Withouten tyme is no erthely thynge:
Nature, fortune, or yet dame sapyence,
Hardynes, clergy, or yet lernynge,
Past, future, or yet in presence. ( 5677 – 80 )“Dame sapyence”:Timepersonifies. Just as Hawes’spersonifications are
fictions, so the qualities and attributes they represent are themselves, being
time-bound, only shadows. Having thrown aside its love-fiction,The Pastime
in its concluding stanzas presses forward from a conception of literary
allegory as cloak for truth toward a vision of time and the cosmos as an
allegory of“cloudy fygures.”Once the triumph of Time has presented the
temporal as itself afiction–afiction which bound in time the composition
of the poem, Graunde Amoure’s quest and indeed the king’sguidanceof
the state ( 2 – 4 , 883 – 84 )–Eternity, with the line“Tyme renneth alwaye his
ende to enbrace”( 5758 ),finally dismisses both time and narrative, using in
the process what could be read as literary terminology:
Now I my selfe shall haue none endynge,
And my maker had no begynnynge. ( 5759 – 60 )Fame’s apotheosis of Graunde Amoure, whose name will endure in writing,
thus prompts an extended meditation that moves from the word’s imperma-
nence in time to Time’sowninsignificance before Eternity. Commenting
implicitly on the word as sign, the passage ends in the absolute presence of
divine being, in which word and thing,“fygure”and“trouthe,”can no longer
be told apart.
WhileThe Pastimehas often been described as an assemblage of archaic
conventions, it has also been noted that the conventions are hardly com-
bined in commonplace fashion. As Edwards points out,^38 Middle English
literature offers no formal analogues for Hawes’s poem. Gordon Kipling,
finding affinities betweenThe Pastimeand the Burgundian chivalric and
heraldic romances of Hawes’s day, notes parallels withLe Chevalier délibéré
by Olivier de la Marche, but dismisses Hawes’s poem as a clumsy and
banal imitation of Burgundian trends.^39 The connexion, however, is a
suggestive one, forLe Chevalier, likeThe Pastime, turns on an unforeseen
structural disclosure. Thisfirst-person allegorical romance is also shaped
around a combination of narratorial identities, but de la Marche’s narrator
is explicitly both pilgrim and knight from the outset, when he is told by
Pensée that he must go to joust with“Accident”and“Debile” in the
“merveilleux pas de la mort”[“monstrous Tourney of Death”].^40
A new narrative focus, however, is foreshadowed when the narrator
arrives at a hermitage,“La Demeurance de Raison”( 34. 8 ). Up to this
122 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland