The Earl of Suffolk’s French Poems and Shirley’s Virtual Coteries

The fifteenth-century London scribe and compiler John Shirley, anthologizer of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and others, is well known for his distinctive headnotes, rubrics, glosses, and running titles, which attribute the poems he copies, identify their patrons, and otherwise add context to text. Shirley went even further, though: as he copied Lydgate’s poetry in particular, the scribe absorbed the poet’s stylistic habits and techniques, which he then deployed in his prefaces and headnotes. Central among these techniques was the device of the “virtual coterie,” a phrase I use to define the distinctively collaborative way in which Lydgate produces poetic authority in his work.¹ Over and over in his poetry, Lydgate invokes the names of both patrons and literary influences or sources, thereby distributing agency across several persons. These coteries are virtual; they exist only on the page, because they often transcend boundaries of place and time as well as between dead source and living patron. They are communal forms of poetic agency, documented within the poetry itself, whereby various individuals throughout time and across the social spectrum work together to produce a poem, to become in some sense the poem’s authors. Shirley recognized the virtual coterie as a poetic technique perfectly suited to bridging the gap between poet and scribe; its inclusivity offered him new opportunities for experimentation and greater agency than ever before.

This essay focuses on Shirley’s use of the virtual coterie as a device in a series of headnotes in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20 that both attribute and misattribute poems to William de la Pole, the earl of Suffolk.² In these headnotes, Shirley explicitly claims that William wrote five French poems: “Doye je chauntier, plouvrer ou ryre,” “Lealement a tous jours mais,” “Face vo coer tout ce que ly plera,” “Je vous salue, ma maystresse,” and “Quel desplaysier, quel courous, quel destresse.” Shirley claims for each of these, respectively, that it either: was made by the earl “affter his comyng oute of prysonne” (25), or was made “whylest he was prysonner in ffraunce” (32), or is “anoþer roundell of my lords makyng of Suffolk whiles he was prysonner in ffraunce” (33), or is “un balade que fist monseignur de Conte de Suffolk quant il estoit prysonier en ffraunce” (a balad that my lord the earl of Suffolk made when he was prisoner in France” [35]), or is “a Roundell made þe same tyme by my sayde lord þerlle of Suffolk” (36). In addition, the arrangement of the poems, in which the roundel “Puis qu’aler vers vous ne puisse” immediately follows another roundel attributed to Suffolk with no intervening headnote, might imply by omission that he wrote it as well (33). Finally, Shirley identifies a seventh poem as a favorite of Suffolk’s, writing in the headnote for it that “my lord of Suffolk þeorlle mich alloweþe [it] in his witt” (36).

Not all of these attributions are accurate, an unsettling fact for scholars given Shirley’s usual accuracy in regard to attributions, and his importance for attestations of authorship. Shirley’s attributions, for instance, help establish the authorship of poems by Chaucer and Lydgate, including “Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn” and Lydgate’s Mummings.³ With Suffolk’s poems, however, the story is more complicated. The last poem listed above, which “þeorlle mich alloweþe [it] in his witt,” is actually Eustache Deschamps’s balade “Dieus nous dona petit de vie,” a fact Shirley does not mention, although he does not explicitly state that Suffolk is the author either.⁴ There are many reasons why one might remain silent about a poem’s author; in a coterie setting, especially, the information may seem to be simply extraneous, telling an audience something they already know. As I will argue, the effects of coterie are crucial here. More troubling, however, is the fact that one of the poems Shirley explicitly credits to Suffolk, the rondeau “Loyaument et a tousjours mais,” was actually written by Alain Chartier.⁵ We have no independent...