What Lies Beneath.
- Author/Editor
- Taylor, Karla.
- Title
- What Lies Beneath.
- Published
- Taylor, Karla. "What Lies Beneath." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 71-88.
- Review
- Taylor argues that Gower's "The Tale of the Two Coffers" (CA 5.2273-2390) engages at least two concerns that underlie much of the "Confessio Amantis" and possibly underlie its revision: ethical choice and the relation of outward signs to inner reality--what Taylor calls "referential integrity" (78). She contrasts the tale with analogous accounts in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" and Boccaccio's "Decameron" to show that Gower's stark plot poses "a nonsensical parody of ethical choice" (78) and that its two externally identical casks with differing contents present the "hapless courtiers" (80) with a pair of signs that are impossible to distinguish rationally. Mention of fortune in Gower's account and the "shadowy evocation of grace" (78) help to raise questions about the king's test as well as the courtiers' choice, and enable Taylor to align details of the tale with Wycliffite arguments about the apprehension of truth, material possession, and their relations with secular dominium, or lordship. She suggests that "the work of the tale is to figure out how Gower's understanding of kingly authority and just rule differs from the emergent [and politically dangerous] Wycliffite discourse of dominium" (84) in which only "unknowable grace" (85) makes it possible to recognize and thereby choose to follow true dominium. Further, the "tense equipoise of sympathy and critique--toward both courtiers and king--registers an uneasiness with partisanship of any kind, especially when it comes to claims of grace-based right to rule" (85-86). The tale, Taylor tells us, "pointedly implicates Richard" (86) and is concerned with issues that "later became the backbone of the case against Richard's tyranny," even though the terms the tale "uses to explore them are almost pointedly non-partisan" (87). Nevertheless, the "discomfort" the tale "registers with the exercise of dominion" enables Taylor to posit an innovative "explanation of the Henrician revisions" to the CA: "the possibility that the revised recension ending [of CA] articulates not so much a vision of ideal dominium as an uneasy "ex post facto" philosophical justification of Gower's shift in allegiance" from Richard to Henry (87-88). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Biography of Gower