Chapter 6 - Romance, Popular Style and the Confessio Amantis: Conflict or Evasion?

Summary

Given the scope of Gower's Confessio Amantis, sometimes the most surprising choices are the omissions, the stories Gower chooses not to tell. In book IV's discussion of Sloth and the various sins of idleness in love, Genius turns to the need for young men to remain active lest they lose the love of their ladies. It is, on the face of things, an ideal subject for romance, as Genius recognizes:

For if thou wolt the bokes rede

Of Lancelot and othre mo,

Ther miht thou sen hou it was tho

Of armes, for thei wolde atteigne

To love, which withoute peine

Mai noght be gete of ydelnesse.

And that I take to witnesse

An old cronique in special,

The which into memorial

Is write, for his loves sake,

Hou that a kniht schal undertake. (Confessio, IV, lines 2034–44)

This is, I think, an interesting move for Genius – and by extension Gower – to make. Genius acknowledges that a fourteenth-century English audience looking for feats of chivalry in the service of love would most naturally read ‘books of Lancelot’ or other romances. More specifically, the Vulgate Lancelot offers plenty of examples of Lancelot momentarily falling into knightly ‘sloth’ before once again serving his lady heroically – the Chevalier de la Charrette episode would seem particularly apt for the point Genius is making here, and he seems to acknowledge as much in these lines. Yet without quite saying that he won't tell such stories, Genius turns away from such romances towards his preferred sources in ‘old cronique’.

This substitution of ‘old cronique’ for books of Lancelot becomes a little stranger when Genius begins his next tale immediately after these lines. It is an Ovidian story, the tale of the battle between Hercules and Achelous (or Achelons, for Gower) for the hand of Deianira. But the tale has been considerably altered from its source in the Metamorphoses, and has come to look much more like a short romance. In Ovid, the tale is told by Achelous and from his perspective, and it presents Hercules as a thuggish brute, ‘accensae non fortiter imperat irae’ (‘unable to master his burning anger any longer’), who nonetheless prevails.