If Amoure has literary affinities with Deguileville’s Pilgrim, however,
the two are also some distance apart. For if the iconography and events of
The Pastimeoften suggest the pilgrimage, other parallels remain veiled.
Amoure initially follows a“fayre pathe”( 71 ), a common enough feature
of the landscape of love-allegory, but it leads not to its usual destination in
a“pleasaunt herber,”^19 but to a divide in the road of ostentatious signifi-
cance. His confrontation with the choice of two paths, one“the streyght
waye / Of contemplacyon”( 85 ), the other the road to“worldly dygnyte /
Of the actyfe lyfe”( 93 – 94 ), also orients the alert reader. Amoure takes the
“actyfe waye”( 112 ), and the alternative generic possibility remains latent
for a long while. The split voice of this poem points to a knowing lover and
an unknowing pilgrim.
There are, however, numerous points at which thefiction of a lover-
narrator is simply dropped, and the“I”is the neutral mediator of a rhetorical
topos. The Tower of Doctrine episodes, with their gestures toward popular
encyclopaedic works, create abrupt alternations between the Amoure-
narrator and the statutory expositor of a didactic text. Thus, a brief encoun-
ter with Dame Arithmetic terminates in a referral of the reader to more
learned textbooks (“To reherse in englysshe more of this scyence / It were
foly, and eke grete neclygence,” 1448 – 49 ), and then moves directly back to
Amoure as lover (“I thought full longe tyll I hadde a syght / Of la bell
pucell...,” 1450 – 51 ). The effect is to superimpose on Amoure’s journey
the author’s and reader’s own progress through the book, so that the
temporalities of the act of reading and the represented narrative action
intersect. We can instance the end of the Tower of Rhetoric episode,
where after Dame Rhetoric has concluded a long oration with a tribute to
Lydgate, the“I”returns:
Now wyll I cease of lusty rethoryke.
I may not tary, for my tyme is shorte,
For I must procede and shewe of arysmetryke
With dyuers nombres, whiche I must reporte.
Hope inwardly doth me well conforte
To brynge my boke vnto a fynysshment
Of all my mater and my true entent. ( 1289 – 95 )Amoure must continue his narration, as he moves on to the next chamber
in the Tower of Doctrine; his inner“hope”recalls his role as lover, his desire
for“a fynysshment”his longing for consummation. But the voice is also,
once again, that of the expositor who must proceed to the next topic. All
these effects merge in the topos of the rhetorician who must continue with
his poem; the lover’s desire and the process of writing become one.
112 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland