Haunted Hoccleve?

: The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, and Conversations with the Dead
Nicholas Perkins

The Chaucer Review, Volume 43, Number 2, 2008, pp. 103-139 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/cr.0.0010

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HAUNTED HOCCLEVE? THE REGIMENT OF PRINCES, THE TROILEAN INTERTEXT, AND CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEAD
by Nicholas Perkins
Thomas Hoccleves medieval and modern readers have repeatedly been drawn to the relationship between the Privy Seal clerk and his older and more celebrated contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer. Hoccleve, of course, invokes his maistir in The Regiment of Princes, and had a picture of Chaucer included in its early copies, drawing attention in the text to the portraits representational fidelity and symbolic power.1 Hoccleves canonization of Chauceras a literary progenitor, as a quasi-religious icon, as a model of authoritative advice, and as the founder of a national poetic traditionhave all been the subject of extended discussion, circling around the familiar trope of father Chaucer,2 and recently coloring it with a renewed interest in the public, political, and ideological positioning of fifteenth-century vernacular poetry.3 In this essay I shall discuss some Chaucerian borrowings and echoes in The Regiment of Princes, many of which have been overlooked or little discussed in the heat of these wider debates. Hoccleve tells us that My deere maistir, God his soule qwyte, And fadir, Chaucer, fayn wolde han me taght, But I was dul and lerned lyte or naght. (207779)4 Many readers have willingly accepted Hoccleves claim that his poetic legacy from this master and father is, paradoxically, one of lack or absence. Three brief examples will illustrate critical views that still have some currency. Jerome Mitchells pioneering book, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century Poetic, questions Hoccleves claims to a close personal connection with Chaucer, and states that there are very few direct allusions to Chaucer in Hoccleves verse

THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2008. Copyright 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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and almost no indisputable Chaucerian echoes in his diction and phraseology.5 John Burrows 1990 essay on Chaucer and Hoccleve does, by contrast, acknowledge Hoccleves immense debt to Chaucer in certain areas, noting that Hoccleves attention to syllable count is one of the most likely legacies of Chaucers tutelage; he also suggests that Hoccleves understanding of the balance and composition of the long stanza and an enhanced awareness of the ample potentialities of English verse are gained from the older poet.6 Nevertheless, Burrow claims far fewer verbal echoes of Chaucer than one would expect to find in the work of an immediate follower.7 In a more recent essay discussing Hoccleves apparent lack of prominence in the fifteenthcentury tradition, John M. Bowers says of Hoccleves Regiment that despite its use of a Chaucerian stanza form, the overall work entirely lacks the Chaucerian characteristics that [later] became most dearly prized.8 I believe that Hoccleves debt to Chaucer is more active, more integral to his style and poetic persona than such assessments allow. In particular, borrowings from Troilus and Criseyde form a powerful undertow to the opening dialogue of Hoccleves Regiment. Many critics have underestimated the extent to which Hoccleve adopts the dialogic mode, patterns of speech, and narrative personae in Chaucers poem, and reformulates them to poetic and strategic advantage.9 Taking time to read some of those adoptions and adaptations can supplement or modify the roles of dutiful dullness, Oedipal anxiety, or ideological confusion that have often been ascribed to Hoccleve, and, instead, might help us develop a reading through a different lensthat of authorial and narratorial conversation. The passages on which I shall focus mostly take the form of conversations in which an older man attempts to counsel and teach a younger onea scenario that mirrors the relationship between the two poets, as Hoccleve describes it in the Regiment. In addition, Hoccleve draws material from Chaucers own experiments in conversational style, especially in the early parts of Troilus and Criseyde. The development of such poetic conversation is, then, itself part of a dialogic process through which Chaucers work was read and reformulated by English writers from Usk, Clanvowe, Gower, and Scogan onwards.10 Further, Hoccleves absorption of Chaucerian personae and his explicit conjuration of Chaucers spirit might encourage us to read these exchanges as conversations with the dead. In the later part of this essay, I shall suggest some implications of Hoccleves dwelling with the spectral Chaucerian corpus.11 Hoccleves Regiment starts with the narrator in bed, deprived of sleep by vexatious Thoght (7), and weary of life itself: My tremblynge herte so greet gastnesse hadde / That my spirites were of my lyf sadde

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(2021). He laments the power of Fortune to involve all ranks of society, from royalty downwards, in her constant inconstancy: Allas, wher is this worldes stablenesse? Heer up, heer doun; heer honour, heer repreef; Now hool, now seek; now bountee, now mescheef. (4749) Escaping from the claustrophobic city into the feeld (117), he meets an older man, who attempts to draw him into conversation and console him with Boethian wisdom. This scenario might already begin to remind us of Troilus and Criseyde, in particular the early conversations between Troilus (young, melancholy, and lamenting in his chambre)12 and Pandarus (older, worldly wise, and offering consolation). Indeed, as long ago as 1968 Mary Ruth Pryor noted that the character of the beggar may owe something to that of Chaucers Pandarus, although he remains a more shadowy figure.13 More recently, in a rich discussion of the Regiments capacity for threat as well as flattery, Sarah Tolmie has suggested Pandarus as the most important precursor of the old man, especially in his role as a go-between or baude (Regiment, 547).14 Here is the moment when Hoccleve encounters the Old Man: He stirte unto me and seide, Sleepstow, man? Awake! and gan me shake wondir faste, And with a sigh I answerde atte laste: A, who is there? I, quod this olde greye, Am heer, and he me tolde the manere How he spak to me, as yee herde me seye. O man, quod I, for Crystes love deere, If that thow wilt aght doon at my prayeere, As go thy way, talke to me no more; Thy wordes alle annoyen me ful sore. Voide fro me, me list no conpaignie. Encresse nat my greef, I have ynow. My sone, hast thow good lust thy sorwe drye And mayst releeved be? What man art thow? Wirke aftir me: it shal be for thy prow. Thow nart but yong and hast but litil seen, And ful seelde is that yong folk wyse been. (13147)

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This scene is clearly indebted to Book I of Troilus and Criseyde, where Pandarus finds Troilus lamenting, shouts at him to awake, and later shakes him. As can be seen from the parallels cited in the Appendix, Chaucer takes time to build up a pattern of awakenings and responses, which Hoccleve distills into a characteristically charged, compressed exchange. Pandaruss wonderlich call and later shaking of Troilus have been transferred to Hoccleves Old Man, who gan me shake wondir faste; Hoccleves sigh recalls Troilus, who syken wonder soore; and even Hoccleves rhymes no more and ful sore echo Troiluss crye namore and thi lore. In addition, there are close parallels in Hoccleves for Crystes love deere, at my prayeere, and go thy way, talke to me no more with Troiluss initial rejection of Pandarus. Indeed, this passage as a whole is a prime example of how skillfully Hoccleve exploits the potential of the rhyme royal stanza that Chaucer developed in Troilus and Criseyde : using enjambment to quicken the pace of the exchange (13536); creating expectation between stanzas (13334); varying the rhythm through interjections and speaker cues (13435, 137); introducing metrical variety, for example by using inversion in the first foot (141, 145) and a broken-backed line (139); using exclamations, short demotic phrases and colloquialisms (137, 143); and generating proverbial force in the final couplet of a stanzahere in the Old Mans put-down of Hoccleves youthful naivete, which parallels Pandaruss claim that he can help Troilus through his own greater experience (14647).15 I have included the Old Mans reply in the passage quoted above because Hoccleves Chaucerian location here is possibly deepened by a small but close analogue to the Canterbury Tales in the Old Mans question What man art thow?, which of course recalls the Hosts question to Chaucers own withdrawnand melancholy?authorial persona just before the tale of Sir Thopas: What man artow? quod he; Thou lookest as thou woldest fynde an hare, For evere upon the ground I se thee stare. (VII 69597)16 Each of these textual patrons, then, provokes a moment of self-scrutiny and self-definition at the point where the authorial persona is preparing to develop his public voice. Just after the first explicit reference to Chaucer, whose name is invoked at the same time that Hoccleves is revealed (Hoccleve, sone? . . . Thow were aqweyntid with Chaucer, pardee [1865, 1867]), the Old Man presses the case for Hoccleve to relieve

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his financial problems by composing a book of advice for Prince Henry in the expectation of reward: Althogh thow seye that thow in Latyn Ne in Frensshe neithir canst but smal endyte, In Englissh tonge canstow wel afyn. Fadir, therof can I eek but a lyte. Yee, straw! Let be! Thy penne take and wryte As thow canst. (187075) In Troilus and Criseyde Pandarus similarly encourages the lovers to put pen to paper in order to further their desires. As the Appendix shows, the passage above is comparable to lines from Book V of Troilus, which use the samealbeit standardrhymes: write / endite / lite. The encouragement is expressed in similar terms too: thow canst wel endite says Pandarus to Troilus; the Old Man says canst but smal endite, then canstow wel afyn. These Chaucerian reminiscences form a group towards the end of the Regiments Dialogue with some other echoes, such as the lines Swich thyng translate and unto his hynesse, As humblely as that thow canst, presente. Do thus, my sone. Fadir, I assente. (195153) These lines are paralleled in situation, wording, and rhyme with passages of Troilus, as when Pandarus tells Troilus in Book I that he must address his own powerful lord, the God of Love, to ask forgiveness for previously scorning lovers: Thus sey with al thyn herte in good entente. Quod Troilus, A, lord! I me consente. (I, 93536) These allusions and analogues help to establish Troilus and Criseyde as a particularly suggestive intertext to the Regiment s Dialogue. In the Appendix, I note numerous other echoes and parallels with Troilus and other of Chaucers works, some of them already cited piecemeal by Hoccleve editors and critics. By describing Chaucers poem as an intertext to the Regiment, I am stopping short of claiming some powerful genealogy by which Troilus and Criseyde unlocks meaning in Hoccleves poem.17 Neither is Oedipal struggle or Bloomian anxiety of influence

