John Shirley, John Lydgate, and the Motives of Compilation

The motives that prompted John Shirley (c.1366–1456) to copy a number of collections in Middle English verse and prose have invited various interpretations. An influential suggestion, first made by Richard Green, is that Shirley should be seen as some kind of “literary apologist and antiquarian” retrieving for posterity literary fragments, chiefly in verse, from a passing literary world.¹ Green’s views echo those of the antiquary John Stow, who in the sixteenth century owned a number of Shirley’s manuscripts and praised him as a “Gentleman . . . [who] painefully collected the workes of Geffrey Chaucer, Iohn Lidgate, and other learned writers, which workes hee wrote in sundry volumes to remayne for posterity.”² The most significant attempt to modify Green’s view has come from Shirley’s latest biographer, Margaret Connolly, who makes considerable efforts to establish that Shirley’s motives in assembling his compilations were those of a member of the Beauchamp affinity, motives that were essentially courtly.³

These views are united in one important respect: they resist the likelihood that Shirley’s motives in his work as a copyist had any commercial element. Shirley, in the views of Green and Connolly, as of other commentators, operated outside the commercial book trade of the metropolis as it existed in his lifetime.

Yet there are obvious difficulties with such views. The notion of Shirley’s “antiquarian” interests ignores that fact that, as Stow reminds us, the major focus for his transcriptional activities was the works of Chaucer and Lydgate. His copying of Chaucer’s works is an aspect of the very large amount of copying of them that took place throughout the fifteenth century. Why, one might ask, should his copies be deemed “antiquarian” when most of the other copying of Chaucer at the same time has generally been considered commercial? And can the impulse to copy the writings of a figure who had died only a generation before and many of whose works were circulating quite widely be reasonably seen as an act of conservation, an attempt to preserve an already elusive past?⁴ The proposition seems both implausible and unnecessary.

It is even less necessary in the case of John Lydgate. He was Shirley’s contemporary and died only a few years before Shirley himself, in 1449. As with Chaucer’s works, his writings were readily accessible in manuscripts that seem generally to have been commercially produced, quite frequently in conjunction with Chaucer’s own poems. He too needed no “antiquarian” preservation.

Nor is it clear that Shirley’s loyalty to the Beauchamps was self-evidently a sufficient motive for his transcriptions. Certainly, a few of the works he copied sought to make a direct connection in their rubrics with Beauchamp in a variety of ways. London, British Library, Additional MS 16165 does include (fol. 245v) a virelai ascribed to Richard Beauchamp (NIMEV, 1288). And the Shirley-derived BL, MS Harley 7333 identifies Beauchamp as patron of Lydgate’s Lives of SS. Edmund and Fremund;⁵ the same manuscript includes his Guy of Warwick (NIMEV, 875), a work apparently commissioned by the Beauchamps.⁶ But these poems are hardly sufficient to demonstrate convincingly that Shirley’s “primary audience for his manuscripts was that of a noble household.”⁷

Two factors do not seem to have been properly considered in assessing the nature of Shirley’s activities as a copier and disseminator of manuscripts. The first is the scale of his activities. He is known to have copied three surviving large assemblages of Middle English texts, with a particular emphasis on works of Chaucer and Lydgate: BL, Add. MS 16165; Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 59. In addition, several other equally substantial surviving manuscripts in Middle English appear to derive from copies now lost, for the creation of which Shirley was responsible: in particular BL, MSS Harley 2251 and Harley 7333, and Add. MSS 29729 and 34360. He also inscribed or annotated various other manuscripts.⁸

These facts are well known, but their implications may not have been...