Images of Kingship in Chaucer and His Ricardian Contemporaries (review)

Interest in the relationship between Richard II's court and some of the richest poetry of his time seems inexhaustible. King Richard himself showed much more evident interest in other art forms, and the poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and, it seems, the Gawain-poet was produced not in, but on the edges, of his court. However, the relationship between court and poetry is no less intriguing for that. In Images of Kingship in Chaucer and His Ricardian Contemporaries, Samantha J. Rayner notes both the absence of a royal poetry of Ricardian kingship and the heterogeneity of her various poets' standpoints in relation to the royal court, but she sees kingship as a shared concern across their poetry. More suggestively, Rayner adopts a broad and decentered perspective on her theme to find common ground in her poets, reflecting that they "unite . . . in their focus on the individual subject's place in a kingdom beset with corrupt practices and unstable leadership" (160). Reading this study, I was usually more interested in the variety of individual subject positions projected by the poetry than in this unifying thesis, and Rayner's readings do bring out some of that diversity.

Rayner divides her book up simply, allocating one chapter each to Gower, Langland, the Gawain-poet, and Chaucer, and framing these with a very brief introduction and conclusion. The Gower chapter discusses only Book 7 of Confessio Amantis and the Chaucer chapter—much less predictable and more ambitious in its selections—accounts for fully half of the book. The first chapter finds Gower dealing very directly with kingship. Rayner concentrates on the five virtues of "policy" and the exempla that illustrate them in Confessio, Book 7. Around this discussion, she considers the context of the book within the confessional frame narrative of Amans and Genius, and aligns herself with the most illuminating critical accounts of the complex relationship between royal government and individual ethics in Gower's poem. Rayner concludes that "Gower's achievement in the Confessio is to make the issue of kingship relevant to every estate" (34) by way of an extremely broad concept of governance encompassing royal power and individual will.

The discussion of Piers Plowman dwells on the vision of the "feeld ful of folk," the parliament of rats and mice, and Lady Mede (36-49). The plowing of the quarter acre and Truth's pardon are then talked through with regard to good subjecthood, a complement to good kingship (49-52). The rest of the chapter deals briefly with the remainder of the poem under this remit, Rayner remarking at the end that "Langland is not concerned especially with the role of the king" but above all with "the responsibility of each individual to reform" (60). Given the theme of her study, I wondered whether Rayner might have done more to show how Langland positions state politics in a merely supporting role. She mentions Christ's apocalyptic kingship, for instance, and might have engaged with work such as Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman further to consider how, and how far, Langland takes politics away from temporal kingship.

The next chapter touches on all four works of the Pearl manuscript, but kingship is off the radar for some time while Rayner concentrates on less specific topics, such as "a sense [in Pearl] of a persona searching for order in a world that is bound by mysteries" (68). Coming to her main theme, Rayner concludes uncontroversially that Pearl and Cleanness relate earthly courts to the heavenly one. Her reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is more contentious, in the first place because she presents it as more obvious than many would allow. She finds the "innate stability and moral healthiness" (80) of Arthur's court to be as good as self-evident, and she takes insufficient account of readings attuned to the social flaws in the poem. Instead, she rebuffs a caricature of such readings...