John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Anglie (1381) and Cronica tripertita, and: John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition (review)

Both of the books under review make a notable contribution to the study of Gower, who emerges here as an erudite and wide-ranging poet in Latin, French, and English. In Poems on Contemporary Events, David Carlson and A. G. Rigg make accessible Gower’s Visio Anglie and his Cronica tripertita. Both are important “eye-witness” accounts of the political upheavals that afflicted England in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. The Cronica tripertita follows the reign of King Richard II, beginning with the rebellion of the Lords Appellant, through to the Wonderful and Merciless Parliaments, and culminating in the deposition of Richard by Henry IV. The chronicle is written in leonine hexa-meters (translated by Rigg into rhyming couplets), and its approach to historiography is both highly poetic and highly biased. The influence of prophetic literature is felt in its allegorical veiling. For instance, Thomas of Woodstock, leader of the rebellion against Richard, is code-named the Swan; Thomas de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, is the Bear, and so on. To ensure that readers were able to follow the argument, the verse was accompanied by Latin prose glosses (presumably composed by Gower himself) that decode the allegory. Gower’s Lancastrian sympathies are ever-present. The tripartite structure of the chronicle gives an early indication of his allegiance: the first part, dealing with the Lords Appellant, is the opus humanum; the second book, concerning Richard’s revenge, is the opus inferni; and the third part, on Henry’s usurpation, is the opus in Cristo.

The Visio Anglie, in unrhymed elegiac couplets (here rendered in un-rhymed pentameters) offers a fascinating apocalyptic vision of the peasants’ revolt and its immediate aftermath. In an allegorical move familiar from Gower’s Vox clamantis, the peasants are grotesquely portrayed as repugnant animals (dogs, boars, foxes, and the like). However, the visionary poet does not remain a detached observer of this troubled world: Passus 16 suddenly sees him fleeing from his own home and then wandering in paranoid terror in the woods—only to be rescued by a ship that carries him and other noblemen through the storm. The moral to be drawn from all this, Gower thinks, is that greater repression is essential, for “peasants always plot toward our death, / If they can subju-gate the noble class” (2099–100).

As Carlson and Rigg explain in their introduction, one of the reasons these two works should matter to students of Gower is that Gower himself envisaged them as an integral part of his magnum opus. This magnum opus as he conceived it was also tripartite in structure, consisting of the English Confessio Amantis, the French Mirour de l’omme, and the Latin Vox clamantis, to which Gower subsequently added the Visio Anglie and Cronica tripertita as, respectively, Book 1 and the final conclusion. Carlson’s edition is based on careful consideration of the surviving manuscript, and Rigg’s translation is eminently readable, though on a few occasions it bears only a very loose resemblance to the original. Line 1265, “Milicies cessit paciensque locum dedit ire,” does not really mean “In sufferance, knights yielded place to wrath,” but rather “knighthood yielded to, and with forbearance surrendered ground to, wrath.” And while Rigg translates lines 1163–64, “Quicque magis celebres fuerant hoc tempore ciues, / Sicut oues mortis procubuere manu,” as “All citizens were at that time close packed: like sheep they fell before the hand of death,” line 1163 presumably means (literally): “Whichever citizens were at time more renowned.”

The collection John Gower, Trilingual Poet also focuses attention on Gower’s non-English output, though the Confessio Amantis is by no means...