Gower's "bokes of Latin": Language, politics, and poetry

Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Volumn 25, Issue , 2003, Pages 123-156

  Echard, Siân ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

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EID: 60949594067     PISSN: 01902407     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sac.2003.0006     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. And possibly in more - there are quite a few manuscripts which now lack final folios. For a complete discussion of the treatment of the end matter, see my "Last Words: Latin at the End of the Confessio Amantis" in Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A. G. Rigg, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Richard Firth Green (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003)
2. John Gower, The English Works of John Gouer, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1901)
3. 2 vols.: "Primus liber Gallico sermone editus . . ."; "Secundus enim liber sermone latino metrice compositus . . ."; "Tercius iste liber . . . Anglico sermone conficitur . . . ," ii. 479-80. This is the third recension version of the colophon. For more on the differences between the different recensions with respect to the colophon, see below
4. There is a wealth of recent scholarship on the relationship between Latin and the vernacular in medieval England. Some of this work appears in the notes below. I take the opportunity here to refer to some important critics who are not directly addressed later: these would include Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the "Aeneid" from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
5. Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
6. and the edited collection Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
7. John H. Fisher, "A Language Policy for Lancastrian England," PMLA 107.5 (1992): 1168-80
8. David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
9. Two collections are also central to current views on these relationships: The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999)
10. and David Wallace, ed., Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
11. Particularly relevant in the latter are Christopher Baswell, "Latinitas," pp. 122-51
12. Christopher Cannon, "Monastic productions," pp. 316-48
13. John V. Fleming, "The friars and medieval English literature," pp. 349-75
14. David Aers, "Vox populi and the literature of 1381," pp. 432-53
15. David Lawton, "Englishing the Bible, 1066-1549," pp. 454-82
16. Steven Justice, "Lollardy," 662-89
17. I am thinking of arguments such as Ruth Evans's when she points out that English, today "a language of world domination," in the Middle Ages had to confront Latin as "the chief instrument of political power." "Like their modern postcolonial counterparts," Evans writes, "medieval vernacular writers found ways to evade the all-encompassing authority of the colonial language"; "Historicizing Postcolonial Criticism," in The Idea of the Vernacular, pp. 366 and 368
18. Sarah Stanbury, "Vernacular Nostalgia and The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002): 99
19. Stanbury, "Vernacular Nostalgia," 97
20. It is important to note that there are readers of the rise of the vernacular who have been careful to recognize the complex political and social affiliations of the vernacular. Alison Cornish points out that while translation from Latin to vernacular (in this case Italian), broadens access and valorizes the vernacular, it is nevertheless the case that "The ocean of translations produced in Italy and France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was no democratic initiative to educate the masses; they were intended, rather, to accommodate a linguistic handicap of the prominent and well-to-do"; her analysis of Guido Cavalcanti's "Donna me prega" points out that "putting Latin thought into the vernacular does not necessarily make things easier" ("A Lady Asks: The Gender of Vulgarization in Late Medieval Italy," PMLA 115.2 (2000): 166, 174)
21. In the English context, Fiona Somerset notes that "the legitimation of some kinds and contexts of written English tended to suppress or delegitimate others," Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 10
22. she cites Nicholas Watson's seminal piece on Arundel's Constitutions: "Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's 'Constitutions' of 1409," Speculum 70.4 (1995): 822-64
23. Many sympathetic readers of Gower argue that Latin is understood by the poet as a more stable language than the vernaculars. Derek Pearsall, for example, writes of the Latin in the Confessio that it may be intended to "contain or encase the potentially volatile nature of the English"; "Gower's Latin in the Confessio Amantis," in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989), p. 22
24. In "Learning to Speak in Tongues: Writing Poetry for a Trilingual Culture," in Chaucer and Cower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. R. F. Yeager (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1991)
25. I discuss the elusiveness of the Latin in the Confessio at more length in "With Carmen's Help: Latin Authorities in Gower's Confessio Amantis " SP 95.1 (1998): 1-40
26. Gower's critical reception is traced in the first chapter of John H. Fisher's John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Frientd of Chaucer (New York: New York University Press, 1964)
27. and by Derek Pearsall in "The Gower Tradition," in Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1983), pp. 179-97
28. More recently, R. F. Yeager sees Gower figuring himself as a new, English Arion: "The goal of universal peace can be furthered by a poetry of appropriately convincing characters and fictions, expressed in a vernacular of increasing stature and availability for presenting serious subjects"; the evolution implied here is not necessarily aesthetic, however, as Gower's choice of English is characterized as a political one - "Targeting the court of the young King Richard . . . The aging moralist may very well have felt he had a final opportunity to strike a righteous blow";John Gower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1990), pp. 241, 262
29. Eneidos Bucolis que Georgica metra perhennis Virgilio laudis serta dedere scolis; Hiis tribus ille libris prefertur honore poetis, Romaque precipuis laudibus instat eis. Gower, sicque tuis tribus est dotata libellis Anglia, morigeris quo tua scripta seris. Illeque Latinis tantum sua metra Ioquelis Scripsit, vt Italicis sint recolenda notis; Te tua set trinis tria scribere carmina Unguis Constat, vt inde viris sit scola lata magis: Gallica lingua prius, Latina secunda, set ortus Lingua tui pocius Anglica complet opus. Ille quidem vanis Romanas obstupet aures, Ludit et in studiis musa pagana suis; Set tua Cristicolis fulget scriptum renatis, Quo tibi celicolis laud sit habenda locis. The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899-1902), vol. 4, p. 361
30. Macaulay suggests, vol. 4, p. 419, that the author might have been Ralph Strode - the same "philosophical Strode" to whom Chaucer directed the Troilus. This and all translations of Latin and French are my own; my goal throughout has been to suggest something of the flavor of Gower's metre and rhyme, and there are times when I have chosen to sacrifice strict literalness in this pursuit. I am most grateful to Claire Fanger, whose advice on both the translations and the argument of this essay have been, as usual, invaluable
31. See Tim William Machan, "Thomas Berthelette and Gower's Confessio," SAC 18 (1996): 149
32. Thomas Berthelette, Jo. Gower de confessione Amantis (London, 1532), aa.iii
33. For versions of this kind of reading of the Vox, see the notes to Aers and Justice below, as well as the comments about current views of the vernacular above. Aers has also argued that the tensions, contradictions, and conflicting political and philosophical positions in the Vox and in the Confessio Amantis are not manifestations of a subtle and coherent moral / political vision; he describes Gower's methods in these works as "a paratactic mode which seals off units from each other and facilitates the propagation of conflicting positions whose conflicts are left unattended, unnoticed." (David Aers, "Reflections on Gower as 'Sapiens in Ethics and Politics', in Re-Visioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager [Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998], p. 199
34. Aers is challenging such recent readings of Gower as those found in James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
35. and Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
36. his title is of course also a reference to Alastair Minnis's "John Gower, Sapiens in Ethics and Politics," MÆ. 49:2 (1980): 207-29
37. and perhaps by implication as well " 'Moral Gower' and Medieval Literary Theory," in Gower's Confessio Amantis, pp. 50-78
38. Judith Ferster, for example, remarks that Gower is bolder in his criticisms of the king in Latin than he is in English; see Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 111-12. There is a long tradition of discussing Gower in terms of the mirror-for-princes tradition, a genre whose roots are in Latin; George R. Coffman made the link in 1945, seeing the poet as a conservative moralist concerned to advise the ruler
39. see "John Gower in His Most Significant Role," Elizabethan Studies and Other Essays in Honor of George F. Reynolds, University of Colorado Studies, Series B, II (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1945), pp. 52-61
40. and "John Gower, Mentor for Royalty: Richard II" PMLA 69.4 (1954): 953-64
41. See also Maria Wickert, Studien Zu John Gower (Cologne: Cologne University Press, 1953
42. translated by Robert J. Meindl as Studies in John Gower [Washington: University Press of America, 1981])
43. Russell H. Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower's Confessio Amantis (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978
44. Elizabeth Porter, "Gower's Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm," in Gower's Confessio Amantis, pp. 134-62
45. In "With Carmen's Help."
46. The uncertainty is crucial here. Frank Grady has recently suggested that we have rather a lot invested in "the neat binary that counterposes a Gower directly involved with the court, first gratefully receiving the king's commission and then passionately rejecting Richard in the 1390s, with an amusedly detached and apolitical Chaucer, tactfully skirting and deflecting the urgent political issues of the day"; Grady is quite right to urge suspicion of the "neatness" of the contrast (and of our desire for it); "Gower's Boat, Richard's Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002): 11
47. In his discussion of the first book of the Vox, Steven Justice argues that Gower, fashioning himself as a public poet, feared the English-speaking rabble's apparent usurpation of the ground of political contest; Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 209
48. in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 440
49. See also Andrew Galloway, "Gower in his Most Learned Role and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381," Mediaevalia 16 (1993 for 1990). would point out that the people rehearse many of the same complaints about the various estates in Gower's Anglo-Norman Mirour de l'Omme, as well
50. for example, Gower prefaces his remarks about bishops in this way: "What's spread around in common's what / I say, and nothing else but that" [Sicomme l'en dist communement, / Ensi dis et noun autrement]; Mirour de l'Omme, Works, vol. 1, lines 19057-58. That is, this is not merely a contest between Latin and English. One could preserve the tenor of Aers's and Justice's arguments by recognizing that the "people" who speak French are not the peasants of the Revolt - they are the rulers and not the mob. It will become clear, however, that I see Gower exploring the dangers inherent in all tongues
51. Tongues, literal and figurative, are a source of anxiety for Gower throughout his career. In the opening Latin verse to the Confessio Amantis, Gower manifests, in short space, many of the elements of his complex view of language: . . . Let me, in Hengist's tongue, in Brut's isle sung, With Carmen's help, tell forth my English verse. Far hence the boneless one whose speech grinds bones, Far hence be he who reads my verses ill. [Qua tamen Engisti lingua canit Insula Bruti Anglica Carmente metra iuuante loquar. Ossibus ergo carens que conterit ossa loquelis Absir, et interpres stet procul oro malus.] Text and translation from Siân Echard and Claire Fanger, The Latin Verses in John Gower's Confessio Amantis: An Annotated Translation (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Books, 1991), p. 3. In these lines Gower both asserts the value and antiquity of the English language and nation - linked to both Saxons and Trojans - while also calling on the help of Carmen, originator of the Latin alphabet, for the writing of his work. The final couplet, with its image of the malevolent tongue of a criric, speaks to the anxiety over uncontrolled speech (vulgar or learned) which dominates the Vox as well
52. Vox, Prol. 43-46: Si vox in fragili michi pectore firmior esset, Pluraque cum linguis pluribus ora forent, Hec tamen ad presens mala, que sunt temporis huius, Non michi possibile dicere cuncta foret. Gower is drawing on Ovid's Tristia and Ex Ponto. See the notes in Eric W. Stockton, The Major Latin Works of John Gower: The Voice of One Crying and The Tripartite Chronicle: An Annotated Translation into English With an Introductory Essay on the Author's Non-English Works (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), p. 343
53. Vox I.xvi. 1505-16: Memet in insidiis semper locuturus habebam, Verbaque sum spectans pauca locutus humum: Tempora cum blandis absumpsi vanaque verbis, Dum mea sors cuiquam cogerat vlla loqui. Iram multociens frangit responsio mollis, Dulcibus ex verbis tunc fuit ipsa salus; Sepeque cum volui conatus verba proferre, Torpuerat gelido lingua retenta metu. Non meus vt querat noua sermo quosque fatigat, Obstitit auspiciis lingua retenta malis; Sepe meam mentem volui dixisse, set hosti Prodere me timui, linguaque tardât ibi. The Ovidian references are to the Fasti and Heroides (and from Tristia both before and after the cited lines; see Stockton, The Major Latin Works, p. 364)
