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Conclusion: Lydgatean Fame after the Fifteenth Century
from PART II - Lydgatean Fame
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
Summary
In his poem A Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell (published 1523), John Skelton narrates a dreamed encounter with the pre-eminent poets of medieval England: John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Lydgate. Standing among the great classical and medieval poets in Fame's retinue, each of these three poets – who, Skelton notes, ‘wantid nothynge but the laurell’ (397) – addresses the dreamer in turn, encouraging him as he prepares for the upcoming judgement of his poetic merits. After Gower and Chaucer have each spoken, Lydgate appoints Skelton ‘to be prothonatory / Of Fames court, by all our holl assent / Auaunced by Pallas to laurell preferment’ (432–4). Skelton thanks his predecessor, and proceeds on his way to Pallas in her pavilion, where his status will be decided.
Skelton's description of these three medieval poets imitates fifteenth-century literary depictions of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate as the three fathers of English poetry. Considering Lydgate's ardent laureate ambitions, it is rather appropriate that he should be the one imagined as ushering Skelton ‘to laurell preferment’. And while critics have variously interpreted Skelton's enigmatic declaration that his three predecessors ‘wantid nothynge but the laurell’, it seems likely that Chaucer – whose dreamer positively recoils from renown in the House of Fame – and Lydgate might have viewed their lack of official laureation very differently.
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- John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame , pp. 146 - 157Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012