John Shirley and John Gower.
- Author/Editor
- Connolly, Margaret.
- Title
- John Shirley and John Gower.
- Published
- Connolly, Margaret. "John Shirley and John Gower." 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. 153-66.
- Review
- In his monumental edition of Gower's works, G. C. Macaulay argued largely on prosodic grounds that the English lyric, "Passe forþe þou pilgryme"--attributed to Gower by John Shirley in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 59--was not by Gower. In this essay, Connolly challenges the disattribution by affirming the reliability of Shirley's attributions, by critiquing Macaulay's stylistic concerns, and by examining the "environment" (163) in which Macaulay made his decision, specifically discussions of the lyric by German scholars undertaken near the time when Macaulay published his edition. Connolly is expert on Shirley, and she justifiably refers to her own work in maintaining Shirley's reliability. Yet, her other arguments are less powerful, and they do not lead to any conviction--hers or mine--that the poem is by Gower, only that the "question of the authenticity" of the lyric "deserves renewed and urgent attention" (166), which it indeed does. It is a powerful lyric, in the tradition of Chaucer's "Truth" as Connolly points out, and included by Shirley in a compilation of related pieces, otherwise all by John Lydgate, as Connolly also records, commenting "were the poem not so clearly labelled as Gower's" by Shirley, "it could pass for one of Lydgate's" (154). Connolly usefully edits the thirty-five line poem in its entirety, helping to bring it back from the obscurity into which Macaulay's treatment helped to cast it, and she discusses all three manuscript witnesses to its text, along the way confronting and rejecting John Stow's attribution of the lyric to Benedict Burgh in British Library, MS Additional 29729, later than Shirley's by some 100 years. I do not think, however, that the poem is Gower's, nor that Connolly's surmises about "how far Macaulay may have been influenced by . . . German scholars" of the time (164) undermines the editor's opinion about attribution. As for metrical concerns, Connolly claims the "disturbance to regular scansion" (162) in the lyric--regularity being so characteristic of Gower--is due to Shirley's "South West Midlands" dialect conflicting with Gower's East Midlands dialect, but she does not provide enough evidence to help me reject Macaulay's claim, as she records, that "It is almost impossible that these verses can have been written by Gower" (155; Macaulay II, clxxiii). I am grateful to be introduced to "Passe forþe" and, with Connolly, would very much like to know who wrote it. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies
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