The Poet as Petitioner.
- Author/Editor
- Burrow, John A.
- Title
- The Poet as Petitioner.
- Published
- Burrow, John A. "The Poet as Petitioner." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 61-75.
- Review
- Burrow looks at authorial self-depictions in a selection of late fourteenth-century poets, including--at various lengths--Langland, Cynewulf, LaŹamon, Thomas Malory, Thomas Hoccleve, and William Dunbar. Chaucer and Gower are, however, his greater focus. As a starting point, he looks at the "autobiographical" passage of William Langland's "Piers Plowman" (62), identifying it as the genre of "petition," specifically on the other's behalf. His overall argument is that this genre underlies references in works of this period that are read as "autobiography" since, in his view the latter is not ultimately a late-medieval genre. Chaucer and Gower move the petition form away from overt requests for material support to more subtle poetic ends. Burrow notes that the petitionary self-identification of Amans as John Gower in "Confessio Amantis," Book VIII is entirely part of the fictive frame--an advance on the generic type. Rather than Gower the poet petitioning a reader, Gower the character is petitioning Venus, another character (69). Burrow finds that, in contrast to Hoccleve or others, a petitionary mode was not especially common in Chaucer's work. He sees authorial petitions in "Fortune," "The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse, and "Lenvoy to Scogan," This last he labels "a real petition" (70), with the understanding that its vagueness would be understood by the actual Scogan. Burrow argues that Chaucer is balancing that actual petition with a complicated byplay similar to Gower's "senex amans" move in the CA. Burrow then looks for the petition type more fictively in the "House of Fame," "Legend of Good Women," and occasionally in the "Canterbury Tales." He sees scenes like Chaucer's petition to Queen Alceste in the prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" as a fictive version of a "court scene of complaint and petition" (72), ultimately creating a focus on the author's humility and self-deprecation. Ultimately Burrow concludes that fictive depictions of petition by Gower and Chaucer "display a certain playfulness" (75) on the part of Ricardian poets. [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 1981
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations