Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

might initially have been“allusive, topical meanings”^75 come to take on new
references. If the forms of apocalyptic thought remained fairly constant, their
content was fluid and indeterminate; changing circumstances changed
possible signification. The narrator of“Twelve Letters Save England,”who
stumbles across a woman in Cheapside setting“xii. letteris in order on a rowe”
on a garment, promptly proceeds to give a detailed point-to-point exposi-
tion;^76 the tale of“wolves”and other emblematic beasts in“When cuckow
time cometh oft so soon,”in BL Lansdowne MS 762 , remains scrupulously
impenetrable.^77
On the other hand, the very openness of propheticfictions severely limits
their practical utility. This is a point on which Robert Mannyng of Brunne
waxes distinctly sardonic. Of Merlin’s prophecies, he writes that

Some men haue them mykel in hande,

That con nought them wel vnderstande.

Y sey for me, y naue no wyt

To open the knottes that Merlyn knyt.

Men may sey more than he hath seyd,

That nothyng ther-to may be leyd.

Merlyn spak on swylk a manere,

That til hit be gon, non may hit lere.^78

A prophecy only yields its historical truth when it is too late.
How does this bear on Hawes’s combination of genres inThe Comfort?
There is a basic structural homology between love-complaint and political
prophecy, since both entail the deferral of a closure that can only be imposed
from without by an other, whether the mistress or the divinity who brings
about the event foretold. The desired sexual consummation with the lady
thus stands in the same relation to the love-fiction as the Apocalypse does to
human history, an intervention from outside time, an epiphany in which
signs are no longer covert. In Hawes’s text, the love-complaintfinds itself
increasingly engorged by a grand narrative of prophecy and fulfillment, in
which anything legible seems tofigure the sorrowing lover’s own state.
Books themselves are well to the fore in this. Given Hawes’s avowed love
of Lydgate, it it hardly far-fetched to perceive here a revision of the opening
ofThe Temple of Glas, that exquisite intertextual echo chamber where lovers
from Virgil, Ovid and Chaucer convene. The lover laments his plight:

Two thyngs me conforte euer in pryncypall:

The fyrst be bokes made in antyquyte

By Gower and Chaucers, poetes rethorycall,

And Lydgate eke, by good auctoryte

Makynge mencyon of the felycyte

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