Haunted Hoccleve?: The Regiment of Princes, The Troilean Intertext, and Conversations with the Dead

Thomas Hoccleve's 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 portrait's representational fidelity and symbolic power.¹ Hoccleve's "canonization" of Chaucer—as a literary progenitor, as a quasi-religious icon, as a model of authoritative advice, and as the founder of a national poetic tradition—have 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.

(2077-79)⁴

Many readers have willingly accepted Hoccleve's 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 Mitchell's pioneering book, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century Poetic, questions Hoccleve's claims to a close personal connection with Chaucer, and states that there are "very few direct allusions to Chaucer in Hoccleve's verse and almost no indisputable Chaucerian echoes in his diction and phraseology."⁵ John Burrow's 1990 essay on "Chaucer and Hoccleve" does, by contrast, acknowledge Hoccleve's "immense" debt to Chaucer in certain areas, noting that Hoccleve's attention to syllable count is one of the most likely legacies of Chaucer's tutelage; he also suggests that Hoccleve's 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 Hoccleve's apparent lack of prominence in the fifteenth-century tradition, John M. Bowers says of Hoccleve's 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 Hoccleve's 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 Hoccleve's Regiment. Many critics have underestimated the extent to which Hoccleve adopts the dialogic mode, patterns of speech, and narrative personae in Chaucer's 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 lens—that 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 one—a scenario that mirrors the relationship between the two poets, as Hoccleve describes it in the Regiment. In addition, Hoccleve draws material from Chaucer's 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 Chaucer's work was read and reformulated by English writers from Usk, Clanvowe, Gower, and Scogan onwards.¹⁰ Further, Hoccleve's absorption of Chaucerian personae and his explicit conjuration of Chaucer's spirit might encourage us to read these exchanges as conversations with the dead. In the...