Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

That governis him bot lak to God and man–

He is worth be king that governe him sa can;

Suppois he be nocht lord of toure na toun,

He micht richt wele for wourschip bere the croun–

Giff he luffis law, vertew and veretie,

He is owdir king, or kingis fere suld be. ( 9815 – 22 )^67

The logic by which king and subject were able to identify was thus made
available in the tradition of theSecretum. In his body natural, the king
shared the subject’s imperfections but was also invited to correct them
through a programme of discipline to which the subject too could aspire.
However, the king also partook of an ideality that made him radically
different from the rest of humanity, for his body politic was unsusceptible
to“the thousand natural shocks / Thatflesh is heir to.”^68
The language of thespeculum principisis, I think, poised to conduct its
own intervention in the debates that have shaped the study offifteenth-
century poetry. Texts of counsel, and other advisory texts, intimate that the
poetic subject’s gestures towards identification with the image of power take
place under the mask of–are, indeed,finally inseparable from–an explicit,
perhaps inevitable, failure to identify. Many late-medieval poems in English
narrate a progress from troubled beginnings to a closure underwritten by an
authoritative text, the invocation of a patron or the intervention of a
powerful precursor or patronal surrogate–a closure that marks the adoption
of the right to speak. Yet that progress is devious and covert, for it takes
place under the sacrificial sign of an explicit recognition and internalization
of deficiency, the mimesis of a willed embrace of frailty and defect. Once
again, Hoccleve’sRegementprovides an exemplary case; failure of identi-
fication is rewritten in order that it may culminate in a scene of self-
recognition and the subject’s“sincerity”finally emerge as the measure of
lack, a being-for a royal other (“Myne inward wil that thristith the welfare /
Of your persone”).^69 Considerable debate was at one stage focused on the
supposed inability of New Historicist critics to imagine the emergence of a
fully formed interiority in literature prior to the sixteenth century.^70 The
evidence of much fifteenth-century poetry suggests that inwardness is
born–and repeatedly reborn–in the self-scrutinizing address of poetic
subject to patron, while the subject’s introspection becomes the source of a
patron’s entertainment.^71
The process of modeling behavior and conduct assumes on the part of the
model an ontological priority over the subject seeking to model itself. The
model is therefirst, and is“real”in a way that the subject is not, but desires
to be. The desire of the late-medieval poetic subject consequently passes

14 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland