stasis, the use of personification–the poem consistently prefigures that
resolution. A multiplicity of successive generic speakers render the source
of a specific utterance difficult to locate. The poem shifts unpredictably
between the narrative teleology of chivalric romance, the consumption of
time in extended passages of love-lyric, and those passages, noted above,
in which the foregrounding of the acts of writing and reading introduces
a near isochrony between events within the narrative and the narration
itself. It may be added that a ruthlessly literal-minded reading of the
narrative tense Amoure employs throughout the poem–a simple past,
punctuated by present-tense rhetorical statements–might imply that the
entire narration has been delivered by Amoure from a purgatorial present
uneasily suspended between time and eternity. In short, the“death”spelt
out in thefinal pages has been immanent in the text throughout, but in
secret, veiled form.
Hawes’s overt portrayal of the rhetorician’s art foregrounds adispositio
that encompasses not only the arrangement of topics, but also the origin
of states:“By dysposycyon, the rethorycyan / To make lawes ordynatly
began”( 860 – 61 ). InThe Pastime, however, the rhetorician has another
and concealed face, and it is here that Hawes’s“fatal”hermeneutics of
“trouthe”and“fygure”reveals a darker purpose. The poem is studded with
impassioned defenses offiguration and diatribes against“dull and rude”
readers who cannot perceive concealed meanings ( 806 – 12 ). The specific
examples that Hawes gives of such a reading throw out an immediate and
vernacular line of connexion to print culture, for they are euhemeristic
exempla drawn for the most part from Caxton’sRecuyell of the Historyes of
Troye.^46 Atlas bears the heavens upon his shoulders to signify his“con-
nynge”in astronomy ( 988 – 94 ); hell, ruled by Pluto, was in reality a Greek
city inhabited by wicked and rapacious giants ( 1002 – 12 ;Recuyell, 323 ,
327 ),^47 and Cerberus’s three heads are moralized tofigure the“thre vyces”
of“pryde / auaryce / and also rapyne”( 1023 , 1026 ;Recuyell, 330 – 31 ). The
culminating instance in Hawes’s catalogue is the tale of Hercules’s slaying
of the Lernaean hydra, which Hawes claims is drawn from“the cronycles
of Spayne.”^48 Following Lefèvre, who himself here follows Boccaccio’s
Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, he makes the Hydra into a half-human
creature, who, Sphinx-like, poses insoluble“sophisms”to passers-by, and
kills them if they fail to supply the correct answers:
ffor as moche as I am the moste wyse creature that euer nature maad. and that I am
acustomed to make a questyon to suche men as I fynde / and them destroye yf
they can not answer therto. and for as moche as I ne fynde in my royame / but peple
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