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entirely satisfactory as a theoretical model for Hoccleves relation to Chaucer here, although Chaucers status as a strong author whom later writers creatively misread is powerfully descriptive of many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts.18 One alternative to a reading based around paternity and inheritance might be the poststructuralist intertext,19 but I want to position my own reading both as more and less authorial than these positions allow. Hoccleves textual relationship with Chaucer is a mixture of knowing debt and unknowing absorptionpart strategic, part happenstancewhile his shaping of conversational patterns also opens a series of imaginative doors to other genres and philosophical traditions that the Regiment and its readers can explore. This mingling of authorial direction and unplanned or unacknowledged resonance is, I believe, vital to the Regiments suggestive power, which eludes or overflows the categories of mirror for princes, complaint, propaganda, autobiography, consolation, or begging poem, that might be applied to it. One mapping of comparable terrain that, I believe, can help us by marking contours both at psychological and ideological levels is Jacques Derridas Spectres de Marx (Specters of Marx). In it, Derrida reflects on the pressures that Marx as a powerful, prior author places on ways of thinking and writing in the twentieth centurywhat Derrida describes as a hauntology of the spectral figures continuing presence/absence. In one of his most openly politically engaged works, Derrida argues that the triumphalism greeting the apparent demise of communist regimes in the late 1980s fails to conceal the complex and sometimes contradictory responses to which an invocation of Marx still gives rise. The energy expended on declaring the death of Marxism implicitly acknowledges its troubling, excessive potential to return: At bottom, the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back; in the future, said the powers of old Europe in the last century, it must not incarnate itself, either publicly or in secret. In the future, we hear everywhere today, it must not re-incarnate itself; it must not be allowed to come back since it is past.20 At the same time as describing this anxious speech act which declares the death of the very thing whose return one fears, Derrida explores a wider practice of spectrality, viewing Marxs own fascination with the spectral through the prism of Shakespeares Timon of Athens and especially Hamlet, which had a powerful influence on Marxs own imaginative frameworks. The cursed legacy and the revenant father are still embedded in this model, then, but while aware of the anxiety about paternity

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that Blooms work powerfully raises, Derridas imagining of the relationship with the threatening yet fecund specter leaves more space for an ambivalently productive summoning up of the dead, as well as performative reaffirmation of their demise. Recent work by Helen Swift on responses to Jean de Meun in the French Roman de la Rose tradition shows how fruitful this approach might be for examining late-medieval responses to powerful authors. Swift adapts from Derrida what she terms a spectropoetics which can summon up, argue with, and challenge the authority of Jean de Meunas happens, for example, in the fifteenthcentury Champion des dames by Martin Le Franc.21 I shall return to some implications of this approach for the relations between dead and living authors that Hoccleves Regiment allows for, but, before that, I should like briefly to discuss three linked areas of the poem where an awareness of the Troilean intertext can, I think, enrich our reading: Boethian dialogue; diseased language; and gendered subjects. We saw above that the Old Mans encouragement to Hoccleve to start writing has an analogue in Troilus and Criseyde. Troiluss impulse to write letters and compose songs as a result of his love, or hope, or despair, provides a complex precedent for Hoccleves narrator, whose initial private complaining and linguistic impotence turn to more public and profitable (though not unproblematic) enditing.22 That pattern of selfregarding complaint, followed by educative or reflective dialogue, also brings another text into play: Boethiuss De consolatio Philosophiae, which likewise places its author-persona at the mercy of Fortune, Death, and elegiac introspection in the opening metrum: Venit enim properata malis inopina senectus Et dolor aetatem iussit inesse suam. Intempestivi funduntur vertice cani Et tremit effeto corpore laxa cutis. Mors hominum felix quae se nec dulcibus annis Inserit et maestis saepe vocata venit. Eheu quam surda miseros avertitur aure Et flentes oculos claudere saeva negat. Dum levibus male fida bonis fortuna faveret, Paene caput tristis merserat hora meum. Nunc quia fallacem mutavit nubila vultum, Protrahit ingratas impia vita moras. Quid me felicem totiens iactastis amici? Qui cecidit, stabili non erat ille gradu.23 White hairs upon my crown untimely came, And trembling wrinkles sag on my spent frame.

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Death finds no welcome in contented life, But is oft summoned when distress is rife. Alas, Death turns deaf ears to my sad cries, And cruel, will not close my weeping eyes. While fickle Fortune transient goods did show, One bitter hour could almost bring me low; Now shes put on her clouded, treacherous gaze, My impious life spins out unwanted days. Why did you harp, my friends, on my renown? My steps were insecure; I tumbled down.24 This first poem in the Consolation is a telling precursor to Hoccleves lamenting narrator at the start of the Regiment, hovering between life and death and bemoaning treacherous Fortune. The first gloss that normally occurs in Regiment manuscripts is indeed from the Consolation, though from the more detailed discussion of Fortune in Book II, prosa 4: Boicius de consolatione: Maximum genus infortunii est fuisse felicem (The worst kind of misfortune is to have once been happy), a passage also cited in Troilus, III, 162528. The Consolation of Philosophy holds a powerful intertextual relation to the Regiment and to Troilus ; it haunts both English texts imagination of melancholy suffering and therapeutic dialogue, with a speaking voice both textually and biographically at the border of death. Returning to Troilus and Criseyde through Hoccleves shared Boethianism might also reinforce the Boethian affiliations and forms of Chaucers poem, especially the prosimetrum effect in Book I of Troilus and Criseyde, with its heightened lyric moments followed by more prosaic advisory dialogue and exegesis. The Old Mans attempt to encourage Hoccleve to talk about his troubles (line 232 onwards, for example) develops a series of Boethian arguments for therapeutic speech. One Regiment manuscript (Cambridge University Library MS Gg.vi.17, fol. 5r) emphasizes this influence by glossing the Old Mans exemplum of the beggar who needs to speak out to gain relief (24859) with a quotation from Consolation, Book I, prosa 4: si medicum expectas oportet vt vulnus detegas (If you are looking for a cure, you need to uncover the wound), words then paraphrased by the Old Man in lines 26063. Pandarus uses the same passage of Boethius to draw Troilus out in Troilus, I, 85758.25 Hoccleve would no doubt have known the Consolation independently, but Chaucers translation of Boethian consolation into the sphere of romance narrative and of English dialogue exemplifies the enabling effect that Troilus and Criseyde seems to have had on Hoccleves poem, allowing him to develop elements of complaint, melancholy, and male-to-male conversation in the more overtly political and personal environment that the Regiment fosters.

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In her discussion of the Regiment s Dialogue, Tolmie characterizes Hoccleves Old Man as a financial/sexual procurer in the mold of Pandarus: Chaucers Pandarus offers a model of specious and unavailing Boethian consolation in an amatory context that Hoccleve reconfigures into a political one. This transition implies that the relationship between poet and prince is, structurally, an erotic one, formed of mutual desire.26 That sense of movement from the amatory to the political is important (shadowing the movement from private lament to public engagement), and the interplay between those fields is also something that Thomas Usk exploits in his own Boethian/Troilean text, The Testament of Love.27 I would temper, though, the idea that the Boethian dialogue is specious and unavailing, a reading shared to an extent by James Simpsons essay on the Regiment, where he contrasts what he sees as a self-absorbed or passive Boethianism with an active, engaged Aristotelian politics in the Regiment proper.28 I believe that the Boethian framework itself has more political potential than this suggests, and in fact Philosophys first moveto banish the elegiac muses (meretriculas [sluts], in Philosophys words)29 from Boethiuss bedside, and awaken his senses from the lethargy of complaint and longing for death into an active scrutiny of the selfis precisely a turn away from unavailing inwardness, and toward the governance of the self and mind.30 As a similarly divided, ghostly presence, someone haunting his own text, Hoccleve can reflect on the rotten state not only of his own body and fortune, but that of the realm, initially via the dangerously uncontrolled figure of bisy thoght (270), later through private dialogue with the Old Man, and finally in public address to Prince Henry.31 The possibilities and dangers of dialogic revelation are colored by the use that Chaucer and Hoccleve make of Boethian medical imagery. I have already discussed the passage about uncovering a wound, common to all three texts, but this is just the most obvious example of a discourse that is woven throughout the Regiment s dialogue and the TroilusPandarus conversations. Images of wounding, the doctor or leche (for example Regiment, 162, and Troilus, II, 571), healing and hoolness (Regiment, 166, and Troilus, I, 961), and therapeutic, confessional speech as the antidote for melancholy are rich poetic sources for both English portrayals of an ailing protagonist in a diseased body politic. In Troilus and Criseyde, of course, Troiluss sickness is joined to the fate of Troy as a whole, on both literal and figurative levels. In the Regiment, too, metaphors of the body crucially bind together Hoccleves personal and public narratives, though

