Shirley, Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.20, and the Circumstances of Lydgate’s Temple of Glass: Coterie Verse over Time

John Lydgate’s courtly dream-poem The Temple of Glass is not among the contents of Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.20, a compilation produced by the London scribe John Shirley during the early 1430s. But the preoccupations of the poem intersect with those of that compilation in a number of suggestive ways, and I want to trace here some of the connections between MS R.3.20 and the copy of The Temple of Glass made by Shirley some years earlier in an anthology that survives as London, British Library, Additional MS 16165.¹ These connections demonstrate something of what can be learned from reading across anthologies as well as from concentrating on individual compilations. They remind us that the production of a single manuscript is not an event frozen in time but a set of actions that can incur the need for future comment or modification.

Trinity, MS R.3.20 is part of an anthology originally including gatherings that are now London, Sion College, MS Arc.L.40.2/E.44 (now in the library of Lambeth Palace), and BL, MS Harley 78.² The compilation shows Shirley at his trilingual best, and has an emphasis on French and on secular poetry that sets it slightly apart from his other anthologies. It includes lyrics in French—some attributed to the duke of Suffolk—and a number of English translations of French verse texts: an anonymous rendering of Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (now in the Sion College manuscript), Hoccleve’s translation of Christine de Pizan’s Epitre au dieu d’amours, and translations by Lydgate from French of poems such as “So as the Crabbe goth forward.” The manuscript includes some Latin as well, in the form of a macaronic paraphrase of the Seven Penitential Psalms attributed to Thomas Brampton, a Latin Regiment of Princes, and some other small fragments. But its inclusion of many French lyrics and forms of French-influenced verse gives it a distinctive flavor.

Another striking feature of the manuscript is that many of its contents are occasional in nature, and related to social events or commissions of one kind or another. Some of these occasions were themselves French, for example those associated with poems composed or commended by William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, ‘quant il estoit prysonier en ffraunce’ (page 35).³ Other of the social occasions commemorated in the manuscript took place closer to home. Lydgate’s mummings at Eltham, Hertford, and Windsor are included here, together with those he scripted for the London companies of the Mercers and the Goldsmiths; ⁴ several of the other works attributed to Lydgate are attached to specific sets of circumstances, like the Goldsmiths’ feast for which the Life of St. George was commissioned, and some shorter lyrics.⁵ “Fresh lusty beaute” (34) is headed by Shirley “A Balade whiche þat Lydgate wrote at þe request of a squyer þat serued in loves court,” while “For love of hire þat excellethe all” (145) is headed “balade made at þe reuerence of our lady by daun Johan Lidegate þe Munke of Bury in wyse of chesing loues at saint Valentynes day.” Shirley’s copy of the French balade “Le mounde va en amenant” (49) is headed “Ycy comence vn balade ffrauncoys fait par le plus grande poetycal Clerk du paris,” and is accompanied by an English version, ascribed to Lydgate (“This worlde is full of stabulnesse” [50–52]; known as “So as the Crabbe goth forward”). The pair of poems is prefaced with the instruction “nowe jugeþe yee þat beothe kunnyng which yowe lykeþe þe beter þe ffrensh or þenglissh,” as if the works could have been part of some kind of poetic or linguistic competition. Shirley’s collection of materials in Trinity, MS R.3.20 presents to us a Lydgate practiced in French and translating from French, and a Lydgate apparently adept at producing poems to order for the...