John Lydgate, Stephen Hawes, and the Making of Henry VIII

Abstract

ABSTRACT Lancastrian and Tudor poets imagine authorship as a model for monarchy. They express this imagining through the figure of the poet-king whose ideal is established by John Lydgate in The Siege of Thebes, where the legendary Theban founder, Amphion, functions as a cipher for Lydgate’s own humbly pretentious poetics. Lydgate’s vision of poet-kingship is later remade by Stephen Hawes in the Pastime of Pleasure, which tells the future Henry VIII a story of how its author rises to kingship by employing poetry in the pursuit of lust. Following Hawes, Henry comes to make poetry in the service of individual desires, but, unlike his forebears, Henry’s claim to the throne is assured by lineage. For Henry, the poet-king mantle offers not a means of claiming power but of consolidating it. His lyrics create a court where resistance to his wants constitutes an act of treason. In the end, the poet-king proves success and menace. It enables commoners to present themselves (however tenuously) at the apex of society and royalty does indeed take note. Yet, when the poet-king moves from fiction into reality, it loses its potential for imagining mobility to instead become an instrument for tyranny.