54. Vox I.xvi. 1579-80: "Verbis planxissem, set viscera plena dolore / Obsistunt, nec eo tempore verba sinunt."
55. Macaulay, vol. 4, p. xxxii. Macaulay's disapproval of Gower's practice includes a complete dismissal of the poet's Latin style: "Most of the good Latin lines for which Gower has got credit with critics are plagiarisms.... The perpetual borrowing of isolated lines or couplets from Ovid, often without regard to their appropriateness or their original meaning, often makes the style, of the first book especially, nearly as bad as it can be" (vol. 4, p. xxxiii)
56. R. F. Yeager, "Did Gower Write Cento?' in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich.: The Medieval Institute, 1989), pp. 114-15
57. Vox I.v.425-32: O tunc si quis eos audisset, quomodo mundus Vocibus attonitus hic et vbique fremit, Dicere tunc posset similes quod eis vlulatus Auribus audiuit nullus ab ante status. Cumque canum strepitus Sathane descendit in aures, Gaudet et infernus de nouitate soni, Cerberus ecce canis baratri custosque gehenne Prebuit auditum letus et inde furit
58. Vox I.ix.681
59. Vox I.xi.793-94: Balle propheta docet, quem spiritus ante malignus / Edocuit, que sua tunc fuit alta scola
60. Vox I.xi.797-98: Sepius exclamant monstrorum vocibus altis, / Atque raodis variis dant variare tonos
61. Vox I.xi.799-802: Quidam sternutant asinorum more ferino, Mugitus quidam personuere boum; Quidam porcorum grunnitus horridiores Emittunt, que suo murmure terra tremit
62. Vox I.xi.803-14
63. Vox I.xi.815-20: Ecce rudis clangor, sonus altus, fedaque rixa, Vox ita terribilis non fuit vlla prius: Murmure saxa sonant, sonitum que reuerberat aer, Responsumque soni vendicat Eccho sibi: Inde fragore grauis strepitus loca proxima terret, Quo timet euentum quisquis adire malum
64. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 213
65. see "The Peasants' Revolt: Cock-Crow in Gower and Chaucer," Essays in Medieval Studies 10 (1993): 53-64)
66. In a recent article, however, Joanna Summers has argued that another poet appropriated the visio section of the Vox in order to bolster his own position, arguing that Thomas Usk's Testament of Love consciously alludes to the Vox in its pro-royalist version: "Usk therefore appropriates the discourse of censure from a work clear in its political stance and affiliations"; "Gower's Vox clamantis and Usk's Testament of Love," MÆ 68.1 (1999): 58
67. Aers, "Vox populi," p. 442
68. Anne Hudson, Lollards and Their Books (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), p. 158
69. By, among others, Macaulay, Works, vol. 4, p. xxxi
70. Fisher, Jobn Gower, p. 103
71. and most recently, by Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, pp. 287-88
72. Vox II. Prol. 75-84: Non tamen ex propriis drcam que verba sequntur, Set velut instructus nuncius illa fero. Lectus vt est variis florum de germine fauus, Lectaque diuerso litore concha venit, Sic michi diuersa tribuerunt hoc opus ora, Et visus varii sunt michi causa libri: Doctorum veterum mea carmina fortificando Pluribus exemplis scripta fuisse reor. Vox clamantis erit nomenque voluminis huius, Quod sibi scripta noui verba doloris habet
73. Vox VII.iv.233-34: "In vulgum clerus conuertitur, et modo vulgus / In forma cleri disputat acta dei." The inappropriateness of disputation over the things of God is a concern of the time, as is suggested by Dame Studie's remarks in passas X of the B-version of Piers Plowman: "For alle that wilneth to wite the whyes of God almyghty, / I wolde his eighe were in his ers and his fynger after . . ."; William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Dent, 1978), X.124-25
74. Confessio Amantis, Prol. 346-55
75. Gower's conservative political attitude towards the peasantry can easily lead modern readers to overlook the condemnation of other classes, including the privileged ones, and easy caricatures of his attitude can lead to an inevitable simplification of the project of the Vox. See, for example, David Aers's remarks on Gower on the ploughmen: "this is a persuasion to perceive the world in a certain way, to classify large numbers of fellow human beings in a particular way which in turn legitimates particular ways of treating them, of seeking to control and punish them. In the light of this outlook, the poet's response to the great rising of 1381 is predictable"; Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360-1430 (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 32
