Rewriting Perfect Friendship in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" and Lydgate's "Fabula Duorum Mercatorum" Author(s): Robert Stretter Reviewed work(s): Source: The Chaucer Review, Vol. 37, No. 3 (2003), pp. 234-252 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096207 . Accessed: 13/03/2013 02:16
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This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:16:29 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REWRITINGPERFECT FRIENDSHIP IN CHAUCER'SKNIGHTS TALEAND LYDGATE'SFABULA DUORUM MERCATORUM
byRobert Stretter
Looking back at Geoffrey Chaucer's Knights Tale from a twenty-first cen one can see a classic "love men tury vantage point, easily triangle"?two over a fighting woman. In fact, Palamon and Arcite's tragic rivalry for the hand of Emelye offers a particularly good medieval instance of what Rene Girard has called "triangular desire," that is, desire mediated through a a rival.1 A in a third party, often strikingly similar scenario appears lesser known the Fabula duorum Chaucer's most distin text, mercatorum, by guished disciple, John Lydgate. The love triangle is so common a feature of literature that it is tempting to take its presence in a given text for granted. But Iwish to argue that the love conflicts in these two poems are unusual because of Chaucer's and with a Lydgate's engagement popular type of medieval English romance and exemplum in which one almost never finds a woman between men. I refer to the tra successfully coming dition of stories that idealized male friendship and brotherhood.2 This thoroughgoing glorification of same-sex bonds is crucial to our inter pretation of the gender and sexual dynamics of many medieval and early modern texts. In contrast to the tradition of fin' amor, which presents a highly codified male-female love as the supreme human relationship, these tales establish a world of intermasculine priorities, firmly relegat ing relationships with women to a place of secondary importance. Chaucer is the first English writer explicitly to set the friendship tradi tion against the ideals of fin' amor. By enlisting the ideological weight of the masculine code of sworn brotherhood in the Knights Tale, a depar ture from his source in Boccaccio's Teseida, Chaucer evokes a struggle between two competing ideals of affectivity, one a theoretically nonsex ual love between men, the other a fundamentally erotic love between the sexes. The incompatibility of these gendered ideals, and Chaucer's decision
THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2003. Copyright ? 2003 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
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to subjugate the former to the latter in the Knight's Tale, results in an intensification of his portrayal of sexual desire as an overwhelming force in human affairs. The conflict of these traditionally separate yet equally powerful models for prioritizing human devotion provides the impetus for Chaucer's story. Moreover, the destruction of one noble bond by another heightens the troubled, often fatalistic tone of the poem. The effect of what Chaucer is doing becomes particularly clear when one compares the Knight's Tale to Lydgate's Fabula, a text on which it appears to have had a heavy influence. Pamela Farvolden, who first explored the relationship between these two texts several years ago, righdy sees Lydgate as responding to Chaucer's portrayal of the tension same-sex between and male-female affection. However, Farvolden pre sents Chaucer and Lydgate as engaged in essentially the same project; woman to cement "both poems," she asserts, "illustrate the exchange of and relations between men."3 In Farvolden's personal political view, Lydgate's Fabula establishes an explicit parallel between sworn brother hood and courdy love in order to extend and intensify the Knight's Tale's implicit message that women's role in romance is to strengthen male bonds. My position is that Chaucer and Lydgate are in fact completely at odds in their portrayals of the relationship between love and friendship. The implication of Palamon and Arcite's fragile relationship is that friendship is no match for sexual desire; Lydgate, on the other hand, reestablishes the supremacy of friendship with an almost ferocious insis tence. My goal in this essay will thus be twofold: first, to show how the conventions of the friendship tradition enable Chaucer's exploration of the power of erotic desire, and, second, to demonstrate how in the Fabula Lydgate essentially undertakes to rewrite Chaucer's fatal rivalry so that male friendship triumphs over male-female love.
I. Chaucer and the Friendship Tradition
Much of the best and most enduring Middle English literature?includ ing major works of the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Malory?celebrates chivalric fin'amors, a fact that can obscure the importance of the discourse of same-sex friendship in medieval England. It will be helpful therefore to some begin by reviewing of what that discourse involved. In depicting the intense bond between Palamon and Arcite, Chaucer could have drawn from two largely distinct friendship traditions: the one, classical amicitia', the other, sworn brotherhood. The highly theorized classical tra dition of ideal male friendship traces its origins at least as far back as Pythagoras, but in the Middle Ages it found itsmost influential articula tion in the writings of Aristode and especially Cicero. Aristode's vision of
This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:16:29 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 236 THE CHAUCERREVIEW perfect friendship, to which he devotes two entire books of the Nicho machean Ethics, involves two men drawn together not by any hope of gain but by similitude and a love of virtue. True friends achieve such spiritual unity that their separate identities begin to collapse; as Aristotle puts it, in a phrase that may have already been proverbial, "a friend is another self." In De amicitia, Cicero places male friendship together with wisdom as the greatest gifts of the gods to mankind and urges that friendship be ranked "above all other things in human life."4Works such as Seneca's a cat Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium and Plutarch's Moralia (which contains alog of famous pairs of perfect friends) further contributed to the codi as fication of ideal male friendship, passing on such commonplaces the notion that friends share a single soul and hold all their possessions in common.5 Theseus and Pirithous, whose friendship ismentioned in the Knights Tale, were two of the most famous exemplars of this tradition.6 Chaucer could have encountered this amicitia perfecta, as Cicero calls it, in any number of places, including the Roman de laRose, where Reason ... defines at some length "Love of freendshipp / / That wole not breke for wele ne woo" (Rom 5201, 5204) ? But both Chaucer and his audience would most likely have been much more familiar with male friendship a common in the form of sworn brotherhood, feature throughout and and connected to an actual European romance, folklore, exempla, a social practice in which men swore solemn, legally binding oath of mutual support.8 Brotherhood was a favorite theme of Middle English as Sir and SirAmadace.9 romances, such Guy of Warwick, Tristrem, Athelston, But the best-known and most representative medieval brotherhood story, was the on the basis of the number of surviving manuscripts and variants, legend of Amis and Amiloun (or Amelius). MacEdward Leach writes that to "every important literature from Celtic to Hungarian and from Norse . . . was and worked over into Italian knew it. [T]he story again again such as miracle many different narrative forms, play, exemplum, prose tale, ballad."10 Chaucer almost certainly knew the Middle English romance Amis and Amiloun since a copy appears in the Auchinleck he seems to have read.11 Manuscript, which concerns two Briefly, the plot of Amis and Amiloun knights of Lombardy who become sworn brothers, vowing to aid each other "In wele & wo, in wrong & ri3t."12 During the course of the tale, various challenges arise Amiloun that test the strength of the bond of brotherhood, but Amis and other in never falter?they remain true to their pledge to help each in a xvrong as well as right, as when Amiloun impersonates Amis judicial a combat so that his friend may avoid perjury. The story ends with to cure supreme test in which Amis murders his own children in order live out their his brother of leprosy. Having passed this test, the knights on same and a days together, both dying the day sharing single grave. The ethos of brotherhood, as even the most cursory look at Amis and
