(Un)couth: Chaucer, "The Shepheardes Calender," and the Forms of Mediation.
- Author/Editor
- Espie, Jeff.
- Title
- (Un)couth: Chaucer, "The Shepheardes Calender," and the Forms of Mediation.
- Published
- Spenser Studies 31-32 (2017): 243-71.
- Review
- Espie is concerned with Tudor reception of Chaucer, treating Gower and (more extensively) Lydgate as mediators of Chaucer for Spenser and his contemporaries, exploring several ways Chaucer was understood, presented, and emulated in Spenser's "The Shepeardes Calender." There are many kinds of "mediation" of Chaucer underlying Spenser's "Calender"--early Tudor editions of Chaucer among them, Espie shows. He pays most attention, however, to "networks of Medieval intertextuality" (244) as they play out in Spenser's work, offering as one example Gower's and Lydgate's possible influences on the June eclogue of the "Calender"--how this eclogue "integrates a commendation [of Tityrus/Chaucer] that Spenser may have derived from Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' and a plaintive voice that he models on what I'll call the Lydgatian mode" (246). Espie assesses Venus's praise of Chaucer in CA 8.2499 as one who "has made 'as he wel couthe' many 'ditees and songes' of love" (Espie's emphasis), exploring how the "commonplace phrase" wel couthe "plays an uncommon role" at the end of CA insofar as "Gower's passage is unique in using the phrase . . . to describe Chaucer's skill as an amorous poet--unique, that is until the 'Calender'" (252-53), where Colin's pursuit of love is central to both his role as poet and his commendation of Tityrus/Chaucer, and where suggestive resonances of "couthe" recur as the phrase is repeated elsewhere in Spenser's work. Combining the Gowerian echo with Lydgate's "plaintive voice" in the June eclogue, Espie argues, Spenser "remakes the Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate triumvirate into a Chaucer and Colin pair" (256), assimilating an old tradition into a new one. Espie also suggests that Gower's presentation of Chaucer as a love poet underlies the inclusion of Thomas Usk's "Testament of Love" in William Thynne's and John Stow's editions of Chaucer, and that John Leland "implicitly align[s] himself with Gower" in his praise of Chaucer. Such "well-read Chaucerians in Tudor England not only consulted Venus's words from the 'Confessio' but also used them to shape their representations of Chaucer" (253). In much of his essay, Espie examines how Lydgate's idea of Chaucer's "Janus-faced poetics" might have influenced E.K.'s prefatory epistle and Spenser's own "paradoxical poetics" (261) in "the process of poetic succession" (262), and how Chaucer's Pandarus-like interpretive mode made its mark on E.K. as an interpreter. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Confessio Amantis