Lydgate and the Lenvoy

Abstract

This article charts the development of the lenvoy (or envoy) in English courtly verse in the fifteenth century, looking in particular at the poetry of Hoccleve and Lydgate. It first offers a brief account of the lenvoy’s formation. Then, drawing on recent theorizations of poetry’s self-authorizing form, it argues that these authors use changed, elaborated or upgraded form to emphasize poetry’s ability to legitimate itself. It explores the role this legitimating form plays in establishing the relationship of poet and poem to patron and audience. In Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, the lenvoy moves from a work’s periphery to become a key structural element of this advice text. A concluding section traces the lenvoy’s influence as a site for self-theorization on later Lancastrian and early Tudor authors.

Keywords:

• Hoccleve
• Lydgate
• envoy
• lenvoy
• form
• poetry
• authority
• rhyme

Notes

1. Bernd Engler (1990) surveys the history of the lenvoy, though he does not emphasize the part played by form in the lenvoy’s evolution towards the metaliterary. The Middle English Dictionary (MED) has entries for both envoie and lenvoie, though I treat both words as meaning the same thing throughout this article.

2. On the circularity of the ballade and other lyric forms, see Knox (2016, 221–228).

3. All quotations from Chaucer’s (1988) works are taken from the Riverside Chaucer, cited hereafter by title and by book and line numbers in parentheses in the main text.

4. As Hanna (1996, 170) writes, “the whole purpose of envoys is to turn on the poems that precede them.” The envoy to Truth may have been suppressed by scribes who preferred the poem as a generalized Boethian lyric (171).

5. On the production of subjectivity as a “textual phenomenon” in Middle English narrative and lyric, see Spearing (2005).

6. Gower’s use of rhyme royal for the supplication to Venus in the Confessio is another early recognition of the link between a form’s status and the rank of a poem’s addressee, matched by the use of rhyme royal for In Praise of Peace.

7. For the classical origins of expressions of authorial humility and the development of the captatio benevolentiae, see Curtius (1953, 407–413).

8. Nigel Mortimer’s study (2005, 58–59) of the literary and political contexts of the Fall of Princes only briefly considers Humfrey’s request for this extra component of the Fall, seeing the envoys as mainly regiminal in purpose and not offering an analysis of their form.

9. See MED “proces,” entry 4 and “remedie,” entry 2.

10. At the end of the Fall of Princes, Lydgate provides a spectacular and extended excursus bringing together many of these Hocclevean and Chaucerian tropes: a lenvoy to his patron and readers, a lenvoy for Humfrey alone (six eight-line stanzas through-rhymed and refrained), words from author to book (two stanzas carrying on the rhymes and refrains of what immediately precedes it) and a “go little book” address modelled on Chaucer’s Troilus (two stanzas likewise carrying on the same rhymes and refrains). Lydgate again cites the notion that “Ynglyssh in ryme hath skarsete” (Book 9, line 3312), a charge that the end of the Fall emphatically disproves.

11. See the various senses recorded in MED “conveien” and “resoun” (n.[2]).

12. Suetonius (2014, vol. 2, 324–325). Lydgate gets this detail via his source, Boccaccio.

13. Julia Boffey (2012, 7–8) catalogues this little-studied group of verse additions and describes Fabyan’s practice as an author-compiler, noting too Fabyan’s knowledge of Lydgate’s poetry. For more details of Fabyan’s biography, see Boffey (2014, 294, 298) where again Boffey points out how Lydgate serves as a model for Fabyan’s authorial activity.