Noise, Soundplay, and Langland's Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif.
- Author/Editor
- Lears, Adin E.
- Title
- Noise, Soundplay, and Langland's Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif.
- Published
- Lears, Adin E. "Noise, Soundplay, and Langland's Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 165-200. Reprinted as chapter 3, "'Wondres to Here': Noise, Soundplay, and Langland's Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif." In Adin E. Lears, World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late-Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). Pp. 94-127.
- Review
- As her title suggests, Lears' essay is generally concerned with "Piers Plowman," but it does include one extended reference to Gower's "Visio Anglie" ("Vox Clamantis" 1.9). In her discussion of aural play, noise, and the "poetics of lolling" in Langland's poem, Lears describes Gower's depiction of the eloquent jackdaw or jay (a figure for Wat Tyler) whose address provokes his listeners to break into a "hubbub of animalistic bleating, barking, and roaring." This is one among a "number of moments in the literature of medieval England"--perhaps the most notable one as Lears puts it--where the "dynamic of noise emerg[es] from misdirected attention or irrational listening," even though, as Lears acknowledges, the scene is more often discussed as Gower's "conservative strategy . . . to marginalize the voices of the peasants" (184). Further on, Lears suggests that Gower's "bird analogy" finds a "telling echo" in the "Wycliffite Tretise of Miraclis Pleying," (185), but she does not mention that both are reflexes of a widely observed orator-as-jay satiric topos found, for example, in Chaucer's description of the Summoner ("General Prologue" 1,642-43) and in the "Poem on the Evil Times of Edward II" of the Auchinleck manuscript, anthologized in Thomas Wright's "Political Songs of England" (1839; 828). Lears changes little or nothing in her treatment of her brief discussion of Gower when revising this essay for inclusion in her book-length study (see pp. 121-22), but she rearranges other things as she revises, adds an assessment of "Mum and the Sothsegger," and later in the book (pp. 186-87), cites Gower's use in "Confessio Amantis" (Book I, 2391) of the clapping-bell topos to decry boasting. Chaucer receives a good deal of attention elsewhere in Lears' book, as do Richard Rolle, Margery Kempe, and others--but not Gower. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.]
- Date
- 2016
2020
- Gower Subjects
- Vox Clamantis