Trojan Wars: Genre and the Politics of Authorship in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

233 Pages·2007·0.992 MB·English

by  Timothy D. Arner

The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

Department of English
TROJAN WARS:
GENRE AND THE POLITICS OF AUTHORSHIP IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND
EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
A Thesis in

English

by

Timothy D. Arner
© 2007 Timothy D. Arner
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

May 2007
The thesis of Timothy D. Arner was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Robert R. Edwards
Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Thesis Advisor
Chair of Committee

Caroline D. Eckhardt
Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Patrick G. Cheney
Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Sherry Roush
Associate Professor of Italian

Robert L. Caserio
Professor of English
Head of the Department of English

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School
ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines the writing of Trojan War narratives by major English authors
from the late fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries with a focus on how these authors
appropriate various literary genres in response to their particular social and political
circumstances. My project challenges prevailing notions of the function of Troy as England’s
foundational myth in both the political and literary cultures of the medieval and early modern
periods. In the Middle Ages the English claimed to be descended from the Trojans who had
survived the war and participated in the founding of Rome alongside Aeneas. Many modern
critics argue that the conflation of the historical and the literary in this myth of national origin
worked to forward the imperial agendas of English monarchs, and that these agendas found
support in the medieval retellings of the Trojan War narrative. I argue that the political
formulation of England’s national identity puts certain pressures how a writer can express his
own authorial identity and that one form of identity constantly threatens to undermine the other.
My work locates authorial politics – that is, authorial self-definition in response to both literary
tradition and issues in English court culture – within the Trojan narratives of Chaucer, Lydgate,
Caxton, and Shakespeare. This approach demonstrates how authorial identity is expressed
textually through the negotiation of genre and competing narrative forms with respect to cultural
context.
For medieval and early modern English authors, the truth of the story is merely a surface
concern as the author seeks to lay claim not to the Trojan legend but simply the right to tell it.
Whereas the Arthurian legend seems to be available to writers who wish to invent new episodes
or reformulate established narratives, the Troy story necessitates that an author justify his literary
project by showing appropriate deference to the other poetic texts in the Trojan tradition. In so
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doing, the writer claims a right to author his own account of the legend. No other story in
English literature requires such a claim, and it is for this reason that the Trojan War narrative
functions as an important site for investigating English authorship.
The dissertation’s title, Trojan Wars, is meant to remind the reader of the multitude of
competing narratives that constitute the legend of the destruction of Troy. At the center of the
legend lies neither a war nor a city but a conspicuous absence, and it is around this absence that
Trojan Wars have been fought by poets and historians trying to claim authority over a disputed
territory that was never really there in the first place. The medieval Troy story conflates the
historical and the literary, and recent scholarship on Trojan texts tends to privilege the former
over the latter. My dissertation will use the important observations made by recent critics
concerning the historiographic importance of Troy in order to highlight its significance in the
formation of an English literary tradition as defined by the idea of authorship and negotiated
through genre. My thesis that is each author’s appropriation and idiosyncratic fashioning of
various genres, particularly epic, romance and history, allows him to claim authority over the
Trojan legend that he chooses to tell while simultaneously critiquing any royal or imperial
agenda that seeks to do the same. The specific choices in genre, I argue, are inherently
intertextual and entirely self-conscious, as each Trojan text functions as a response to the other
works in circulation as well as the political concerns of the nation during the time of its writing.
Through this approach, I identify the emergence of an English authorial identity that begins with
Chaucer and trace its development through the Middle Ages and Renaissance in order to
demonstrate how literary authority functions in relation to political authority.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Introduction – New Troys: The Construction of an English Literary
Tradition…………………………………………………………………..1
Chapter 2: Chaucer’s Second Hector: Diomede and the Possibilities of Epic in
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde…………………………………………..22
Chapter 3: Ulysses and the Threat of Romance in John Lydgate’s Troy Book…..74
Chapter 4: Caxton’s Trojan Authorship………………………………………….120
Chapter 5: “A Juggling Trick: To Be Secretly Open”: Intertextual Fetish and
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida…………………………...................163
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….. 201
Works Cited……………………………………………………………………… 207
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Acknowledgements
First, thank you to the members of my dissertation committee for their support and
encouragement. The idea for this dissertation was born out of a seminar on Medieval History
Writing taught by Alice Sheppard at Penn State in the Fall of 2000. My thinking about medieval
and early modern literature, concepts of genre and authorship, and the importance of the Troy
legend developed throughout my graduate career in challenging and stimulating courses taught
by Sherry Roush, Caroline Eckhardt and Patrick Cheney. I want to thank them for the time spent
discussing my work and for providing me with different ways of considering important issues in
literary criticism.
My dissertation advisor and mentor, Robert Edwards, has been a guiding voice from my
arrival at Penn State in 2000 and has been the single greatest influence on my scholarly work.
His generosity and sage advice on matters professional and personal have proven invaluable, and
he provides a terrific model for how to manage a productive scholarly career balanced with a
rewarding family life.
Penn Staters who came before me have become friends and colleagues through our
annual contact at Kalamazoo, MLA, and the New Chaucer Society. I have benefited greatly
from conversations with Craig Bertolet and Wolfram Keller. Wolfram, as another “Trojan
author,” is my German intellectual-doppelganger whose work on these same texts has helped me
think about my own approach.
Financial support came from Penn State’s Institute for Arts and Humanities, who
provided me with a Summer Fellowship in 2005, and an award from the Penn State Graduate
School Alumni Association.
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My peers at Penn State served not only as exceptional colleagues but also as amazing
friends. Their intellectual contributions to this project are significant but cannot even begin to
compare to their impact on my life beyond the academic world. I have often argued that even
my least intellectual moments – time spent tailgating, playing softball, and singing karaoke – are
all part of the writing process, and these people have been there for all of it. I have incurred
social and intellectual debts that I can only hope to begin to repay.
Christopher White, Lissette Szwydky, Dustin Stegner and Lindsey Jones read sections of
the dissertation and offered valuable feedback. Marques Kem, amicus et magister, helped with
Latin translation. Dan Hicks, though “only a historian,” amazed me with his intellect and his
wit, and he has shared with me the taste of victory. Doc Rissel is the big brother I always
wanted, and I thank him not only for his humor and good cheer but also for being there
throughout the most important moments and events of the past seven years. Niamh O’Leary
provided the epigraph for this dissertation and was a constant source of light throughout my
darkest days of trying to finish this damn thing. Sarah Breckenridge showed up at just the right
time and even as a rookie she was an amazing medieval colleague and a true friend.
Steele Nowlin gets his own paragraph. He was there in the beginning, driving down dark
and strange roads to Alice’s medieval seminar during our first semester of grad school. He was
and always will be the consummate friend and roommate, always ready with advice and insight
and an appropriate Star Wars reference. No amount of reading, coursework, or time in the
library ever meant anywhere near as much as five minutes talking with Steele on the balcony of
our Bellefonte apartment.
My wife, Stacey, was with me throughout the whole writing process, displaying
incredible compassion, love, and understanding as she lived with both Dr. Arner and Mr. Hyde.
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She has been and continues to be my greatest source of strength and support. She reminds me
every day of what it means to be partners as together we teach our three-month-old Katie how to
smile.
Finally, my dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Patti and Gary, Dave and Mary Beth.
They always trusted me to make good decisions with regard to my education and career, and
they gave me the tools and the support to make sure that I would succeed. This work is the
culmination of many years of study but it represents only a step on my continuing path of
learning and teaching, a journey I take ever with my family at my side.

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Epigraph

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel–
‘Here is the march along these iron stones’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind
He said, I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

“Epic,” Patrick Kavanagh (1938)

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Chapter 1

Introduction
New Troys: The Construction of an English Literary Tradition
In the Middle Ages, Troy was not ancient history. As a living myth that continued to
evolve along with the English nation, Troy functioned as a site for examining England’s cultural
and political questions. Troy was never fixed within an ancient past but was located within the
English present in order to critique political ideologies and cultural practices. As a myth of
national origin, Troy was used by monarchs to legitimize dynastic claims and imperial
ambitions, to fashion England and its ruling class as the successors to a celebrated Trojan
civilization that continued to flourish in the New Troy of medieval London. For English writers,
Troy served as a valuable analog for exploring the pressing political and cultural issues of the
day, for questioning the value of dominant ideologies and presenting alternative modes of
discourse, and for revealing the dark underbelly of England’s cultural institutions, particularly
chivalry. Troy was the absent city that remained ever-present in medieval and early modern
England, its ghosts continually resurrected through royal pageantry and iconography, its tragic
legend endlessly played out on the written page and Renaissance stage as a means for England to
come to terms with its place within its own modern historical context.
This dissertation is a study of how writers in the late medieval and early modern periods
established a literary tradition of English authorship based on textual representations of the
Trojan War. Traditionally, scholarship on Troy’s significance in England during the Middle
Ages and early modern era has focused on either historiographic issues – how representations of