Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

cloak truths with“clowdy fygures.”^11 Such terminology is resonant for the
court poet: just as the“truth”of the exegetes is cloaked by the“cloudy
fygures”of the poets, and may be cloudily foretold in books of prophecy,
so political“truths”(accessions to thrones, royal marriages) can be foretold
through the standard ploys of pageant-makers.^12 Hawes received cloth from
a king, and gave“clokes.”
Previous readers of Hawes’s poems have found much to occupy them,
both in Hawes’s obvious identification of poetic with political and royal
authority, and in his display of a rhetorician’s passion for rhetoric. My own
reading will follow these paths, but with a difference. It entersThe Pastime
through Hawes’s handling of narrative voice and prosopopeia,tofind
authority behind a series of veils, unpredictably and chillingly located. It
then leaves the poem by way of its more overt pronouncements on rhetoric,
and its place amid some contemporary affiliations between rhetoric and
politics on which we have already touched. The poetry of love is once again
a presence, but inThe Pastimeit is the immediately apprehensible face of
a deadly anamorphosis.
The Comfort of Loverstoo turns on secrecy, but secrecy here resides in a
bleak fragmentation ofThe Pastime’s already unstable synthesis of genres.
The Comfortcombines political prophecy and love complaint in what at
this historical remove appears to have been a bid for reinstatement at a
court from which the poet had been expelled. This results in a bizarre and
fascinating hybrid, since it entails the marriage of two genres that might
atfirst seem compatible in their representation of the speaking subject,
but which in literary practice cancel one another out. The result is a text
that avails itself of a cultural detritus of available literary languages and
models, striving to name a loss that ultimately is not quite available to its
consciousness.

loveinthetimeofrhetoric

The Pastime centers on a personified lover, Graunde Amoure, who is
commanded by Fame to undergo an education in the Towers of Doctrine
and Chivalry and thereby win the maiden La Bell Pucell. When the poem
begins, however, this narrator has no name; he is the anonymous speaker
of love-lyric orchanson d’aventure, appearing in“a medowe...gaye and
gloryus”( 64 ), surrounded by all the trappings of theditand its Chaucerian
offspring. The speaker remains a lover (almost) throughout; the desire for
which he stands moves the narrative, associating it with the modes of

110 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland