness instead of asking for help from his more experienced friend. For Chaucer’s style in Tr, see Barry Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford, 1992), 314–59, especially his discussion of “the quickening pulse, the authentic accents, of gossip and sheer chat” (321), interleaved with the poem’s more elevated discourses. As Windeatt notes, Pandarus and Troilus nearly always address one another in the familiar thow form, “apart from a few moments of grave conjuration (i. 682–4; iv. 596–7; v. 496)” (319). Another characteristic of the verbal art of Tr is the resonance of different discourses within a word or phrase, such as Troilus’s claim that for the most diligent of love’s servants, “Hym tit as often harm therof as prow” (I, 333). “Prow” can mean both honor and tangible reward. In our passage, Hoccleve develops the Regiment ’s frequent interplay between images of paradoxical lack and excess in “Voide fro me . . . / Encresse nat my greef, I have ynow” (141–42), and the Old Man’s phrase “Wirke aftir me: it shal be for thy prow” (145) likewise evokes spiritual and financial benefits; see MED, s.v. prou (n.), meanings 1 and 2. For Hoccleve’s pecuniary discourses, see, for exam-ple, Perkins, Hoccleve’s “Regiment,” 39–49, and Robert Meyer-Lee, “Thomas Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money,” Exemplaria 13 (2001): 173–214. For an assessment of Hoccleve’s overall linguistic debt to Chaucer, see Simon Horobin, The Language of the Chaucer Tradition (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), 118–25. Horobin suggests that “Perhaps the most likely explana-tion for the close relationship between Hoccleve’s and Chaucer’s linguistic practices is that Hoccleve deliberately modelled his practice upon that of Chaucer” (124). 16. I would not want to place too much weight on this phrase, as it or something like it occurs elsewhere, for example in line 421 of the Auchinleck version of Sir Orfeo (ed. A. J. Bliss, 2nd edn. [Oxford, 1966]), but the parallels in the scenarios here are also suggestive. 17. Hoccleve, of course, explicitly cites Gower as his other “maistir” (1975), and the Regiment ’s mingling of autobiographical personae and exemplary narratives owes much to the Confessio Amantis, while the influence of Langland is also evident in Hoccleve’s wandering, questioning, “thoghty” persona. On Hoccleve’s relationship to Gower and Langland, see, for example, Charles R. Blyth, “Thomas Hoccleve’s Other Master,” Mediaevalia 16 (1993): 349–59; and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” in Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds., Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship (Philadelphia, Pa., 1997), 67–143, at 84–85, 117–18. 18. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1973). Paul de Man’s review essay on Bloom’s book is helpful here (“Appendix A: Review of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence,” in Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn. [London, 1983], 267–76). De Man challenges what he sees as Bloom’s reliance on “a linear scheme that engenders a highly familiar set of historical fallacies” (272), and suggests how Bloom’s propositions might have force along other lines of connection apart from the temporal, and other levels of analysis apart from those based on individual authors or whole texts: “If we are willing to set aside the trappings of psychol-ogy, Bloom’s essay has much to say on the encounter between latecomer and precursor as a displaced version of the paradigmatic encounter between reader and text” (273, and compare 276). For discussions that do significantly draw on Oedipal or competitive mod-els of poetic responses to Chaucer, see, for example, A. C. Spearing, “Renaissance Chaucer and Father Chaucer,” English: The Journal of the English Association 34 (1985): 1–38; Nicholas Watson, “Outdoing Chaucer: Lydgate’s Troy Book and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid as Competitive Imitations of Troilus and Criseyde,” in Karen Pratt, ed., Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Dr Elspeth Kennedy (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 89–108; and Knapp, “Eulogies and Usurpations.”

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19. See, for example, Michael Riffaterre, “Compulsory Reader Response: The Intertextual Drive,” in Michael Worton and Judith Still, eds., Intertextuality: Theories and Practices (Manchester, U.K., 1990), 56–78. Riffaterre claims the reader’s desire to seek out the intertext as a powerful force in textual response, and one could read Hoccleve’s invo-cations of Chaucer in the Regiment as a staging or embodiment of this reflex. 20. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994), 48. 21. Helen Swift, Gender, Writing, and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France (1440–1538) (Oxford, 2008), 18–99. I am very grateful to Dr. Swift for discussing this issue with me and showing me her insightful work before publication, which alerted me to Specters of Marx. 22. On a comparable move from solitary complaint to socialized dialogue in Hoccleve’s Series, see David Mills, “The Voices of Thomas Hoccleve,” in Catherine Batt, ed., Essays on Thomas Hoccleve (London, 1996), 85–107; James Simpson, “Madness and Texts: Hoccleve’s Series,” in Julia Boffey and Janet Cowan, eds., London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1991), 15–29; and Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 175–80. 23. Boethius, The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (Cambridge, Mass., 1918; repr. 1978), Bk. I m.1, 9–22. All subsequent citations will be from this edition, incorporated into the text. 24. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford, 1999), 3. Where noted, the translations are those of Walsh; otherwise, they are my own. 25. For Boethian connections in Regiment manuscripts, see Perkins, Hoccleve’s “Regiment,” 180–81. No glosses to Boethius are noted at I, 857–58, in Tr manuscripts by C. David Benson and Barry Windeatt, “The Manuscript Glosses to Chaucer’s Troilus and Crieyde,” Chaucer Review 25 (1990): 33–53. For further discussion of Tr annotation, see Julia Boffey, “Annotation in Some Manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 3 (1995): 1–17. 26. Tolmie, “Prive Scilence,” 294n20. For notions of desire and the relationship between poet and prince, viewed through a Lacanian framework, see Anthony J. Hasler, “Hoccleve’s Unregimented Body,” Paragraph 13 (1990): 164–83. For the later use of Pandarus as a paradigm for the flattering courtier, see Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge, U.K., 1997). 27. See Turner, “Certaynly His Noble Sayenges.” Usk reframes Tr ’s language of sexual desire to match his apparently spiritualized object in the Testament, but as Turner points out, Usk’s own desires encompass political advancement, not simply idealized love or Boethian consolation: “At times, Usk explicitly stresses the idea that his aims are purely spiritual . . . However, as Usk is writing to further his political career . . . the political and the spiritual become tangled” (31). On Chaucer’s own refiguring of Boethian material within an amatory frame in Tr, see, for example, Jill Mann, “Chance and Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale,” in Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), 93–111; and Helen Phillips, “Fortune and the Lady: Machaut, Chaucer and the Intertextual ‘Dit,’ ” Nottingham French Studies 38 (1999): 120–36, at 124–25. 28. Simpson, “Nobody’s Man”; Simpson’s powerful reading of the Regiment is reframed in his Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002), 204–14. Knapp also pays close attention to the Boethian intertext in his discussion of consolation in the Regiment (The Bureaucratic Muse, 93–106). Knapp reads Hoccleve as presenting an especially acute and anxious version of the “Boethian subject” (99), and argues that “[Hoccleve’s] dia-logue is never allowed to pass into consolation” (98). This is a rich account of Hoccleve’s relations with the Boethian intertext, though I differ somewhat from Knapp in placing more weight on the generative possibilities in Hoccleve’s Boethianism, and I would not

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read as much “stability of genre and of subject” (100) in Boethius’s own persona as Knapp does. For a valuable reading of Gower’s and Chaucer’s own responses to Boethius, see Winthrop Wetherbee, “Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Chaucer, Gower, and the Boethian Tradition,” in R. F. Yeager, ed., Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange (Victoria, B.C., 1991), 7–35. Wetherbee suggests, for example, that the interplay between Latin and English in Gower’s CA parallels Boethius’s dialogism (9). Hoccleve’s interplay between apparently spoken, marginal dialogue and written, authoritative advice-text might also be read via this Boethian (and Gowerian) trajectory, along with Hoccleve’s more local Boethian dramatis personae of advice-giver and writer in trouble in the Regiment’s Dialogue. Various kinds of reflective interplay between the Dialogue and Regiment proper are discussed, for example, in Anna Torti, The Glass of Form: Mirroring Structures from Chaucer to Skelton (Cambridge, U.K., 1991), 87–106; Hasler, “Hoccleve’s Unregimented Body,” 164–83; and Perkins, Hoccleve’s “Regiment,” 137–50. 29. Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae, Book I, prosa 1. 30. In John Walton’s early fifteenth-century translation of Boethius, which appears alongside the Regiment in two manuscripts, Walton includes a biographical prologue, which paints Boethius as an active political figure who criticized Theodoric’s tyranny. Theodoric’s subsequent death and damnation are also prominently described, helping to recuperate the Consolation as a speculum principis whose effects reach into the politi-cal sphere. See Mark Science, ed., Boethius: De Consolatione Philosophiae, Translated by John Walton, EETS o.s. 170 (London, 1927), 4–12. See also Seth Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in The Consolation of Philosophy (Princeton, 1985), 94–110, for a reading that focuses on the development of educative speech and a move towards “reasoned elo-quence” (94) in the early part of the Consolation. 31. See Tim Armstrong, Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (Basingstoke, 2000), 8–29, for the effects created in Hardy’s work by a poetic voice haunting his/her own poem. 32. Perkins, Hoccleve’s “Regiment,” 137–50. On secrecy in Tr, see Barry Windeatt, “‘Love That Oughte Ben Secree’ in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Chaucer Review 14 (1979): 116–31. 33. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Walsh, 5–6. 34. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Walsh, 6. 35. For a reading of shifting gender balance in Tr, and the implications of Troilus as a “feminized” figure, see Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), 101–11 and 165–85. 36. Blyth, ed., Regiment of Princes, 205; see Appendix. 37. For discussion of melancholy narrators in texts of this period, including the French dit tradition on which both Chaucer and Hoccleve draw, see Lynn Dunlop, “Cities without Walls: The Politics of Melancholy from Machaut to Lydgate,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Cambridge, 1998). 38. Compare Turner, “Certaynly His Noble Sayenges,” for the ways in which Usk adapts amatory language from Tr for personal and political uses. 39. This move is, of course, mirrored and intensified in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. See Jill Mann, “The Planetary Gods in Chaucer and Henryson,” in Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds., Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge, U.K., 1990), 91–106. 40. See, for example, Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler, eds., Poems of Cupid, God of Love: Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre au dieu d’Amours” and “Dit de la rose,” Thomas Hoccleve’s “The Letter of Cupid”: Editions and Translations, with George Sewell’s “The Proclamation of Cupid” (Leiden, 1990); Anna Torti, “Hoccleve’s Attitude Towards Women: ‘I shoop me do my peyne and diligence / To wynne her loue by obedience,’” in Juliette Dor, ed.,

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A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck (Liège, 1992), 264–74; Catherine Batt, “Hoccleve and . . . Feminism? Negotiating Meaning in The Regiment of Princes,” in Catherine Batt, ed., Essays on Thomas Hoccleve (London, 1996), 55–84; and Ruth Nissé, “‘Oure Fadres Olde and Modres’: Gender, Heresy, and Hoccleve’s Literary Politics,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 275–99. 41. R. F. Yeager writes: “Apart from the Regement, when Hoccleve personifies Death in other poems, he does so as a ‘he’” (“Death Is a Lady: The Regement of Princes as Gendered Political Commentary,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 [2004]: 147–93, at 149). However, in the note that Yeager cites to support this claim, Blyth states: “For Hoccleve death is usually feminine” (Regiment, ed. Blyth, 219). See, for example, Hoccleve’s “Learn to Die,” lines 36, 52, 54, 72, 156, etc., and the explanatory note in Roger Ellis, ed., Thomas Hoccleve, “My Compleinte” and Other Poems (Exeter, 2001), 227. Ellis suggests that Hoccleve is influenced here by the grammatically feminine Latin mors ; see also Batt, “Hoccleve and . . . Feminism?,” 65n10. Yeager (162–63) briefly dis-cusses the first eulogy to Chaucer in the Regiment, but not the fact that here Hoccleve’s personified Death is masculine: “What eiled deeth? Allas, why wolde he sle the?” (1967). For Hoccleve, then, Death is only sometimes a lady. In lines 1961–81 of the Regiment, Hoccleve’s male Death seems close to the figure of Satan as lord of the World: “For to sleen al this world thow hast yment” (1978; and compare the reference to Christ, 1979–81). Another source of gender complication in Hoccleve’s Death(s) could come from the tradition of a female Fortune casting the mighty down: see Regiment, 22–35, which refer to Fortune and (ungendered) Death. In “Learn to Die” Hoccleve adds to his source the image of (female) Death destroying all ranks of society and checkmat-ing “Al that lyf berith” (161; compare BD, 652–78, where Fortune plays chess with the lover). Yeager quotes Blyth’s note as referring to a “king and queen of Death” elsewhere in Middle English (149). Blyth’s reference is in fact to a debate between Lady Life and Lady Death in the alliterative Death and Liffe (Israel Gollancz, ed., Death and Liffe [London, 1930]). On the same page, Yeager refers to a manuscript picture in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Selden supra 53, fol. 188r, as depicting “Hoccleve at the bedside of a dying man” (149n3). The image is of a robed figure at the man’s bedside, with a skel-etal Death brandishing a staff. There are complex narratorial layers in the text, but the picture illustrates the passage in “Learn to Die” when the personified Sapience shows an image to the Disciple of a dying young man talking to him. The standing figure’s primary identification, then, is as the Disciple. For this picture, see Perkins, Hoccleve’s “Regiment,” 155 and references. 42. Andrew Lynch, “‘Manly Cowardyse’: Thomas Hoccleve’s Peace Strategy,” Medium Ævum 73 (2004): 306–23, who goes on to make a case for Hoccleve’s pacifism in the Regiment and elsewhere. Hoccleve’s unmanliness was the subject of comment from his Victorian editors. Furnivall, for example, tells us that “We wish he had been a better poet and a manlier fellow” (Frederick J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz, eds., Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, rev. Jerome Mitchell and A. I. Doyle, EETS e.s. 61, 73 [repr. as one vol-ume, London, 1970], xxxviii); Furnivall’s flight of fancy on the relative domestic authority of Mrs. Hoccleve and Mrs. Chaucer (xxxvii) is one of the unintended highlights of the Minor Poems edition. 43. Batt, “Hoccleve and . . . Feminism?” 44. For the strategic adoption of traditionally feminine attributes as part of a textual persona, see Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 80–82, who argues that in CT Chaucer is “utterly dependent upon that which the Wife [of Bath] embodies in her own person, upon her particular expertise within the division of labor (knowledge of the body; wifely eloquence; dealing in textus ; felaweshipe, pilgrimage, and ‘wandrynge by the weye’)” (82). The per-sona of the “unmanly” or melancholy clerk-narrator is also prominent in the French dit

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tradition (as for example in Machaut’s Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse), which could well form a shared model for Chaucer and Hoccleve; I am grateful to Tony Spearing for discussing this point with me. For Hoccleve’s knowledge and use of French writers, see J. A. Burrow, “Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets,” in Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone, eds., The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford, 1997), 35–49. For the complications of gender and clerkliness in this period, see also R. N. Swanson, “Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation,” in D. M. Hadley, ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London, 1999), 160–77. 45. See Colin Wilcockson, “Glutton’s Black Mass: Piers Plowman, B-Text, Passus V 297–385,” Notes and Queries 243 (1998): 173–76. A-text, Passus 5, and C-text, Passus 7, have analagous scenes. 46. See Nicholas Perkins, “Thomas Hoccleve, La Male Regle,” in Peter Brown, ed., A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350–c.1500 (Oxford, 2007), 585–603, at 587–93. 47. For these questions, see in particular Hasler, “Hoccleve’s Unregimented Body,” and Tolmie, “Prive Scilence,” esp. 292–96, 304–5. 48. See lines 4355–4403, and Perkins, Hoccleve’s “Regiment,” 111–14. 49. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 57. 