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in the very different trajectory that the Regiment takes, the Old Mans encouragement to speak out, voiced in the open field, is deliberately to be overheard by Prince Henry, whereas Troiluss revelations to Pandarus, made within the walls of his chamber, must be kept out of the public eye.32 Triangulating the relationship, then, between Boethius, Troilus, and the Regiment allowing the texts to haunt one anothercan, I think, help to nuance our sense of how those traditions are being put to use in differing English contexts and genres. After singing her own lament on Boethiuss enervated state, Philosophy questions him: Tune ille es, ait, qui nostro quondam lacte nutritus nostris educatus alimentis in virilis animi robur evaseras? (Tell me, she asked, are you the man whom once I nurtured with my milk and reared on my solid food until your mind attained full maturity?33) (I, pr. 2). She soon recognizes that he is suffering from a loss of energy (lethargum patitur) and has forgotten for the moment who he is34 (Sui paulisper oblitus est) (I. pr. 2). Part of her task, then, is to repair his divided self and reawaken the manliness that Philosophy nurtured through her earlier maternal care. This passage has a powerful relation both to Troilus (of whom Pandarus asks What! Slombrestow as in a litargie? [I, 730; and see also I, 96061]), and to Hoccleves sleepwalking narrator, whose wits fer goon hem to pleye (105). The Boethian/ Troilean suggestion of an unmanly, feminized or infantilized figure also resonates in the Regiment, since Hoccleve frequently connects his poverty and melancholy to images of sexual lack.35 Questioning him about the underlying reasons for his grief, the Old Man earlier links Hoccleves symptoms with three potential causeswealth, poverty, and unrequited love: Now, goode sone, telle on thy grevance: What is thy cause of thoght in special? Haast thow of worldly goodes habundance And carist how that it ykept be shal? Or art thow needy and hast nat but smal, And thristist sore a ryche man to be? Or lovest hire that nat loveth thee? (23238) Charles Blyth suggests Chaucers Book of the Duchess, 74648 and 114043, as a parallel for this part of the Regiment.36 There are certainly similarities between these passages in which a prospective counselor attempts to draw out a melancholy interlocutor. Perhaps the most suggestive parallel between the Book of the Duchess and the Regiment as a whole, though, is in

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the opening figure of the insomniac, melancholy poet-narrator, facing death: For I have felynge in nothyng, But as yt were a mased thyng, Alway in poynt to falle a-doun; For sorwful ymaginacioun Ys alway hooly in my mynde. .......................... And I ne may, ne nyght ne morwe, Slepe; and thus melancolye And drede I have for to dye. (BD, 1115, 2224) The Chaucerian narrators choice of a book to rede and drive the night away (49) is echoed by Hoccleves imagined role for his own text (Regiment, 2141), and Blyth cites certain other possible parallels and echoes (noted in my Appendix). This earlier Chaucerian dialogue relating to desire and loss does indeed provide an intriguing precedent for Hoccleves textual persona, dwelling on Fortune and communicating with the dead, and it enriches our reading of the Regiment s Dialogue.37 The parallels, however, are neither close enough nor consistent enough to make large claims about the Regiment s relationship to the Book of the Duchess, and the difference in form (octosyllabic couplets as opposed to rhyme royal stanzas) also limits the potential for verbal and intertextual resonances to develop. In the context of the earlier Troilean resonances, the Old Mans suspicion that Hoccleve is lovelorn also chimes with Troilus and Criseyde : in effect, the Old Man raises the possibility that Hoccleve is a kind of Troilus, whose addled state is brought on by unrequited love. The question is soon subsumed into the Old Mans warnings against bisy thoght and the dangers of heresy, channeling us away from love as the cause of Hoccleves melancholy (and thus, generically, away from romance or love vision), but the connections between poverty, sickness, and desire to speak to and for the royal body allow a tantalizing relationship between the poems to continue.38 Indeed, the Old Mans comments on heresy echo the melancholy lovers dangerous questioning of Fate and the gods in the pagan context of Troilus and Criseyde, as when Troilus speaks through Boethius to voice his confusion in Book IV of Chaucers poem.39 In the Regiment the prospect that Hoccleves thoght lurkynge thee withynne (274) might lead to heresy and despair is raised only to be countered, but it nevertheless leaves an uncomfortable trace on the progress of the Dialogue. The Old Man, then, suspects that Hoccleves lack of governance (266) could be the result of love or lust

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(in the advice section of the poem, lustful desire is explicitly seen as a danger to the integrity of the body politic). He later questions Hoccleve about his sex life, outlawing lust for lust oonly (1592). Aligning sex with that other generative and self-defining activity, writing, the Old Man echoes Troilus and Criseyde by warning Hoccleves alter ego that Thentente is al; be waar ay of folie (1596; compare Troilus, V, 1630: Thentente is al, and nat the lettres space). That phrase from Troilus comes in Criseydes straunge (V, 1632) letter to Troilus, but it also has a general, proverbial force, so I do not want to make too much of its appearance here; Hoccleves use of it is as likely to be an unconscious reminiscence, or a shared use of a commonplace, as a deliberate adoption of Criseydes voice. Its appearance does, however, press the wider question of Hoccleves relation to gendered roles. Does the Troilean and Boethian intertext contribute to a feminized Hocclevean persona? Hoccleves treatment of gender has become the subject of greater scrutiny recently. His playfully ironic gestures to the superiority of women in the final section of the Regiment, his complex reworking of Christine de Pisan in The Letter of Cupid, and his invocation of a threatening female audience in the Series, followed by the suffering and sinful female protagonists in its later narratives, have provoked diverse readings.40 Recently, R. F. Yeager has proposed that Hoccleves personification of a female Death in the Regiment, 20802107, opens a window onto a gendered politics in the poem, seeking to promote a virile Chaucerian masculinity against the perceived effeteness of the courts both of Richard II and Henry IV. Yeagers claim that the menacing Lady Death must be resisted by an explicitly manly rhetoric that co-opts Chaucer as its lineal guarantor is certainly thought-provoking, though his argument is weakened by claiming that this instance of Death as female is unique to the Regiment.41 By contrast, Andrew Lynch has argued that the unusually active personality effect in several of Hoccleves poems helps to establish a clerkly counter-discourse to the norms of chivalric masculinity, especially in Hoccleves admissions of cowardice; his comically impaired indulgence in drinking, flirting, and profligate spending; and his garrulous speech.42 This approach is closer to Catherine Batts nuanced account of Hoccleves negotiations of gender, which draws attention to the shifting affiliations and subject-positions in his poetry.43 While it is plausible that Hoccleve wishes to promote a manly Chaucerian heritage that encompasses Chaucers hy vertu (1971) and orthodox piety in the Regiment, Hoccleves own textual persona is, I would argue, much less secure, exploiting at various moments poses such as melancholy incapacity, clerkly admonition, and female unruliness.44 Nor is Hoccleve the only figure to shift roles in the Dialogue. The Old Mans warning that in marital sex Thentente is al appears to place

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him as an upholder of traditional morality, in contrast to Pandaruss compromised position as Criseydes uncle and Troiluss praeceptor amoris. Both, however, claim that though they might appear foolish, they should be listened to (Regiment, 400417, and Troilus, I, 62430; see Appendix), and the Old Man later has a confessional speech describing his own sinful youth: Whan I was yong, I was ful rechelees, Prowd, nyce, and riotous for the maistrie, And among othir, consciencelees. By that sette I nat the worth of a flie; And of hem hauntid I the conpaignie That wente on pilgrimage to taverne, Which before unthrift berith the lanterne. There offred I wel more than my tythe, And withdrow Holy Chirche his duetee. (61018) With its conpaignie that goes on pilgrimage to taverne, this passage echoes both the Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman B.5, where Glutton and his friends attend the tavern in a grotesque parody of the mass.45 Aside from these local reminiscences, however, the Old Mans confessional history has a precursor in Pandarus, whose previous experience of excesse (I, 626) pressurizes the narrative of Troilus and Criseyde. At this point, the Old Man speaks from a persona close to the Hoccleve of the Male Regle, one whose earlier sinfulness has caused his poverty, but whose acknowledgment of past wrong provides the occasion for turning confession into complaint, advice, or petition.46 It is, of course, a pattern that is repeated in the Regiment itself, with Hoccleve plotting a move from melancholy outsider to (precariously) authoritative counselor. Other doppelgnger abound: does the paternal Old Man stand in for a nearly absent Henry IV, or for father Chaucer? Is Hoccleve, then, a shadow of Prince Henry in the Dialogue? How does Hoccleves personal lack of governance map onto the political body that he anatomizes in the Regiment proper?47 These multiplied relationships, split or doubled personae, and ventriloquized speakers may be read both through the symptoms of Hoccleves melancholy, and also through the poems drive to speculate, that is, to coin a currency of advice/money. Hoccleve claims, of course, that advice such as Aristotles (and, by implication, his own) is wel bet than gold in cofre (2040), and he later tells the story of John of Canace, who tricks his greedy relatives by staging his ownership of borrowed money, living off their self-interested generosity,

