sole surviving copy of what is probably hisfinal poem,The Comfort of
Lovers, the formula has changed–he is“somtyme grome”of the late king’s
chamber, presumably a sign that he had no similar post under Henry VIII.
The print can be dated to 1515 on typographic grounds, though the poem
was, according to the title page, written between 1510 and 1511 , raising the
possibility of earlier prints or manuscript circulation. All that is known
further is that he was dead by 1529 , when the earlier of two surviving prints
of a poem by his admirer Thomas Feylde,A Controversy between a Lover and
a Jaye, refers to“Yong Steuen Hawse whose soule god pardon.”^6 If we take
this to suggest that Hawes was at least in his twenties by the time he wrote
his earlier poems, it seems reasonable to suppose that he may not long have
outlived the composition ofThe Comfort of Lovers.
Hawes’s double commitment to the Tudor line and an English poetic
tradition are apparent in the words with which he dedicates his longest
poem,The Pastime of Pleasure, to Henry VII:
Your noble grace and excellent hyenes,
For to accepte, I beseche ryght humbly,
This lytell boke, opprest with rudenes,
Without rethorycke or colour crafty.
Nothynge I am experte in poetry
As the monke of Bury,floure of eloquence,
Whiche was in tyme of grete excellence
Of your predecessour the .v. kynge henry,
Vnto whose grace he dyde present
Ryght famous bokes of parfyte memory,
Of his faynynge with termes eloquent,
Whose fatall fyccyons are yet permanent,
Grounded on reason; with clowdy fygures
He cloked the trouthe of all his scryptures. ( 22 – 35 )^7Through this modestytoposHawes, with some adroitness, performs an
act of twofold legitimation. By connecting his king with an illustrious
Lancastrian precursor,^8 he validates thefirst Tudor’s claim, built on divine
“grace”( 3 ) and his own“gouernaunce”( 6 ). But the lines, a dedication
miniature in words, also allude to a previous act of dedication by poet to
king–that of theTroy Book^9 – with the effect that Hawes constructs a
genealogy of poets conterminous with that of the ruler. Hawes sets himself
in the line of Lydgate, the poet whom, of the triumvirate of Chaucer, Gower
and Lydgate cited by later medieval English authors, he seems chieflyto
have admired.^10 Lydgate further becomes the authority for a poetic practice
that we have seen interrogated in Skelton’sBowge, in which“fatall fyccyons”
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