Questioning Romance: Amadas and Ydoine in Gower's Confessio Amantis

Abstract

Questioning Romance: Amadas and Ydoine in Gower's Confessio Amantis Simon Meecham-Jones John Gower's Confessio Amantis, written in the 1380s and revised in the 1390s, provides persuasive proof of the extent to which an ambitious poet writing in Middle English w a s able, and obliged, to establish a creative space for his writing through explicitly highlighting the (respectful) relationship of his work to the 'authoritative' texts of past auctors. In the Confessio Gower assimilated into his poem an enormous variety of stories and examples culled from his wide reading, each integrated into the poem's organising structure of the seven deadly sins of lovers. The Confessio establishes a complex structure of summation and appropriation in which the sheer profusion of material gathered can blur the subtleties of Gower's treatment of particular narratives, further complicating attempts to ascertain the relationship between the subjectivity Gower constructs within his texts and his reading of the conventions of the texts and genres which provided his sources. Gower's attitudetothe genre of romance have proved fruitful in shedding light on his conception of the 1 All citations from the Confessio Amantis are from The Works of John English Works, ed. G. C Macaulay (2 vols., Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1901 36 Simon Meecham-Jones poet as necessarily engaged in the criticism of past literature. T w o recent studies2 of Gower's reading of romance have undertaken examinations of the structural and thematic importance of the poet's reinterpretation of the 'ancient romance'3 of Apollonius of Tyre which occupies nearly two thousand lines of the Eighth book of the Confessio, but alternative and revealing insights into Gower's ambivalent critical reading of the romance genre are provided also through the fleeting reference to the romance of Amadas et Ydoine in the Sixth book of the poem. Conjuring the shades of familiar literary figures lies at the heart of Gower's narrative technique, furthering the intention stated in the opening lines of the work, to recognise the enduring potency of literary culture: Of h e m that writen ous tofore The bokes duelle, and w e therfore Ben tawht of that was write tho: (Prologue 1-3) The texture of the Confessio Amantis is supported and the text's scope of meaning enlarged through the artful recollection of previous literature, leading Simpson to characterise the poem as the expression of a highly sophisticated reading strategy: 'What else is the Confessio Amantis than, at one level, an extended and extremely subtle account of the psychology of reading?' In the selection of material for the Confessio, though, Gower approaches anterior texts as reader and prospective writer simultaneously, and his critical choices - to include or to exclude material from diverse narrative sources - provide invaluable evidence as to his understanding of the proper role of an author. The frequency with which he demonstrates the breadth of his reading threatens to create problems of interpretation for subsequent readers (as, presumably, it had for Gower's 2 William Robins, 'Romance, Exemplum, and the Subject of the Confessio Amantis' Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 19 (1997), 157-81; Jeremy Dimmick, '"Redinge o Romance" in Gower's Confessio Amantis', 125-137 in Tradition and Transforma in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer 1999) 3 Robins, p. 157. 4 J. Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge- Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 254. e • g Amadas and Ydoine in Gower's Confessio Amantis 37 contemporaries) in determining the measure of significance to be accorded to names and to narrative traditions glancingly referred to in the course of the poem. Are such undeveloped references to specific literary sourcestobe read as spots of occasional colour enhancing the text, or as structural components of an ambitious architectonic design imparting unity to the work as a whole? The inherent difficulty in reading Gower's technique of allusion is tellingly illustrated in the Amadas reference in Book VI of the poem. The Confessio is developed through the narrative device of the 'confession' of a poetic persona (dubbed 'Amans' - the lover) to Genius, priest of Venus. In Book VI, in the course of confessing the 'smale lustes' which 'for a time...