A Poet at Work: John Gower's Revisions to the "Tale of Rosiphilee."
- Author/Editor
- Green, Richard Firth.
- Title
- A Poet at Work: John Gower's Revisions to the "Tale of Rosiphilee."
- Published
- Green, Richard Firth. "A Poet at Work: John Gower's Revisions to the 'Tale of Rosiphilee'." In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of R. F. Yeager. Ed. Susannah Mary Chewning. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 217-226.
- Review
- Green's essay digs into Gower's process of revision, looking at the successive versions of lines depicting a procession of beautiful ladies seen by Rosiphilee, as these lines are altered in Macaulay's three recensions of the CA. C. S. Lewis had drawn attention to the revision of these lines in his "The Allegory of Love," citing the line in its third recension form as evidence for Gower's aesthetically demanding revisions of his own work. Green finds this account unpersuasive, and tracks a more complex path. Green argues that the revision from first to second recension was made in order to produce a couplet that would be more resistant to scribal error. This revision however, creating the couplet, "The beaute of here faye face / There mai non erÞly Þing deface," produced its own difficulty, as the lines in this form might easily seem to suggest that these ladies were fairies, the belief in which, as Green has argued in his "Elf Queens and Holy Friars," had been the subject of a systematic and hostile ecclesiastical campaign. Green thus reads the subsequent revision, that of Macaulay's "third recension," ("The beaute faye upon her face / Non erthly thing it may desface") as Gower's attempt to make it "clear that it is fairy beauty, not the fairies themselves, that is at issue" (225). In tracing Gower's careful negotiation of the language of fairies and fairyland, Green concludes that these revisions demonstrate that "Gower was far readier than Chaucer to respond to the imaginative appeal of fairyland, even as he paid lip-service to the conventional morality of those clerics who were determined to render it impotent" (226). [EK. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Manuscripts and Textual Studies