Studies in the Age of Chaucer

‘‘What is me?’’: Self and Society in the Poetry of Thomas Hoccleve Lee Patterson Yale University To redeem what is past and to transform every ‘‘It was’’ into ‘‘Thus would I have it!’’—that only do I call redemption! Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra The tendency toward unified control prevails during our developmental history, probably because a single organism requires that there be one single self if the job of maintaining life is to be accomplished successfully—more than one self per organism is not a good recipe for survival. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens As the Male Regle nears its end, Hoccleve asks, with the willful naiveté that makes his poetry at once enigmatic and endearing, ‘‘Ey, what is me 3at to myself thus longe / Clappid haue I?’’1 Hoccleve is the most strenuously autobiographical poet of early English literature: not until at least Donne, or perhaps even Wordsworth and the high Romantics do we find his equal in self-observation.2 To the first critics of Hoccleve’s This essay has benefited from the generous responses by audiences who listened to various sections and versions that were delivered at the University of London (in 1994 and again in 1998), at the New Chaucer Society (1996), at the University of Minnesota (1997), and at the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan (1997). Also to be thanked are the former students who have repaid my infliction upon them of Hocclevian obsessions with many insights, especially Christine Chism, Alzada Tipton, Ethan Knapp, and Robert Meyer-Lee. 1 M. C. Seymour, ed., Selections from Hoccleve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 22, lines 393–94. 2 Any discussion of the issue of self-representation in Hoccleve’s writing must acknowledge the groundbreaking analysis provided by J. A. Burrow in his lecture ‘‘Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages: The Case of Thomas Hoccleve,’’ PBA 68 (1982): 389–412. Burrow rightly points out that discussions of autobiography cannot be usefully organized by a distinction between the literally conventional and the historically real, an argument made earlier if somewhat irresolutely (as Burrow notes) by Penelope B. R. Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 208–31. 437 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER poetry, as to more recent commentators, these self-representations are understood as conventional poses required for thematic reasons. This understanding locates his account of his misbehavior in the Male Regle within a penitential context, establishing a pattern of sin followed by contrition, while it reads his dialogue with the almsman in the Regiment of Princes as both providing a cautionary example of misgovernance to Prince Henry and as motivating the poem’s function as a petition for relief from the anxiety of poverty.3 And Hoccleve’s remarkable account of his madness and the social isolation it forced upon him in his late Complaint has also been interpreted as a penitential exercise, a story of sin and contrition, with the result that the other items that comprise the so-called Series have been located within the same moralizing context.4 Other critics, more alert to the literary and psychological complexities inherent in all acts of self-representation, have avoided claiming that Hoccleve’s autobiographical protagonist is simply an everyman adopted to prove a moral point. But they have continued to read his various accounts of himself as essentially strategic, poses adopted depending on the needs of the communicative situation. Here the argument is primarily that Hoccleve wears the mask required of the subordinate who wants his superior audience to listen to his importunities and advice. According to John Burrow, ‘‘Hoccleve makes a fool of himself to amuse the great man,’’ a reading that is at one point endorsed by Hoccleve himself, when he admits—in a poem written for Edward, duke of York—that the poem serves as ‘‘an owtere of my nycetee / For my good lordes lust and game and play.’’5 And in the Male Regle he admits that ‘‘who so him 3 Eva M. Thornley, ‘‘The Middle English Penitential Lyric and Hoccleve’s Autobiographical Poetry,’’ NM 68 (1967): 295–321; Charles R...