fare you well, for I must frome you go
To other louers whiche are in dyspayre,
As I dyde you to confort them also. ( 2486 – 88 )and Dame Fame departs with a magnificently garbled“For I must hens to
specyfy the dedes / Of theyr wortynesse, accordynge to theyr medes”( 314 – 15 ).
The cumulative effect of such passages in this poem of love is paradoxical.
Amoure himself is a personification on a quest moved by the desire for
which he stands, and yetThe Pastimerecurrently queries the possibility
of treating such afigure narratively at all. In the poem’s closed allegorical
world, Amoure’s reputation has always gone before him; his name always
assures him of a welcome ( 384 – 85 , 2976 – 89 , 3790 – 99 , 4471 – 72 ) and each
new group of allegorical ladies he meets has heard of him and his quest
( 491 – 97 , 4473 – 79 , 4885 – 90 ). The inner logic of this is revealed by the ladies
who greet Amoure after his slaying of the seven-headed giant:
They prayed me to shewe them my name;
“La graunde amoure it is,”I sayde,“in dede”;
And than sayde they,“No wonder though ye spede.” ( 4883 – 85 )If Amoure is love embodied, his quest is already complete; personification
here seems to circumvent narrative and leave it redundant.
While personification and narrative are somewhat uneasy companions
in Amoure’s text, its intercalated love-lyrics – which take the form of
complaints, petitions and dialogues– generate different tensions. They
explore at length Amoure’s uncertainty as to the narrative’soutcome,and
their expansive musings pull against the succession of events, their static,
ritual gestures seeming impervious to narrative context. This lyric self-
containment is illustrated by a later manuscript, Bodleian MS Rawlinson
C. 813 , which includes six love-complaints that draw–one briefly, the other
five extensively–on bothThe PastimeandThe Comfort of Lovers.^26 Passages
from several scenes are woven together in an elaboratecento,andarenot
materially altered by the loss of their narrative frame. Other episodes
employed–Amoure’s“supplycacyon”to Venus ( 3804 – 908 ), and the letter
she sends to Pucell ( 3951 – 4086 )–are highly self-contained in thefirst place
and need still less alteration, and parts of the dialogue between Amoure and
Pucell are transformed into a single-voiced complaint by the simple expedient
of dropping Pucell’slines.^27 In particular, nos. 13 , 14 , 15 and 16 of the lyrics in
the Rawlinson manuscript, on fos. 14 v– 27 v, can be read as one continuous
complaint, the near seamless product of a skillful exercise in compilation; the
last lines by Hawes that we hear in this group are Amoure’sfinal words to
Pucell in the open-endedComfort of Lovers( 923 – 24 ), to be addressed shortly.
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