Free The Columbia History of British Poetry by Carl Woodring, James Shapiro Page B

analysis of human love in all its manifestations from comic to sublime, its playful wit, fierce denunciations of vice, earnest pleas for peace and charity, and splendid portrayal of a mutable and treacherous world in inevitable and irresistible decline almost pull it apart. If Chaucer offers us a world without comment, Gower offers us something more like an encyclopedia with a moral commentary; not as risqué as The Canterbury Tales , but not in need of apology or retraction either.
Chaucer's most famous follower was John Lydgate (d. ca. 1449), a long-lived monk whose enormous output has earned him much jocular

 

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abuse. Lydgate does not have any of the qualities which make Chaucer fresh for every generation that reads him; he is instead a much more typical product of his age, and was in consequence accorded an admiration even higher, in some cases, than that offered to Chaucer. Lydgate is above all a storyteller, and he undertakes to extend and enlarge the body of stories in English verse. He adds a tale to The Canterbury Tales , and embarks on some enormous translations: the Troy Book (from Guido della Colonna's Latin and a French translation) and the Fall of Princes (from Boccaccio's Latin and a French translation). These works show the medieval preoccupation with complete systems: the Fall of Princes is a giant catalogue of the downfall of notable people since the world beganthe first story is that of Adam and Eveshowing the domination of Fortune over our world with the general didactic message not to trust to earthly things.
The Troy Book gives the whole complete story of Troy, which is far removed from Homer's partial (in all senses) account. The story of Troy for the Middle Ages began with Jason and ended with the death of Ulysses at the hand of his own unrecognized son by Circe. It provided a nostalgic paradigm for the downfall of civilization in the sacking of a great city: a reverberating image of loss. Lydgate ties his own translation to the English wars with France, but there must have been few times in the Middle Ages when this tale of hopeless valor, betrayal, and destruction was not all too appropriate. The story had grown steadily; minor characters like Troilus and Criseyde developed their own parts within it; the nations of Europe traced their origins back into it; it became everyone's history, combining the appeal of national epic and continuing soap opera. It is a mark of the distinction between Chaucer and Lydgate that Chaucer (like Homer before him) chose to focus on a tiny episode within the giant history, whereas Lydgate tried to encompass the whole thing systematically in serial style. Lydgate's verse is pedestrian but serviceable, and the story he tells has an undeniable power: the whole course of the war is traced from the initial insult offered to Jason and reaches its climax in the savage slaughter of the innocent Polyxena: a kind of moral sweep that judges even as it describes the course of events.
But Lydgate cannot let it rest there: he goes on patiently to provide accounts of the rest of the lives of all the participants; to him the whole story is more important than the literary climax. In the Troy legend the medieval blurring of the boundary between fiction and history is most

 

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apparent: "history" and "story" are after all the same word. We do not know if Lydgate thought of his work as translating, versifying, or embellishing, or a combination of all three:
For in metring though ther be ignoraunce,
Yet in the story ye may fynde plesaunce
Touching substaunce of that myn auctour wryt.
                                           (TB.V.34913493)
But he is quite clear about the all-important purpose of it: in the tale one can recognize the instability of Fortune, murder, falsehood, treason, rape, adultery,
As in this boke exaumple ye shal fynde . .