John Metham's "Straunge Style": Amoryus and Cleopes as Chaucerian Fragment

In the ninety years since Hardin Craig edited the unique manuscript of John Metham's Amoryus and Cleopes (1449) for the Early English Text Society, critical interest in the romance, an exotic reimagination of Ovid's Pyramus and This be narrative as Christian miracle tale, has been slow to develop. Most twentieth-century attention to Metham's romance, which blends the motifs and geography of the matter of the Orient with the elite, aureate style introduced by Chaucer and amplified by Lydgate, took the form of passing remarks in studies of medieval English romance and sporadic dismissals of its inconsistent prosody.¹ On occasion, Amoryus and Cleopes attracted guarded admiration as a creative rewriting of an Ovidian sentimental tragedy (for example, in R. M. Lumiansky's commendation of Metham's "seeming originality in shaping [his] materials"), despite its general affinity with medieval Christian moralizations of Ovid's narrative in which a Christian metanarrative subsumes pagan misfortune.² Aside from these fleeting notes of recognition, Amoryus and Cleopes remained largely untouched until the last decade, over the course of which appeared a fresh edition of the romance, by Stephen F. Page, and two articles devoted to elucidating its literary constitution and participation in fifteenth-century trends of Chaucerianism.³ Craig's opinion that Metham possessed no certain familiarity with Troilus and Criseyde, and still less with the Canterbury Tales⁴—despite his commemoration of Chaucer's "style" and "practyk of rymyng" at lines 2171–74 and 2185–92—was at long last definitively overturned by Page, whose essay and edition establish Metham's mastery of an unusually accurate Chaucerian voice and ironic tone, along with his extensive "reliance, even intertextual play, on the works of Chaucer."⁵ Roger Dalrymple has, in turn, added further historical perspective to Page's important analyses by demonstrating that Metham's "cultivati[on of] a selective Chaucerian identity" takes the form of moral simplification and disambiguation of his source material in a manner consistent with the fifteenth-century "narrowing of the Chaucer tradition" influentially described by Paul Strohm.⁶

Of course, the recuperation of Metham as a fifteenth-century Chaucerian ought neither to overshadow the eclecticism of his wide-ranging tastes in literature—evident in the contents of his own modest oeuvre (which includes treatises on palmistry and physiognomy as well as astrological prognostications)—nor to underestimate the idiosyncrasy (and independence) of his poetic voice, conspicuous above all in his romance's unorthodox approach to versification. If Chaucer's elevated style made its mark upon Metham, so too did legends of Alexander, romans antiques , Middle English popular romance, and hagiography, all of which supplied Metham with details, motifs, and in some cases identifiable precedents for elements of Amoryus and Cleopes. Insofar as Chaucer was a substantial influence, Metham's status as a participant in what is now recognized as a flourishing fifteenth-century East Anglian literary milieu—which included John Lydgate, John Capgrave, Osbern Bokenham, Stephen Scrope, and the Pastons, and boasted a lively culture of patronage and manuscript production—argues against a narrow or monolithic view of Metham's poetic interests. Within this loose-knit group alone, the diversity of "Chaucerianisms" recognized by recent critics is striking: from Lydgate's politicized contribution to the marketing of Chaucer's legacy by means of a subservient projection of his own poetic persona;⁷ to Capgrave's sensitive adoption of Chaucerian "complexities and ambiguities" in shaping his hagiographic romance of Saint Katherine;⁸ to Bokenham's indirect, allusive critique of Chaucerian classicism from a devotional perspective in his Legendys of Hooly Wummen;⁹ and onwards. Metham was confronted with a range of possibilities as to how to respond to Chaucer's precedent within a changing social and literary landscape in which the cultural capital of a Chaucerian imprimatur was increasingly esteemed.

The purpose of this essay is not to delineate Metham's undoubted engagement with non-Chaucerian literary traditions—although that task still remains to be fully addressed—but to broaden and resituate our understanding of his adaptation of Chaucerian materials and ideas of poetic practice. Those critics who have taken...