John Lydgate's "Mumming at Windsor": Clothilda, Women's Steadfastness, and Lancastrian Rule
Lydgate’s “Mumming at Windsor,” performed before Henry VI and his household in 1429, is not the straightforward work of propaganda that it has been taken to be. Lydgate interjects ironic observations about women into his ostensibly earnest propaganda celebrating Henry’s Gallic roots. These observations may have awakened Lydgate’s audience from complacent spectatorship and invited them to question his sincerity throughout. Lydgate conveys a complex message, consonant with the troubled politics that emerge elsewhere in his writings, even as he trumpets his support for the English claim to France.
John Lydgate, Stephen Hawes, and the Making of Henry VIII
ABSTRACT Lancastrian and Tudor poets imagine authorship as a model for monarchy. They express this imagining through the figure of the poet-king whose ideal is established by John Lydgate in The Siege of Thebes, where the legendary Theban founder, Amphion, functions as a cipher for Lydgate’s own humbly pretentious poetics. Lydgate’s vision of poet-kingship is later remade by Stephen Hawes in the Pastime of Pleasure, which tells the future Henry VIII a story of how its author rises to kingship by employing poetry in the pursuit of lust. Following Hawes, Henry comes to make poetry in the service of individual desires, but, unlike his forebears, Henry’s claim to the throne is assured by lineage. For Henry, the poet-king mantle offers not a means of claiming power but of consolidating it. His lyrics create a court where resistance to his wants constitutes an act of treason. In the end, the poet-king proves success and menace. It enables commoners to present themselves (however tenuously) at the apex of society and royalty does indeed take note. Yet, when the poet-king moves from fiction into reality, it loses its potential for imagining mobility to instead become an instrument for tyranny.
The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistance to Medieval Performances
In recent years, the drama of medieval Europe has received an unusual amount of attention, somewhat surprisingly given the marginalization it suffered for most of the twentieth century.' With, however, the decline of the ahistorical formalist paradigm, which favored the more obviously "literary" plays of the renaissance and later periods, the study of medieval drama has finally come into its own. An important though often undervalued strain of this new interest has taken the form, broadly speaking, of cultural critique aimed at tracing out the ways in which medieval performances of all kinds-whether plays sponsored by guilds or confraternities, royal entries, processionals, or other sorts of public spectacle-were tied to the economic, political, intellectual, religious, and social practices of their local sites of performance. Systematic archival work such as the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project in Great Britain and Bernd Neumann's comprehensive survey of religious drama in Germany, as well as the more individualized inquiries undertaken at various locations in France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands,2 have made it easier to trace the intricate filiations linking early European performances to the cultures that produced them. This critical activity, itself part of a pervasive shift in focus within literary studies as a whole, has largely moved away from viewing medieval dramatic performances as literary texts or historical documents or even theatrical events, investigating them instead primarily as forms of social practice.