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and leaving them a chest containing not a hoard of coins, but an advisory text from beyond the grave. The equally profligate Hoccleve, at the margins of death and with a text of advice to offer, is also trying an alchemists trick of turning paper into gold, and he explicitly aligns himself with John of Canaces predicament.48 Marx, in Derridas spectral reading, identifies a similar conjuring trick in the money economy and its discontents: In his wild imaginings, in his nocturnal delirium (Hirngespinst), the miser, the hoarder, the speculator becomes a martyr to exchangevalue. He now refrains from exchange because he dreams of a pure exchange. . . . The hoarder behaves then like an alchemist (alchimistisch), speculating on ghosts, the elixir of life, the philosophers stone.49 Both Hoccleve and John of Canace are presented as the opposite of the miser: the fool large (4361), the spendthrift, borrowing others capital and voices in order to speculate, to invent a value for their text and life. And in the Regiment, as various readers have suggested, Chaucer is represented as a kind of gold standard in which Hoccleve can invest, can bring to life in order to shore up his own poetic resources. Yeager thus remarks on a revivified Chaucer in the Regiment, and on the portrait in MS Harley 4866 with its accompanying stanza (499298) making a claim to virtual double identity with Chaucer; James Simpson likewise comments that the function of the portrait in the Hoccleve manuscript is indeed, on the face of it, to bring Chaucer back to a life of sorts, and he later notes that Hoccleve is clearly using Chaucer as a name with which to conjure.50 One strand of imagery that I should like to emphasize in this passage and the accompanying portrait is the dual sense of rhetorical invention and generative value with which Hoccleve invests Chaucer, and which he by implication inhabits through Chaucers textual/spectral presence. Chaucer is the firste fyndere of our fair langage (4978), and Hoccleves stated aim is to allow those who have lost thoght and mynde (4997) of him, to ageyn him fynde (4998).51 The idea of Chaucer is here reminiscent of the mental faculties that had deserted Hoccleve early in the poem, when the Old Man tells him I fond thee soul and thy wittes echone Fer fro thee fled and disparpled ful wyde. (2089) Here an act of recollection is also called for, to fynde the Chaucer who has been lost. But Chaucers own status as fyndere, and Hoccleves

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prayer to the Virgin that his love should be allowed to floure and fructifie (4991), allow for another level of meaning: Chaucer the fyndere is also an inventor, and it is his rhetorical inventio that grants him ongoing value. By fynde [ing] Chaucer, Hoccleve is also rhetorically inventing Chaucer (and by extension, himself) as a textual and valuable presence, and he is hoping that, unlike at the opening of the poem, when thoght lurkynge . . . withynne (274) was an uncontrolled, debilitating disease or incubus, giving rise to illegitimate thoghtful (81) offspring, the renewed Chaucerian corpus will breed productive thoughts: Whan a thyng depeynt is Or entaillid, if men take of it heede, Thoght of the liknesse it wole in hem breede. (50035) The situation is not stable, for soon after pouring his verbal resources into this high point of Chaucerian presence and surplus value, Hoccleve is reminding Prince Henry of his own dearth and emptiness, paradoxically through deictic attention to the physical book he is composing: More othir thyng wolde I fayn speke and touche Heere in this book, but swich is my dulnesse, For that al voide and empty is my pouche, That al my lust is qweynt with hevynesse, And hevy spirit commandith stilnesse. (501317) In this passage of the Regiment, as elsewhere in Hoccleves writing, it is almost impossible to set the line between strategic (in)direction and confessional revelation; between the anxiety of influence and the pointed deployment of a literary trope. Here I think it is revealing to turn again to Derridas exploration of the ambiguity of the spectral prior author, which he approaches through the multivalence of the French word conjuration, and its English and German cognates. Derrida dwells on the forever errant surplus value that the word produces in the meanings that it gathers up: 1. Conjuration signifies, on the one hand, conjuration (its English homonym) which itself designates two things at once: a. On the one hand, the conspiracy (Verschwrung in German) of those who promise solemnly, sometimes secretly, by swearing together an oath (Schwur) to struggle against a superior power. . . .

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b. Conjuration signifies, on the other hand, the magical incantation designed to evoke, to bring forth the voice, to convoke a charm or spirit.52 After tracking a path for such meanings back through Marx to Shakespeare and then to Marxs spectralizing of the money economy as itself a form of counterfeiting, Derrida returns to Marxs struggle to fend off his own specters: 2. For conjuration means, on the other hand, conjurement (Beschwrung), namely, the magical exorcism that, on the contrary, tends to expulse the evil spirit which would have been called up or convoked (OED: the exorcising of spirits by invocation, the exercise of magical or occult influence).53 Hoccleves conjuration of Chaucer indeed arises as part of a compact between his alter ego and the Old Man, an agreement to write in the face of personal haunting, political anxiety, and the death of Chaucer. As Tolmie suggests, the identity of the Old Man melts back into that of Hoccleve himself at the end of the Dialogue, while Hoccleves textual presence, his chance to make a name for himself, is also, as we have seen, closely linked to the conjuration of Chaucers name in the Dialogue. That conjuration is imbued with fears of death, violence, and mortality, but the projected vertu (1971) of Chaucer (and, here, Gower) fends off Death for a while, an act of conjurement that allows the specter of the Old Man to sink out of sight, and enables Hoccleve to clear his mind of the restlees bysynesse (1) that had dominated the Dialogue. One of the most striking characteristics of Chaucers poetry, which subsequent writers recreated to varying effect, is a self-deprecating authorial persona that promotes open-ended relationships between text, literary tradition, and audiencea persona that in Hoccleves hands becomes more urgent and autobiographical, one might say more Langlandian. A famous instance of this bookish reflection in Chaucer comes towards the end of Troilus and Criseyde : But litel book, no makyng thow nenvie, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. (V, 178992)

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Hoccleve appears to mimic, or even outdo Chaucers modesty topos in the Prologue to the Regiment proper, where he introduces his three Latin sources and claims: For thogh I to the steppes clergial Of thise clerkes thre nat may atteyne, Yit for to putte in prees my conceit smal, Good wil me artith take on me the peyne. (215053)54 Chaucers envoy, of course, goes on to ask of scribes and readers that non myswrite the, / Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge (V, 1795 96). The envoy form, in its incorporation of the modesty formula and claim to value, makes important demands on its readers, extending into the texts afterlife (a busy one in the case of Troilus and Criseyde), and writing the author into that process. At the end of the Regiment, Hoccleve returns to the possibilities for reflection and framing opened up by Chaucers Go, litel bok envoy (V, 1786); indeed, Hoccleves sensitivity to the textualness of his own writing makes the envoy an ideal vehicle for his combination of authorial anxiety and challengehere suggested in the way that he asks and then answers his own question about the poems hardynesse; in his own creation of and then reliance on the princes humble pacience; and in the immediate qualification of the texts rhetorical nakedness to its having a plain (and thus honest and trustworthy) kirtil:55 O litil book, who gaf thee hardynesse Thy wordes to pronounce in the presence Of kynges ympe and princes worthynesse, Syn thow al nakid art of eloquence? And why approchist thow his excellence Unclothid sauf thy kirtil bare also? I am right seur his humble pacience Thee geveth hardynesse to do so. (544047) In this stanza, the first lines question is echoed and answered in the last lines, completing a miniature circle of auto-authorizing, and drawing the princely reader into that circle as a pacien[t] reader. It is a

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process of connecting text, author, and reader that Hoccleve seems also to explore in the autumnal opening of his Series : Aftir at heruest inned had hise sheues, And that the broun sesoun of Mihelmesse Was come, and gan the trees robbe of her leues, That grene had ben and in lusty freisshenesse, And hem into colour of 3elownesse Had died and doun throwen vndirfoote, That chaunge sanke into myn herte roote. (Series, 17)56 Several readers have drawn attention to a possible echo of the Canterbury Tales here, replaying Chaucers springtime opening in a minor key in that move from Whan that Aprill to Aftir at heruest.57 Another metaphor that colors this opening is the image of literary production as harvest, as in Chaucers Prologue to the Legend of Good Women: For wel I wot that ye han her-biforn Of makyng ropen, and lad awey the corn, And I come after, glenyng here and there, And am ful glad yf I may fynde an ere Of any goodly word that ye han left. (F 7377) Hoccleves opening to the Series, with its belatedness, its reworking of the harvest image, and its personal involvement (Hoccleve becomes another plant who is affected [perced, perhaps?] to the roote), might almost be read as a lament for the passing of Chaucers textual licour. The decline and fall of the leaves from freisshnesse paradoxically freisshly brou3te . . . to my remembrance / That stablenesse in this worlde is ther noon (Series, 89), in another Hocclevean shift from dearth to surplus, that is, from loss to memory and composition, initiating the Series poetic project of calling to mind Hoccleves textual self, via a process of recollection, dialogue, and compilation.58 For Hoccleve, then, Chaucers sometimes painful absence, sometimes revenant presence, work at these multiple levels, as a contributor to anxiety or lack, but also as an impetus to the development of Hoccleves own poetic identity, along with the comparable explorations of persona and authorial presence that Hoccleve encountered in Langland and Gower. If Hoccleve is haunted, then the ghost of father Chaucer is gentle as well as forbidding, and that wider textual hauntology proposed

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in Derridas reading of Marx can also provide a model for the shady intertextual relations between the Regiment and Troilus and Criseyde as they inhabit overlapping spaces, each changed by the others presence, and each spending time with the dying author, divided self, and therapeutic dialogue of De consolatione Philosophiae ; in these texts, the spectral author certainly (re)pays us a visit.59 St Hughs College, University of Oxford Oxford, United Kingdom (nicholas.perkins@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk)

APPENDIX
Chaucerian Parallels, Echoes, and Shared Proverbs in The Regiment of Princes
This appendix does not claim to be exhaustive, nor do I believe that every one of these parallels or echoes is a conscious reminiscence of Chaucer by Hoccleve; some are no doubt due to unconscious absorption or simply a shared literary milieu. (Proverbial phrases are keyed to B. J. Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500 [Cambridge, Mass., 1968].) I discuss some of the most compelling parallels in the preceding article. I have also brought together here scattered references in editions and discussions of the poem, in order to inform debates around the extent and nature of Hoccleves poetic relationship with Chaucers works. I have divided the parallels into two groups: those relating to Troilus and Criseyde and those relating to other of Chaucers works. I use the abbreviations for Chaucers works listed in The Riverside Chaucer.

A. The Regiment of Princes and Troilus and Criseyde Troilus and Criseyde Woost thow nat wel that Fortune is comune To everi manere wight in som degree? (I, 84344; Whiting F 524)

The Regiment of Princes

1570: Fortune attacks rich and poor

And how in bookes thus writen I fynde, The werste kynde of wrecchidnesse is A man to han been weleful or this. (5456)

Usually glossed: Boecius de consolatione Philosophiae; maximum genus infortunii est fuisse felicem, &c. (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy: The worst kind of misfortune is to have once been happy, etc.)

For of fortunes sharpe adversitee The worste kynde of infortune is this, A man to han ben in prosperitee, And it remembren whan it passed is. (III, 162528; Whiting I 41)

Whan to the thoghtful wight is told a tale, He heerith it as thogh he thennes were (99100)

Tho wordes and tho wommanysshe thynges, She herde hem right as though she thennes were (IV, 694 95; cf. V, 17679) And Pandarus, that ledde hire by the lappe, Com ner, and gan in at the curtyn pike. (III, 5960)

Passe over; whan this stormy nyght was goon And day gan at my wyndowe in to prye (11314)

The Regiment of Princes [Pandarus] cryde Awake! ful wonderlich and sharpe; What! Slombrestow as in a litargie? (I, 72930)

Troilus and Criseyde

He stirte unto me and seide, Sleepstow, man? Awake! and gan me shake wondir faste, And with a sigh I answerde atte laste: And with that word he gan hym for to shake (I, 869) But natheles, whan he hadde herd hym crye Awake! he gan to syken wonder soore, And seyde, Frend, though that I stylle lye, I am nat deef. Now pees, and crye namore, For I have herd thi wordes and thi lore (I, 75054)

A, who is there? I, quod this olde greye, Am heer, and he me tolde the manere How he spak to me, as yee herde me seye. O man, quod I, for Crystes love deere, If that thow wilt aght doon at my prayeere, As go thy way, talke to me no more; Thy wordes alle annoyen me ful sore.

Voide fro me, me list no conpaignie. Encresse nat my greef, I have ynow. (13142)

But for the love of God, at my preyinge, Go hennes awey; for certes my deyinge Wol the disese, and I mot nedes deye; Therfore go wey, ther is na more to seye. (I, 57174) I hope of this to maken a good ende. (I, 973) The wise seith, Wo hym that is allone For, and he falle, he hath non helpe to ryse (I, 69495; Whiting W 434)

Plukke up thyn herteI hope I shal thee cure (161).

The Book seith thusI redde it yore agoon: Wo be to him that list to been allone, For if he falle, help ne hath he noon To ryse. (2047)

The Regiment of Princes Hid nat thi wo fro me, but telle it blyve. (I, 595)

Troilus and Criseyde

23266: Old Man urges Hoccleve to speak about his melancholy Therfore, as frend, fullich in me assure, And tel me plat what is thenchesoun And final cause of wo that ye endure (I, 68082)

[A beggar] ne lettith for no shame His harmes and his povert to bywreye To folk as they goon by him in the weye. (25052)

Right so, if thee list have a remedie Of thyn annoy that prikkith thee so smerte, The verray cause of thyn hid maladie Thow moot deskevere and telle out al thyn herte. (26063)

The beste is that thow telle me al thi wo; And have my trouthe, but thow it fynde so I be thi boote, er that it be ful longe, To pieces do me drawe and sithen honge! (I, 83033)

For whoso list have helyng of his leche, To hym byhoveth first unwre his wownde. (I, 85758; Whiting L 173) God wold I were aryved in the port Of deth, to which my sorwe wol me lede! (I, 52627)

Unwys is he that bisy thoght ne dredith. In whom that he his mortel venym shedith, But if a vomyt aftir folwe blyve, At the port of despeir he may arryve. (27073)

The Regiment of Princes Than thought he thus: If I my tale endite Aught harde, or make a proces any whyle, She shal no savour have therin but lite (II, 26769)

Troilus and Criseyde

Thy savour yit ful smal is, as I trowe, But or aght longe I shal the soothe knowe. (39899)

40713: the Old Man claims that wisdom is concealed under a poor appearance

And likly that thou deemest for folie Is gretter wysdam than thow canst espie. (41213) See also 610749: Old Mans youthful excesses

Ye, Troilus, now herke, quod Pandare; Though I be nyce, it happeth often so, That oon that excesse doth ful yvele fare By good counseil kan kepe his frend therfro. I have myself ek seyn a blynd man goo Ther as he fel that couthe loken wide; A fool may ek a wis-man ofte gide. (I, 62430; Whiting F 404)

But here, with al myn herte, I the biseche That nevere in me thow deme swich folie (III, 39394) Compare Tr, V, 21821; 167476 A blynd man kan nat juggen wel in hewis. (II, 21; Whiting M 50) Compare Tr, IV, 15867; CT, I 304142 (Whiting V 43) Thentente is al, and nat the lettres space. (V, 1630)

687ff.

The blynde man of colours al wrong deemeth. (994)

1252

Thentente is al; be waar ay of folie. (1596)

The Regiment of Princes But cesse cause, ay cesseth maladie. (II, 483; Whiting C 121) How myghte I than don, quod Troilus, To knowe of this, yee, were it nevere so lite? Now seystow wisly, quod this Pandarus; My red is this: syn thow kanst wel endite, That hastily a lettre thow hire write (V, 128993) Thus sey with al thyn herte in good entente. Quod Troilus, A, lord! I me consente (I, 93536)

Troilus and Criseyde

Styntynge cause, theffect styntith eek (1660) [frequently glossed: cessante causa]

Althogh thow seye that thow in Latyn Ne in Frensshe neithir canst but smal endyte, In Englissh tonge canstow wel afyn. Fadir, therof can I eek but a lyte. Yee, straw! Let be! Thy penne take and wryte As thow canst (187075)

Swich thyng translate and unto his hynesse, As humblely as that thow canst, presente. Do thus, my sone. Fadir, I assente. (195153)

Do that I seye, and lat me therwith gon (II, 1052)

Quod Troilus, Depardieux, ich assente! (II, 1058) Right as an aspes leef she gan to quake (III, 1200)

With herte as tremblyng as the leef of asp (1954)

(See also LGW, 2648; SumT, III 1667; Whiting A 216.)

The Regiment of Princes Lay al this mene while Troilus, Recordyng his lesson in this manere (III, 5051)

Troilus and Criseyde

Recordyng in my mynde the lessoun That he me yaf, I hoom to mete wente. (201011)

I took corage, and whyles it was hoot, Unto my lord the Prince thus I wroot (201516; compare Whiting I 60)

And as I am avysed sodeynly, So wol I telle yow, whil it is hoot. (IV, 126263) And I, emforth my connyng and my might, Have and ay shal, how sore that me smerte, Ben to yow trewe and hool with al myn herte (III, 999 1001) But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. (V, 179092) Compare Tr, IV, 279 And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ouide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. (V, 179192) Tr, II, 1461 (compare Whiting L 301) Compare Tr, III, 616 Compare Tr, V, 186364

Nathelees, swich as is my smal konnynge, With also treewe an herte, I wole it oute (206667)

The steppes of Virgile in poesie Thow folwedist eek. (208990)

2091

For thogh I to the steppes clergial Of thise clerkes thre nat may atteyne (215051)

3134

4223

544851

B. Suggested Parallels and Echoes between the Regiment and Other Works by Chaucer
Chaucer For I have felynge in nothyng, But as yt were a mased thyng, Alway in poynt to falle a-doun (BD, 1113) Passe we over untill eft (BD, 41) And yet my boote is never the ner (BD, 38) I stalked even unto hys bak, And there I stood as stille as ought, That, soth to saye, he saw me nought; For-why he heng his hed adoun, And with a dedly sorwful soun He made of rym ten vers or twelve Of a compleynte to hymselve (BD, 45864)

The Regiment of Princes

[Thoght] My mazid heed sleeplees han of konnynge And wit despoillid (11011)

Passe over; whan this stormy nyght was goon (113)

I roos me up, for boote fond I noon In myn unresty bed lenger to lye. (11516)

By that I walkid hadde a certeyn tyme, Were it an hour I not, or more or lesse, A poore old hoor man cam walkynge by me, And seide, Good day, sire, and God yow blesse! But I no word, for my seekly distresse Forbad myn eres usen hir office (12025)

The Regiment of Princes But, sir, oo thyng wol ye here? Mr thynketh in gret sorowe I yow see; But certes, sire, yif that yee Wolde ought discure me youre woo, I wolde, as wys God helpe me soo, Amende hyt, yif I kan or may. Ye mowe preve hyt be assay; For, by my trouthe, to make yow hool I wol do al my power hool. And telleth me of your sorwes smerte; Paraunter hyt may ese youre herte, That semeth ful sek under your syde. (BD, 54657) This messager com fleynge faste And cried, O, how! Awake anoon! Hit was for noght; there herde hym non. Awake! quod he, whoo ys lyth there? (BD, 17881)

Chaucer

Old Mans attempt to counsel Hoccleve

He stirte unto me and seide, Sleepstow, man? Awake! and gan me shake wondir faste, And with a sigh I answerde atte laste:

A, who is there? I, quod this olde greye, Am heer (13135)

Why slepist thou, whanne thou shulde wake? Quod Shame; Thou doist us vylanye! (Rom, 40089)

The Regiment of Princes Thou wost ful lytel what thou menest; I have lost more than thow wenest. (BD, 74344) Good sir, telle me al hooly In what wyse, how, why, and wherfore That ye have thus youre blysse lore. (BD, 74648)

Chaucer

Thow doost me more annoy than that thow weenest. Good man, thow woost but litil what thow meenest. (170, 173)

Now, goode sone, telle on thy grevance: What is thy cause of thoght in special? Haast thow of worldly goodes habundance And carist how that it ykept be shal? Or art thow needy and hast nat but smal, And thristist sore a ryche man to be? Or lovest hire that nat loveth thee? (23238)

Nyl she not love yow? Ys hyt soo? Or have ye oght doon amys, That she hath left yow? Ys hyt this? For Goddes love, telle me al. (BD, 114043) CT, I 280914 He was in chirche a noble ecclesiaste. (CT, I 708)

32326

He is a noble prechour at devys (404)

Ye been a noble prechour in this cas. (CT, III 165) Compare PardT Sted, 1, 8, 17, 20, 25 Compare CT, IV 3138

62430

86269

208090

The Regiment of Princes Upon my bed I sat upright And bad oon reche me a book, A romaunce, and he it me tok To rede and drive the night away (BD, 4649) CT, VI 398 Compare CT, I 284 CT, IV 1223 Compare Gent, 56 (and Bo) Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee. (CT, III 1038) Compare also CT, IV 1177212 Compare CT, III 29

Chaucer

At hardest, whan yee been in chambre at eeve, They been good for to dryve foorth the nyght (214041)

2425

2950

3081

364854

And it no wondir is, as seemeth me, Whan that I me bethoght have al aboute, Thogh that wommen desyre sovereyntee (511113)

518485

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Notes
For help and advice at various stages in writing this article, I am very grateful to Mishtooni Bose, James Simpson, Tony Spearing, and the editors and anonymous readers for The Chaucer Review. 1. Discussions of the Chaucer portrait include James H. McGregor, The Iconography of Chaucer in Hoccleves De Regimine Principum and the Troilus Frontispiece, Chaucer Review 11 (1977): 33850; Jeanne E. Krochalis, Hoccleves Chaucer Portrait, Chaucer Review 21 (1986): 23445; David R. Carlson, Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait, Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991): 283300; Derek Pearsall, Thomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes : The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation, Speculum 69 (1994): 386410, at 4023; Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park, Pa., 2001), 11924; and Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleves Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, U.K., 2001), 11721 and plate 2. 2. See, for example, A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 92110; Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 298322; John M. Bowers, The House of Chaucer & Son: The Business of Lancastrian Canon-Formation, Medieval Perspectives 6 (1991): 13543; Ethan Knapp, Eulogies and Usurpations: Hoccleve and Chaucer Revisited, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 24773 (a revised version of which also appears in his The Bureaucratic Muse, 10727). 3. This has been a burgeoning field for some time now. On Hoccleve and Lydgate, see, for example, Lee Patterson, Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate, in Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds, eds., New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History (Princeton, 1993), 69107; Pearsall, Thomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes ; James Simpson, Dysemol dais and fatal houres: Lydgates Destruction of Thebes and Chaucers Knights Tale, in Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone, eds., The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford, 1997), 1533; Paul Strohm, Englands Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation (New Haven, 1998); Paul Strohm, Hoccleve, Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court, in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, U.K., 1999), 64061; Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse ; Perkins, Hoccleves Regiment of Princes ; Scott-Morgan Straker, Deference and Difference: Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Siege of Thebes, Review of English Studies, n.s. 52 (2001): 121; Nicholas Perkins, Representing Advice in Lydgate, in Jenny Stratford, ed., The Lancastrian Court: Proceedings of the 2001 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington, Lincolnshire, 2003), 17391; Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, U.K., 2005); Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgates Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford, 2005); James Simpson and Larry Scanlon, eds., John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (Notre Dame, 2006); Robert Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, U.K., 2007); and Jenni Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, U.K., 2007). 4. Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1999). All quotations of Regiment are taken from this edition and cited by line number in the text. 5. Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century Poetic (Urbana, Ill., 1968), 11023, at 122. Mitchell was skeptical of Hoccleves claims to have known Chaucer well enough to claim him as his maistir and fadir, and some readers have followed his lead in downplaying their personal connection. However, as John Burrow points out in his invaluable biography, Hoccleves claims to have known Chaucer are entirely plausible (J. A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve [Aldershot, 1994], 10). Recent important

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research by Linne Mooney has also brought to light the fact that Hoccleve himself wrote a document dated November 9, 1399, under Henry IVs Privy Seal, ordering the Exchequer to pay Chaucer ten pounds arrears of the annuity Chaucer was granted under Richard II, and thus confirming the continuation of this annuity under the new regime (Kew, National Archives E 404/15/62). This document strengthens evidence for the personal connection between the two men; see Linne R. Mooney, Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 293340. I am very grateful to Professor Mooney for showing me her essay before publication. 6. J. A. Burrow, Hoccleve and Chaucer, in Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds., Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge, U.K., 1990), 5461, at 59. 7. Burrow, Hoccleve and Chaucer, 59. Burrow lists a handful of reminiscences from Chaucers shorter poems in the Regiment (61n22). 8. John M. Bowers, Thomas Hoccleve and the Politics of Tradition, Chaucer Review 36 (2002): 35269, at 361. 9. An acute reading of Hoccleves Male Regle that does take account of its Chaucerian pre-text appears in Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, 11020. 10. See, for example, Paul Strohm, Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Writers as Readers of Chaucer, in Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds., Genres, Themes and Images in English Literature, from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century (Tbingen, 1988), 90104; Marion Turner, Certaynly His Noble Sayenges Can I Not Amende: Thomas Usk and Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer Review 37 (2002): 2639; John M. Bowers, Three Readings of the Knights Tale : Sir John Clanvowe, Geoffrey Chaucer, and James I of Scotland, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 279307; Richard Axton, GowerChaucers Heir?, in Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds., Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge, U.K., 1990), 2138; R. F. Yeager, ed., Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange (Victoria, B.C., 1991); May Newman Hallmundson, Chaucers Circle: Henry Scogan and his Friends, Medievalia et Humanistica 10 (1981): 12939. 11. In this sense, dwelling with sounds some of the resonances of the Latin word conversatio, which in medieval usage can mean intercourse, association, habitation, dwelling, and manner of life; see Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (London, 1975), s.v. conversatio. The root verb, verso, also has a significant amount of play in its meanings, implying both movement (hence twist, turn), and also the way in which repeated or confined movement suggests stasis (dwell, settle, live). This range is present in the Middle English conversacioun, whose meanings the MED classifies as: 1. manner of living; conduct; behavior; 2. a) association or communication; b) mating; 3. the place where one lives or dwells, whether physically or spiritually; habitat, dwelling place. It thus reflects something of the flexible and interdependent relationships that intertextual reading can develop. 12. Tr, I, 358. All quotations from Chaucers works are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Boston, 1987). 13. Mary Ruth Pryor, Thomas Hoccleves Series : An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V. iii. 9, Ph.D. diss. (UCLA, 1968), 44. Pryor follows Frederick J. Furnivalls edition (Hoccleves Works III: The Regement of Princes, EETS e.s. 72 [London, 1897]) in misleadingly calling the Old Man a beggar. I do not mean to imply here that Hoccleve presents himself as particularly young in the Regiment (indeed he says that he has lived and worked in the Privy Seal for nearly twenty-four years). However, he describes his interlocutor as a poore old hoor man (122), and the Old Man calls him yong (146); their relationship thus parallels Tr s conversational dynamic. 14. Sarah Tolmie, The Prive Scilence of Thomas Hoccleve, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 281309, at 294. Tolmie cites two textual parallels and comments that Pandaruss description of the fragmentary state of Troilus as he that departed is in everi

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place / [and who] is nowhere hol (TC 1. 9601) could be a description of the Hoccleve narrator (294n20). 15. Pandarus calls Troilus thow fol (I, 618) for keeping quiet about his love-sickness instead of asking for help from his more experienced friend. For Chaucers style in Tr, see Barry Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford, 1992), 31459, especially his discussion of the quickening pulse, the authentic accents, of gossip and sheer chat (321), interleaved with the poems more elevated discourses. As Windeatt notes, Pandarus and Troilus nearly always address one another in the familiar thow form, apart from a few moments of grave conjuration (i. 6824; iv. 5967; v. 496) (319). Another characteristic of the verbal art of Tr is the resonance of different discourses within a word or phrase, such as Troiluss claim that for the most diligent of loves servants, Hym tit as often harm therof as prow (I, 333). Prow can mean both honor and tangible reward. In our passage, Hoccleve develops the Regiment s frequent interplay between images of paradoxical lack and excess in Voide fro me . . . / Encresse nat my greef, I have ynow (14142), and the Old Mans phrase Wirke aftir me: it shal be for thy prow (145) likewise evokes spiritual and financial benefits; see MED, s.v. prou (n.), meanings 1 and 2. For Hoccleves pecuniary discourses, see, for example, Perkins, Hoccleves Regiment, 3949, and Robert Meyer-Lee, Thomas Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money, Exemplaria 13 (2001): 173214. For an assessment of Hoccleves overall linguistic debt to Chaucer, see Simon Horobin, The Language of the Chaucer Tradition (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), 11825. Horobin suggests that Perhaps the most likely explanation for the close relationship between Hoccleves and Chaucers linguistic practices is that Hoccleve deliberately modelled his practice upon that of Chaucer (124). 16. I would not want to place too much weight on this phrase, as it or something like it occurs elsewhere, for example in line 421 of the Auchinleck version of Sir Orfeo (ed. A. J. Bliss, 2nd edn. [Oxford, 1966]), but the parallels in the scenarios here are also suggestive. 17. Hoccleve, of course, explicitly cites Gower as his other maistir (1975), and the Regiment s mingling of autobiographical personae and exemplary narratives owes much to the Confessio Amantis, while the influence of Langland is also evident in Hoccleves wandering, questioning, thoghty persona. On Hoccleves relationship to Gower and Langland, see, for example, Charles R. Blyth, Thomas Hoccleves Other Master, Mediaevalia 16 (1993): 34959; and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Langland and the Bibliographic Ego, in Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds., Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship (Philadelphia, Pa., 1997), 67143, at 8485, 11718. 18. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1973). Paul de Mans review essay on Blooms book is helpful here (Appendix A: Review of Harold Blooms Anxiety of Influence, in Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn. [London, 1983], 26776). De Man challenges what he sees as Blooms reliance on a linear scheme that engenders a highly familiar set of historical fallacies (272), and suggests how Blooms propositions might have force along other lines of connection apart from the temporal, and other levels of analysis apart from those based on individual authors or whole texts: If we are willing to set aside the trappings of psychology, Blooms essay has much to say on the encounter between latecomer and precursor as a displaced version of the paradigmatic encounter between reader and text (273, and compare 276). For discussions that do significantly draw on Oedipal or competitive models of poetic responses to Chaucer, see, for example, A. C. Spearing, Renaissance Chaucer and Father Chaucer, English: The Journal of the English Association 34 (1985): 138; Nicholas Watson, Outdoing Chaucer: Lydgates Troy Book and Henrysons Testament of Cresseid as Competitive Imitations of Troilus and Criseyde, in Karen Pratt, ed., Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Dr Elspeth Kennedy (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 89108; and Knapp, Eulogies and Usurpations.

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19. See, for example, Michael Riffaterre, Compulsory Reader Response: The Intertextual Drive, in Michael Worton and Judith Still, eds., Intertextuality: Theories and Practices (Manchester, U.K., 1990), 5678. Riffaterre claims the readers desire to seek out the intertext as a powerful force in textual response, and one could read Hoccleves invocations of Chaucer in the Regiment as a staging or embodiment of this reflex. 20. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994), 48. 21. Helen Swift, Gender, Writing, and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France (14401538) (Oxford, 2008), 1899. I am very grateful to Dr. Swift for discussing this issue with me and showing me her insightful work before publication, which alerted me to Specters of Marx. 22. On a comparable move from solitary complaint to socialized dialogue in Hoccleves Series, see David Mills, The Voices of Thomas Hoccleve, in Catherine Batt, ed., Essays on Thomas Hoccleve (London, 1996), 85107; James Simpson, Madness and Texts: Hoccleves Series, in Julia Boffey and Janet Cowan, eds., London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1991), 1529; and Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 17580. 23. Boethius, The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (Cambridge, Mass., 1918; repr. 1978), Bk. I m.1, 922. All subsequent citations will be from this edition, incorporated into the text. 24. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford, 1999), 3. Where noted, the translations are those of Walsh; otherwise, they are my own. 25. For Boethian connections in Regiment manuscripts, see Perkins, Hoccleves Regiment, 18081. No glosses to Boethius are noted at I, 85758, in Tr manuscripts by C. David Benson and Barry Windeatt, The Manuscript Glosses to Chaucers Troilus and Crieyde, Chaucer Review 25 (1990): 3353. For further discussion of Tr annotation, see Julia Boffey, Annotation in Some Manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde, English Manuscript Studies, 11001700 3 (1995): 117. 26. Tolmie, Prive Scilence, 294n20. For notions of desire and the relationship between poet and prince, viewed through a Lacanian framework, see Anthony J. Hasler, Hoccleves Unregimented Body, Paragraph 13 (1990): 16483. For the later use of Pandarus as a paradigm for the flattering courtier, see Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge, U.K., 1997). 27. See Turner, Certaynly His Noble Sayenges. Usk reframes Tr s language of sexual desire to match his apparently spiritualized object in the Testament, but as Turner points out, Usks own desires encompass political advancement, not simply idealized love or Boethian consolation: At times, Usk explicitly stresses the idea that his aims are purely spiritual . . . However, as Usk is writing to further his political career . . . the political and the spiritual become tangled (31). On Chaucers own refiguring of Boethian material within an amatory frame in Tr, see, for example, Jill Mann, Chance and Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knights Tale, in Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), 93111; and Helen Phillips, Fortune and the Lady: Machaut, Chaucer and the Intertextual Dit, Nottingham French Studies 38 (1999): 12036, at 12425. 28. Simpson, Nobodys Man; Simpsons powerful reading of the Regiment is reframed in his Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002), 20414. Knapp also pays close attention to the Boethian intertext in his discussion of consolation in the Regiment (The Bureaucratic Muse, 93106). Knapp reads Hoccleve as presenting an especially acute and anxious version of the Boethian subject (99), and argues that [Hoccleves] dialogue is never allowed to pass into consolation (98). This is a rich account of Hoccleves relations with the Boethian intertext, though I differ somewhat from Knapp in placing more weight on the generative possibilities in Hoccleves Boethianism, and I would not

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read as much stability of genre and of subject (100) in Boethiuss own persona as Knapp does. For a valuable reading of Gowers and Chaucers own responses to Boethius, see Winthrop Wetherbee, Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Chaucer, Gower, and the Boethian Tradition, in R. F. Yeager, ed., Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange (Victoria, B.C., 1991), 735. Wetherbee suggests, for example, that the interplay between Latin and English in Gowers CA parallels Boethiuss dialogism (9). Hoccleves interplay between apparently spoken, marginal dialogue and written, authoritative advice-text might also be read via this Boethian (and Gowerian) trajectory, along with Hoccleves more local Boethian dramatis personae of advice-giver and writer in trouble in the Regiments Dialogue. Various kinds of reflective interplay between the Dialogue and Regiment proper are discussed, for example, in Anna Torti, The Glass of Form: Mirroring Structures from Chaucer to Skelton (Cambridge, U.K., 1991), 87106; Hasler, Hoccleves Unregimented Body, 16483; and Perkins, Hoccleves Regiment, 13750. 29. Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae, Book I, prosa 1. 30. In John Waltons early fifteenth-century translation of Boethius, which appears alongside the Regiment in two manuscripts, Walton includes a biographical prologue, which paints Boethius as an active political figure who criticized Theodorics tyranny. Theodorics subsequent death and damnation are also prominently described, helping to recuperate the Consolation as a speculum principis whose effects reach into the political sphere. See Mark Science, ed., Boethius: De Consolatione Philosophiae, Translated by John Walton, EETS o.s. 170 (London, 1927), 412. See also Seth Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in The Consolation of Philosophy (Princeton, 1985), 94110, for a reading that focuses on the development of educative speech and a move towards reasoned eloquence (94) in the early part of the Consolation. 31. See Tim Armstrong, Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (Basingstoke, 2000), 829, for the effects created in Hardys work by a poetic voice haunting his/her own poem. 32. Perkins, Hoccleves Regiment, 13750. On secrecy in Tr, see Barry Windeatt, Love That Oughte Ben Secree in Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer Review 14 (1979): 11631. 33. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Walsh, 56. 34. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Walsh, 6. 35. For a reading of shifting gender balance in Tr, and the implications of Troilus as a feminized figure, see Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), 10111 and 16585. 36. Blyth, ed., Regiment of Princes, 205; see Appendix. 37. For discussion of melancholy narrators in texts of this period, including the French dit tradition on which both Chaucer and Hoccleve draw, see Lynn Dunlop, Cities without Walls: The Politics of Melancholy from Machaut to Lydgate, Ph.D. diss. (University of Cambridge, 1998). 38. Compare Turner, Certaynly His Noble Sayenges, for the ways in which Usk adapts amatory language from Tr for personal and political uses. 39. This move is, of course, mirrored and intensified in Henrysons Testament of Cresseid. See Jill Mann, The Planetary Gods in Chaucer and Henryson, in Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds., Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge, U.K., 1990), 91106. 40. See, for example, Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler, eds., Poems of Cupid, God of Love: Christine de Pizans Epistre au dieu dAmours and Dit de la rose, Thomas Hoccleves The Letter of Cupid: Editions and Translations, with George Sewells The Proclamation of Cupid (Leiden, 1990); Anna Torti, Hoccleves Attitude Towards Women: I shoop me do my peyne and diligence / To wynne her loue by obedience, in Juliette Dor, ed.,

