The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt Matthew Fisher David Watt, The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series.” Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2013. $99.95. Writing poetry about writing poetry is a temptation that few poets have resisted. Thomas Hoccleve is not among that select few. In the middle of [End Page 347] the twentieth century, Robert Graves dismissed “what passes as English poetry” as “the product of either careerism, or keeping one’s hand in: a choice between vulgarity and banality.” David Watt’s book, The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series,” attempts to uncover where along that spectrum we can place Hoccleve’s literary labor and its products as aesthetic and material propositions. Watt takes as his primary subject the process, not the product, of Hoccleve’s writing, and to that end interrogates its material remnants and the poetic fictions of its composition. Watt begins his book with a bold observation: “This is not the book I initially planned to write. The version of this book that I had in my head was never the version on the page in front of me” (1). Such a statement is honest, and draws attention to the chasms between intentionality and execution that are at the heart of all creative and critical endeavors. At the same time, Watt implies that the book escaped his control in some way. Though he thus sets up a parallel for his arguments about the complexities of Hoccleve’s compositional difficulties, it is a disturbing beginning. His frank honesty about the potential failures of process suggest that the product, too, may be problematic. The book offers a sustained engagement with the entirety of Hoccleve’s Series, and though many of its points are locally persuasive, it does not quite succeed in offering a critical framework that can make compelling sense of the gap between anticipation and execution it perceives in Hoccleve’s poetry. More successful is Watt’s attempt to focus on both the ephemeralities and the materialities of the poetic process. As Watt argues in the book’s introduction, “the Series offers a reflection on, not a reflection of, his [Hoccleve’s] conception of book production” (4). To this end, Watt marshals paleographical evidence along with careful close readings of the entirety of Hoccleve’s Series, a sequence of five distinct and interrelated Middle English poems, the best known of which are the first two, the “Complaint” and “Dialogue.” “Learn to Die” has occasioned some more recent criticism, but the remaining two poems, “The Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife” and “The Tale of Jonathas,” have warranted little critical attention over many years. A book-length study of Hoccleve’s Series is a welcome contribution to the field. Watt is to be commended for his sustained focus on Hoccleve’s complexly allusive poetry, and his careful encounter with the manuscript instantiations of that verse. The three autograph manuscripts of Hoccleve’s poetry (or possibly four, as Linne Mooney has recently argued in these pages) have been [End Page 348] disproportionately subject to the kind of paleographically and codico-logically grounded literary criticism that Watt assays. The first chapter of The Making attempts to construct Hoccleve’s likely audience “in and for the Series” through the lens of San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111. Watt reads the claims of Hoccleve’s narrator persona “Thomas” as reflecting and responding to the issues faced by Hoccleve and his poetry, and its reception by a coterie readership among the clerks of the Privy Seal. Watt argues Hoccleve’s poems “are meant to circulate among those at work in the Privy Seal and elsewhere in Westminster Hall” (31). That “elsewhere” ultimately covers quite a bit of ground, deriving from Ethan Knapp’s exposition of Hoccleve’s bureaucratic vision and Emily Steiner’s Langlandian documentary imagination, and stretching back to the coterie audiences of Piers Plowman described by Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and others. Watt asserts an imagined audience ranging from the king, to the upper echelons of the nobility, to Hoccleve’s fellow clerks. His depiction of a stratified and plural audience for the Series, its multiple valences carefully crafted...