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3 - Loose Tongues in Lydgate's England
from PART II - Lydgatean Fame
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
Summary
On folio 150 of the ‘Findern’ manuscript (Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6), there appear three stanzas excerpted from Lydgate's Fall of Princes which are recorded by the scribe as the first part of a seven-stanza poem. The subject of the poem is the human tongue, or, more specifically, the damage that loose tongues can do:
Ther is nomore dredfull pestelens /
Than is tonge that can flatere & fage
For with his corsyd crabbed violens /
He enfecteth folkis of euerey Age /
Woo to tongis frouward of ther Langauge
Woo to tongis false furyuus and woode /
Whiche of no person neuer con say good /
(1–7)
Most striking about these lines is their unmitigated pessimism concerning the function of the human tongue, which goes beyond the advisory tradition's emphasis on the dangers of rumour. Here, the fault lies specifically with the wayward speech-member, which is variously characterised as ‘frouward’, ‘false’, ‘furyuus’, and ‘woode’. The only solution to its ‘pestelens’ is control; the next two stanzas advise readers to ‘say the best alway in reportyng / For in wel saying noman may offende’ (10–11), and to take care when exercising their judgement ‘[o]r eny worde out of therre lyppys passe’ (21).
These stanzas offer a vivid glimpse of late-medieval anxiety concerning uncontrolled and malicious tongues, an anxiety voiced by pastoral and political texts alike.
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- John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame , pp. 56 - 80Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012