John Gower Copies Geoffrey Chaucer.
- Author/Editor
- Cole, Andrew.
- Title
- John Gower Copies Geoffrey Chaucer.
- Published
- Cole, Andrew. "John Gower Copies Geoffrey Chaucer." Chaucer Review 52 (2017): 46-65.
- Review
- Cole's essay has two primary thrusts. In the first, after acknowledging that "Chaucer borrows from Gower" in various places, he sets out to demonstrate that in the "Legend of Good Women" at least "Gower copies Chaucer in a fashion similar both to how medieval readers often gloss texts in their focus on keywords and how scribes literally copy Chaucer often by rewriting his text, reordering his syntax, opting for easier readings, and quashing poetic effects" (47). Thus the major effort of this half of his essay is to show that 1) Gower's narratives of Pyramus and Thisbe and Cleopatra, on which he grounds his claims, are borrowed from Chaucer's tellings, since the same, or similar, words occur centrally in each other's versions; 2) words jotted by readers in the margins of manuscripts to locate ideas or discussion for future reference provide evidence of a period-specific manner of reading by "keywords" and "patterns" that Cole finds characteristically "medieval"; 3) when scribes "quashed" Chaucer's "poetic effects" by rewriting him more simply the result mirrors Gower's "copying" of Chaucer. In order to achieve #1, Cole posits that "LGW was an ongoing project for the poet, which can sustain an early date before the composition of Tr[oilus]" (59, fn.35)--i.e., prior to "the late1380s," (58) when possibly Gower began the CA (58). To achieve #2--a claim that he says illuminates the "shared 'pattern' (emphasis Cole's), whereby the story is formed around certain key terms clustered within coincident passages" (52)--Cole first cites as evidence the occurrence in both Gower's and Chaucer's narration of Thisbe and Pyramus the "key terms" "'Thisbe,' 'Priamus,' 'nyght,' 'tre' (in Chaucer) and 'Tisbee,' 'Piramus,' 'nihtes,' 'tree' (in Gower)" (52). For Cole, these words in both versions indicate that Gower was reading Chaucer (and not the other way around) "medievally," picking up patterns built around "key words" that he later replicated in the CA: "highlighting only the main points as if they were signposts--only taking in the key terms, in the manner of glossing and annotation, and then building poetry around those extractions" (53). The result is #3, "quashed poetry: "Gower reduces narrative details, simplifies them, and . . . inclines toward a simpler presentation, indeed a 'simplicior lectio,' that preserves key terms and narrative details only found in Chaucer" (53). That the reverse might have been happening fails to engage Cole's interest; neither does he suggest how either poet might have told the story of Pyramus and Thisbe without mentioning Pyramus, Thisbe, or the night, or a tree. The latter half of Cole's essay is devoted to unravelling what Chaucer meant by "moral Gower" in the closing lines of TC. "My claim," he says, "is that Chaucer coins the phrase 'moral Gower' as a way to evoke the more familiar locution 'ethicus Ovidius,' thus characterizing Gower's habits of reading and adapting or 'correcting' sources" (56). By way of arguing this, he asserts that the so-called "quarrel" between Chaucer and Gower supposedly initiated with the Prologue to the "Man of Law's Tale" (which Cole recognizes (59) as dependent upon Gower's "Tale of Constance") is really a good-humored disagreement about how to read Ovid, framing his case with a nod to Kosofsky Sedgwick: "Ovid is the important source text over which, it seems, both poets enact their rivalry. Which is to say, the rivalry is not between two poets; rather, it is about what is 'between' [Cole's emphasis] them, literally: Ovid" (60). The unspecified implication of Gower's Ovid as "ethicus" is that Chaucer's is then something else, something more . . . romantic? poetic? complex? aesthetically pleasing? To his credit, Cole does not fill in the blank, but concludes with an idea more interesting: "Hence the 'moral Gower': moral, because his handling of Ovid is not Chaucer's but is executed just as much within the Chaucerian frame. Likewise, Chaucer's own legends inevitably emerge within the Gowerian frame. Each does what the other will not do, but each is necessary to understanding the work of the other" (62). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Language and Word Studies