allegorized love-quest, and constantly propelling it onward with phrases
such as“So forth I rode”and“So forth I went.”
His subsequent encounter with Dame Fame, iconographically sur-
rounded by“tongues of fyre”( 157 ), conjoins love with the language ofgloire
so prominent in English court culture and its Burgundian antecedents.
It is in reply to Fame’s questioning that he announces his name for the
first time (“What was my name, she axed me treuly. / To whome I sayde it
was la graunde Amour,” 185 – 86 ). Amoure, in short, only reveals his identity
in response to Fame’s promptings, and thereby underscores the intimate
relationship between love and the pursuit of honor so common in
rhétoriqueurwriting.^13 When Fame with her “swete reporte”praises La
Bell Pucell, Pucell immediately becomes the object of desire, as Amoure’s
heart is“set on fyre / With brennynge loue moost hote and feruent”
( 288 – 89 ). Now the amorous quest will be one with the quest for renown,
Amoure’s desire with desire for glory in the service of the“comyn welthe”
( 252 ). These initial encounters inaugurate a process that continues through
Amoure’s meetings with the didactic personifications of the Towers of
Doctrine and Chivalry. Hefigures an erotic desire that his encounters
with these representatives of powerful literary discourses model and refine.^14
As such a mobile desire, Amoure echoes a number of literary predecessors.
Again like the“I”most immediately implicated in the dream action of
Guillaume de Lorris’sRoman de la Rose,^15 he moves through the allegorical
landscape“at a uenture”( 2967 )–atabula rasa, an ingenuous narrator with
no powers of prediction, continually open to new narrative event and
meaning. Hawes’s most pervasive narratorial debt, however, is to a poem
itself influenced by theRoman, Deguileville’sPèlerinage de la vie humaine,
and its continental successors.^16 In Deguileville’s poem, the limited aware-
ness of Guillaume de Lorris’s narrator has theological significance, and he
becomes the“naive narrative persona...who has everything to learn, the
universal human situation.”^17 The Pastimelinks its Tower of Doctrine
episodes with instructional and encyclopaedic works of the kind printed by
Wynkyn de Worde,^18 so that Amoure’s visit to Dame Grammar requires him
to behave like a student straight from the interrogatory pages of Donatus:
“Madame,”quod I,“for as moche as there be
Viii. partes of speche, I wolde knowe ryght fayne
What a nowne substantyue is in his degre,
And wherfore it is so called certayne.” ( 582 – 85 )Yet such passages too are shaped by Amoure’s identity as romance-lover, as
pedagogic discipline replaces the romance-hero’s statutory tribulations.
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