Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

In Aloco,I menejuxtaB:

Woo is hym that is blynde and maye not see! ( 515 – 18 )

Such alienated speech plays along the border of the signified, effectively
abolishing language’s ceaselessly shifting relation throughout the poem to
some supposed allegorical interior. The narrator’s response in the face of
Dame Sans-Pere’s lady Desyre was, we recall, to announce himself as the
“letter”Drede. Now, Drede in turn bestows literal substance on an imag-
inary conspiracy:

And as he rounded thus in myne ere

Of false collusyon confetryd by assente,

Me thoughte I see lewde felawes here and there

Came for to slee me of mortall entente. ( 526 – 29 )

The“lewde felawes”are themselves corporeal, if shadowy,figurings of the
moral generalities of“false collusyon confetryd by assente”(the very line
could furnish the plot of a miniature morality play). Drede narrowly deflects
castration by hallucinating a plot, for we cannot know how far the“col-
lusyon”and“assente”are part of others’conspiracies against him, and how
far they are his own. The dreamer who began with a wish to write moral
poetry hasfinally acquired authority through having“authored”a con-
spiracy, and at the end of the dream he is poised to leap from the ship–an
ironic reduction to the letter indeed of his initial desire to join the company
of dead poets.^69
Historians of curial satire have remarked on its highly conventional
nature. Rooted by origin in the experiences of clerics at early courts,^70 it
is less remarkable for concrete social criticism than for its translation of the
nuances of political circumstance into a hypostatized literary mode, marked
by the repetition of topoi that change very little.^71 With its elite range of
literary reference, it offers to a knowing clerisy its own mostflattering
mirror, producing an apparently limitless self-consciousness that is a matter
of alwaysknowing betterthan the courtierly dupes whose sole preoccupation
is with secular ambition and polity.^72 The Bowge’s innovations, as critics
have agreed, are generic and formal; the introduction of dream vision
produces a new chronotope. Historical specificity may be glimpsed in the
imaginary topography of the poem’s action. It is initially organized around a
chimerical Dame Sans-Pere, who, as the“awnner”( 50 ) of the shipThe
Bowge of Courte, is analogous to the monarch, and whose dazzling defiance
of representation, which precipitates the dreamer’s imaginary crisis, mirrors
a“kingship of distance”^73 in which the monarchic body is ambivalently
divided between its spectacular political function and the invisibility of the

60 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland