with the theme of love–the very“balades of feruent amyte”( 1391 ) the poem
deplores–serves in part to mislead, distracting the reader from a meaning
that isfinally sprung like a trap. Hawes’s poem works by indirection, sifting
out those who can read rightly and consigning the others to the outer
darkness of“ygnoraunce”and“slouth”( 1142 ). It also supplies this imagined
relation between book and reader with a clear political analogue. After his
Caxton-derivedexempla, Hawes embarks on a description of the“redolent
well of fomous poetry”( 1051 ) from which spring four rivers. One of them is
the river of“vnderstondynge”( 1056 ), a faculty that is, in Hawes’s account,
deployed on a public and political rather than an intellectual stage; its
proper exercise entails the recognition that resignation and withdrawal are
to be preferred to impulsive and warlike action ( 1075 – 99 ). The falls of Troy
and Rome both exemplify the dangers of disrupting peace, and bringing
ruin, for“a lytell cause / grounded on vanyte”( 1081 )ora“contrauersy”
( 1098 ). This commonplace has a precisefifteenth-century heritage, for as
Hawes’s reference to Troy reminds us, it was familiar from the various
speeches of the counsellors to caution and reason in theRoman de Troieand
its derivatives.^50
Mervyn James has associated such political quietism with a late-
medieval“moralization of politics,”arguing that the“loss of nerve”dis-
cernible in the magnates of the laterfifteenth century, and their increasing
unwillingness to take significant political risks, are at once mediated and
shaped by the period’s literary taste for providentialist history.^51 It is not
going too far to suggest that Hawes, by providing political analogues to
long-established modes of reading, represents his art as allegorical inter-
pellation. Obedience and conformity are bound up with the reading of
allegory, a genre which arouses in the reader an illusory sense of interpre-
tative autonomy. Moralization of the“lytterall censes trewe”( 677 )isan
active process, in which the reader, making connexions, drawing parallels,
perhaps mastering a particular iconography, must invest much labor. Yet
this occurs within clearly defined boundaries; the reader is offered a subject
position that seems to bestow a large share in determining the allegory’s
meaning, and the result is misrecognition. Poetry thus becomes, for
Hawes, a mode of policing“the errynge people / that are retractyf”
( 1123 ):“euyll treason”characterizes both subjects who rebel against their
king and Godfrey Gobylyve with his treacherous tongue, subjected to
Correction ( 888 , 4133 ).
The Pastime of Pleasureframes a relation between rhetorician and audi-
ence which replicates that between monarchy and political subject. The
secrecy on which its narrative turns is doubled by the secrecy and coercion
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