[I saw clearly that no one has come that way since I’d entered, for the sharp-bladed
grass had not been disturbed and the bright, sparkling dew was still on the thick
grass]^21
The untrodden grass reminds us that Esperance was only afiction.
Hawes’s poem too distances personification, showing it in changing
perspectives. Godfrey Gobylyve, the grotesque dwarf who provides an
antifeminist and antiromance counter to Amoure’s courtly idealism, enters
the picture with a peculiar low-style density and specificity, marked by
Kentish dialect, doggerel rhymed couplets and a comic genealogy ( 3514 – 47 ).
It is thus all the more surprising when Correction, galloping up with her
“knotted whyppe”( 4118 ), tells us who he“really”is, and introduces herself:
“My name,”quod she,“is called correccyon,
And the toure of chastyse is my mancyon.
This strong thefe, called false reporte,
With vylayne courage and an other sorte
And vyle perlers false coniecture,
All these I had in pryson full sure.
But this false reporte hath broken pryson
With his subtyll crafte and euyll treason,
And this Iourney pryuyly to spede,
He hath cladde hym in this foles wede.” ( 4126 – 35 )Before he is subjected to any other punishments, the errant Godfrey is
punished by personification, rewritten–or rather exposed beneath a textual
“foles wede”–as False Report. The whole episode is richly reflexive. False
Report has escaped the prison where he was held with False Conjecture. His
crime, says his warden Correction, is speaking ill of women, but the level of
literary self-consciousness suggests that False Report and False Conjecture
stand for the uncontained menace of gossip, subversive and potentially
anarchic if it invades love-allegory’s circumscribed purlieus. Correction’s
chastisement of Gobylyve thus dramatizes throughprosopopeiaanother
rhetoricalfigure, that ofcorrectio.^22
This“correction”of a potential misreading introduces other kinds of
discipline. Dame Rhetoric has claimed that her science
was founde by reason
Man for togouernewell and prudently,
His wordes to ordre, his speche to puryfy. ( 691 – 93 ; emphasis mine)The rhetorician promotes good government and self-government, and his
experiments with diction refine the language, both points on which Hawes
aligns himself with Lydgate. The common term in these activities is reason;
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