After his return to England in 1429 Lydgate wrote a
number of celebratory verses for Henry VI’s coronation.
His Lives of Sts. Edmund and Fremund (3,508 lines
in rime royal) was presented to the king in the 1430s,
probably after the king’s visit to Bury St. Edmunds in
1433–34. For the king’s brother, Humphrey, duke of
Gloucester, Lydgate wrote his longest work, The Fall of
Princes (36,365 lines in rime royal), between ca. 1431
and 1438. It is a rendering of Laurent de Premierfait’s
French prose translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus
virorum illustrium. His last major works seem to have
been his Lives of Sts. Albon and Amphibel (4,724 lines
in rime royal), commissioned in 1439 by John Wheth-
amstede, abbot of St. Albans, and a rime royal transla-
tion of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta secretorum,
left incomplete on his death and fi nished by Benedict
Burgh. Other substantial poems attributed to Lydgate
include a lengthy allegory, Reason and Sensuality (7,042
lines in couplets), and many shorter poems of doubtful
canonicity.
In addition to these long poems there are numerous
shorter ones on a variety of subjects. These include a
popular dream vision, The Temple of Glass, and short
verse narratives, such as his Debate of the Horse Sheep
and Goose and The Churl and the Bird, several mum-
mings, and a number of devotional lyrics. But the variety
of Lydgate’s poetic output resists concise summary: it
ranges from his translation of Aesop to a treatise for
laundresses and a dietary (instructions on healthy diet
and behavior). By the most capacious estimates it runs
to about 150,000 lines of verse. His sole prose work, The
Serpent of Division, is a brief history of Rome.
This range of subject matter is refl ected in the range
of his patrons, which extended from royalty and nobil-
ity through a broad spectrum of English society, both
religious and lay, male and female, individual and
institutional. He was at the call of those who wished
him to entertain, instruct, admonish, and propagandize
on their behalf.
Lydgate stands crucially between Chaucer and
the later evolution of English poetry. He wrote in the
generation immediately after Chaucer’s death and ac-
knowledges Chaucer as his “master” in frequent lavish
tributes. A number of his works are self-consciously
conceived within a tradition of Chaucer’s works that is
refl ected in imitation at conceptual, stylistic, and verbal
levels. Thus his Troy Book sets itself in relation to the
subject matter of Troilus and Criseyde; The Siege of
Thebes contains an imitation of the beginning of the
General Prologue and extensive verbal borrowings from
the Knight’s Tale; The Complaint of the Black Knight
and The Temple of Glass imitate Chaucer’s dream vi-
sions, The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame,
respectively. Lydgate was to play an important role in
the creation and dissemination of the Chaucer tradition,
particularly through his own popularizing of Chaucerian
style and subjects.
Lydgate’s Chaucerian imitation is related to the most
distinctive tendency in his art, its rhetorical amplifi ca-
tion. His instinct was to elaborate his materials, often on
a massive scale. The most striking—or notorious—ex-
ample of this tendency is the opening sentence of his
Siege of Thebes, which imitates the opening sentence of
Chaucer’s General Prologue, Lydgate’s sentence extends
Chaucer’s from eighteen to 65 lines. Indeed much of
Lydgate’s amplifi cation comes from a natural tendency
nurtured by a careful reading of Chaucer, through which
poetic hints of his “master” could be vastly expanded.
Thus, out of suggestions in Chaucer’s language, he
created a distinctive aureate diction, a Latin-derived,
polysyllabic language that often characterizes his “high
style,” particularly in his religious verse. At its least suc-
cessful, in conjunction with elaboration of allusion and
syntax, it could lead to the obscurity that has earned him
the condemnation of many modern critics.
Lydgate’s meter systematizes Chaucer’s versifi cation
through a regular use of fi ve types of iambic pentameter
line. One particularly striking feature of this system-
atization is the frequent use of the “headless” line (one
that lacks an initial stressed syllable). Lydgate’s own
development of Chaucer’s metrics was the “broken-
backed” line, in which stressed syllables clash across
the caesura.
It was probably through his amplifi cation and sys-
tematization of Chaucer’s art that Lydgate gained his
considerable reputation in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Allusions in that period acclaim him as part of a great
triumvirate of ME poets, together with Chaucer and
Gower. And in simple quantitative terms, in numbers of
surviving manuscripts, Lydgate was the most popular of
all ME poets. His Fall of Princes survives in complete
or selected forms in over 80 manuscripts, his Life of Our
Lady in nearly 50, The Siege of Thebes in 30. Among
Lydgate’s shorter poems both his Verses on the Kings
of England and his Dietary exist in over 50 copies. In
addition many of his works were issued by the early
printers, Caxton, Pynson, and de Worde, often more
than once.
This massive dissemination of Lydgate’s works
during the later Middle Ages led to his wide-ranging
infl uence on later writers and forms. The Fall of Princes
shaped literary conceptions of tragedy in the early
Renaissance. His mummings are important texts in the
evolution of English drama. And the works of (among
others) Dunbar, Henryson, Douglas, Hawes, and Skel-
ton, as well as many lesser fi gures, show the infl uence
of his work in their writings, an infl uence that extended
into the 17th century.LYDGATE, JOHN (CA. 1370–1449)