Chaucer, Gower, and Fifteenth-Century Poetry in English.

Author/Editor
Attridge, Derek.

Title
Chaucer, Gower, and Fifteenth-Century Poetry in English.

Published
Attridge, Derek. "Chaucer, Gower, and Fifteenth-Century Poetry in English." In The Experience of Poetry: From Homer's Listener's to Shakespeare's Readers (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019), pp. 228-53.

Review
This--chapter 10--is part of a larger analysis of poetic reception. It is a useful introduction into close-to-current thinking on poetic reception in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Gower is mentioned only a few times, however, and only the "Confessio Amantis." Attridge notes that the shift from French to English poetry in the period led to a "growing audience for poetry in English among the increasingly large circle of administrators who managed London's commercial interests and the merchants and traders who contributed to its wealth" (228). He cites Strohm and Middleton on our increasing sense of the period's audience and its social status, before moving on the broader question of poetic performance versus manuscript delivery. Attridge offers a fairly thorough analysis of "Troilus and Criseyde," and its representation of both performance and reading. Briefly shifting to Gower, he argues that the CA, like "Troilus and Criseyde," "hovers between the oral and the literate" (238); he then returns to Chaucer with the "Canterbury Tales," remarking that the sense of being caught between written and oral form seems to extend to the speaking pilgrims, as well. He then moves to a discussion of metrical form, which similarly focuses primarily on Chaucer, though he mentions Gower's "strict tetrameter verse" (243). He suggests that the pentameter line represents a break from "the song-oriented four-beat forms" (243). As a broad exploration of the slow shift from poetry as a purely oral form to its later existence primarily in writing, the chapter gives a good sense of a transitional period. That being said, scholars of Gower well find more here about the trends of his period than about his actual work. [RAL. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]

Date
2019

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Language and Word Studies
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification