Dullness and the Fifteenth Century.

Author/Editor
Lawton, David.

Title
Dullness and the Fifteenth Century.

Published
Lawton, David. "Dullness and the Fifteenth Century." ELH 54.4 (1987): 761-99.

Review
Lawton here challenges the apparent critical consensus that fifteenth-century poets were not as good as their fourteenth-century forbears, or were, in a word, "dull" (761). In contrast, he argues that "the fifteenth century authoritatively consolidates the public voice and role of English poetry" (762), and that the "dullness" of his title is not that attributed to the period by critics, but rather the consistent use of a humility topos by poets presenting themselves as dull or otherwise lacking. This move Lawton traces to Boethius, but in the period attributes it first to Chaucer, where it has a playfulness mostly lost when handled by his successors. Briefly exploring, as a first example, Hoccleve's "dull" self-presentation in "Regement of Princes," Lawton finds him a student of Chaucer, although a passage in which Hoccleve addresses the burning of Lollards comes across to him as an "an unprompted Gowerian intervention by a poet into current affairs and public policy" (764). Learned Chaucerian technique of professing authorial incapacity nevertheless insulates Hoccleve from direct social critique. Lawton then presents an example from Lydgate's "Fall of Princes" using age as a similar protection, then moving on to the common trope of poets declaring themselves lesser than, first, Gower and Chaucer, and by century's end also including Lydgate. Examples considered include Osbern Bokenham, George Ashby, and John Shirley, all of whom Lawton sees as in large part following Lydgate's model. Lawton characterizes a "strong, non-Chaucerian, moral undertow" (768) in many of these poets' works, and presents in some depth Alexander Barclay's translation of the "Ship of Fools" as an example. All of these poets following Lydgate Lawton characterizes as "a culture" (771). To characterize that culture, he examines work of George Ashby, which he considers "an anthology of fifteenth-century public discourse" (772). Lawton resists writing off Ashby as "conventional or commonplace" (773), but instead suggests focusing on these works in their broader cultural context "devoted to the search for Wisdom in the Biblical sense" (775). The tone he uncovers is evident in what he takes to be fifteenth-century taste in Chaucer: rather different from our own, foregrounding works that are less popular now, including "'Troilus,' 'Melibeus,' the Clerk's Tale, The Monk's Tale, 'Boece,' The Knight's Tale and the Parson's Tale," so that "the Chaucer of the fifteenth century is unusually austere" (780). Lawton observes that "fifteenth-century writing is to a great extent the literature of public servants" (788), which managed to be "courageous and hard-hitting" but also "socially acceptable" (789). The humility topos of dullness allows for that duality by insulating the poet from censure, a maneuver which Lawton sees ultimately as "the social mask of a Renaissance poet" (791). He then concludes with reference to Jürgen Habermas and Terry Eagleton, allowing him to theorize this body of work in terms more familiar to a 1987 audience. Overall this essay covers significant ground, and while subsequent readings of this period and these poets may not always share Lawton's overarching sense of a commonality between fifteenth-century poets, this essay has supported a significant amount of further work on the period. [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]

Date
1987

Gower Subjects
Influence and Later Allusion