I wolde therwith no man were myscontente;
Besechynge you that shall it see or rede,
In every poynte to be indyfferente,
Syth all in substaunce of slumbrynge doth procede.
I wyll not saye it is mater in dede,
But yet oftyme suche dremes be founde trewe.
Now constrewe ye what is the resydewe. ( 533 – 39 )The Vices, too, terrified Drede by implying, then denying, that a conspiracy
was forming against him ( 173 – 74 ; 493 – 94 ). Now Drede, the eighth courtly
vice, ensnares the reader in the same anxiety, implying that to have followed
and understood this tale of moral corruption so far is by definition to be
privy to its world, to be one of the damned. And the poem, having, like the
monarch it serves, constituted its own secretive inner spaces, now turns
finally on the reader, and peremptorily demands further self-scrutiny:“Now
constrewe ye what is the resydewe”( 539 ).
62 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland