Whan she was gone, inwardly than wrought
Vpon her beaute my mynde retentyfe.
Her goodly fygure I graued in my thought. ( 1506 – 08 )Pucell herself has become the“mater”( 709 ) on which Amoure’sfive faculties
work. It is impossible here to draw a useful distinction betweeninventio
and falling in love, as rhetorical treatise and love-literature become different
ways of reading what is at root the same desire. The passage reminds us that
Dame Rhetoric has already spoken of the“fantasy”of the rhetoricians of
old in terms that suggest Amoure’s allegorical quest; they are driven“Newe
thynges to fynde”( 728 ), and to bring their invention to fulfillment, by
“brennynge loue”( 727 )and“hole desyre”( 735 ). And when the quest’send
is reached, the link between rhetoric and love is once more underlined, as
Pucell greets Amoure with“depured and...lusty rethoryke”( 5267 ).
Such glossing, of course, is integral to the hermeneutic modes on whose
lexis Hawes draws so readily. The views of rhetoric found in Hawes’spro-
logues and in Dame Rhetoric’s speeches are mutually sustaining; in both the
poet, by touching a truth and“cloking”it subtly, wields an authority with
both doctrinal and political foundation. In Hawes’s earlierThe Example of
Virtue, the exegete’sid estis explicitly built into the narrative, always pointing
“vertically”to another sense:
The water eclyped was vayneglory,
Ever with yeopardy and tempestyous,
And the shyp called was ryght truly
The vessell of the passage daungerous. ( 134 – 37 )InThe Pastime, however, the vocabulary of revelation and concealment
also applies to the structural use of vernacular modes. Declaring a provi-
sional allegiance to the literature of courtly love, it also makes use of that
literature’s wittily self-advertising approach to rhetorical trope, in particular
prosopopeia. For an instance of this heritage we may turn to Machaut’s
Remède de Fortune. Esperance has just departed after her colloquy with the
lover-narrator, and he is returning to the small wicket gate by which he
originally reached his isolated“destour”in the Park of Hesdin:
Mais je m’aperçu bien que nuls
N’estoit alez par ceste voie,
Depuis que venus y estoie;
Qu’en riens n’i estoit depassée
L’erbe poingnant, et la rousée
Clere et luisant seur l’erbe drue
N’estoit pas encor abatue...114 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland