5 - Mémoires d'outre-tombe: love, rhetoric and the poems of Stephen Hawes

Summary

In his study of the grands rhétoriqueurs of France and the Low Countries, Paul Zumthor recurs regularly to the metaphor of clothing. The rhétoriqueur works in a “costume of language … made out of the fabric of a protocol woven from ancient, exhausted feudal traditions”: he also wears the poetic robes which are the prince's gift. However, both garments conceal the pains of economic vulnerability and constraint; the poet as court servitor is literally a sign of monarchic magnificence, no one regarding the miserable body beneath. The point is not new to Zumthor; the Curial similarly remarks that “Oftymes the peple make grete wondrynges of the Ryche robe of the courtyour / but they knowe not by what labour ne by what dyffyculte he hath goten it.” However, it provides an apt point of entry into the life of Stephen Hawes, who belongs among those poets about whom little is known outside the sources that document such matters as royal donations of garments. In 1503 he received an allowance of four yards of black cloth for mourning on the occasion of the funeral of Henry VII's queen. His name does not, however, appear among the list of those officers who received mourning for Henry VII's funeral, a fact to which I will return. One other record, in the accounts of John Heron, treasurer of the chamber, shows for January 10, 1506 a payment to Hawes of ten shillings “for a balett that he gave to the kings grace in rewarde.”