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Amiloun makes clear, establishes a world in which a formal oath between men supersedes all other bonds and responsibilities, whether familial, matrimonial, political, or religious. The brotherhood of Amis and Amiloun gives an idea of the nature of the relationship that Emelye's presence destroys in the Knight's Tale. It is in a similar context of same-sex we overarching loyalty that find Palamon and Arcite, brothers "[y] sworn ful depe" (11132), as Chaucer describes them. Sworn brotherhood is not a detail Chaucer found in his source, for in the Teseida Boccaccio mentions only that the knights are kinsmen. Indeed, there is no initial indication in Boccaccio of a particularly close relationship; the men fall in love with Emilia before the poet ever has them speak to each other. Chaucer's decision to add sworn brotherhood in the Knight's Tale therefore seems especially significant. The Knight's Tale is not, of course, a romance of brotherhood, but Chaucer's charac terization of his protagonists heightens the significance of Emelye's abil ity to come between them. By presenting Palamon and Arcite's bond as not only one of blood (an accident of nature) but also of solemn oath (an act of will), Chaucer conjures a whole set of generic expectations from the romances of brotherhood. Upon hearing the knights described as sworn brothers, many in the audience would think of heroes such as Amis and men who share a unseverable Amiloun, truly bond?a rela tionship able to endure the most extreme physical, social, and spiritual pressures. If Palamon and Arcite are anything like Amis and Amiloun, a or medieval reader listener might reason, they should be above so slight a as over the sex. Chaucer's inclusion of sworn thing rivalry opposite brotherhood thus places focus squarely upon "al the love of Palamon and Arcite," as he tellingly entities an early version of the Knight's Tale in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women (F 420, G 408), and suggests a world in which women no more than a role. play supporting Yet, significandy, Chaucer reveals the sworn brotherhood only after the kinsmen same have spied Emelye?at the very moment, in fact, when the sex bond is shattered male-female love. who sees by Palamon, Emelye first out of the prison window, indignantly invokes the mutual oath of brotherhood to protest Arcite's loving her as well, saying that he revealed his love "As to my conseil and my brother sworn / To forthre me" (I scene as a 1147-48). Chaucer clearly structures this clash of opposing models of desire and duty, for in virtually the same breath Palamon appeals to the discourse of brotherhood and injects the language of fin amors, describing Emelye as "my lady, whom I love and serve" (11143). Palamon alludes to a few of the formal duties of sworn brotherhood, such as the giving of advice, but Chaucer does not dwell on the specifics of the relationship. In all likelihood, he could assume that his audience was familiar with them already. What Chaucer does, in effect, is use brother hood as a shorthand for (theoretically) indestructible male relationship
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in order to highlight the power of an even stronger force that destroys it?love between the sexes. Arcite defends himself against Palamon's an charge of falseness with appeal to the primacy of love, declaring "Love a ... is gretter lawe / Than may be yeve to any erthely man" (11165-66), and thus, by implication, dismissing the "laws" of brotherhood under which Palamon has indicted him. The law of love, according to Arcite, is innate, natural, (by extension) divine, as opposed to the "positif (I 1167), artificially established, terrestrial codes of brotherhood. Itmight be objected that the triumph of love is to be expected here, that it is highly conventional. If Cupid's victory seems inevitable and therefore less remarkable, it is largely on account of the powerful fin 'amors tradition that typically portrays love as victorious. But, as I have been arguing, this is decidedly not the case in romances of brotherhood, and, at the begin ning of the Knight's Tale, one cannot be sure what kind of tale it is. In romances of brotherhood, many things test the strength of the oath, but amatory rivalry is almost never one of them. In Amis and Amiloun, for instance, Amis is able to pledge himself to his wife Belisaunt without com even promising his friendship with Amiloun, though the language of the troth plight is almost identical to his brotherhood oath (298-99, 583-88). But Amis staunchly refuses to plight troth with a steward who offers his friendship. The marriage is not a threat to brotherhood because the poem considers a male-female relationship to be of an order altogether men. different from?and ultimately inferior to?brotherhood between Gender thus ensures that the one does not or even hierarchy displace seriously compete with the other; brotherhood and marriage can coex ist in Amis and Amiloun only because they are conceived as unequal. In the event of a conflict, Amis is quite prepared to sacrifice his blood fam ily for his adoptive brother. The most shocking proof of this comes when Amis learns that the blood of his infant children is the only thing that can cure Amiloun of leprosy. Amis proceeds to cut their throats in the nursery, an act at which we might expect even the most understanding wife to feel that her husband's devotion to friendship has gone too far. But women in romances of friendship and brotherhood are portrayed as recognizing and even endorsing the primacy of male devotion. Their function is largely to provide opportunity for displays of loyalty between men.13 After learning of the death of her children, Amis's wife delivers an astonishing speech of self-renunciation:
"God may sende ous childer mo, Of hem haue J)ou no care. 3if itware at min hert rote, For to bring J3ibroker bote, My lyf y wold not spare." (2393-97)
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The sacrifice of the children is the culminating lesson in a story that teaches that male friendship is the ultimate good. Amis's dilemma is pre sented as an Abrahamic test of faith, which heaven rewards with a mirac ulous Christmas resurrection of the children. This apparent divine sanction of infanticide has troubled some critics,14 but Amis and Amiloun not create a does attempt to coherent moral universe in orthodox reli terms. the creates own gious Instead, poem its moral coherence around the ideal of brotherhood.15 Such is the strength of sworn brotherhood that all and even conventional else?women, children, goods, health, notions of honor and religious devotion?become mere tokens to be used in the service of that bond. This literary tradition of sworn brotherhood imparts enormous sig nificance to the relationship that Emelye unwittingly destroys in the Knight's Tale. The disintegration of sworn brotherhood, and all it repre sents, underscores the overwhelming and destructive power of erotic love in the world of the tale. Male relationships, whether in romances of brotherhood or treatises on perfect friendship, are portrayed as the sum mit of human affection, superior to male-female love insofar as they reject the distraction of sexual desire and exist between equals. Brotherhood functions as a microcommunity within society at large?an idealized space of trust, justice, equity, and altruism. But in the Knight's Tale, reverses of as Chaucer Amis and Amiloun's hierarchy brotherhood supe rior to erotic love, presenting us instead with a Cupid "out of alle charitee / . . . that wolt no felawe have with thee!" (I 1623-24).16 The word "felawe" has an important resonance here, suggesting not only that Cupid no acknowledges equals, but implying also that he obstructs comrade ship between the mortals under his control. The line can also mean that no Cupid has friend, for "felawe" is the term Chaucer applies to Pirithous (11192), Theseus's famous friend.17 But neither friendship nor brother hood offers a serious challenge to the God of Love, for, as Theseus says, "Ayeyns his myght ther gayneth none obstacles" (I 1787). The over whelming power of Cupid that pervades the Knight's Tale bodes ill for same-sex ideals of devotion. Whereas brotherhood is traditionally imag ined as constant, egalitarian, and selfless, the kind of love Palamon and Arcite feel for Emelye is fickle, domineering, and, above all, selfish. Love is what leads Arcite to announce to his "leeve brother" (I 1184): "Ech man for hymself, ther is noon oother" (11182). This attitude could not more be at odds with the ethic of mutual support that undergirds sworn brotherhood.