76. Vox V.xvi.883-94: Dum Susurro manet et vir linguosus in vrbe, Plebis in obprobrium scandala plura mouet; Nam linguosus homo reliquos velut altera pestis Ledit, et vt turbo sepe repente nocet. Set quia lingua mala mundo scelus omne ministrat, Que sibi sunt vires dicere tendo graues. Lingua mouet lites, lis prelia, prelia plebem, Plebs gladios, gladii scismata, scisma necem; Extirpat regnis, dat flammis, depopulatur Lingua duces, lingua predia, lingua domos: Lingua maritorum nexus dissoluet, et vnum Quod deus instituit, efficit esse duo
77. Vox III.xv.1267-72: Vox populi cum voce dei concordat, vt ipsa In rebus dubiis sit metuenda magis: Hec ego que dicam dictum commune docebat, Nec mea verba sibi quid nouitatis habent. In cathedram Moysi nunc ascendunt Pharisei, Et scribe scribunt dogma, nec illud agunt
78. The proverb Vox populi, vox dei is also referred to in the Mirour de l'Omme 12725-26: "Au vois commune est acordant / La vois de dieu . . ." Ferster notes Gower's apparently shifting attitudes toward the voice of the people in Fictions of Advice, pp. 130-32; her concern is with contemporary ideas about royal government, rather than with the issues of poetic language that I am discussing here
79. Mirour, lines 505-12: Mais cil qui lors ust bien oï Temptacioun come il blandi Par la douçour de sa parole, Il porroit dire bien de fi Que ja n'oïst puisqu'il nasqui Un vantparlour de tiele escole: Car plus fuist doulce sa parole Que n'estoit harpe ne citole
80. Compare, for example, Chaucer's House of Fame, with its progression from the retelling of the Aeneid at the outset, to the vision of the House of Rumour at the end, where the dreamer sees "fals and soth compouned" and "shipmen and pilgrimes, / With scrippes bret-ful of lesinges, / Entremedled with tydynges"; Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), III.2108, 2122-24
81. Vox, Prol., lines 53-54: "Adde recollectis seriem, mea musa, Latinis, / Daque magistra tuo congrua verba libro."
82. Confessio, Prol., lines 52-53
83. Confessio, Prol., before line 499: Vulgaris populus regali lege subactus Dum iacet, vt mitis agna subibit onus. Si caput extollat et lex sua frena relaxet, Vt sibi velle iubet, Tigridis instar habet. Ignis, aqua dominans duo sunt pietate carentes, Ira tamen plebis est violenta magis. (Echard and Fanger, p. 11)
84. Confessio, Prol., lines 499-506
85. cf. also Vox V, lines 991-92
86. For a detailed discussion of Anglo-French in fourteenth-century England, see W. Rothwell, "The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer," SAC 16 (1994): especially 56-66
87. In this study of medieval English records, Rothwell concludes that "Two languages such as Anglo-French and Middle English, being used in one stratum of society on a daily basis by generations of scribes, officials, and scholars, simply cannot be kept apart; the idea that such people could have in their minds neat and tidy pigeonholes for each language is a product of modern, not medieval, thinking," 66. Latin and English are similarly often combined; Linda Ehrsam Voigts concluded her presidential address on the relationship between Latin and vernacular in medieval English scientific and medical manuscripts by remarking that "We must not bring modern assumptions about the integrity of monolingual texts to these late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English writings. If we do, we will fail to understand the bilingual culture that produced nearly half of the scientific and medical manuscripts that survive from this period, and we will overlook the variety of ways in which this bilingual culture exploited the linguistic resources of two languages"; "What's the Word? Bilingualism in Late-Medieval England," Speculum 71.4 (1996): 823
88. The eyes and ears are first on Genius's list, in Book I of the Confessio, as a potential source of sin and deception: Confessio I, before line 289: Visus et auditus fragilis sunt ostia mentis, Que viciosa manus claudere nulla potest. Est ibi larga via, graditur qua cordis ad antrum Hostis, et ingrediens fossa talenta rapit. The doors of fragile mind, the eye and ear, So faulty are, no hand may shut them up. That way is broad by which the foeman goes Into the heart's cave, grabs the buried gold. (Echard and Fanger, p. 19)
89. Confessio VIII.2904
90. Vox VII.ix.751-52: "Nil sibi quod genera linguarum nouerat olim / Confert, qui muco mortuus ore silet."
91. Confessio, Prol. 1-3: "Of hem that writen ous tofore / The bokes duelle, and we therfore / Ben tawht of that was write tho"; VIII.2925-27: "Bot go ther vertu moral duelleth, / Wher ben thi bokes, as men telleth, / Whiche of long time thou hast write."
