5 - Gower’s Ballades for Women

Summary

BOB YEAGER's PUBLICATION OF Gower's French Balades, together with an English translation, has given us all a chance to take another look at two collections of poems that have otherwise been available only in Macaulay's edition of Gower's Complete Works, both of which have remained relatively unstudied both by Gower scholars and by readers of fourteenth-century French poetry. The Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz merits interest if only for Gower's adoption of the ballade form for the purpose of a single extended argument, on fidelity in marriage. More varied and more accomplished are the Cinkante Balades, fifty-two separate poems on the vicissitudes of love that reveal Gower's deep immersion in the lyric poetry of Guillaume de Machaut and his French successors. Gower's debt to these poets has not always been assumed, and it has become more evident only as their works too have become better known. Ardis Butterfield has done the most to place Gower's ballades in relation to this tradition, tracing “their idiom, tightly constrained vocabulary, and argumentative structure” to the example set by Gower's French predecessors as part of her more general study of the re-use of conventional language in the international literary culture to which Gower belonged. At the same time, however, each of the major poets that followed Machaut also sought to put his own signature upon the lyric tradition that he inherited, and just as interesting as the evidence of shared language are the poems in which they introduce new themes and turn to other sources for their diction and imagery. One set of poems that deserves closer attention in this regard consists of the five ballades that Gower wrote in which the speaker is a woman.

Together, these five poems illustrate some of the diversity of Gower's collection, and they also provide a test case on how he both exploited and departed from the models provided by his predecessors that can have implications for the remainder of his ballades, as well. They occur together near the end of the Cinkante Balades, numbers 41–44 and 46.