'My Compleinte' and Other Poems (review)

234 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) – is valid, then why not demonstrate its validity with a study of authentic liturgical acts? It may well be that ecclesiastical attitudes to liturgy have been restrictive and exclusive, but analysing cultic practices that were not, in their time, considered formally liturgical does not offer any reflection on medieval liturgy. It seems as if the concept of liturgy is being re-defined here in part for the convenience of the authors’ argument, and in part as its own subversion of social structure. And the danger with re-defining ‘liturgy’ based on the desire to be inclusive is that the word loses its fundamental usefulness. If the authors want to write about ritual practice they may do so; but if they claim that such practice deserves to be called liturgy, then the distinction between public and private, prescribed and spontaneous, official and unofficial becomes lost: and it is precisely in those distinctions, I would suggest, that the possibility of support for or subversion of cultural values resides. Peter Whiteford School of English, Film and Theatre Victoria University of Wellington Hoccleve, Thomas, ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. Roger Ellis (Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies), Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2001; paper; pp. 336; 1 b/w halftone; RRP $25.95; ISBN 085989701X. It is scandalous that, under current Australian DEST categories, a critical edition is assigned a fraction of the value of an ‘authored’ monograph. If Roger Ellis were working in Australia, the massive scholarly effort behind this splendid critical edition of Hoccleve would count for little. This new version of ‘My Compleinte’ and other poems is welcome because older EETS editions of Hoccleve, their subsequent re-editions, and even more recent editions, have insufficient explanatory notes. Although J. A. Burrow’s edition of Complaint and Dialogue (EETS, 1999) has more scholarly apparatus, it does not clearly deal, says Ellis, with the significance of Hoccleve. Now Ellis has produced his edition based upon the surviving holographs, (mostly in the UK, though one is in Australia, ‘Conpleynte paramont’, State Library of Victoria 096/G94), and he has given us full critical apparatus, including explanatory notes. There is one noticeable error: on p. 21 a phrase is omitted in the translation from Suso. Hoccleve was a loner who used the story of his life as the subject of his Reviews 235 Parergon 20.1 (2003) poetry, a man given to self-pity, although his distress is sometimes satirical. Yet he is an approachable poet, simpatico in the way he deals with his literary and personal problems, and reveals ‘the complex relation between the persona of a narrator and his total environment’. Moreover, his poems contain much humorous dialogue with friends, readers and even the authors of the works he translated. Hoccleve had many personal troubles to write about. He alludes to his dissolute youth and what appears to have been an unfortunate marriage, which prevented an ecclesiastical career. He spent his working life as a clerk at the office of the Privy Seal in London, enduring recurring financial problems, and in 1414 suffered a nervous breakdown from which he recovered but remained the victim of hurtful gossip. He hoped in vain that his poetry would rescue him from chronic insecurities through the patronage of noble people to whom he refers in his poems, the Countess of Westmoreland, the Duke of Gloucester, the Countess of Hereford. At the very least he hoped that Lord Furnival or Henry Somer, respectively the Head and UnderTreasurer of the Exchequer, might see that his salary was paid on time. And what of Hoccleve as an author? Ellis argues that since later scribes often used Hoccleve’s earlier, but now lost, holograph drafts, the later scribal copies illuminate the poetic process as he moved from his earliest drafts to his final versions. Hoccleve himself understood his literary labours as work-in-progress (shades of post-modern theorising) within which he claimed a very modest position. In the four-tier Bonaventuran model of literary activity – the scribe who copies, the compiler who collates, the commentator who comments, and the author who writes original material – he claimed to be no more than a copying scribe...