Haunted Hoccleve?: <i>The Regiment of Princes</i>, The Troilean Intertext, and Conversations with the Dead

Abstract

Thomas Hoccleve’s medieval and modern readers have repeatedly been drawn to the relationship between the Privy Seal clerk and his older and more celebrated contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer. Hoccleve, of course, invokes his “maistir” in The Regiment of Princes, and had a picture of Chaucer included in its early copies, drawing attention in the text to the portrait’s representational fidelity and symbolic power. 1 Hoccleve’s “canonization” of Chaucer—as a literary progenitor, as a quasi-religious icon, as a model of authoritative advice, and as the founder of a national poetic tradition—have all been the subject of extended discussion, circling around the familiar trope of “father Chaucer,” 2 and recently coloring it with a renewed interest in the public, political, and ideological positioning of fifteenth-century vernacular poetry. 3 In this essay I shall discuss some Chaucerian borrowings and echoes in The Regiment of Princes, many of which have been overlooked or little discussed in the heat of these wider debates. Hoccleve tells us that