Lydgate, JOHN

Lydgate, JOHN, an admirer and imitator of Chaucer, was born at Lydgate, near Newmarket, in Suffolk, about 1370, and became a monk in the Benedictine monastery of Bury St Edmunds. He studied some time at Oxford, travelled into France and Italy, and returned a master of their poetry. In the monastery he appears to have taught the rhetoric and philosophy of his time, and he wrote poetry with equal ease upon the most widely different themes. His death probably occurred about 1450, and we have his own evidence that his last years were harassed by poverty. Until his old age he seems to have been more of the poet than the monk, but among his later works are a metrical Life of St Edmund and the Legend of St Alban. Ritson has enumerated in his Bibliographia Poetica no fewer than 251 pieces written by Lydgate, and most probably even this list is incomplete. A selection from the minor poems was edited by Mr Halliwell for the Percy Society in 1840. Lydgate's longer works are the Storie of Thebes, the Troy Book, and the Falls of Princes. The Storie of Thebes is represented as a new Canterbury tale, told by the author after joining the company of pilgrims at Canterbury. It is written in rhyming ten-syllable couplets, and contains about 4780 lines. Its sources are the Thebaid of Statius and the Teseide of Boccaccio. The versification is rough, and, indeed, it cannot be denied that the poem is dull and prolix to a degree, the prologue alone excepted. The Troy Book was undertaken about 1412, at the request of Prince Henry, afterwards Henry V., and was finished in 1420. It is written also in the ten-syllable couplet, and is divided into five books, and founded on Guido di Colonna's Latin prose Historia Trojana. Its best-known passage is the long panegyric on his 'Maister Chaucer' in the third book. The Falls of Princes, divided into nine books, is written in Chaucer's seven-line stanza, and contains upwards of 7000 stanzas. It was written in 1430 by desire of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and is founded on a French paraphrase by Lawrence de Premierfait of Boccaccio's Latin work, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. Other works that may merely be mentioned here are the Dauance of Machabre, or Dance of Death, translated from the French; the Court of Sapience; and the Temple of Glass, a copy of Chaucer's House of Fame.