Lydgate and the Surplus of History

This essay considers three historical poems by John Lydgate. I argue that, in his Siege of Thebes, Troy Book, and Fall of Princes, Lydgate uses poetic form to write about history in the negative. Rather than try to represent history in form, that is, he draws his reader's attention to the matter of history that his forms exclude. By attending to the way that Lydgate invokes this leftover quantity of historical matter, which he terms the "surplus," I cast light both on Lydgate's own theory of form and the theories of form found in his Lancastrian contemporaries.