Copying Couplets: Performing Masculinity in Middle English Moral Poetry.
- Author/Editor
- Fitzgerald, Christina M.
- Title
- Copying Couplets: Performing Masculinity in Middle English Moral Poetry.
- Published
- Exemplaria 32 (2020): 107-29.
- Review
- Fitzgerald frames her essay with Polonius's precepts from Shakespeare's "Hamlet," suggesting, "Shakespeare is drawing on an older, vernacular tradition and practice of masculine advice poetry"--"an obscure body of conduct poetry concerned with the performance of masculinity" (108). Fitzgerald focuses on couplets that "perform masculine authority in multiple modes" (109), and in so doing must navigate the tension between homosocial elements of masculinity and the excesses that would have been decried in what Vance Smith has called "arts of possession." The "later medieval masculine social self" is revealed in the content, performance, production, circulation, and form of this poetry. "Masculinity," Fitzgerald argues, "becomes a commodity to trade" (110). She calls attention to their "fungible nature" as they draw men together in networks of exchange. Beginning with couplets from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108, Fitzgerald traces iterations of them using the "Index of Middle English Verse"; she includes a useful chart that helps to illustrate the poetic body generated by these connected couplets. The interchangeability of these couplets is key--hence the use of the term "fungible couplets"--and results from a "mercantile discourse and ethics" that is "entirely masculine" and that seems to be particular to the middle class (115). They often employ the "performative voice of father advising son," which leads Fitzgerald to discuss particular examples wherein we find these voices appropriating authority in the copying of the couplets. Chaucer is appropriated in the Carthusian MS (British Library MS Add. 37049), and Gower in Hill's manuscript (Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354). The act of copying might itself be considered a performance of masculine authority wherein the copyist takes on the voice of masculine authority. Hill, for example, copies tales from "Confessio Amantis" but neglects to include their allegorical frame: "Yet, at the end of each tale, Genius's voice still survives in a few lines, often addressing the now-absent Amans as 'my son' and underscoring the moral and ethical lesson of the tale" (124). Fitzgerald returns to Shakespeare to conclude, suggesting that Shakespeare does not mock Polonius through the precepts he spouts but rather in so doing displays "the ways that masculinity and masculine authority are a performance, and to recognize the contradictions and anxieties of masculinity itself in his own age and the age preceding him" (125). [JS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Manuscripts and Textual Studies