JOHN LYDGATE. Hoccleve claimed to have known GEOF-
FREY CHAUCER personally, which is plausible consider-
ing the older poet retired to Westminster in 1399.
Hoccleve shared lodgings with other clerks at the
Chancery Inns before he was married, and he humor-
ously recounted this period in his mock-penitential
confession, LA MALE RÈGLE (1405–06). The marriage,
which he claims was a love match, probably occurred
between 1399 and 1411. Although the position of a
Privy Seal clerk was relatively secure in the later Mid-
dle Ages, Hoccleve frequently described himself as
short of money, and a number of his poems included
petitions to the king and other infl uential fi gures to
ensure the clerks received their backdated annuity
payments. He solicited aristocratic PATRONAGE for some
of his poetry, a strategy that seems to have succeeded
with his most popular poem, The Regiment of Princes
(De Regimine Principum, 1411–12) a book of advice for
the future Henry V, which survives in more than 40
manuscript copies. He may also have found occasional
work as a scribe for the London book trade, judging by
the appearance of his scribal hand in a production of
JOHN GOWER’s CONFESSIO AMANTIS.
Sometime around 1414, Hoccleve suffered some
kind of mental breakdown, which he refers to in a col-
lection of poems, which his editors have titled the
Series. The Series describes the poet’s efforts to come to
terms with his illness and its aftermath, and movingly
details how the crowd turns away from him in Lon-
don, still doubting whether he has recovered his san-
ity. The Series is Hoccleve’s most remarkable
achievement and an extraordinarily self-refl ective com-
mentary on the act of poetic composition.
Thomas Hoccleve died in 1426, probably shortly
after his retirement. His last years saw an increase in
his literary activities as he copied out many of his
poems and compiled his Formulary (1423–25), a set of
scribal templates for the use of Privy Seal clerks, which
has now become an invaluable resource for students of
English administrative history.
Hoccleve’s poetry has attracted scholarly attention
because of the unusual extent to which he utilizes
material from his own life in the presentation of his
author-narrators. Unfortunately, this led some scholars
to assume a straightforward correspondence between
Hoccleve the writer and his poetic persona, an anx-
ious, inept, and rather pitiful fi gure. While they have
been more sensitive to the complexities of literary
invention at work in Hoccleve’s self-portrait, later crit-
ics have generally centered on the topics of madness,
autobiography, and subjectivity when exploring his
infl uence on the world of letters. This has tended to
reinforce the image of the poet as a victim or misfi t,
either as a strangely self-conscious writer in a medieval
world (although this presupposes that self-conscious-
ness is an early modern development) or as a man
sidelined from society by mental illness. Recent work,
however, has sought to redress the balance through a
revaluation of Hoccleve’s literary talents.
FURTHER READING
Burrow, J. A. “Thomas Hoccleve.” In English Writers of the
Late Middle Ages, edited by M. C. Seymour, no. 4. Alder-
shot, Hampshire, U.K.: Varorium, 1994.
Knapp, Ethan. The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and
the Literature of Late Medieval England. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.
Elizabeth EvershedHOUSE OF FAME, THE GEOFFREY CHAUCER
(ca. 1378–1380) The House of Fame is GEOFFREY
CHAUCER’s second DREAM VISION poem, written many
years after his fi rst, The BOOK OF THE DUCHESS. Probably
written after Chaucer’s travels in Italy, it refl ects his
interest in the works of the Italian authors Dante and
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO, as well as the wide range of his
reading, from VIRGIL and OVID to the Bible, as well as
other authors of French and Latin texts.
The House of Fame shares elements of Chaucer’s
other dream visions: The narrator dreams after reading
a book, and there is much interest in dream theory and
the nature of love. Written in octosyllabic COUPLETs,
the poem is composed of three books, all of which
begin with either a proem (preface) or invocation—an
address to a deity for aid, a classical literary convention
followed in many of the works that are discussed in the
poem. The original manuscripts of this text are lost,
and the later three remaining copies are all incomplete,
leaving scholars with some speculation as to whether
Chaucer had fi nished the work or had intentionally left
it incomplete.HOUSE OF FAME, THE 219