John Gower
- Author/Editor
- Peck, Russell A.
- Title
- John Gower
- Published
- Peck, Russell A.. "John Gower." In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. Helterman, Jeffrey and Mitchell, Jerome. Detriot: Gale Research, 1994, pp. 178-90.
- Review
- Peck attempts to provide a one-chapter overview of Gower and his works. It begins with a list of Gower's works (including a selective bibliography of manuscripts and editions); it offers a discussion of Gower's biography and then of each of his works in turn; and it concludes with "References,” a bibliography that includes the major book-length studies of Gower and a handful of important articles. About half of the section on Gower’s life is concerned with his relation to Chaucer. Separate paragraphs treat Agnes Groundolf, the date of Gower’s birth and his ancestry, his property dealings, his relation to the Priory of St. Mary Overey’s, and his lost writings, including Fisher’s speculation on Gower’s participation in the “Pui.” The discussion of the major works is given over mostly to their structure and a to summary of their contents. MO is labeled a “complaint against the ills of the world.” Like Fisher, Peck gives only a passing reference to the catalog of the virtues, and he describes the poet turning at the end of the poem from the foolish songs of his youth to “a new song of disenchantment,” passing over the penitential and redemptive spirit of the life of the Virgin with which the poem concludes. His discussion of VC gives a standard account of the textual history and revisions of the poem, of its contents, including Book 1 and the "Cronica Tripertita," and of its sources. In describing CA, Peck refrains from repeating the arguments of his own published writing on the poem, either his 1978 book on "Kingship and Common Profit" or his most recent essay on “The Phenomenology of Make Believe” (see JGN 14, no. 1), though both are rightfully included in his list of references. He gives a fairly detailed account of Gower’s revisions of CA, then treats briefly the frame of the confession, the characters of Genius and Amans (each amusing in his partial understanding), the arrangement of the lessons, and the implications of the Prologue and the epilogue for Gower’s penitential purpose. The “strength” of the poem, however, which he repeatedly describes as a delight, “lies in its stories,” and he concludes with a list of the dozen tales that he finds most notable (p. 189). The chapter ends with brief accounts of Gower’s shorter poems. Consistent with the format and purpose of the volume in which it is found, there is little in Peck’s chapter that is new. Most, in fact, can be found in either Macaulay or Fisher, and though he takes a critical view of the notion that Gower’s revisions in CA reflect a public change of allegiance (p. 188), Peck repeats some of the more speculative inferences about his relationship with Chaucer (p. 180), and he adopts the idea that Gower had his own scriptorium (pp. 178, 182) which most others who have worked on the text have by now pretty much discarded. There are a few other quibbles one could raise: his account of the revisions of CA suggests that the “third” recension evolved from the “second” when it is more sensible to think of it as a separate revision of the “first;” and Gower didn’t receive his first collar of S’s from Henry after his accession (Peck, p.189) but in 1393 (see Fisher, p. 68). Otherwise, Peck has presented in brief form a useful summary of what is currently known about the poet and his works, and his chapter could be a good starting point for students who are making their first acquaintance with his writing. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 18.2.]
- Date
- 1994
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
- Biography of Gower