In his study of espionage in Renaissance literature, John Michael Archer
has suggested that the courtly subject of early modern culture is essentially
paranoid in structure.^61 Drede’s encounters with his adversaries, as I suggested
above, confirm this by troping anew the encounter with Dame Sans-Pere, this
time in a panicked rivalry of courtierly male“authorship”where revulsion and
attraction are intertwined. Fearful himself, Drede has taken on some of her
fearful inscrutability on this terrain of wavering identities. The Vices are at
once irresistibly attracted to him and terrorized by him, and Drede is as
deeply implicated in this mutual observation as any of them. His complicity
with his interlocutors is explicitly revealed in his colloquy with Suspycyon,
after which the poem looks back at a reader caught out in inquisitiveness:
Soo he departed. There he wolde be come,
I dare not speke; I promysed to be dome. ( 228 – 29 )On many occasions Drede, observing the seemingly arbitrary encounters
that go on around him, moves in to listen:“And I drewe nere to harke what
they two sayde”( 296 ). Drede, it would seem, is as alert as the most devious
among his interlocutors; he is apparently shocked by what he hears:
What sholde I tell more of his rebaudrye?
I was ashamed so to here hym prate.
He had no pleasure but in harlotrye. ( 372 – 74 )But he has heard it, and like an adept informer reported it, so that the reader
is given“all the pleasures of surveillance”that might on another day be
found in the confessional.^62
The exchanges between Drede and his enemies mesh with the poem’s
concern withfigurative language. They endlessly and anxiously strive to
read and gloss him; simultaneously, they impose themselves on his vision in
almost excessive iconographic detail
Than, in his hode, I sawe there faces tweyne...( 428 )
Thenne I behelde how he dygysed was...( 351 )
I saw a knyfe hyd in his one sleve...( 433 )or merrily sing songs like“Sythe I am no thynge playne”( 236 ). As Ad Putter
observes, these characters are“instantly‘readable’to anyone but Drede
himself.”^63 Their vicious self-advertisement, however, also marks a surplus
that intimates the doubleness of Drede’s clerical“connynge.”While not
immune to the Vices’menaces, he can in a sense read them, tabulating the
details of their verbal opacity, with its hints and gaps, in the equally obscure
The Bowge of Courteand the paranoid subject 57