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II. Friends and Lovers? A Word on Dichotomies
Thus far I have characterized the conflict in the Knight's Tale as one between the sexual desire of men for women and the nonsexual love between men that "to vertu all entendith" (5309), as the Middle English Romaunt of theRose puts it. But another possibility inevitably presents itself to modern critics: same-sex erotic love. The versus carnal spiritual dichotomy, ubiquitous in medieval culture and literature, on which my initial formulation is based, has been often called into question in recent decades. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, revisiting and revising Girard's trian gular desire, has argued convincingly that male same-sex desire exists on a continuum from genuinely nonsexual "homosocial" male bonding at the one end to fully consummated homosexual desire at the other.18 The areas between these poles are not clearly demarcated and, at least by the nineteenth century, "homosocial desire" in literature involves complex mechanisms of sublimation and triangulation. Itmight then legitimately be asked whether the conflict in the Knight's not love two Tale is between spiritual and sexual but rather between dif ferent types of sexual desire that we would today identify as "heterosex and "homosexual." This invokes the sometimes heated ual" question scholarly controversy over the status in the Middle Ages of what has been called "homosexuality" since the late nineteenth century. No one denies same-sex acts in the what is that sexual occurred medieval period; very difficult to know is how those acts were understood, even by those who engaged in them. This problem is taken up by the so-called essentialist over there existed a "homo constructionist debate whether premodern sexual that an connection between sexual subjectivity," is, acknowledged choice and or as the constructionists object identity, whether, maintain, as a is a modern cultural "homosexuality" distinct category production which can only be applied anachronistically to premodern persons, who appear to have understood sexuality in terms of deviant/normative acts, rather than as constitutive of identity.19 My own view tends towards the constructionist position; consequently, I avoid the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual," with their inevitable modern connotations, in favor of "same-sex" and "male-female" when sex referring to desire inmedieval literature.20 But itmust be stressed that ual desire, however articulated, has very little place inmedieval friendship are conventions. While Sedgwick and others quite right to insist that it is to the sexual from the the tra impossible separate absolutely nonsexual, dition of ideal male friendship takes pains to place itself at the opposite end of the spectrum from erotic love. Moreover, friendship often explic as an on this itly bases its claim to supremacy interpersonal relationship denial of allegedly "base" carnality. Aristotle identifies erotic attachment
This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:16:29 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ROBERTSTRETTER 241 as an imperfect or inferior form of friendship; Cicero scornfully dismisses voluptas from his discussion of true friendship; likewise, later essayists and poets such as Francis Bacon, Montaigne, and Spenser explicidy deny a sexual component to ideal same-sex friendship.21 Of course, the weight of tradition does not preclude writers from collapsing the sex/spirit dichotomy by mingling friendship with eroticism, and, indeed, by the late sixteenth century, such experimentation regularly occurs in English lit erature. Christopher Marlowe's Edward //provides a particularly good instance of sexualized friendship, and the anxiety about this kind of con fusion of theoretically separate categories plagues Spenser's "E.K" to the point where he must insist that the friendship between Colin and Hobbinol in the January Eclogue of The Shepheardes Calendershould not be as an endorsement of love."22 interpreted "disorderly But this anxiety about the erotic potential of same-sex relationships is not to be found in the Knight's Tale.25 In fact, Chaucer, like many other medieval writers, seems to employ the rhetoric of friendship precisely for its ability to provide a foil for sexual desire. In addition to Chaucer, the poets of Amis and Amiloun, Sir Amadace, the Roman de la Rose, and, as we will see, Lydgate in the Fabula, all set friendship against sexual desire to varying degrees. Further evidence of the nonsexual character of the friendship tradition can be found in the ease with which friendship rhetoric was in monastic Aelred of for appropriated writing.24 Rievaulx, turns Cicero's De amiticia into De amicitia without instance, spirituali sig nificant modification of Cicero's ideology. Monastic articulations of friendship are more direcdy relevant to Lydgate than to Chaucer, but the majority of medieval discourse on friendship was filtered through clerkly as a is in nonsex writers, and, result, friendship imagined spiritualized, terms even in secular literature.25 In a ual ostensibly spite of what post Freudian audience might see as the glaring possibility of sexualized friendship, friendship in the Middle Ages was conceived as a genuine to as not as sex alternative sexual desire, something other, in different garb. To situate (homo) sexuality outside of the medieval friendship tra dition is not to deny that friendship could sometimes cloak sexual rela tionships; nor is it to make the Middle Ages into "a heterosexual Utopia where queer identities did not exist and queer practices had been policed largely out of sight."26 It is rather to differentiate between the complex, often contradictory world of social practice and the idealized, conven tional world of literary representation. The friendship tradition's dichotomy between "carnal" and "spiritual" is indeed artificial and col lapsible. It is possible, however, to realize the artificiality and collapsibil a ity of dichotomy while still acknowledging its significance as a structuring literary device. a case The Knight's Tale is in point. Chaucer seems particularly inter not ested in the effect that he achieves by collapsing the sex/spirit
This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:16:29 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 242 THE CHAUCERREVIEW dichotomy but by preserving and playing off it.27 It is the theoretical dif ference between spiritual and sexual love that allows Arcite to distinguish his love for Emelye from Palamon's, a bit of casuistry on which he bases his first attempt to escape the duties of brotherhood. Seizing upon Palamon's initial question of whether Emelye is in fact an incarnation of the goddess Venus, Arcite asserts that "Forparamour! loved hire first" (I 1155, my emphasis), going on to explain, "Thyn is affeccioun of hooly nesse, / And myn is love as to a creature" (I 1158-59). The irony, of course, is that Palamon had been speaking rhetorically and that his love is also very much "as to a creature." The power (and humor) of this scene has everything to do with a tug-of-war between two different modes of desire. In the love overthrows prison episode, erotic, carnal, "creaturely" spiritualized love?not the religious devotion of Palamon for Emelye that Arcite speciously posits, but rather the equally solemn bond of sworn brotherhood that joins the men.
