‘Lyke Chaucers boye’: Poetry and Penitence in Gascoigne’s Grief of Joye

Laam, Kevin

Early Modern Literary Studies 14.1/Special Issue 18

Abstract

In The Renaissance Chaucer, Alice Miskimin argues that the cult of Chaucer in Elizabethan England was built on readers’ naïve disregard for the polysemous textures of medieval allegory. According to Miskimin, the rhetorical principle of significatio through which medieval allegorists such as Chaucer were able to weave in and out of multiple fictional personae was subsumed in the Renaissance by the rival principle of decorum, which held allegorical representation to a crippling standard of consistency. Miskimin traces a devolving history through which Chaucer is coaxed to slough off his thorny medieval skin and, in the interest of full disclosure apropos to the Renaissance, to reveal himself as the ‘I’ of his poems. “The study of Chaucer’s reputation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,” she writes, “reveals the gradual conflation of his various poetic identities into a composite personality, the synthetic ‘Chaucer’ praised by his publishers (Caxton, Thynne, and finally Speght), and venerated by his imitators”.

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