The Chaucer Review 36.2 (2001) 158-183 // --> [Access article in PDF] Trumping Chaucer: Osbern Bokenham's Katherine Paul Price This essay illustrates a particularly intriguing case of a fifteenth-century poet trying to come to terms with the major poets who preceded him, notably Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate. According to Samuel Johnson, "It is . . . dangerous to be placed in a state of unavoidable comparison with excellence, and the danger is still greater when that excellence is consecrated by death. . . . He that succeeds a celebrated writer has the same difficulties to encounter." 1 In modern critical parlance this problem of writing in the shadow of a great literary predecessor has been diagnosed as the "anxiety of influence." Since his famous work bearing this title Harold Bloom has retracted his claim that such anxiety was first caused by the achievements of Shakespeare. 2 Moreover, A. C. Spearing has shown that writers following Chaucer felt something of the difficulties described by Johnson. 3 Lydgate frequently imagines himself as a star contrasted into dullness by the brightness of Chaucer:
My Great Predecessors.pdf
Such a tribute is far from grudging: that a great writer should induce an awareness of one's mediocrity is a personal evocation of the scale of that writer's achievements. As Hoccleve shows, an author's feelings of relative deprivation testify to the value of what he is missing: "Allas, that thou thyn excellent prudence / In thy bed mortel mightist naght byqwethe." 5 However, this kind of tribute makes anxiety an expression of homage. To put it extremely, an index of a great poet's achievement is the damage done to those that follow. Thus in a Book of Curtesye from the 1470s, an [End Page 158] appreciation of the feats of Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate spills over into a more explicit expression of poignant envy at the way these writers have hoarded poetic riches:
The work of one fifteenth-century poet, Osbern Bokenham, represents an intriguing example of an author dwarfed by great predecessors and, therefore, seeking to write in "some other way." Bokenham tries to disassociate his verse from the poetry of Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate, but does so in an attempt to compete with, and even exceed, his predecessors. In relation to his poetic fathers--and to adopt briefly the familial model of Bloom's theory--Bokenham is a son frustrated into rebellion. One ingenious aspect of his rebellion, however, deserves attention. Bokenham recruits St Katherine of Alexandria, the saint synonymous with high intellectual achievement, into his own campaign against the established medieval canon. To some extent David Lawton and Sheila Delany have discussed Bokenham's attempt at "some other way" of writing. 9 However, it has not yet been observed that a unique innovation within his passio of the martyr Katherine of Alexandria represents a kind of May-day triumph for the... 2ff7e9595c
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