transnational rhetorical market where proficient Latinity, and the dexterous
wielding of classical metre and allusion, are major commodities.
As we shall see in later chapters, this new development subjects the textual
self-imagining of poets writing in English near the center of power after 1485
to imaginary dislocation, contestation and interference. The relations of
identification on which cultural identity had been founded–identification
with monarch and nation, with the English language and with a post-
Chaucerian literary past –encounter a competing model. The reign of
Henry VII witnessed the emergence–intermittent and compromised, but
present nonetheless–of a Latin humanist poetics at court, which, as we shall
see, answered the problem of Tudor legitimacy by fusing the originary
moment of the new dynasty with tropes of humanistrenovatio. They thus
effected a break both with the immediate political past of dynastic strife, and
with its vernacular literary equivalent. Like their English counterparts, they
celebrated the images of monarch and nation, but articulated these compo-
nents of cultural identity with a different and in certain domains more
prestigious language, and with literary and dynastic lineages in which the
fifteenth-century poetic and political genealogies of their English counter-
parts, closely bound to the Lancastrian moment and its troubled aftermath,
did notfigure. Their incipient literary professionalism linked them to the
economic register in a style that distinguished them sharply from their English
forebears and contemporaries. In short, this new rhetoric was grounded in
material and immaterial considerations–a Latin language according its
practitioners quasiprofessional status and accompanied by its own authenti-
cating narratives–alien to the temporal categories and imaginary structures in
which English public poetry was based. In his position at this conjuncture,
André was a professional poet in a sense hardly true of earlier native authors, in
whose vernacular work a temporality based in erratic,ad hocpayment had
revealed itself in the markings of an edgy petitionary inwardness.
Hawes ponders an explicit opposition between native public poetry in
the Lydgatean mould and the new language of political panegyric when, at
the beginning ofThe Comfort of Lovers, he submits himself to his readers’
“grete gentylnes”as one who is
none hystoryagraffe / nor poete laureate
But gladly wolde folowe / the makynge of Lydgate^5The allusion is almost certainly to Bernard André, one of thefirst recorded
poets laureate in England^6 and holder of the title of historiographer royal: a
distinct innovation at the English court, and one emblematic of the new
conjunction of revisionist dynastic history, Latinity and professionalism.^7
Beginnings: André and Dunbar 21