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6 - Lydgate's Fortune in the House of Fame
from PART II - Lydgatean Fame
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
Summary
Of the various Chaucerian works upon which Lydgate drew, the House of Fame is of particular significance in relation to his own poetics of fame. As well as producing essentially ‘a rewriting of the House of Fame’ in the form of his own dream-poem, the Temple of Glass, Lydgate regularly repurposed the vocabulary and imagery of Chaucer's poem in the service of his laureate ambitions. A key example occurs in the prologue to book IV of the Fall of Princes. In the midst of his lengthy encomium concerning writing and poetry, Lydgate describes the eventual fruit of Petrarch's literary labours:
And thus be writyng he gat hymsilff a name
Perpetuelli to been in remembraunce,
Set and registred in the Hous of Fame[.]
(IV.120–2)
Lydgate's reference to Fame's house imbues what had been the chance-dominated setting of Chaucer's dream-poem with a sense of potential permanence and stability. Here, Fame's palace is not an unreliable den of contingency, but is instead a virtual temple where poets may ‘[p]erpetuelli’ preserve the memory of their names and their works. Through his poetry, Petrarch (who is not among the pillared poets listed in the House of Fame) has determined his own fame, something that would be unthinkable with respect to the petitioners in Chaucer's poem (or to the dreamer-poet himself). Lydgate's brief reference to Fame's house thus redefines its relationship to contingency and refigures it as the appropriate monument to his laureate predecessor.
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- John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame , pp. 129 - 145Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012