attests a move away from poeticfiction to a vantage point from which the
discrete episodes that have preceded it, with their discontinuous treatment
of narratorial voice, can form an intelligible ensemble.
The narrator’s gestures of gradual withdrawal also illuminate the poem’s
earlier treatment ofprosopopeia. The playfulness with which personifica-
tions read and interpret one another–Mars“reads”Fortune, Correction
“retracts”Gobylyue–are now seen to have foreshadowed an unexpected
ending in which Amoure himself is reread. Since the narrative has hurried
over the wedding of Amoure and Pucell, Amoure’s romance desire seems to
find satisfaction and full closure only in the death that terminates his role in
the poem. He is left in Purgatory, awaiting the Last Judgement; but his
narration of his own death has already forced a last judgement on the reader,
who is compelled to read the poem’s love-fiction anew and reconsider the
ambiguities that formerly surrounded the poem’s genre. The reader is left
buried alive with Hawes’s repentant sinner, awaiting resurrection, and the
act of reading the poem itself takes on the aspect of an intercessory prayer.
The poem does not end here, however; and the concluding triumphs
further Hawes’s displacement of poeticfiction. Fame, thefirst to appear,
proclaims that the“famous actes”( 5588 ) of Graunde Amoure will be immor-
tal, and calls on Remembraunce,
Commaundynge her ryght truely for to wryte
Bothe of myn actes and my gouernaunce,
Whiche than ryght sone began to endyte
Of my feates of armes... ( 5594 – 97 )If we assume, as I think we can, that the record she begins isThe Pastime
itself, the result is a strikingmise en abîme. Throughout, we have been
reminded of the physical book that isThe Pastime; now, afigure within the
poem begins to write the poem. We simultaneously observe, however, that
the“book”is notfinished yet. Fame’s words represent the poem as chivalric
romance, and we may recall that early in the poem Amoure’s quest is
proleptically pictured in just this way on a“clothe of aras”( 413 ) in the
Tower of Doctrine: as“a full noble story”( 414 ) in which his“passage
daungerous”( 473 ) ends with his marriage to Pucell. But as Time appears
to counter Fame’s declaration of“Infenyte I am, nothynge can me mate”
( 5604 ), the poem’s generic strand of chivalric romance is in turn put aside
by the homiletic elements that have now come to the fore.
Time reminds us that he is the precondition of all earthly existence, and
of everything pertaining to it, including the sacral history of man’s fall and
redemption. He also continues the literary reflections begun by Fame:
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