"Now Wo, Now Gladnesse": Ovidianism in the Fall of Princes

Considering the sheer volume of verse he produced, one of the most neglected English poets is John Lydgate—and one of the most neglected works is his Fall of Princes, a monumental, 36,000 line collection of "tragedies," or stories of great men brought low by Fortune. When he set out to translate Laurent de Premierfait's translation of Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium at the behest of his patron, Humphrey of Gloucester, Lydgate embarked upon an ambitious journey through world history, starting with Adam and Eve and ending with King John of France. He left his readers in little doubt as to the purpose of his translation: it is designed to educate princes, to "shewe the chaung off wordli variaunce," and it does so over and over again.¹ As a result, the Fall of Princes seems impervious to critical attention; since Lydgate preemptively discloses the meaning of each exemplum, he leaves little room for interpretation beyond the singular and rigid reading of history enforced in the text. The raw material of the past—embodied in the figures of fallen princes—is revealed, almost providentially, to have always already conformed to a moral mold that it is Lydgate's task to describe. But first impressions are often misleading, particularly where Lydgate is concerned.

As Paul Strohm has pointed out, it is worth rethinking the Fall of Princes, if only because it so clearly fascinated its sixteenth-century readers, not only inspiring a massive continuation, the Mirror for Magistrates, itself fodder for later poets and playwrights, but also fundamentally shaping the notion of tragedy that developed in the later part of that century.² In fact, the Fall of Princes ultimately does not work very well as a simple collection of moralized exempla; indeed, it fails at its task of moralization at key junctures, not least because Lydgate is himself a kind of literary critic, a poet who reads multiple versions of the stories he reproduces and attempts to do justice to them all, despite the contradictions and inconsistencies by which they are surrounded. To be sure, these moments of contradiction do not occur very often, nor do they seriously threaten the overriding moral purpose of the text; readers are certainly not in doubt as to the lesson that the poem sets out to teach. But Lydgate has ambitions that exceed the mandate he receives from Humphrey—or, put another way, he is burdened by an awareness of the impossibility of reducing all history to a single moral and driven to articulate that impossibility at critical moments in the text. As I will show, it is the pairing of such artistic ambition with that burdensome historical acuity that produces in the Fall of Princes a quality that can only be called aesthetic—by which I mean a category of understanding the human in the world that escapes linear causalities (like "sin causes bad fortune") and resists periodization (as "medieval," "early modern," or the like).

But this aesthetic quality is present only intermittently in the text. The overriding lesson that Humphrey wishes Lydgate to teach—great men fall because they have sinned, and the great men of the future can resist the depredations of Fortune by embracing virtue—dominates the long poem and tends to shield troublesome and contradictory moments from view. Crucially, the clearest statement of this theme appears at the beginning of book 2, where Lydgate explains that sin, not Fortune, causes falls:

For fals Fortune, which turneth as a ball, Off vnwar chaunges thouh men hir wheel atwite, It is nat she that pryncis gaff the fall, But vicious lyuyng, pleynli to endite: Thouh God aboue ful offte hem doth respite, Longe abideth, and doth his grace sende To this entent, thei sholde ther liff amende.

(FP, 2.43-49)

In itself, of course, this passage constitutes a perfectly transparent articulation of the thesis of the Fall of Princes as a whole. But its placement in book 2, rather than in the elaborate prologue to the text, where it would seem to belong, retroactively asks readers to examine book 1 in light...