The Memorial Form of John Lydgate’s Troy Book

Abstract

This essay argues that both sides of the continuing debate about whether Lydgate’s Troy Book is more interested in political legitimation or admonition have not understood the form of the poem. It claims that this form is, surprisingly, akin to that of postmodern memorial monuments, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which provide a framework for a trans-temporal communal negotiation of values that is ambivalent and underdetermined by design. Scrutinizing Lydgate’s use of the term memorial and depiction of memorial monuments (especially those for Hecuba and Hector) across the breadth of the poem and in light of its source, the essay demonstrates how the poem’s apparent contradictions or confusions are in fact expressions of its informing idea. In conclusion, the essay reflects on the implications of its argument and anachronistic methodology for the conceptual and methodological confines of synchronic historicism and, more generally, for the relation between historical contingency and aesthetic objects.

Keywords:

• John Lydgate
• Troy Book
• memorial theory
• new historicism
• new formalism
• synchronic historicism
• fifteenth-century political poetry

Notes

1. Webber has published large portions of this dissertation (2009, 2010), but not, regrettably, his valuable consideration of the Troy Book.

2. Lydgate (1906–1935), Prologue, line 78. All references to the Troy Book are to this edition and will be henceforth given in the text by book and line.

3. For the published version of this argument, see Meyer-Lee (2007). Perkins (2003) formulates a similar but converse position: Lydgate primarily seeks correction of his patron, but he must be a prince-pleaser to accomplish this.

4. Nall (2012) addresses the debate but then seeks to sidestep it.

5. MED s.v. “memorial,” n. 1a.

6. The association, evident in this passage, between a memorial to the “grete emprises … of conquerours” and the “laurer grene” that also signifies those “emprises” (2.872–74) seems to inform Lydgate’s use of the term in Book 3 in the well-known paean to Chaucer that punctuates his account of the sorrow of Troilus and Criseyde. A monument to poetic excellence, the “laurer of oure enghshe tonge” is that which Chaucer deserves on the model of Petrarch’s receipt of the laurel “for his excellence … perpetually for a memorial” (3.4246–49). The other use of the term in association with literary composition is adjectival and appears in the prologue, referring to the “bokes” of “auctours” of old, whose “writyng [is] nowe memorial” (pro. 177, 149, 171). In light of the other usages, the term here would seem to mean “established as textual memorial,” in the way that Ovid’s Metamorphoses memorializes Hercules.

7. For a recent consideration of these two spectacles, see Sponsler (2014). Approaching Lydgate’s writing from a rather different direction — in the complex and ambivalent manner that it engages with the early-fifteenth-century controversies regarding religious images — Gayk (2010, 110) arrives at a formulation for Lydgate’s understanding of his poetry as “material memorials” congruent in general ways with the one I adopt here.

8. From this sentence through the end of the paragraph, I have reproduced formulations from Meyer-Lee (2013, 61), where the idea of a poetic memorial serves as a device to organize my commentary on the Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, and Fall of Princes. A key inspiration for these formulations is Choay (2001, 6–7).

9. Guido (1936, 95, 227) does not mention the tomb and statue of Jupiter, and does not refer to the Palladium as a memorial.

10. Guido’s summary of Polyxena’s speech in Griffin’s edition takes up fourteen lines of text and is in third person except for three words (1936, 236). For more on Polyxena, see Shutters (2001).

11. A bluntly unequivocal example of this kind of memorial is the obelisk that stands a short walk from my residence in front of the old Dekalb County courthouse in downtown Decatur, Georgia. Erected in 1908 at the height of Jim Crow, its extensive inscriptions baldly seek to project “glory” upon the past casualties of Confederate troops in order to promote the white supremacist aspirations of the present. For example, its west face states, “After forty-two years another generation bears witness to the future that these men were of a covenant keeping race who held fast to the faith as it was given by the fathers of the Republic.”

12. For the Troy Book’s advocacy of peace, see, e.g. Straker (1999a, 1999b) and Witalisz (2011).

13. More generally, we may see the principle of coincidentia oppositorum as native to the situation of any clerical writer producing secular advisory verse for a prince — native to the task, that is, of encouraging the prince to better a world that the writer believes with absolute certainty to be inherently corrupt, ruled by the chaos of fortune, and ultimately doomed. See Scanlon (2014, 515).

14. In Guido the parallel with the chantry chapel is more suggestive than definite (1936, 178).

15. Critics have been drawn to the oratory’s death-transcending valence more than to its memento mori one. See, e.g. Strohm (2008), Fewer (2004), and Mueller (2013).

16. For Hector as a stand-in for Henry, see most recently Witalisz (2011, 97–147). This paragraph and the next one adapt my discussion of Hector and the end of the Troy Book in Meyer-Lee (2014).

17. The opposing views toward Lydgate’s minor changes at this point are predictable. For Webber, “Nothing in Book 5 is more revealing of Lydgate's [anti-war] intentions than the way in which he inflates the casualty figures over his source material (2008, 125).” For Mueller, who focuses on Lydgate’s elision of Guido’s roll-call of the slain nobility, “Such a morbid ending did not suit the tastes of [pro-imperialist] Lydgate, who eliminates the listing of the slain and substitutes a conclusion in which he identifies himself, lauds his patron Henry V, and pays homage to Chaucer” (2013, 79).

18. For a similar conceptualization of this kind of aesthetic function, developed in much greater detail than I have space for, see Fowler (2013).

19. These formulations have some similarity to Dimock’s (1997) notion of resonance, but by my simile of wormholes and imagery of aligning currents I mean to retain a firmer, if still always mediated, relationship between different moments of aesthetic apprehension.