John Lydgate
born c.
1370, Lidgate, Suffolk, Eng.
died c. 1450, Bury St. Edmunds?
English poet, known principally for long
moralistic and devotional works.
In his Testament Lydgate says that while still a
boy he became a novice in the Benedictine abbey
of Bury St. Edmunds, where he became a priest in
1397. He spent some time in London and Paris;
but from 1415 he was mainly at Bury, except
during 1421–32 when he was prior of Hatfield
Broad Oak in Essex.
Lydgate
had few peers in his sheer productiveness;
145,000 lines of his verse survive. His only
prose work, The Serpent of Division (1422), an
account of Julius Caesar, is brief. His poems
vary from vast narratives such as The Troy Book
and The Falle of Princis to occasional poems of
a few lines. Of the longer poems, one translated
from the French, the allegory Reason and
Sensuality (c. 1408) on the theme of chastity,
contains fresh and charming descriptions of
nature, in well-handled couplets. The Troy Book,
begun in 1412 at the command of the prince of
Wales, later Henry V, and finished in 1421, is a
rendering of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia
troiana. It was followed by The Siege of Thebes,
in which the main story is drawn from a lost
French romance, embellished by features from
Boccaccio.
Lydgate
admired the work of Chaucer intensely and
imitated his versification. In 1426 Lydgate
translated Guillaume de Deguilleville’s Le
Pèlerinage de la vie humaine as The Pilgrimage
of the Life of Man, a stern allegory; between
1431 and 1438 he was occupied with The Falle of
Princis, translated into Chaucerian rhyme royal
from a French version of Boccaccio’s work. He
also wrote love allegories such as The Complaint
of the Black Knight and The Temple of Glass,
saints’ lives, versions of Aesop’s fables, many
poems commissioned for special occasions, and
both religious and secular lyrics.
His work
is uneven in quality, and the proportion of good
poetry is small. Yet with all his faults,
Lydgate at his best wrote graceful and telling
lines. His reputation long equalled Chaucer’s,
and his work exercised immense influence for
nearly a century.
