1. Critics of the Ovidian story differ on whether or not Canace succeeds in evoking
our sympathy. Florence Verducci, Ovid's Toyshop of the Heart
(Princeton, 1985), for
instance, argues that Canace does not elicit our sympathy. To Verducci, there is a "comic
banality" in Canace's laments (p. 230). Unlike the other letters in the Heroides, Canace's
letter, according to Verducci, does not convey "the 'serious' expression
of 'grief or passion' but
just the reverse" (p. 234). A summary of recent studies on the Heroides can be found in
Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 (Chicago, 1989), pp. 60-71.
2. A. C. Spearing, "Canace and Machaire," Mediaevalia 16 (1993), 211-21
(at p. 215). Although some of Spearing's observations in this essay concur with my argument, it
will be seen that I disagree fundamentally with his assertion that, "Gower has chosen to exclude
from his poem, at least on any explicit level, the problematic of female authorship into which Ovid
plunged at the outset" (p. 219).
3. The classical study of Gower's political views is John H. Fisher, John Gower:
Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York, 1964). See also Russell Peck,
Kingship and Common Profit in Gower's "Confessio Amantis" (Carbondale, 1978);
Elizabeth Porter, "Gower's Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm," in Gower's
"Confessio Amantis": Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1983),
pp.135-62; and, more recently, George B. Stow, "Richard II in John Gower's Confessio
Amantis," Mediaevalia 16 (1993), 3-31, and Judith Ferster, "O Political Gower,"
Mediaevalia 16 (1993), 33-53.
4. Robert F. Yeager, John Gower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion
(Cambridge, 1990), p. 208.
5. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Feminist Approaches to the Body in
Medieval Literature (Philadelphia, 1993), p. ix.
6. Lomperis and Stanbury, Feminist Approaches to the Body, p. ix.
page 83
7. In her discussion of the relationship between the king and his people, Ferster
mentions the story of "The Courtiers and the Fool" in the Confessio Amantis (VII.3945-4026) in which Gower implies that the king should listen to his people ("O Political Gower,"
p.41). Ferster cites in this respect two significant lines in which Gower notes how important it is
for a king not to oppress his people: "The poeple was nomore oppressed, / And thus stod every
thing redressed" (4009-10). Thus, while certainly recognizing and supporting the king's authority
over his subjects, Gower also emphasizes the importance of the independent voice of the people.
On the "comun vois" in the Confessio Amantis, besides Ferster, see Anne Middleton, "The
Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II," Speculum 54 (1978), 94-114. As
regards this same theme in Vox Clamantis, another major work by Gower, Ann W. Astell
has remarked that "[i]n Gower's view, God renders a temporal judgment, analogous to the final
one, against bad rulers through the historic, popular, and parliamentary voice of the people." See
""The Peasants' Revolt: Cock-crow in Gower and Chaucer," Essays in Medieval Studies,
Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 10 (1994), 54.
8. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, in The English Works of John
Gower, ed. G.C. Macaulay, 2 vols. (London, 1900), 1, III:148-50. All further quotations
from the Confessio Amantis are taken from this edition.
9. In the Heroides, her nurse was the first one to know that Canace was in
love, and that she was pregnant. She even tried to help her have an abortion (33ff).
10. Lynda E. Boose, "The Father's House and the Daughter in It: The Structures of
Western Culture's Daughter-Father Relationship," in Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda E.
Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore, 1989), p. 33.
11. Boose, "The Father's House," pp. 46-47.
12. Boose, "The Father's House," p. 21.
13. Critics have usually noticed the literariness of the letter.
Spearing, for instance, has
observed that "[it] consists of an elaboration of 'love's contraries' that might appear unchanged in
any medieval love-complaint" ("Canace and Machaire," p. 215). This rhetoricity, moreover,
reminds us of Gower's source, Canace's letter in the Heroides. Verducci sees Ovid's letter
as "a comic revision of literary and psychological expectations," which is achieved "by means of
excessive but revealing conceits, by extravagant rhetorical display, innuendo or inopportune
verbal point" (p. 233). Although I would not see Genius' version in such comic terms, I do think
that there is also a certain sense of artificiality in Canace's letter.
14. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT, 1979), p.
7.
15. Ovid, Heroides and Amores, ed. G. P. Goold (Cambridge,
1977), ll.3-4. These
lines can be translated as follows: "My right hand holds a pen, the other holds a sword, and in my
lap lies an unrolled paper."
page 84
16. Spearing, "Canace and Machaire," p. 218.
17. Spearing, "Canace and Machaire," p. 218.
18. C. D. Benson, "Incest and Moral Poetry in Gower's Confessio Amantis,"
Chaucer Review 19 (1984), 100-9, has compared Eolus' "frenesie" to Canace's and
Machaire's frenzy of love: "there are suggestions that [Eolus'] `frenesie' (210) of anger is not only
the result but also the equivalent of his children's frenzy of love" (pp. 104-5). Benson, though,
does not elaborate on the similarities between anger and love.
19. Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its
Commentaries (Philadelphia, 1990), p.162. The Middle English Dictionary gives two
definitions of "malencolie" in its emotional manifestations: "A mental disorder or emotional
disease due to unnatural melancholy . . . ; may be brought on by love, disappointment, etc.";
and, "Anger, rage, hatred."
20. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (1914-16) (London, 1981), 14: 245.
21. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," p. 246.
22. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," p. 249.
23. Wack, Lovesickness, p. 162.
24. Spearing, "Canace and Machaire," p. 217.
25. Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 147.
26. Strohm, Social Chaucer, p. 146.
27. Strohm, Social Chaucer, p. 147.
28. In the "Prologue" to the first version of the Confessio, Gower writes
that Richard II commissioned him to write "Som newe thing . . . / That he himself it mihte loke /
After the forme of my writynge" (*51-53).
29. Richard H. Jones, The Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Later
Middle Ages (New York, 1968), p. 167.
30. Quoted from Harold F. Hutchinson, The Hollow Crown: A Life of Richard
II (New York, 1961), p. 199. On Walsingham and his writings, see also Chronicles of the
Revolution: 1397-1400, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester, 1993).
31. Hutchinson, Hollow Crown, p. 199.
32. Hutchinson, for instance, has commented that "[w]e are told by most of the
chroniclers of Richard's violent outbursts of temper, and there is no need to doubt them"
(Hollow Crown, p. 199).
33. See Prudentius, Psychomachia, in Aurelii Prudentii Clementis
Carmina, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 90 vols. (Hoelder, 1926), 61: 175-78, ll.109-77.
34.The Book of the Vices and Virtues, ed. W. Nelson Francis (London,
1942), p. 25. Rosemund Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their
Posterity (Princeton, 1966), has established the influence of penitentials like Somme le
Roi on the Confessio.
35. Hutchinson, Hollow Crown, p. 200.
page
85
36. Benson, for instance, has lamented "Genius' failure to condemn Canacee"
("Incest and Moral Poetry," p. 102).
37. Jones, Royal Policy of Richard II, p. 175.