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A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck (Lige, 1992), 26474; Catherine Batt, Hoccleve and . . . Feminism? Negotiating Meaning in The Regiment of Princes, in Catherine Batt, ed., Essays on Thomas Hoccleve (London, 1996), 5584; and Ruth Niss, Oure Fadres Olde and Modres: Gender, Heresy, and Hoccleves Literary Politics, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 27599. 41. R. F. Yeager writes: Apart from the Regement, when Hoccleve personifies Death in other poems, he does so as a he (Death Is a Lady: The Regement of Princes as Gendered Political Commentary, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 [2004]: 14793, at 149). However, in the note that Yeager cites to support this claim, Blyth states: For Hoccleve death is usually feminine (Regiment, ed. Blyth, 219). See, for example, Hoccleves Learn to Die, lines 36, 52, 54, 72, 156, etc., and the explanatory note in Roger Ellis, ed., Thomas Hoccleve, My Compleinte and Other Poems (Exeter, 2001), 227. Ellis suggests that Hoccleve is influenced here by the grammatically feminine Latin mors ; see also Batt, Hoccleve and . . . Feminism?, 65n10. Yeager (16263) briefly discusses the first eulogy to Chaucer in the Regiment, but not the fact that here Hoccleves personified Death is masculine: What eiled deeth? Allas, why wolde he sle the? (1967). For Hoccleve, then, Death is only sometimes a lady. In lines 196181 of the Regiment, Hoccleves male Death seems close to the figure of Satan as lord of the World: For to sleen al this world thow hast yment (1978; and compare the reference to Christ, 197981). Another source of gender complication in Hoccleves Death(s) could come from the tradition of a female Fortune casting the mighty down: see Regiment, 2235, which refer to Fortune and (ungendered) Death. In Learn to Die Hoccleve adds to his source the image of (female) Death destroying all ranks of society and checkmating Al that lyf berith (161; compare BD, 65278, where Fortune plays chess with the lover). Yeager quotes Blyths note as referring to a king and queen of Death elsewhere in Middle English (149). Blyths reference is in fact to a debate between Lady Life and Lady Death in the alliterative Death and Liffe (Israel Gollancz, ed., Death and Liffe [London, 1930]). On the same page, Yeager refers to a manuscript picture in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Selden supra 53, fol. 188r, as depicting Hoccleve at the bedside of a dying man (149n3). The image is of a robed figure at the mans bedside, with a skeletal Death brandishing a staff. There are complex narratorial layers in the text, but the picture illustrates the passage in Learn to Die when the personified Sapience shows an image to the Disciple of a dying young man talking to him. The standing figures primary identification, then, is as the Disciple. For this picture, see Perkins, Hoccleves Regiment, 155 and references. 42. Andrew Lynch, Manly Cowardyse: Thomas Hoccleves Peace Strategy, Medium vum 73 (2004): 30623, who goes on to make a case for Hoccleves pacifism in the Regiment and elsewhere. Hoccleves unmanliness was the subject of comment from his Victorian editors. Furnivall, for example, tells us that We wish he had been a better poet and a manlier fellow (Frederick J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz, eds., Hoccleves Works: The Minor Poems, rev. Jerome Mitchell and A. I. Doyle, EETS e.s. 61, 73 [repr. as one volume, London, 1970], xxxviii); Furnivalls flight of fancy on the relative domestic authority of Mrs. Hoccleve and Mrs. Chaucer (xxxvii) is one of the unintended highlights of the Minor Poems edition. 43. Batt, Hoccleve and . . . Feminism? 44. For the strategic adoption of traditionally feminine attributes as part of a textual persona, see Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 8082, who argues that in CT Chaucer is utterly dependent upon that which the Wife [of Bath] embodies in her own person, upon her particular expertise within the division of labor (knowledge of the body; wifely eloquence; dealing in textus ; felaweshipe, pilgrimage, and wandrynge by the weye) (82). The persona of the unmanly or melancholy clerk-narrator is also prominent in the French dit

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tradition (as for example in Machauts Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse), which could well form a shared model for Chaucer and Hoccleve; I am grateful to Tony Spearing for discussing this point with me. For Hoccleves knowledge and use of French writers, see J. A. Burrow, Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets, in Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone, eds., The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford, 1997), 3549. For the complications of gender and clerkliness in this period, see also R. N. Swanson, Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation, in D. M. Hadley, ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London, 1999), 16077. 45. See Colin Wilcockson, Gluttons Black Mass: Piers Plowman, B-Text, Passus V 297385, Notes and Queries 243 (1998): 17376. A-text, Passus 5, and C-text, Passus 7, have analagous scenes. 46. See Nicholas Perkins, Thomas Hoccleve, La Male Regle, in Peter Brown, ed., A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350c.1500 (Oxford, 2007), 585603, at 58793. 47. For these questions, see in particular Hasler, Hoccleves Unregimented Body, and Tolmie, Prive Scilence, esp. 29296, 3045. 48. See lines 43554403, and Perkins, Hoccleves Regiment, 11114. 49. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 57. 50. Yeager, Death Is a Lady, 182, 161; Simpson, Chaucers Presence and Absence, 257, 258. See also Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 11924, who discusses the portrait in the context of Hoccleves persistent doubling of key images and concepts (110). A fascinating discovery in Mooneys recent work is a receipt for the payment of Hoccleves annuity, written by Hoccleve and sealed with his personal seal (Kew, National Archives E 43/554). Hoccleves motto va illa voluntee she interprets as he goes there willingly, and the central image, of a pointing hand or maniculum, Mooney speculates may indicate that the text refers to heaven (the hand points up to a cross that punctuates the start/finish of the motto), or wherever the king commands that the clerk go (Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve, 31518). If the maniculum is Hoccleves personal device, there is also an intriguing connection with Chaucers familiar gesture in the margin of MS Harley 4866, directing viewers back to Hoccleves own claims to intimate knowledge, or preoccupation with Chaucers personal and poetic corpus: along with its other, more public meanings, Chaucers pointing hand paradoxically but tellingly might be said to mimic Hoccleves own device and desires. 51. Here Blyths reading lost gives better sense than Furnivalls lest (which is the reading of MS Harley 4866), and completes a circle of losing and finding that Hoccleve sets up by calling Chaucer a fyndere and then by encouraging his readers to fynde him again. My thanks to Charles Blyth for confirming that the reading lost occurs in nearly all the extant manuscripts (the only other exception is Coventry City Record Office MS Accession 325/1, which is not a very reliable witness and is related to Harley). For a discussion of this stanza that employs the Harley reading, see Yeager, Death Is a Lady, 16061. 52. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4950 (italics in the original). 53. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 58. 54. Chaucers image is itself a nod to Statius, who in Thebaid XII.81617, asks his book not to presume to rival the Aeneid ; see note to these lines in B. A. Windeatt, ed., Troilus and Criseyde (Harlow, 1984), 557. 55. See Perkins, Hoccleves Regiment, 46. I quote the envoy addressed to Prince Henry, which appears in nearly all the extant and complete manuscripts. Another envoy, addressed to the Duke of Bedford, appears with the Regiment in London, British Library MS Royal 17 D. xviii and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Dugdale 45. It was also copied by Hoccleve into San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 111, fols. 37v38r (Furnivall and Gollancz, eds., Hoccleves Works: The Minor Poems, 5657). The Bedford envoy likewise

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combines elaborately submissive rhetoric with an implicit challenge to the reader to peise and weye / What myn entente is (2324). 56. Ellis, ed., Thomas Hoccleve. 57. See, for example, Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse, 16465, and references in his note 12. Knapp notes the Boethianism of this opening too: Hoccleves work begins with the decayed autumn of a Boethian lament (165). 58. Hoccleves Dialogue with a Friend in the Series has some similarities with the Regiment s Dialogue, and of course much of the Series uses rhyme royal. However, there is not such a clear textual debt to Tr in the Series. Possible reasons for this include the fact that the Series was written nearly ten years after the Regiment, and Hoccleve had absorbed Chaucerian language more fully into his own poetic; that the Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend are not so close in situation to the TroilusPandarus conversations, and have other important intertexts (such as Isidore of Sevilles Synonyma); and that Hoccleve had in mind other Chaucerian connections with the Seriesfor example, the playful discussion of appeasing women readers, which of course is analogous to the Prologue to LGW, and which uses the Wife of Bath as a textual authority on gender politics (Dialogue with a Friend, lines 69498). Possible Chaucerian allusions and echoes in the Series are noted in Ellis, ed., Thomas Hoccleve ; M. C. Seymour, ed., Selections from Hoccleve (Oxford, 1981); and J. A. Burrow, ed., Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue, EETS o.s. 313 (Oxford, 1999). 59. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 125.