92. Vox, p. 313: "Explicit libellus qui intitulatur Vox Clamantis."
93. These are Oxford, All Souls' College, MS 98
94. Glasgow, University Library, Hunterian MS T.2.17
95. London, British Library, MSS Cotton Tiberius A IV and Harley 6291
96. The Cronica covers the events of the end of Richard's reign, concluding with the assertion that Richard starved himself to death in January 1400; for a discussion of more exact dating of the copies of the Vox that also contain the Cronica, see Fisher, John Gower, pp. 99-109
97. Vox, p. 313: Tres namque tunc regni nobiles super hoc specialius moti, scilicet Thomas Dux Glouernie, qui vulgariter dictus est Cignus, Ricardus Comes Arundellie, qui dicitur Equs, Thomas Comes de Warrewyk, cuius nomen Vrsus, hii vero vnanimes cum quibusdam aliis proceribus sibi adherentibus, vt regie malicie fautores delerent, ad dei laudem regnique commodum in manu forti iusto animo viriliter insurrexerunt, prout in hac consequenti cronica, que tripertita est, scriptor manifestius declarare intendit
98. Cronica tripertita, Works, vol. 4, III 462-63: "O quam pensando mores variosque notando, / Si bene scrutetur, R. ab H. distare videtur!" Some 15 lines follow which compare the two head-to-head, often with both contrasted in a single line. My translation expands the initials to the rulers' names, but this is a piece of aesthetic license; I am in fact tantalized by Robert W. Epstein's argument that the use of the initials is a deliberate strategy: "The opposition of Richard and Henry IV is literally literal: it resides in the letter. Richard II and Henry IV become simply R. and H., individual letters, arbitrary signs without positive value, interpretable only in their binary operation, the recognition of each requiring the presence of the other. . . . some fifteen years after originally opposing Henry to Richard in the Confessio, Gower is still defining Lancaster through opposition rather than essential unity"
99. Cronica tripertita, III 484-89: Hoc concernentes caueant qui sunt sapientes, Nam male viuentes deus odit in orbe regentes: Est qui peccator, non esse potest dominator; Ricardo teste, finis probat hoc manifeste: Post sua demerita periit sua pompa sopita; Qualis erat vita, cronica stabit ita
100. Compare the Latin verse at the end of the Confessio; whether commending the book to Richard or to Henry, Gower again shifts to leonines. However, he also uses the form throughout the Cronica tripertita, a work in which he is not always triumphant or confident in tone. Perhaps it is the contrast, rather than the verse form itself, which is important here. A. G. Rigg points out that "the Leonine rhyme and the fondness for onomastic wordplay" are common features of fourteenth-century political poetry; A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066-1432 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 291
101. First recension: Secundus enim liber, sermone latino versibus exametri et pentametri compositus, tractat super illo mirabili euentu qui in Anglia tempore domini Regis Ricardi secundi anno regni sui quarto contigit, quando seruiles rustici impetuose contra nobiles et ingenuos regni insurrexerunt. Innocenciam tamen dicti domini Regis tunc minoris etatis causa inde excusabilem pronuncians, culpas aliunde, ex quibus et non a fortuna talia inter homines contingunt enormia, euidencius declarat. Titulusque voluminis huius, cuius ordo Septem continet paginas, Vox clamantis nominatur (English Works, vol. 2, pp. 479-80)
102. Lynn Staley, "Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture," Speculum 75.1 (2000): 78
103. For another discussion of Gower's political affiliations in terms of complication, irony, and anxiety, see Frank Grady's careful analysis of Gower's late English poem "To King Henry the Fourth, in Praise of Peace," in "The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity," Speculum 70.3 (1995): 552-75
104. Vox I.xx. 1977-82: Hec humus est illa vario de germine nata, Quam cruor et cedes bellaque semper habent: Tristia deformes pariunt absinthia campi, Terraque de fructu quam sit amara docet. Non magis esse probos ad finem solis ab ortu Estimo, si populi mutuus esset amor. Ovid is again the source
105. For a useful survey of these studies, see Nicholas Watson, "The Politics of Middle English Writing," in The Idea of the Vernacular, pp. 331-52
106. Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); pp. 216-17
107. Confissio, Prol. 22-24: "And for that fewe men endite / In oure englissh, I thenke make / A bok for Engelondes sake (A boke for king Richardes sake)." Of course by the time Gower wrote the Confessio - and certainly by the time of the Henrician revisions - it simply is not true to say that "few men" make poetry in English - another reason to treat with some suspicion Gower's statements about language