In his magisterial Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley, 1983), Richard Helgerson explores instances of the “self-presentation” of high-minded and self-confident “laureate” poets working within an early modern system of authorship that was “essentially new” (Helgerson, 3). Insofar as his is a synchronic study, Helgerson is less interested in medieval English precedent as he is in tracking laureate strategies of negotiating the needs and codes of the current “moment” (Helgerson, 14). A more diachronic analysis of the laureate poet might readily light upon the fifteenth-century example of the prolific poet and propagandist John Lydgate, who is indeed the central figure in the remarkable new study by Robert J. Meyer-Lee.
Meyer-Lee provides a powerful demonstration of continuities of poetic practice from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, through literary-historical analysis of what he calls the “laureate poetics” bound up with the style and career of Lydgate (1). Whereas Lydgate provides an influential model through his ability to maintain independent poetic authority even as he negotiates partisan interests, Lydgate's poetics is shadowed by its less successful but equally influential Other—what Meyer-Lee calls the “beggar poetics” of Thomas Hoccleve, read here as a failed laureate who turns fatefully inward to a self fragmented by frustration and desire (103).
Meyer-Lee opens his analysis by linking the rise of “laureate poetics” with the material conditions of Lancastrian England. Whereas Ricardian England's interest in literature was general enough to allow poetry to flourish relatively free of political instrumentality, Lancastrian patrons, in need of legitimation after the 1399 usurpation of Richard II's throne, sought poets capable of channeling moral authority to particular political ends. Meyer-Lee usefully turns to Petrarch's and Boccaccio's meditations on poetry in order to read the contradiction between timeless poetic authority and dependence upon secular power as the primary problem for the laureate.
Meyer-Lee goes on to analyze “laureate poetics” through close study of its primary practitioner, John Lydgate. Meyer-Lee presents Lydgate's strategic “personalization” of received material as key to his poetic practice, which features unambiguous binding of the first-person narrative voice of the poem with the historical person of its author (56). Meyer-Lee pays particular attention to Lydgate's use of “epideictic” address (that intending “praise or blame” [56]), reading such ornate discourse as due less to sycophantism than to a deliberate attempt to link the moral authority of the praising poet with the political authority of the patron (64). Analyzing the “humility topos” in Lydgate's laureate performances, Meyer-Lee presents a poet confident enough in the civilizing power of poetry to compare himself with a prince, even as the precarious social distance between laureate and patron undermines such gestures (82).
The injurious effects of the socioeconomic gap between laureate and patron are made clear in Meyer-Lee's analysis of the “mendicant poetics” of Thomas Hoccleve (89). For Meyer-Lee, Hoccleve, as a privy seal clerk, could never acquire a position outside the Lancastrian political machine, whereas the Benedictine monk Lydgate could rely on a relatively independent moral subject-position. Hoccleve's obsessive worries about his finances are tied to his failure to navigate Lancastrian literary terrain, leading to his morbid dwelling upon the material circumstances of his subjection. Meyer-Lee suggests that despite much direct influence, Hoccleve's self-presentation as a beggar beholden to secular powers haunts a number of later failed attempts at practicing the laureate poetics launched by Lydgate.
In chapter 4, “Lydgateanism,” Meyer-Lee studies a pair of poets who engage the still-living Lydgate as a laureate, analyzing Benedict Burgh's appropriation of “aureate” verse as an attempt to join Lydgate's poetic lineage and circle of patrons (133), while reading A Reproof to Lydgate as evidence of an aristocratic sense of threat from laureate poetic authority. Meyer-Lee then presents George Ashby as the last truly “Lydgatean” laureate, detailing the manner in which Ashby's laureate performance ultimately gives way to a Hocclevean emphasis on his personal subjection to secular power (167). Meyer-Lee includes a valuable analysis of the decisive impact of commercial printing on laureate poetics, showing how William Caxton views laureateship as a valuable property of commodifiable texts rather than as a repeatable practice.
In chapter 5, Meyer-Lee follows the “trace of Lydgate” in the careers of Stephen Hawes, Alexander Barclay, and John Skelton, each of whom, disappointed by the Tudor court, is drawn to Hoccleve's beggar poetics (177). Meyer-Lee contends that a fundamental shift in laureate poetics is produced by Henry VII's institutionalization of the position through Bernard André's installation as poet laureate, altering the formerly “notional” status of laureate poetics (174). Meyer-Lee provides a fascinating reading of Hawes's fundamentally “erotic” laureate desires, linking his poetry's turn inward toward a fragmented self with the later verse of Thomas Wyatt (188–90). Meyer-Lee then shows how the high-minded laureate ambitions of Barclay proved incompatible with conditions of patronage privileging superficial entertainments, as well as how Skelton's obsession with the title of poet laureate flattens his poetic output, subordinating Lydgatean idealism to concerns about patronage.
In a suggestive epilogue, Meyer-Lee presents Thomas Wyatt as the “anti-laureate” (220), arguing against George Puttenham's view of Wyatt's verse as fundamentally “new” (221) to instead show how Wyatt combines techniques of Lydgatean verse with tropes of courtly love in the process of producing the self-obsessed literary speaker that would be central to early modern English verse. In suggesting that Lydgatean laureate practice informs the poetics of Edmund Spenser and even William Wordsworth, Meyer-Lee offers a sketch of fruitful directions that could be taken by a literary-historical criticism intent upon moving beyond assumptions of absolute rupture between the medieval and the modern. Meyer-Lee's careful and engaging study contributes to critical revision of the often broad brushstrokes of literary periodization, presenting a powerful case for laureate poetics and mendicant poetics as two significant currents running through fifteenth- and sixteenth-century constructions of first-person poetical voice.
