Geoffrey Chaucer, "Lak of Stedfastnesse" (before 1400)

1)  Unlike the rhetorical structure of "Truth" or "Gentilesse," this balade's construction does not appear to ask anything of its readers until the end, when a "Superreader" is invoked, in the persona of the "prince," who appears to have the power to change the world described in the first three stanzas by a series of seven actions or attitudes which will enable him to "wed thy folk agein to stedfastnesse" (28).  What is the effect upon readers who are NOT "prince"?  Is this a poem with an audience of one?

2)  The notion that the world once was a better place and that the current age has fallen away from our ancestors' glories is a commonplace Chaucer inherited from classical literature as well as from the Christian notion of the Fall (i.e., Genesis).  However, like many commonplace ideas, its expression is not universal, but rather it arises at times and places where authors feel it once again has become appropriate.  What about the late years of Chaucer's life might have encouraged him to resurrect this old conceit for special delivery to Richard II and the court?  For clues, check discussion question 4 for "Gentilesse."

3)  This poem, like many of the other short lyrics, violates a pattern we have seen in Chaucer's longer works.  Readers of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" since E.T. Donaldson have noticed the regularity with which Chaucer adopts the persona of a naive, dumpy, shy, even ignorant man who's getting nowhere with the ladies and resorts to books because they're all the consolation he can find in the world.   Donaldson pointed out that Chaucer's life records tell us he has been a customs inspector and a construction site superintendent for the king, jobs for which naivete and shyness, at least, would be absurd qualifications.  He also married Phillipa Paon, sister to Catherine Paon Swynford, first the governess of the duke of Lancaster's children and then his third wife, mother to the line which would be the House of Lancaster in the fifteenth-century's Wars of the Roses.  She had married the late Mr. Swynford before marrying John of Gaunt, the duke, but marrying Lancaster made her the wife of the wealthiest man in England and, next to Richard II, the most powerful.  So Chaucer was related by marriage to the duke and through him to future kings Henry IV, V, and VI (consult your Shakespeare history plays for their cultural significance in the next era).   Chaucer also was both a public envoy of the king and a secret agent in Europe on business we still do not know. 

        Instead of pleading ignorance, forgetfulness, unoriginality, or incompetence, this poem directly attacks the success of anyone at court as resulting from pursuit of "mede and wilfulnesse," doing "his neighbour wrong or oppression" by "some collusion," and believing vices have become virtues.  Does this poem seem at all dangerously challenging to the social pretensions of the most powerful people in England, France, and Italy, upon whose largesse Chaucer depended for his living?  What does this tell you about GC's idea of the poet's role in English society, and what might it mean for readings of the Canterbury tales or the Troilus? 

4)  Why write a poem about an obscure cultural characteristic like "stedfastnesse"?  As in the case of "Truth" and "Gentilesse," if people are debating it, there are reasons why it has become an unstable concept.  Chaucer lived during a period of unstable social relations, caused in part by the bubonic plague, which killed perhaps 2/5 of the population of England beginning when he was a young man (1347-9).  The survivors inherited wealth from the victims, and sought to advance from commoners into the ranks of the "gentils."  Ordinary laborers could stand and bargain with wealthy "gentil" landowners over the price of their labor because there were too few workers to get the crops planted or harvested.  Also, the long "regency" of John of Gaunt, caused by the inheritance of the throne by an infant Richard II, produced a divided court as friends of the king and the great magnates who backed Lancaster squared off over how best to run the court and the nation.  At one point, the magnates mounted a political attack against Richard's popular but corrupt friends and appealed them of treason for badly advising the king etc.  Those young men were executed, and Richard never forgave the "Lords Appellant."  When Richard formally took the throne at 18, he moved against the Lords Appellant and had several of them executed.  Then he married Anne of Bohemia, whose European entourage brought to the court many customs and attitudes borrowed from the influential French and Burgundian courts.  Social roles throughout the kingdom became destabilized by these socio-economic and political forces, and the right to proclaim one's "gentil" status became increasingly a matter for public debate.  In 1417, seventeen years after Chaucer's death, Parliament enacted the Statute of Additions, which ruled that one's name was not legally complete on legal documents like summonses, wills, indictments, etc. unless any titles one assumed were also included, like "esquire," "yeoman," or (of course) "gentleman."  If social roles are becoming slippery, and one's neighbor might be a "churl" one year and a "genil" the next, how might that affect cultural perceptions of loyalty and truth-telling?  For instance, would it be wise to tell the truth about one's neighbor's churlish origins once he had become "gentil"?  Be alert for the subtle use and criticism of the little lies we tell to make our way in the world as you read the Canterbury tales and the Troilus.

    For a recent exploration of the problem of instability in Middle English terms of value, especially the transformation of the ME word "trouthe" into "troth" [promise] and "truth" [historical fact], see Richard Firth Green's Literature and Law in Ricardian England: A Crisis of Truth (Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania P, 1999) [820.9 G7971c].

5)  The lyric poems often are used in evidence to attempt to date Chaucer's works, usually under the assumption that short lyrics were typical "schoolboy" products of a young courtier's training and that the "more mature" works like the long narrative poems (Troilus, "Knight's Tale") date from his middle years or from his old age.  How does our expectation of a poem, and of an author's intentions, change depending upon how old we believe the author may be when the poem was written?  What kinds of internal and external evidence are there for dating works of literature, and where might you find more about how to use that evidence?

6)  Of the fourteen manuscript versions of this poem, few offer significant variants except for the "envoy," which occurs in few of them (see n. RC 1190).  However, in one manuscript (No. 432, Trinity College, Dublin), the word "collusioun" in line 11 is replaced with "ymaginacioun" (1190).  That is, according to the Trinity College manuscript's poem, what aides a man to do "his neighbour wrong or oppressioun" is not conspiracy with others (collusion) but the mind's power to make creative images (ME, "ymaginacioun").  Would you accept this as a possible variant Chaucer might have intended, a rough draft, perhaps, or even a final revision that survived in only one manuscript version while all the rest preserved his earlier, social vision of the danger?  Or would you oppose that reading on some grounds based in your reading of Chaucer's attitude toward the mind's image-forming power?  Before you jump to conclusions based upon generalizations about a poet's likely admiration for mental images and their creative transformation of reality, you might want to track Chaucer's usage of the word in a concordance of his works.  We have a printed concordance to the Canterbury tales, and you can find a fairly good online concordance, as well.  How does Chaucer typically treat this part of the mind, and how might that affect your reading of the Trinity College version of "Lak"?

    Those are obscure but powerful questions addressed by the art of "textual editing," the ways a scholar turns a series of manuscript versions and printed editions of a work into a single, most accurate version for scholars.  An extremely thorough variety of textual editing produces what are called "variorum" editions, which preserve in parallel texts every variant spelling, missing or added piece of text, or variation in order of texts' parts, in all the surviving manuscripts or printed editions.  These are the tools of graduate students and professional scholars, but non-specialist readers can use them too if they know what they're looking for.  Contact me if you are interested in learning more about editing practices and the variorum editions of any of our authors.  To see Professor Sheila Cavanagh's very well-explained set of instructions for how a scholarly edition is prepared, and a well-equipped set of scholarly tools (paper and online), click here.

Some useful scholarly studies of Chaucer's short lyrics:

Back to English 330, Syllabus View.