- I follow here Rita Copeland’sfine discussion in“Lydgate, Hawes and the
Science of Rhetoric in the Late Middle Ages,”Modern Language Quarterly 53
( 1992 ), 57 – 82 , which works fromThe Pastime’s explicit statements on rhetoric
rather than from its narrative structure. Copeland suggests that“A rhetoric
understood on the model of the‘veils offiction’justifies its own exclusiveness
and secrecy as instrument of both discursive and political control,”supporting
an ideology of“royal absolutism”and“state sovereignty”( 79 , 80 ). - Carlson,English Humanist Books, 56 – 57. The surviving manuscripts of Henry’s
own library include mostly French texts, though his Privy Purse expenses show
that he bought English books too: Anglo, “Court Festivals”; Plomer,
“Bibliographical Notes from the Privy Purse Expenses.” - Walker,John Skelton,p. 38.
- Green,Poets and Princepleasers,p. 193.
57 .Minor Poems, 153. - For Oedipus and Fortune, see Lydgate,The Fall of Princes,i, 3277 – 97 , 3517 – 41.
For a survey of medieval Oedipus traditions, Léopold Constans,La Légende
d’Oedipe étudiée dans l’antiquité, au moyen âge et dans les temps modernes(Paris,
1881 ), and Lowell Edmunds,“Oedipus in the Middle Ages,”Antike und
Abendland 22 ( 1976 ), 140 – 55 .On“Thebanness”as a principle of recursiveness,
“disordered memory and fatal repetition” in medieval historiography:
Patterson,Chaucer and the Subject of History, 75. - The most detailed suggestions have come from Alistair Fox, who argues that
Hawes was unwillingly privy to a conspiracy to endanger the succession among
those immediately around him in the household, and was forced to feign disloyalty
to the Tudor line. See Fox,“Stephen Hawes”andPolitics and Literature, 56 – 72. - BL MS Harley 69 , fol. 2 v.
- College of Arms MS R 36 , fol. 124 v. The document is transcribed by Richard
Firth Green,“A Joust in Honour of the Queen of May, 1441 ,”Notes and
Queries 225 n.s. 27 ( 1980 ), 386 – 89 ( 387 ). Green’s dating of this cartel is
corrected by Gordon Kipling,“The Queen of May’s Joust at Kennington
and theJustes of the Moneths of May and June,”Notes and Queries 229 n.s. 31
( 1984 ), 158 – 62. I would like to thank the College of Arms’s archivist, Mr. R. C.
Yorke, for his assistance with my own work on these materials. - Kipling,Triumph of Honour, 133.
- College of Arms MS R 36 , fol. 124 r– 124 v.
- College of Arms MS R 36 , fol. 124 r.
65 .“The Justes of the Moneths of May and June,”Remains of the Early Popular
Poetry of England, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 4 vols. (London, 1864 – 66 ),ii, 123 , line 65.
66 .JohnStevens,MusicandPoetryintheEarlyTudorCourt(London, 1961 ), 154 – 202.
67 .AsLerer(Courtly Letters, 54 ) notes, Stephen Greenblatt’s canonical analysis of
Wyatt’s poetry–“power over sexuality produces inwardness”–resonates for
Hawes’sComfort: see Greenblatt,Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 124 – 25 .Onthe
parallel with Wyatt, see, too, Colin Burrow,“The Experience of Exclusion:
Literature and Politics in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII,”Cambridge
History,ed.Wallace, 793 – 820 ( 797 ), and Meyer-Lee,Poets and Power, 190.
210 Notes to Pages 128 – 33