III. The Knight's Tale Redux: Lydgate's Fabula and the Reassertion of Friendship
In the second quarter of the fifteenth century John Lydgate revives the clash between friendship and love in the Fabula duorum mercatorum, a poem that can usefully be seen as an answer to the Knight's Tale?one in which the male rivalry of Chaucer's poem is imagined with a different outcome. The Fabula has its origins in the Disciplina clericalis as a short friendship story, which Lydgate expands to 130 Chaucerian stanzas. The basic story appears to have been well known, for versions of it can also be found in the Alphabetum Narrationum, facob's Well, and the Gesta Romanorum. Boccaccio presents his version of this friendship story in Decameron X, 8 as the legend of Titus and Gisippus, which would later become popular in Renaissance England through Thomas Elyot's retelling of it in The Book Called the Governor (2:12). Since Lydgate's Fabula is no longer well known, it will be necessary to rehearse some of itsmore significant aspects. The plot follows the famil severe tests iar trajectory of the friendship tale: perfect friends undergo of their loyalty; they make great sacrifices, which appear easy because of the strength of their devotion; finally, friendship triumphs and receives are two general admiration. The heroes of this friendship tale unnamed merchants, one from Baldac (in modern Syria) and the other from or Egypt. Unlike Amis and Amiloun Palamon and Arcite, the friendship between the two merchants develops by reputation, not association, until some "[o]f her too lovys was maad a stable chene."28 They live for time one at in this state of perfect friendship before they visit another, which
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point the tests begin. The poem culminates with a classic friendship test in which one friend risks his life for the other. In this case, the merchant of Baldac confesses falsely to a murder in order to save his friend, who is about to be executed for the crime (of which he too is innocent). Scholars have found litde for which to praise the Fabula beyond pro viding Lydgate with an exercise in stylistic imitation and amplification. Walter F. Schirmer complains that Lydgate "revel [s] in sententious mor alizing," and Derek Pearsall writes that while "as an exercise in style it is superb," the simple fable "sinks beneath such a weight."29 But I contend that Lydgate's approach to his central theme is particularly significant. The Fabula, in addition to being the best late medieval English specimen of a friendship tale, is remarkable for featuring a love rivalry between friends, something that appears to have precedent in English literature only in Chaucer.30 What Lydgate adds to the "simple fable" is the weight of heavily theorized male friendship. While Farvolden points out that the Fabula at times preserves the language and ideology of sworn brother hood, Lydgate has in fact translated Chaucer's brotherhood into the more codified amicitia perfecta derived from theorists such as Cicero and Seneca. As will become clear, the Fabula essentially functions as a test case for classical friendship theory's claims about the power of magnanimous friendship to conquer selfish desire. Though not identical, sworn broth erhood and classical male friendship in the Knight's Tale and the Fabula occupy similar positions with respect to male-female love; however, amici tia perfecta in Lydgate is able to do what sworn brotherhood in Chaucer could not: vanquish Cupid. The murder episode in the Fabula, which proves the worth of the mer is second test in an ear chant of Baldac, the major the poem. It balances lier test in which the merchant of Egypt is first credited with saving Baldac's life. This first test is of particular relevance to the Knight's Tale because it involves the two friends loving the same woman. Chaucer's general influence on Lydgate's poetry is well established, but it would seem, furthermore, that Lydgate was particularly familiar with the Knight's Tale. Derek Pearsall finds that Lydgate's "closest knowledge of Chaucer's ... work is concentrated in the Knight's Tale, the Troilus, and the Parlement [ofFoules] ."31It is the Knight's Tale that Lydgate uses as inspiration for his Siege of Thebes, which he presents as an addition to the Canterbury Tales. James Simpson has argued that the Siege provides a context for the Knight's Tale that complicates and ultimately forecloses the optimistic pos sibilities of Chaucer's treatment of fortune and human destiny.32 There is reason to believe that Lydgate similarly sets the Fabula in the context of the Knight's Tale, this time engaging and reshaping Chaucer's vision of the power dynamic between love and friendship. Given Lydgate's intimate knowledge of the Knight's Tale, Palamon and not Arcite could have been far from his mind as he penned his own story
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of friends in love with the same woman. In addition to the general simi larity of the scenarios, several details suggest the possibility of more con scious borrowing, notably the diagnosis of Baldac's lovesickness as "Amor ereos" (336), along with a technical medical discussion of the disease that (as in Chaucer) links it to mania and melancholy. Another noteworthy detail is the lovestruck Baldac's reference to his beloved as "[m]y sweete fo" (234), echoing Arcite's deathbed words to Emelye (I 2780). But if Lydgate indeed revisits Chaucer in the Fabula, he radically revises his pred ecessor, since he resolves the problem of the love triangle in a manner opposite to the Knight's Tale: the friends trade the woman between them instead of falling into rivalry. The difference between the two treatments of these similar situations reveals the extent to which Chaucer deflated the ideological power of the friendship tradition in the Knight's Tale. Lydgate insists on the continued supremacy of that tradition, yet in the wake of Chaucer he cannot do as previous friendship writers had usually done and simply ignore the threat to male bonds posed by male-female love. In order to understand how Lydgate succeeds in acknowledging and yet still circumventing the power of erotic desire in his friendship tale, itwill be helpful to examine the Fabula's love triangle in some detail. When the merchant of Baldac visits Egypt, his friend receives him joy fully and puts all his possessions at the command of his guest. The gen erous host even provides for his friend's romantic needs:
And, list he were pryked with paramours, Ful many a lady and maiden by his side On white palfreys he made for to ryde. (173-75)
But the woman who captures Baldac's heart is his Egyptian friend's bride to-be. Insofar as Lydgate's love triangle mirrors that of the Knight's Tale, Egypt's fiancee corresponds to the notoriously "undeveloped" Emelye. as a the is never even a makes But love object, fiancee, who given name, we at some her predecessor appear positively complex. While get least woman sense of Emelye's desires from her prayer in Diana's temple, the in the Fabula is no whatsoever?no no no inner given agency name, voice, life. Farvolden puts it succinctly: "Not acting, she is acted upon."33 The fiancee is given only a short description, completely idealized (e.g., "In hir was nothyng, that nature myht amende" [392]), and she is especially in Amis and the praised for meekness and feminine passivity. As Amiloun, woman in the Fabula functions primarily as an opportunity to showcase the calm, rational power of male friendship. She exists as a faceless token between men. of exchange it is But although Lydgate thoroughly marginalizes the woman, sig nificant that he does not dismiss the power of the love she occasions.
