Gower, John, (c. 1330-1408), Poet.
- Author/Editor
- Gillespie, Stuart.
- Title
- Gower, John, (c. 1330-1408), Poet.
- Published
- Gillespie, Stuart. "Gower, John, (c. 1330-1408), Poet." In Shakespeare's Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources. 2d ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). pp. 159-63. First edition published in 2001 by Athlone Press.
- Review
- Gillespie's dictionary entry outlines the reception of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" in sixteenth-century England, citing CA as "one of the great achievements of fourteenth-century poetry" and listing comments by Sidney, Richard Greene, Spenser, Jonson, and Puttenham (159). He quotes Book VIII.1700-38 of Caxton's 1554 edition of the CA Apollonius tale as corresponding to the "recognition scene" in "Pericles" 5.1, and mentions a few other correspondences that critics have identified between CA and Shakespeare's plays and poems. But the focus here is "Pericles." Gillespie reports that Shakespeare combined the "main outline" of Gower's Apollonius plot with the version of Lawrence Twine, and that the "most striking difference" between the poem and the play "may be the figure of Gower himself as Chorus," generally synopsizing critical opinion supported by citation of some eighteen studies. He does, however, propose an additional, undeveloped observation: that "the limpidity of the Gower story and its affinities with the saint's life narrative" (162) may have influenced more than just the plot of "Pericles." [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]
- Date
- 2016
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Confessio Amantis