Introduction: Laureates and beggars

Summary

This study, most fundamentally, investigates why the idea of the poet laureate becomes so important in much of the English poetry of the fifteenth century and delineates the consequences that the development of this idea have had for the shape of English literary history. The most central figure in this investigation is John Lydgate, self-proclaimed disciple of Chaucer and monk of Bury, and the object of study may succinctly be termed Lydgatean laureate poetics. But considered from a broader perspective this study also seeks to account for fifteenth-century English poetry more comprehensively than is usual by using the notion of the laureate as a lens for tracing the trajectory and vicissitudes, over the course of more than a century, of that branch of this poetry that self-consciously presents itself as an object of high culture. From this view, this study examines what happens between the two earliest English literary encounters with that most definitive of poets laureate, Francis Petrarch: Chaucer's translation of at least one of Petrarch's sonnets in the 1380s, and the next English rendering of Petrarch's Italian in the lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt, some 150 years later.

The possible literary historical narratives that these two moments imply are many, but interpretations have most often fallen into one of two camps: either these moments chart the emergence of the English Renaissance, or they speak of literary continuity rather than rupture, of Wyatt recovering what Chaucer initiated rather than beginning anew with the same material.