1 - Chaucer's Ghoast, Ovid's ‘Pleasant Fables’, and the Spectre of Gower

Summary

This is a work about spectres. Succinctly put, it is concerned with the mutual hauntings of Ovid, Chaucer, and Gower in the early modern English literary imagination. As such, it seems only appropriate to begin with an instructive seventeenth-century ghost story. In 1672, an anonymously written book attributed to ‘a Lover of Antiquity’ was printed in London (figure 1). Sold by Richard Mills, this 133-page octavo bears the curious title:

Chaucer's Ghoast: Or, A Piece of Antiquity. Containing twelve pleasant Fables of Ovid penn'd after the ancient manner of writing in England. Which makes them prove Mock-Poems to the present Poetry. With the History of Prince Corniger, and his Champion Sir Crucifrag, that run a tilt likewise at the present Historiographers.

This lengthy and somewhat convoluted description of the volume's contents is followed on the title page by a Horatian line (‘Multa renascentur quae iam cecidere, &c.’, a motto ‘englished’ nearly a century earlier by George Puttenham as ‘Many a word yfalne shall eft arise’) that is seemingly calculated to signal the volume's interest in the characteristic humanist enterprise of revivifying ‘ancient’ texts. Continuing in this vein, a range of peritextual materials throughout Chaucer's Ghoast repeatedly juxtapose old and new, evincing a sustained interest in the dynamics of literary resurrection. ‘To the Readers’, for instance, begins with the proclamation that ‘New Books & Pamphlets, Sirs, [are] now adays thrust so fast out of the Press, that they will not give the Readers time to breath’, yet the anonymous author immediately qualifies this with the further assertion that it has always been so. This, too, he contends, ‘was the misery of Juvenals time’. From this initial gesture towards novelty's inevitable repetitions, ‘To the Readers’ proceeds to introduce a related paradox: the volume's literary contents themselves are also simultaneously ‘neither new nor old’.