defective“vnderstandynge”( 186 )ofthosewhohad“wened for to haue made
an ende / Of my bokes before [t]he[y] hadde begynnynge”( 183 – 84 ). This
suggests aLegend-of-Good-Women-like misconstruction of the poet’s earlier
writing, and we may either imagine that in court circles groups involved
in amorous“play”and political and factional affiliations may have over-
lapped, or learn from recent criticism of both Chaucer and (almost a century
and a half later) Wyatt to be more warily alert to the political subtexts of
such“play.”^67 Either way, the uncertain historical referent ofThe Comfort’s
ambiguities– whether it be love-play, the formal rituals of early Tudor
patronage in the lists or in the chamber, or darker plottings–is surely of
less interest than the strange, jagged poetic surfaces those ambiguities produce.
If one reads the text as a covert petition, addressed to a patron such as
Mary Tudor, then the“three Ps”lines do yield up some sense. We could
construe thus: Hawes never really“hated”his lady; at some point he stopped
writing for fear of powerful enemies (“my ryght hande I dyde bynde”).“The
good gretest P”( 139 ) may be Pucell fromThe Pastime of Pleasure,^68 reentering
the scene as afictional surrogate for the female patron addressed. Hawes
perhaps suggests that if she knew the truth behind his apparentpeccata
(the three Ps as sins, like those engraved on Dante’s forehead as he journeys
up the mount of Purgatory),^69 she would“releace”him of his sins–in other
words, forgive and absolve him.
This is all possible; it is not, however, the poem Hawes actually wrote.
The whole episode remains disconnected, and it is a paradox that most of
its inner fractures seem to stem from its play on“truth,”a word whose
signifieds one might have expected to be mutually affirming. At various
points“truth”seems to connote political loyalty, nobility of blood and
sincerity in love, the lover’s“troth.”The truth about the lover’s situation is
known to God above ( 167 ) and should be made known to his lady. In
another important stanza ( 183 – 89 ), the word also suggests the“truth”of the
lover’s earlier books, which some had tried to prevent from being written
although
Who lyst the trouthe of them for to ensu[e]
For the reed and the whyte they wryte full true. ( 188 – 89 )We will return later to the claim that Hawes’s earlier texts–includingThe
Pastime of Pleasure–conceal some form of unitary meaning, although as
in Dunbar’sThe Thrissill and the Rois,“the reed and the whyte”conven-
iently blend the Tudor rose with the lady’s countenance. These versions of
truth might appear to converge in an emphatic if coded profession of
devoted service misunderstood, but such a view is curiously foreign to the
Mémoires d’outre-tombe 133