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HOCCLEVE AND LYDGATE (THEMES (Mental Illness:
The Series: speaker talks…
HOCCLEVE AND LYDGATE
THEMES
Mental Illness:
- The Series: speaker talks about his period of mental instability (a "lost vessel"); friends go on pilgrimage for his health; later describes wit as a pilgrim (went away and now its back)
- How does Illness and recovery shape genre in The Series?
- La Male Regle
Authority: Can an author be held responsible for how a reader interprets his work?
- The Series questions how to give advice to a prince? (generic tools? rhetorical strategies?)
- Constant references to Chaucer in Hoccleve and Lydgate
Textual Production:
- Hoccleve shows himself in the present working on textual production
- The Series is for a patron but Hoccleve seems to be making/writing the book as he is in dialogue with his friend
- Compilation metaphor in FOP: new corn coming form old chaff
Gender (and genre):
- Hoccleve "submits" to the ladies in his prologue and says he will translate a romance for them
- Lady in TOG has a lot of autonomy (choice)
Performance:
- Speaker in The Series talks with an image of death in Suso translation (Similar to Everyman?)
- "Danse Macabre": multiplicity of voices (interactions through dialogue): pope, bishop, cardinal, archbishop, clerk, parson, king constable, laborer, emperor, baron, patriarch, gentlewoman, friar, child, hermit
"Trouthe": Both Hoccleve and Lydgate question how to determine "trouthe" in political alliances; e.g., Siege question the ethics of remaining loyal to bad political alliances (references to Troy/Thebes)
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COURT POLITICS
Hoccleve:
- often mentions his court position in the office of the privy seal
- genres: religious compositions (prayers, allegories); romance; stories for moral education; treatise about preparing for your own death
- structural form: relies heavily on dialogue
Lydgate:
- Desire vs. Duty in TOG
- story of Oedipus in SOT shows what can happen if a prince makes a bad marriage
- Tydeus in SOT made into a hero figure (Lydgate's modification) that emulates Henry V
Audiences:
- court
- king or royal/noble patron
- Merchants (see work on Lydgate's performative pieces)
ORTHODOXY
Traditional readings of Lydgate and Hoccleve:
- apologists for religious orthodoxy
- social conservatives
Anxieties:
- Hoccleve's friend cautions him against reading his complaint in public
- The Series brings up current case of Lollard John Badby
"Address to Sir John Oldcastle":
- describes heresy as a snare
- poem asks Oldcastle to confess (orthodox); poem publicly mitigates conflict b/w the king and his knight
- Loss of Christianity linked to loss of masculinity and knighthood (what's at stake?: faith, chivalry, social status, gender roles)
- places agency (and blame) on the heretics (abstract, evil, de-personalized group); says they infected Oldcastle with their ideas
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