50. Yeager, “Death Is a Lady,” 182, 161; Simpson, “Chaucer’s Presence and Absence,” 257, 258. See also Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 119–24, who discusses the portrait in the context of Hoccleve’s “persistent doubling of key images and concepts” (110). A fascinat-ing discovery in Mooney’s recent work is a receipt for the payment of Hoccleve’s annuity, written by Hoccleve and sealed with his personal seal (Kew, National Archives E 43/554). Hoccleve’s motto “va illa voluntee” she interprets as “he goes there willingly,” and the central image, of a pointing hand or maniculum, Mooney speculates may indicate that the text refers to heaven (the hand points up to a cross that punctuates the start/finish of the motto), or wherever the king commands that the clerk go (“Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve,” 315–18). If the maniculum is Hoccleve’s personal device, there is also an intriguing connection with Chaucer’s familiar gesture in the margin of MS Harley 4866, directing viewers back to Hoccleve’s own claims to intimate knowledge, or preoccupation with Chaucer’s personal and poetic corpus: along with its other, more public meanings, Chaucer’s pointing hand paradoxically but tellingly might be said to mimic Hoccleve’s own device and desires. 51. Here Blyth’s reading “lost” gives better sense than Furnivall’s “lest” (which is the reading of MS Harley 4866), and completes a circle of losing and finding that Hoccleve sets up by calling Chaucer a “fyndere” and then by encouraging his readers to “fynde” him again. My thanks to Charles Blyth for confirming that the reading “lost” occurs in nearly all the extant manuscripts (the only other exception is Coventry City Record Office MS Accession 325/1, which is not a very reliable witness and is related to Harley). For a discussion of this stanza that employs the Harley reading, see Yeager, “Death Is a Lady,” 160–61. 52. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 49–50 (italics in the original). 53. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 58. 54. Chaucer’s image is itself a nod to Statius, who in Thebaid XII.816–17, asks his book not to presume to rival the Aeneid ; see note to these lines in B. A. Windeatt, ed., Troilus and Criseyde (Harlow, 1984), 557. 55. See Perkins, Hoccleve’s “Regiment,” 46. I quote the envoy addressed to Prince Henry, which appears in nearly all the extant and complete manuscripts. Another envoy, addressed to the Duke of Bedford, appears with the Regiment in London, British Library MS Royal 17 D. xviii and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Dugdale 45. It was also copied by Hoccleve into San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 111, fols. 37v–38r (Furnivall and Gollancz, eds., Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, 56–57). The Bedford envoy likewise

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combines elaborately submissive rhetoric with an implicit challenge to the reader to “peise and weye / What myn entente is” (23–24). 56. Ellis, ed., Thomas Hoccleve. 57. See, for example, Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 164–65, and references in his note 12. Knapp notes the Boethianism of this opening too: “Hoccleve’s work begins with the decayed autumn of a Boethian lament” (165). 58. Hoccleve’s “Dialogue with a Friend” in the Series has some similarities with the Regiment ’s Dialogue, and of course much of the Series uses rhyme royal. However, there is not such a clear textual debt to Tr in the Series. Possible reasons for this include the fact that the Series was written nearly ten years after the Regiment, and Hoccleve had absorbed Chaucerian language more fully into his own poetic; that the “Complaint” and “Dialogue with a Friend” are not so close in situation to the Troilus–Pandarus conversations, and have other important intertexts (such as Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma); and that Hoccleve had in mind other Chaucerian connections with the Series—for example, the playful discussion of appeasing women readers, which of course is analogous to the Prologue to LGW, and which uses the Wife of Bath as a textual authority on gender politics (“Dialogue with a Friend,” lines 694–98). Possible Chaucerian allusions and echoes in the Series are noted in Ellis, ed., Thomas Hoccleve ; M. C. Seymour, ed., Selections from Hoccleve (Oxford, 1981); and J. A. Burrow, ed., Thomas Hoccleve’s “Complaint” and “Dialogue,” EETS o.s. 313 (Oxford, 1999). 59. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 125.

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