Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait

Abstract

Of the numerous images proposed as representations of Chaucer in early manuscript illuminations, one portrait type has some claim to be a true portraiture of Geffrey Chaucer:1 the Ellesmere-Hoccleve type. It occurs earliest in the miniature of Chaucer as one of the Canterbury pilgrims in the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, now in the Huntington Library and probably made c. 1400-1410;2 and it recurs soon thereafter as an illustration to a passage about Chaucer in a number of copies of Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes (figs. 1-2). Some reason for believing this Ellesmere-Hoccleve portrait type to be a true-to-life image of Chaucer may lie in the relations between the Eilesmere miniature and the miniature that recurs in the Hoccleve manuscripts; the best reason, however, resides in the peculiarities of the material and literary context in which the type occurs with Hoccleve's writing. The issue of the truth of the Ellesmere-Hoccleve portrait type is bound up with the issue of Hoccleve's relations with Chaucer, specifically, the nature of Hoccleve's interest in Chaucer's likeness. Briefly, it was to Hoccleve's advantage to see to it that any portrait he put about with his Regiment of Princes really looked like Chaucer. Hoccleve's poem is a versified Fiirstenspiegel, written in 1411 for Prince Henry of Monmouth, later Henry V, and published by Hoccleve in a series of presentation copies, the production of which he supervised;3 the publication's purpose was to elicit patronage. Along with other claims to familiarity with Chaucer put forward in the poem, to circulate a portrait of Chaucer with it would serve Hoccleve's purpose of linking himself with a poet who stood high