In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

T H R E E It has been the aim of the first two chapters of this study to trace out the implications of an early bureaucratic culture as an important source of Hoccleve’s poetic persona, to argue on the one hand that the contemporary ‘‘Wrytynge no financial anxieties in those offices were a shaptravaille is’’ ing influence on his experiment in autobiography and, on the other hand, to argue that the growing laicization of clerkly bureaucrats led Scribal Labor him into an interest in the more liminal defiin the nitions of gendered identity and an attempt to Regement of Princes find a source of authority independent of masculine positions within the court and ecclesiastical structures. In this chapter, I will turn to the more public poetry of Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes. The Regement of Princes was the centerpiece of the most successful phase of Hoccleve’s poetic career. After the composition of the Letter of Cupid in 1402, there followed a relatively productive, and public, period in which he wrote ‘‘La Male Regle’’ (1405), numerous short balades addressed to significant men in London government such as Henry Somer, the Keeper of the Wardrobe, and John Carpenter, the town clerk of London.1 Hoccleve’s next 1. For brief discussions of these men and the works addressed to them, see Seymour, Selections, 111. 78 The Bureaucratic Muse datable poem was the Regement, a long and ambitious text that survives in more than forty copies, at least two of which were presentation copies made under Hoccleve’s close supervision.2 The political events of the early fifteenth century help explain why this poem might have found such popularity or at least such widespread and well-funded distribution. The period between 1410 and late 1412, the years during which the Regement was written, have long been famous as the years in which the ailing Henry IV, still trying to consolidate the rule gained by the usurpation of Richard II’s throne, was faced by a strong challenge for power from his eldest son, the future Henry V.3 The exact maneuverings of these years are obscure in the contemporary chronicles, perhaps because of a need to keep the future king’s name spotless, but what facts we do know indicate that the prince was perceived to be encroaching on his father’s prerogative.4 Indeed, the prince was so active in these years that many histo2 . Seymour, Selections, 114. The forty-three surviving manuscripts of this poem, compared to fifty-seven of the Canterbury Tales, forty of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and only thirty of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, indicate that the Regement was one of the most widely distributed poems of the fifteenth century. For data on these manuscripts, see A. S. G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall, ‘‘The Manuscripts of the Major English Poetical Texts,’’ in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 257–78. The literature on the manuscript tradition of the Regement is enormous, partly because of the number of the manuscripts and partly because of the issues of patronage involved in the production of the presentation copies. The fundamental treatment is M. C. Seymour, ‘‘The Manuscripts of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes,’’ Transactions of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society 4 (1974): 255–97, supplemented by A. S. G. Edwards, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: A Further Manuscript,’’ Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 5 (1978): 32. See also Charles Blyth, ‘‘Editing the Regiment of Princes,’’ in Essays on Thomas Hoccleve, ed. Catherine Batt (London: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1996), 11–28; Richard Firth Green, ‘‘Notes on some mss of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes,’’ British Library Journal 4 (1978): 37–41; D. C. Greetham, ‘‘Challenges of Theory and Practice in the Editing of Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes,’’ in Manuscripts and Texts, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 60–86; Kate Harris, ‘‘The Patron of British Library ms Arundel 38,’’ Notes and Queries 31 (1984): 462–63; Marcia Smith Marzec, ‘‘The Latin Marginalia of the Regiment of Princes as an Aid to Stemmatic Analysis,’’ Text 3 (1987): 269–84, and also her ‘‘Scribal Emendations in Some Later Manuscripts of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes,’’ Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 1 (1987): 41–51. 3. The Regement can be quite precisely dated. A terminus ad quem is provided by habitual...

Share