Gower, Chaucer and the Art of Repentance in Robert Greene's Vision

Abstract

The guest appearances by Chaucer and Gower in Greenes Vision reflect a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tradition of paired citation; here they represent rival literary values and styles, exploited by Greene in a complex and playful mock-repentance. While Greene claims to be moving away from a licentious, Chaucerian comedy, he is really expanding his range to incorporate the farcical vein of the recently published anonymous Cobler of Canterburie, and the tale offered by Gower as a corrective to the former follies of Greene's pen in fact closely resembles his earlier romances. Within the vision the authority of both the poets is dismissed when King Solomon appears to reject every study except Theology; what appears to be a dramatic conversion from folly to wisdom is in fact a much more playful and unstable piece in which all claims to literary authority come to look suspect. Even though the Vision is (as Newman insisted when he published it posthumously in 1592) authentic Greene, the ‘real’ Greene presents us with a radically inauthentic authorial self. In constructing and playing with his persona Greene exploits shared interests with both Chaucer and Gower and exploits related techniques; it seems both from the Vision and the later dream-vision A Quip for an Upstart Courtier that his self-interested appropriation of elements of late-medieval poetry for his own ends does not preclude informed and intelligent engagement with it.