Three Notes on Middle English Poetry and Drama.
- Author/Editor
- Sargent, Michael G.
- Title
- Three Notes on Middle English Poetry and Drama.
- Published
- Sargent, Michael G. "Three Notes on Middle English Poetry and Drama." In Wilfried Haslauer, intro. A Salzburg Miscellany: English and American Studies 1964-1984. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1984. II: 131-80.
- Review
- Only the third of Sargent's three "notes" pertains to Gower. Sub-titled "Religious Form, Amorous Matter: Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women' and Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'" (pp. 159-80), it compares the two poems as "strikingly similar in many aspects." Sargent's tally of similarities begins with the fact that each work opens with reference to "books of former ages" (160), each "offers a vision in which the narrator is met by the court of the god of Love," each includes reference to the "debate of the flower and the leaf" (161), and each connects the court of its vision with the court of Richard II. This "similar framing device" is matched by a "similar generic motif: the parody of a major form of popular religious literature" (162), i.e., books of saints' lives in Chaucer's poem and a "version of the confessor's manual" (163) in Gower's. "Another similarity" of the two poems, Sargent tells us, "is that both poems exist in more than one recension" (172), positing that the poets may have shared "a common motive for revision": reducing or eliminating Ricardian material, perhaps because "political developments made it wise to obscure" such material (177). Next, Sargent apparently abandons his list of similarities--but only apparently--to consider the putative quarrel between Gower and Chaucer. He cites the references to tales of incest (Canace and Apollonius) in Chaucer's "Man of Law's Prologue" which, traditionally, underlie the idea of a quarrel which Sargent thinks, possibly, should "be interpreted as one friend's joke on another" (180). Earlier in his essay, Sargent had deduced that incest was crucial to Gower's parody of a confessional manual: after summarizing at length his views of the poem's presentation of how and to what extent six of the seven deadly sins and their branches align Christian morality and, parodically, courtly ethos (167-70), Sargent claims that Gower's "use of the format of the confessor's manual" raises a question "which should have been hovering in the consciousness of every medieval reader" of CA: "How can Lechery ever be considered a sin in a religion based on idealized eroticism?" (171). The only answer offered by Genius (and Gower) is incest, Sargent tells us, because incest is unnatural and "the only sin of Lechery that the religion of Cupid could admit" (179). Chaucer's "gentle parody" of Gower's parody, it seems, can "be taken as evidence of similar outlook" (180).] [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]
- Date
- 1984
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Confessio Amantis