Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

His consciousness of the superiority of his master did not, however, prevent him from venturing to make use of the same material, and in the Chaste Spouse of the Emperor Gerelaus he re-tells the story of Constance.

A number of minor poets make up the list. Benedict Burgh—the shadow of Chaucer’s shadow—completed The Secrets of the Philosophers, a peculiarly dull poem which Lydgate left unfinished at his death. Side by side with him worked George Ashby, clerk of the signet to Queen Margaret, and a little later comes Henry Bradshaw, a monk of St. Werburgh’s Abbey at Chester. They are all worthy, honest men, who utter moral platitudes with an air of conviction; painstaking but unskilful apprentices in the workshop of poetry, who conscientiously blunt their tools and cut their fingers in a vain effort to do the work of master craftsmen. One curious little development is, however, worth noticing. In the latter half of the fifteenth century two poets, Sir George Ripley and Thomas Norton, wrote treatises on alchemy, in verse. Ripley’s The Compound of Alchemy, or the Twelve Gates, and Norton’s Ordinall of Alchemy, owe their interest in the first place to the proof they afford that verse at the time was a natural means of instruction rather than an end in itself; and in the second to their adventitious connection with the Chanouns Yemannes Tale. Norton endeavours to copy the Chaucerian couplet, and Professor Saintsbury suggests that he is probably the Th. Norton whom Ascham, in his Scholemaster, classes with Chaucer, Surrey, Wyatt and Phaer, as having vainly attempted to replace accent by rhyme.

Stephen Hawes falls into a class somewhat apart. Writing at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, he stands at the parting of the ways, and while his poetry shows signs of the new influences that were at work, his heart is evidently with the old conventions which are beginning to pass away. His chief poem, The Pastime of Pleasure, or the Historye of Graunde Amoure and la Bell Pucell: containing the Knowledge of the Seven Sciences and the Course of Man’s Life in this World, is sufficiently described by its title. It stands, as it were, half-way between Chaucer and Spenser, at one moment clearly recalling the love scenes of Troilus and Criseyde, at another reminding us equally forcibly of the elaborate and ingenious allegory of the Faerie Queene. The combination of chivalry and allegory was something new, and though Hawes himself proved incapable of making the most of its possibilities, English literature owes him a real debt. He never rises to any great height. Mr. Murison, in his chapter on Hawes in Vol. II of the Cambridge History of Literature, draws attention to certain verbal resemblances between the Passetyme of Pleasure and the Faerie Queene, but the passages quoted serve only to show how far removed the music of Spenser is from the speech of ordinary men. At his worst Hawes sinks beneath the lowest level of what can possibly be allowed to pass as verse. The dialogue between Graunde Amour and Dame Grammar defies parody:—

“Madame,” quod I, “for as much as there be
Eight partes of speche, I would knowe right faine,
What a noune substantive is in his degree;
And wherefore it is so called certaine?
To whom she answered right gentely againe
Saing alway that a noune substantive
Might stand without helpe of an adjective.

That the stanza of Troilus and Criseyde should be used for such stuff as this is unbearable.

The Scottish Chaucerians are of far more intrinsic importance. The love-allegory of the Kingis Quair shows the influence of Chaucer not only in its use of the Chaucerian stanza—henceforth to be known as the rhyme royal—but in the evidence it affords of its author’s acquaintance with the English version of the Romance of the Rose. Moreover, in it may be noticed that sympathy with the freshness and joy of nature which forms so strong a bond between Chaucer and his Scottish disciples, and is so conspicuous by its absence in the work of the English Chaucerians. Emily herself might well walk in the garden where

... on the smale grene twistis[214] sat
The little sweete nyghtingale, and song
So loud and clear, the hymnes consecrate
Of loves use, now softe now loud among,
That all the gard(e)nes and the walles rong
Ryght of their song, and on the copill[215] next
Of their sweet harmony, and lo the text:
“Worschippe, ye that loveres be(ne) this May,
For of your bliss the kalendes are begonne,
And sing with us, away winter, away,
Come sumer, come, the sweet season and sonne,
Awake, for schame! that have your heavenes wonne,
And amourously lift up your heades all,
Thank Love that list you to his merci call;”

and the picture of Joan Beaufort,

The fairest or the freschest yong(e) floure
That ever I sawe, me thoght, before that houre;

has something of Chaucer’s daintiness and grace.