Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower's Supplemental Role.

Author/Editor
Rogers, Will.

Title
Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower's Supplemental Role.

Published
Rogers, Will. "Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower's Supplemental Role." Chapter 4 in Will Rogers, Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England (Leeds, UK: Arc Humanities Press, 2021). Pp. 103-24.

Review
This chapter pertains to Shakespeare's "Pericles," but with a pervasive emphasis on Gower's "Confessio Amantis" Book VIII as foundational not only to the tale of Apollonius/Pericles retold in the play, but also to the centrality of old age and "infirmities" in the character of Shakespeare's choric Gower (1.0.2-3). Rogers uses the term "prosthesis" metaphorically, as a visual or verbal "supplement" that fills the "gaps" in a portrayal (105 et passim; "Pericles" 4.4.8). Both Gower-characters, in the CA and in "Pericles," personify the "prosthetic role of old age . . . [as] debility . . . [but also] as an additive to power and authority" with wisdom to impart (104-5). In parallel fashion, both Gowers deploy a fusty old tale to serve their present-day audience as a "restorative" capable of bringing "new life" and "ethical healing" (106; also 114-16, 118-19). Shakespeare's Gower is himself a "prosthetic" figure, as his narrative voice fills in the missing pieces of the story and supplements the dumb shows (111, 117). Rogers asserts the "central position" of the Gower-persona's "surprise appearance at the end of Book VIII [as an old man]" to "moments of revision within Shakespeare's own text." In this famous scene in the CA, Venus presents the poet-persona with a mirror in which he sees his ravaged face through "myn hertes yhe" (8.2824), as he evocatively describes, and thus is cured of his love (116). Just as the earlier Gower must rely on his inward eye "as a prosthesis to his powers of sight," so Shakespeare's Gower must call upon the devices of the theater and the imagination of the audience (3.0.58) as a "crutch" to help them "see" the story (122-23). The wisdom personified in both figures is the "confession of impairments and debility, all of which serve as the staff for the old man" (124). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]

Date
2021

Gower Subjects
Influence and Later Allusion
Confessio Amantis