Remodeling Authorship in Lydgate's Fall of Princes

Abstract

The frame narrative of John Lydgate's Fall of Princes self-consciously reflects on authorship and literary authority as it dramatizes the creative processes of a variety of writers, including those involved in the composition of the Fall itself. Writers such as Cicero, Chaucer, and Lydgate's source authors "Bochas" and "Laurence" are all depicted as humble retellers who are productively engaged with a network of literary dependence and collaboration that looks surprisingly like Lydgate's own authorial context. I argue that the repetition of this depiction serves to equalize the text's various author figures: the hierarchies that at first seem to structure the relationships between writers are leveled out, leaving us instead with a community of fellow authors who participate in a non-competitive model of authorship in which literary authority is shared among them. Recognizing how the Fall builds its own humble but powerful authority in this way can help us better appreciate Lydgate's famously intertextual and dependent body of works in particular, and, more broadly, it can serve as a corrective for the influence that anachronistic modern ideas about authorship have had, and continue to have, in scholarship on medieval vernacular literature.