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Baldac's desire for his friend's fiancee plunges him into a near-fatal com bination of lovesickness and guilt. In contrast to Amis and Amiloun, and, I would suggest, thanks in no small part to the influence of Chaucer, male-female love is now a serious force to be reckoned with, even in the masculine world of a friendship tale. The portrayal of love in the Fabula is almost identical to the portrayal of Cupid in the Knight's Tale: tyranni cal, irrational, and irresistible. Lydgate explicitly sets up the conflict between love and friendship when Baldac laments,
Love can no I se in no coost. frenship, weel, Alias, Cupide disseyvable for to leve. Love rechchith nat his freend [to] wrath and greve. Alias, of love such is the fervent heete, That litil chargith his freend for to leete. (255-59)
Such sentiments, unthinkable in the worlds of Amis and Amiloun or Sir to a substantial elevation of the of Amadace, point power romantic, male female love in friendship tales. The conflict between friendship and love will become a major theme in later literature, but itmust be emphasized that in the mid-fifteenth century the situation is still extremely rare. Baldac's problem is that he knows he should not love his friend's fiancee, and yet he cannot keep himself from loving. Since he cannot choose not to love, and since even repressing the love is not considered possible, the only choice left to him is to betray his friend or to die. And so, after the fashion of a perfect friend, Baldac resigns himself to the latter fate (249). Lydgate wrestles here with the same problem that Chaucer presents to his young knights in Theseus's prison: the fragile balance between duty and desire. Baldac shares Palamon's opinion that desiring a friend's beloved?in case a matters even more this fiancee, making clear-cut than in Chaucer?is a serious form of In contrast to betrayal. striking Arcite, Baldac agonizes that he should "[d]isnatural or traitour been i-founde" (252). In friendship stories, this fear of being disloyal to the sacred bond of friendship typically inspires acts of bravery and sacrifice, but to Baldac now friendship appears powerless to counteract the demands of Cupid. On the surface, Baldac's lovesickness would appear to be a conventional one friendship dilemma such as the Amis faced in choosing between his children and his sworn brother. There is, however, an important differ ence: Baldac is not faced merely with a difficult yet ultimately rational choice, one that can be measured coolly against the requirements of friendship, but with the mysterious, irrational, and inexorable force of love. It is notable that Baldac, unlike Arcite, never attempts to defend his on love principle, however shaky. At the same time, he cannot stop lov
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ing. The friendship-love conflict becomes a test of human rationality, the foundation upon which friendship theory erects its imposing edifice. And rational friendship in the Fabula, as with brotherhood in Chaucer, no appears to be match for passion. A sense of the overwhelming power of love dominates Baldac's eventual confession to Egypt, which explicitly identifies the problem of rationality:
"O, mercy, freend, and rewe vpon my liff: Deth fro my gilt, I wot, is resounable
But in o thyng I am inexcusable, That I so love that fayr incomperable
to to I can nat And, be slayn, love leete. Do, what yow list: for, tyl myn herte ryve, / may nat chesyn, that I am hir man; For, with my silf thouh I evirmor stryve, Ther is noon othir, that I love can."
(400-401, 403-404, 406-10, my emphasis)
Given friendship's usual omnipotence, the tenor of this confession high lights a significant shift in the portrayal of the power of love. Lydgate deserves the credit for the conflict in this sharpening love-friendship way, for although he is retelling an older story, he has greatly elaborated the importance of friendship and the challenges to it. In the Disciplina and other earlier versions of the there is no con exemplum tale, expressed cern about hurting one's friend, no talk about the inevitability of love. Lydgate's sources praise the exchange of the girl as a display of liberal ity, but provide no real tension between love and friendship as conflict ing ideals. At this point, the Fabula seems in danger of following the Knight's Tale's course to tragedy. Instead, it veers back to the tradition of transcendent friendship. When Egypt hears of his friend's love, he gently scolds him? not for loving his fiancee, but for thinking that jealousy could cause con tention between true friends. Then, without hesitation, he declares, "I gyf hir the: haue, tak hir by the hond" (420). Egypt's act reestablishes the supreme virtue of friendship within the world of Lydgate's tale, and to of overcom returns the narrative the familiar pattern friendship as ing trials through sacrifice. Egypt, whose priorities the poem validates can appropriately ordered, definitively refutes Baldac's belief that "love an as no frenship." Baldac's fears about love are anomaly; it is almost if a a he forgets that he is in story of friendship, literary haven from the "natural" imperatives of love. In his descriptions of the power of love, and
This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:16:29 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ROBERTSTRETTER 247 moreover in his assumptions about the reaction of his friend, Baldac seems to be operating under the value system of fin' amor, which posits love as the ultimate human law. Egypt, on the other hand, acts within the traditional value to which a woman can friendship system, according never come men. the same-sex between Lydgate consistently privileges relationship; when Baldac and his new bride leave for home, the poet comments that Egypt's "freendys partyng did hym mor to smerte / Than love of hir, that sat so nyh his herte" (468-69).
IV.All the Love of Baldac and Egypt: Friendship Theory and Female Marginalization
The exchange of the girl, which is portrayed as a completely virtuous and selfless act, cannot help but trouble modern readers with its appar ently callous objectification of women, a concern that haunts the sim ilar exchange at the end of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona. Lydgate places the Egyptian's fiancee on a par with his other posses sions?lands, castles, hawks and hounds, all things the Egyptian puts at the disposal of his friend (169-80). At no point does Lydgate question how the young woman might feel about marrying Baldac rather than Egypt. Nevertheless, it is difficult to feel much for the nameless fiancee, who goes along quietly with the new marriage, and who, the poet tells us, later enjoys an idyllic life with Baldac. There is not the slightest hint at any ethical complications. I think it would be wrong to dismiss the of the fiancee as an marginalization simply instance of the antifemi nism that seems endemic to so much medieval literature. Instead, I would like to suggest that Lydgate's choice to erase female subjectivity is dictated by a desire to explore the power and limits of the rhetoric of male friendship. A major reason for the moral tranquility of the Fabula has to do with Lydgate's particular vision of friendship. More than any other English poet before him, Lydgate sees friendship in the heavily theorized, rhetor a ical terms of classical amicitia. As monk of Bury, Lydgate had access to an extensive library, and his classical learning can be seen throughout his poetry. In the Fabula he refers by name to "Senek" (603) and cites Seneca's Epistulae (611), one of the most important sources of classical friendship material in the Middle Ages. Unlike Chaucer's sworn broth ers, Lydgate's merchants are consistentiy described in terms of classical ideals about the goodness, similitude, and fame of perfect friends. Before ever they meet, Baldac and Egypt follow the friendship convention of sharing their goods:
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By lond or se the good her chapmen carye Was entircomownyd by her bothys assent: Yiff oon hadde ouht plesaunt or necessarye, Vnto the tothir anoon he hath it sent. (92-95)
Lydgate stresses that the most distinctive thing about the two merchants is their virtue, the sine qua non of the friendship tradition. "Vertu goth fere, he may nat hyde his liht" (64), the poet asserts, explaining how two strangers could become such fast friends. Lydgate spends almost thirty lines (64-91) celebrating the fact that "Tweyne of o kynde togidre drawe neere" (73), and his emphasis on classical virtue creates a friendship story in which the friends, unlike Amis and Amiloun, are not required to rede fine traditional morality. Lydgate's use of classical amicitia in the Fabula has particularly inter esting implications for understanding the exchange of the fiancee, a sce nario that seems constructed for the express purpose of validating the axioms of the classical friendship tradition. On one level, for instance, the exchange is the logical extension of the proverb that true friends share everything. Egypt's declaration upon Baldac's arrival, "What so I haue, is platly in your myht" (179), is not merely a polite expression of largesse; it ismeant literally. Although the actual trading of a human strikes modern one would as being readers, hope, fundamentally wrong, the poem presents the actions of the two men as entirely consistent with honor and virtue, at least according to the criteria of the friendship tra the scene more dition. The artificiality of exchange becomes somewhat intelligible when one considers that it also enacts the axiom that a friend is "another self," that perfect friends are so similar as to be essentially the same. has taken in the to the Lydgate already care, early poem, portray merchants as the proverbial one soul in two bodies: "So ful they were of oon accordement, / As oon in too and too in oon for euere" (96-97). These lines not only stress the unity of the men, but also foretell friendship's triumph over its various challengers. In this context, the lovesickness and a exchange scenes are less a genuine conflict than demonstration that the bond of friendship provides, as Gervase Mathew puts it, "a union so close as to lead to unity."34 Lydgate pushes friendship rhetoric to its lim its in the exchange episode by treating the "friend is another self dic tum in literal fashion. If the friends really are interchangeable, then theoretically it should not matter whom the woman marries. I emphasize the theoretical because this is so clearly the site of Lydgate's interest. He is not concerned in the Fabula with the realities of human psychology (to which Chaucer ismuch more attuned), but rather with constructing what is essentially a morality play on the virtues of friendship.
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If the result is ultimately less satisfying than the Knight's Tale, one important reason is that if Lydgate sometimes complicates Chaucer in his poetry, in the Fabula he does the opposite. In reworking the Knight's Tale, Lydgate makes it into a much less provocative story, effectively smoothing the rough waters of Chaucer's tale with the oil of amicitia per fecta. It is perhaps not terribly surprising that Lydgate, the Monk of Bury, should import the clerkly tradition of classicized perfect friendship to reassert the superiority of platonic male bonds to passion between the sexes.35 But the different treatments of friendship and brotherhood in the Knight's Tale and the Fabula have implications beyond the poems in The fact that most readers would question. prefer Chaucer's version of the love rivalry to Lydgate's is not merely an indication of Chaucer's supe riority as a poet, but also points to the limitations of idealized human relationships such as male friendship as a subject for interesting poetry. Stories of triumphant, exemplary friendship continue to appear in English literature after Lydgate, but even with the Renaissance's renewed interest in classical friendship, the ideal friendship tale was a dying genre. Perhaps this is because there is something inherendy undramatic about an invincible ideal. Even though Lydgate treats male-female desire in a more serious way than does most previous friendship literature, the intru sion of love still ultimately produces only a local effect, a temporary dra matic tension that is quickly forgotten as the story moves ahead to its celebratory conclusion. The Fabula is a rigged game in which the triumph of friendship is preordained. It is this that makes it less of an achieve ment than the Knight's Tale. The genuine clash of ideals, the uncertainty of the one over outcomes, bittersweet "victory" of ideal another, makes more for much interesting storytelling, as Chaucer realized. use Chaucer and Lydgate friendship and fin 'amors, respectively, as a kind of generic occupatio, invoking and obliquely harnessing the imagi native power of literary traditions in which they decline to participate. Lydgate borrows commonplaces about love in order to write a friendship tale, while Chaucer draws on the code of brotherhood in order to write a philosophical chivalric romance. The contest between love and friend ship that Chaucer and Lydgate in large part initiate enjoys a long and rich life in English literature. The dichotomized clash of love versus friendship, of sex versus spirit, of female versus male (and indeed the eventual sexualizing of friendship, the collapse of the dichotomy estab was to a lished by friendship theorists), become favorite theme of English literature in the centuries following Lydgate, figuring prominently in such works as Euphues, the Arcadia, and The Faerie Queene, and, arguably, on playing itself out most brilliandy the Renaissance stage.36
Pacific Union College
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was An earlier version of this essay presented at the 36th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, in May 2001. I would like to express my gratitude to A. C. Spearing, Elizabeth Fowler, Cristina Cervone, Elizabeth Bridgham, and Chaucer Review's anonymous for their valuable suggestions. 1. See Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and theNovel (1961), trans. Yvonne Freccero (Balti more, 1966), especially chap. 1. Girard points out that the passion between men embroiled in a love rivalry can actually surpass what either feels for the woman who is supposedly the source of the quarrel. This sort of passion is sometimes called mimetic desire, because the desirer's choice of love object depends largely on the fact that "[the object] is already desired by another person whom he admires" (7). For a Girardian reading of the Knights Tale, see Laurel Amtower, "Mimetic Desire and the Misappropriation of the Ideal in the Knight's Tale" Exemplaria^ (1996): 125-44. 2. The most comprehensive survey of this tradition remains Laurens J. Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain: Friendship in Tudor Literature and Stuart Drama (Bloomington, Ind., 1937). 3. Pamela Farvolden, "'Love Can No Frenship': Erotic Triangles in Chaucer's on 'Knight's Tale' and Lydgate's Fabula duorum mercatorum," in Sovereign Lady: Essays Women inMiddle English Literature, ed. Muriel Whitaker (New York, 1995), 21-44, at 35. 4. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson, rev. edn. (Harmon dsworth, 1976), 1166a33,1169b6; Cicero, Laelius de amicitia and Somnium Scipionis, ed. and trans. J. G. F. Powell (Warminster, 1990), V 17. a 5. For helpful survey of classical friendship theorists and their transmission in the Middle Ages, see the first chapter of Reginald Hyatte's The Arts of Friendship: The Idealization of Friendship inMedieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden, 1994). See also James McEvoy, "The Theory of Friendship in the Latin Middle Ages: Hermeneutics, Con c. textualization and the Transmission and Reception of Ancient Texts and Ideas, from AD c. 350 to 1500," in Friendship inMedieval Europe, ed. Julian Haseldine (Stroud, 1999), 3-44. are 6. The Knights Tale, I 1191-1201. All Chaucer citations from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Boston, 1987), hereafter cited by line number in the text. to 7. I quote from the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose, which Chaucer is known have translated in part (see Riverside Chaucer). The section on friendship, which draws on to not to heavily De amicitia and makes explicit reference "Tulius" (5286), is thought have been translated by Chaucer, but he almost certainly would have been familiar with the ideas contained in it. 8. On the historical details of sworn brotherhood, see MacEdward Leach's introduc tion to his edition of Amis and Amiloun, EETS os 203 (London, 1937), lxv-lxxi, and Maurice Keen, "Brotherhood in Arms," History 47 (1962): 1-27. See also Alan Bray's forth coming book, The Friend (Chicago). 9. See Mills, One Soul, chap. 2, and Anna H. Reuters, Friendship and Love in theMiddle am English Metrical Romances (Frankfurt Main, 1991). 10. Leach, Amis and Amiloun, v. 11. Laura Hibbard Loomis, "Chaucer and the Auchinleck MS: 'Thopas' and 'Guy of Warwick,'" in Essays and Studies inHonor of CarUton Brown (New York, 1940), 111-28. 12. Amis and Amiloun, ed. Leach, line 149. Hereafter cited by line number in the text. 13. In Sir Amadace, for instance, the hero vows to share half of whatever he has with another man, which results in his nearly cutting his wife in two at the man's request. The wife herself would rather die than allow her husband to break his word. See Sir Amadace Ireland Brookhouse and the Avowing of Arthur: Two Romances from the MS, ed. Christopher (Copenhagen, 1968). 14. See, for instance, Dean R. Baldwin, "Amis and Amiloun: The Testing of Treufye," on Papers Language and Literature 16 (1980): 353-365. a 15. As Susan Crane comments on the Anglo-Norman Amis eAmilun: "The deity is pas to as in sive force at the disposal of the poet, be invoked necessary support of friendship's of in the demands. A more clearly present supernatural force and absolute arbiter right and Culture in and poem is friendship itself (Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, Anglo-Norman Middle English Literature [Berkeley, 1986], 121). and Venus who will not "holde 16. It is telling to contrast this Cupid, champartie" (I, to 'Ye holden 1949), with the "Benigne Love" (III, 1261) often referred in TC. There [Venus] regne and hous in unitee; / Ye sothfast cause offrendship ben also" (III, 29-30, my italics).
