Hawes’s words express a traditional affinity betweenratioandoratio,well-
ordered words denoting order in humanity and state.^23 Here Godfrey’s
undisciplined and treasonous body, his crude vernacular dialect–the“bar-
bary tongue”( 920 ) that the rhetorician’selocutiorefines^24 – and the“jangler”’s
vulgar antifeminism are set against Amoure’s courtliness and rhetoric’s civi-
lizing effects upon body and language,finamourembracing the very virtues
privileged by the rhetorician’s endeavors. Rhetoric is here a force for coercion.
A similarly pointed foregrounding ofprosopopeiaappears as Amoure
prays for guidance in the Temple of Mars, but here it seems rather to stress
the limitations of poetic trope. Mars offers aid to Amoure, but behind
him stands Fortune, who claims that her mutability constrains his power.
Mars’s twofold response is unexpected. Not merely is Fortune without
substance (“The man is fortune in the propre dede / And not thou that
causeth hym to spede,” 3212 – 13 ), an essentially Boethian position, she
derives her power solely from the labors of poets who have“made a fygure”
( 3208 ) of her,“of the trouth to make relacyon”( 3211 ). Mars’s interpretative
procedure opens up some alarming possibilities. So ruthless a collapsing
offigures into their inceptions would, if pressed farther, issue in a world
totally dominated by the planets, which would itself contradict Mars’s
concluding Boethian claim that“The man is fortune in the propre dede.”
Further, the general tenor of Mars’s argument, divorced from its specific
instance, suggests thatfigures bear no necessary relation to truth, and indeed
can, as here, distort it. The poetic“fygure”is identified, howeverfleetingly,
with Fortune herself; double-faced and potentially deceptive, masquerading
as a cause where it may be no more than a gloss. The vocabulary with which
Hawes regularly celebrates the poet’s function is here, but the context strips
it of its customary weight. The speech opens up serious questions about
the ontological and epistemological status of the poetic trope; it is“nought,”
a cipher, its capacity to point beyond itself called into doubt.
Less portentously and more playfully, the poem consistently usesprosopo-
peiato display thefictive quality of its love-allegory. When Amoure and Pucell
separate after theirfirst extended scene together, Amoure comments that
Neuer before, as I trowe and wene,
Was suche departynge true louers betwene. ( 2379 – 80 )As Spearing points out, these lines have an ironic dimension, since the
allegory’s point“is to generalize.”However, if Amoure here seems to believe
his experience“unique and unprecedented,”^25 his fellow personifications are
under no such illusion, but regularly call attention to their“generalizing”
function. Counsel leaves Amoure with the words
116 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland