"Cast Thy Bread Upon the Waters": A Paradigm from Ecclesiastes in Gower's "Apollonius of Tyre."
- Author/Editor
- McAlpine, Monica E.
- Title
- "Cast Thy Bread Upon the Waters": A Paradigm from Ecclesiastes in Gower's "Apollonius of Tyre."
- Published
- McAlpine, Monica E. "'Cast Thy Bread Upon the Waters': A Paradigm from Ecclesiastes in Gower's 'Apollonius of Tyre'." In Bonnie Wheeler, ed. Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Pp. 225-35.
- Review
- McAlpine suggests that Gower's "Tale of Apollonius of Tyre" may have been influenced or inspired by Ecclesiastes 11.1, leaving the suggestion unconfirmed, but using it to guide her intense, even fervent, appreciation of the character of Apollonius as a figure of "goodness and wisdom from the start" (229). She argues that the events of the tale--reinforced by the diction and imagery of gift-giving—"introduce, validate by experience, and authoritatively confirm the virtues with which the hero confronts his adventures" (225). The liberality of Apollonius's gift-giving is essential to his character, McAlpine tells is, a virtue she aligns with Bonaventure's commentary on Ecclesiastes 11.1 and with Apollonius's own agency in accepting fortune (eventually) and submitting to divine providence, concerns McAlpine also observes in Bonaventure's commentary. Fundamental to McAlpine's argument is the wheat that Apollonius gives freely to the citizens of Tharsis which she reads as the "bread" of Ecclesiastes, as its "waters" are the hero's recurrent adventures by sea. McAlpine extends the symbolic value of the gift of bread to the burial at sea of Apollonius's wife, through which his daughter, Thaise, also becomes a gift, along with "other gifts" in the tale (228). Apollonius's final gifts, his sacrificial offerings to Diana in her temple in Ephesus, McAlpine tells us, completes "the depiction of Apollonius's virtues" (232), and leads to the recognition scene between husband and wife, brought about, not only by the seas of fortune and by Apollonius's "family trait of disciplined management of one's suffering," but also by the "intervention" of his "dream of divine origin"--fortune, agency, and Providence combined. These interconnections in this final tale of the "Confessio Amantis," McAlpine concludes, respond to similar concerns in the Prologue of the poem and indicate the "many-sidedness of Gower's thinking for which "Ecclesiastes could have been a rich resource" (233). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2006
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues and Literary Relations