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17. As Richard Firth Green and John M. Bowers have both argued, felawe could some times have unsavory connotations in Middle English (something akin to 'partner in crime'), but in the friendship tradition the term is unequivocally positive. Richard Firth Green, "The Sexual Normality of Chaucer's Pardoner," Mediaevalia 8 (1985 for 1982): 351-58; John M. Bowers, "Queering the Summoner: Same-Sex Union in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales," in Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve, ed. R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse (Asheville, N.C., 2001), 301-24. 18. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1992). 19. Virtually no one self-identifies as an "essentialist," but the case for a transhistorical homosexual subjectivity has been made most influentially by John Boswell in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980) and Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modem Europe (New York, 1994); see also Rictor Norton, The Myth of theModern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (London, 1997). In scholarship on medieval literature, examples of the "essentialist" position include Bruce W. Holsinger, "The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy," in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York, 1996), 243-74; John M. Bowers, "Queering the Summoner"; and BrittonJ. Harwood, "Same-Sex Desire in the Unconscious of Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls," Exemplaria 13 (2001): 99-135. The constructionist argument bases itself in large part on the work of Michel Foucault, particularly The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York, 1978; repr. 1990). One of the most engaging constructionist histories is Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982; New York, 1995) by Alan Bray. See also on David Halperin, One Hundred Years ofHomosexuality: And Other Essays Greek Love (New York, 1990). Halperin has since attempted to discourage excessively rigid interpretation of the Foucauldian distinction between sexual acts and identities in "Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality," Representations 63 (1998): 93-120. Eve Sedgwick examines the political ramifications of the essentialist-constructionist debate (which she recasts in terms of "minoritizing" and "universalizing" viewpoints) in her intro duction to Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), 1-63. as 20. Tied it is to the essentialist-constructionist debate, the question of terminology has proved very controversial in medieval studies. Monica McAlpine's "The Pardoner's Homosexuality and How ItMatters," PMLA 50 (1980): 8-22, illustrates some of the pitfalls of applying modern terminology to medieval fictional characters. More recently, Carolyn Dinshaw has argued for the use of "heterosexuality" in "A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Gawain and the Green Knight" Diacritics 24.2-3 (1994): 205-26, and "Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer," Exemplaria 7 (1995): 72-96. V. A. Kolve, "Ganymede / Son ofGetron: Medieval Monasticism and the Drama of Same-Sex Desire," Speculum 73 (1998): 1014-67, gives a nondogmatic overview a of sexuality studies' terminology controversy and makes case for the qualified use of "homosexuality" when referring to the premodern period. 21. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 8 (1156b2); Cicero, De amicitia, IX 32; Bacon, "Of Love" in The Essays, ed. Jon Pitcher (Harmondsworth, 1985), 89; Montaigne, "Of Friendship," in The Essayes of Montaigne (1603), trans. John Florio (New York, 1933), 146-47; Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London, 1977), IV.ix.2, IV.x.26. 22. Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven, 1989), 33. am 23. I unconvinced by Andrew James Johnston's "Wrestiing with Ganymede: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and the Homoerotics of Epic History," Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 50 (2000): 21-43, which argues that the Knight's Tale exhibits a "violent homo eroticism" (21). Johnston begins by asserting that the tale is "markedly devoid of erotic desire of then on to a any kind," but goes posit "subtext of homoeroticism," "underlying erotic concerns," and "hidden sexual anxieties" (25, 35, 36), which I feel the text cannot support. 24. See Adele M. Fiske, Friends and Friendship in theMonastic Tradition (Cuernavaca, Brian Patrick and Mexico, 1970); McGuire, Friendship Community: The Monastic Experience 350-1250 (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1988). 25. On intense nonsexual in see friendship medieval romance, C. Stephen Jaeger, Love: In Search a Lost Ennobling of Sensibility (Philadelphia, 1999); Hyatte, Arts of Friendship,
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87-135; and M.J. Ailes, "The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality," in Masculinity inMedieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (London, 1999), 214-37. It should be sworn was pointed out, however, that brotherhood less explicitly nonsexual than medieval amicitia. On the homoerotic possibilities of male bonding in chivalric romance, see Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucers Canterbury Tales (Princeton, 1994), 39-54; William Burgwinkle, "Knighting the Classical Hero: Homo/Hetero Affectivity in Eneas," Exemplaria 7 (1993): 1-43; and David F. Greenberg, The Construction ofHomosexuality (Chicago, 1988), 257n82, 261. 26. Bowers, "Queering the Summoner," 301. Bowers rightly critiques this reductive view of the complexities of medieval sexual experience. See also Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, N.C., 1999), 183-206. 27. Chaucer is fully capable of blurring these distinctions when it suits him, as is sug on gested by the large body of scholarship the sexuality of the Summoner and the Pardoner, his "freend" and "compeer" (GP 670). Robert F. Sturges, Chaucers Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (New York, 2000), summarizes much of the debate. Arguments for the Pardoner and/or Summoner as ambiguously "queer" or specifically homosexual include: Bowers, "Queering the Summoner"; Steven F. Kruger, "Claiming the a Pardoner: Toward Gay Reading of Chaucer's Pardoners Tale," Exemplaria 6 (1994): 115-39; Michael A. Calabrese, "'Make a Mark That Shows': Orphean Song, Orphean Sexuality, and the Exile of Chaucer's Pardoner," Viator 24 (1993): 269-86; and Glenn F. Burger, "Kissing on the Pardoner," PMLA 107 (1992): 1143-56; McAlpine's influential essay "The Pardoner's Homosexuality" has been critiqued by C. David Benson, "Chaucer's Pardoner: His Sexuality and Modern Critics," Medievalia 8 (1985 for 1982): 337-49, and R. F. Green, "Sexual Normality." 28. Lydgate, The Minor Poems offohn Lydgate, vol. 2 (Secular Poems), ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS os 192 (London, 1934), line 49. Hereafter cited in the text. 29. Walter F. Schirmer,/oAw Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of theXVth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (Berkeley, 1961), 238; Derek Pearsall, fohn Lydgate (London, 1970), 204. See also Lois A. Ebin, John Lydgate (Boston, 1985), 111-12. 30. Medieval romance, of course, offers numerous examples of conflicts between a are knight's duty to his lord and to his lady, which arguably versions of friendship rivalry. But the mutual love, say, of Arthur and Lancelot for Guinevere is fundamentally a differ ent kind of situation in that the lord-vassal relationship does not involve the equality and are similitude that the hallmarks of the friendship tradition. 31. Pearsall,/o/m Lydgate, 64. 32. James Simpson, "'Dysemol daies and fatal houres': Lydgate's Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer's Knights Tale" in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), 15-33, esp. 29. 33. Farvolden, "Love Can No Frenship," 32. 34. Gervase Mathew, "Ideals of Friendship," in Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory ofC. S. Lewis, ed. John Lawlor (Evanston, 111., 1966), 46. 35. It is unfortunate that no reliable evidence survives concerning the Fabulds imme diate audience or the circumstances of the poem's composition that might help further wrote Fabula for explain Lydgate's artistic choices. It is possible that Lydgate the patrons in London's mercantile circles after his return from France in 1426 or 1427, but the poem as return to in 1433. On might just easily have been written after Lydgate's Bury Lydgate's see known activities during these periods, Derek Pearsall,/oAn Lydgate (1371-1449): A Bio Bibliography, ELS Monograph Series 71 (Victoria, B.C., 1997), 28-40. same-sex is 36. In Shakespeare alone, the tension between and male-female loyalties Merchant crucial to the plots of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Loves Labors Lost, The of Venice, most Two Much Ado About Nothing Twelfth Night, The Winters Tale, and, perhaps notably, The Tale. Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare and Fletcher's dramatization of the Knights
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