that underwrite the poem’s discussions of rhetoric, where rhetoric as
Ciceronian force for law and civil order is linked to a secret text that presents
the rhetorician as Hydra-headedauctorand wellhead of meaning. Grande
Amoure’s narration of his own death mirrors Hawes’s pursuit of a literary
practice that establishes his authority through a secret withdrawal from his
text. In the wake of Roland Barthes’s famous essay, we are perhaps over-
accustomed to viewing the death of the author as the birth of the reader,
as though antiauthorial iconoclasm were only ever a liberatory gesture,
releasing the reader into the production of meaning.^52 Hawes’s poem,
however, raises the real possibility that the“death of the author”can have
the reverse effect; the poem’s narrator vanishes from the text in order that
discursive authority mayfinally be more powerfully established. Death here
allows a new form of revenance–concealed and diffuse, as rhetorical effect
and affect. The author“dies”to this text in one way in order to effect an
uncanny return in others–covertly, in multiple fashion, by side and back
doors.^53
The authority that Hawes proclaims is a vernacular authority, sup-
ported by allusion to Chaucer, Gower and of course Lydgate. As we have
seen, however, the domain in which he asserted it contained other align-
ments of rhetoric, language and authority, in particular those embodied
by Bernard André, his colleagues and other humanist scholars. There is,
David Carlson writes, no evidence that Henry VII“adopted a grand
strategy for patronizing humanists,on the basis of an intuitive grasp of
the deep, long-ranging political implications of a movement still only
emergent in England.”^54 However, the poetry promoted by this“‘closed
shop’of continentalliterati”^55 did, as we have seen, gain prestige; Green
detectsatthispoint“a tendency for English to lose ground to Latin as the
vehicle for courtly propaganda.”^56 When Hawes speaks of the relation
between the status of the courtly humanists and“the makyng of Lydgate,”
that relation is, as we have noted, seen as explicitly oppositional. Yet his
work makes its own contribution toétatisteideology, albeit one less overt
than the poems of Bernard André or Pietro Carmeliano, and in the process
endows his own English poetic lineage with a new political importance. If
inThe PastimeHawes rehearses the familiar praise of Chaucer, Gower and
Lydgate, he does so in support of a poetry that both advocates and adopts
a rhetoric of secrecy, existing ambiguously within the margins of public
discourse. Hawes is thus able to establish a new and powerful space for
a vernacular voice. InThe Pastime of Pleasurehis narrative effects, at the
heart of the public sphere of rhetorical persuasion, a replication of the
instrumentality of secrecy.
128 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland