With The Boke of Cupide, God of Love John Clanvowe begins a modern English literary tradition.¹ Although he does not laud Chaucer by name, he is the first to write "Chaucerian" poetry, for himself and his friends, and also for Chaucer. Fifteenth-century poets would call Chaucer "floure of rethoryk / In Englissh tong and excellent poete,"² "worthie Chaucer glorious,"³ "noble Chaucer, of makaris flour,"⁴ "gronde of wel-seying . . . / My maister Chaucer,"⁵ and "the honour of Englissh tonge," "maistir deere and fadir reverent, / My maistir Chaucer, flour of eloquence, / Mirour of fructuous entendement," "firste fyndere of our fair langage."⁶ Although Chaucer would not be called "father" again until John Dryden termed him the "Father of English poetry" in his preface to Fables Ancient and Modern centuries later,⁷ Edmund Spenser in the English Renaissance referred to him as "Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled."⁸

Whatever merits there may be in such accolades, the identification of Chaucer as "ground," "father," "first finder [originator]," and "well" of English poetry would seem to present him as foundation and inventor, father and source of poetic inspiration in English,⁹ as if poets no longer need rely on the fountain Hippocrene, sacred to the muses. Praises of Chaucer that present him as a "father" or "source" of English poetry or poetic inspiration in such a way imply that his qualities as a poet are transhistorical, but, in fact, it is writers like Clanvowe, Spenser, and a host of others in between who created an enduring Chaucerian tradition by responding in vigorous and innovative ways to Chaucer's work. It is their efforts, as much as those of Chaucer, that generated an active vernacular literature in medieval England. Though one might expect that such praises of Chaucer would elevate in turn a writer like Clanvowe to the status of "father" or "first founder" of English literary tradition (since he is the first to write a Chaucerian poem that survives), they have instead diminished his importance and occluded his work. Similarly, while fifteenth-century writers looked to John Gower and John Lydgate as examples of poetic excellence alongside Chaucer,¹⁰ Chaucer's work later overshadows the two almost entirely.¹¹ Although many of these poets achieved an entree to the tradition through their Chaucerian allusions and imitations, ironically, the literary canon they helped create disregarded them as derivative and extraneous. Ultimately, the high value placed on Chaucer has meant that the efforts of poets like Clanvowe, who helped fashion the Chaucerian aesthetic, lost their value as "original" works and came to seem instead pale imitations to be ejected from the Chaucer canon.

But Clanvowe was more than just an imitator. His Boke of Cupide draws significantly on earlier English writing, such as The Owl and the Nightingale, alongside Chaucer and the French poetry Chaucer embraced. In keeping with the dynamic of a literary tradition, Clanvowe is a "poet's poet," writing for a specific audience keenly attuned to the refinements of poetry making. Clanvowe shares this readership's interest in elevating vernacular poetry to a high station in the fields of intellectual discourse and entertainment,¹² what Chaucer speaks of as the "best of sentence and moost solaas" (CT I[A]798). Clanvowe is one of those self-generated "sons of Chaucer,"¹³ writing for a sophisticated audience that shares his delight in the artifice of poetry, with its conventions and its variety. In his interest in and anxiety about producing poetry in English, as opposed to Latin or French, he likewise espouses a tradition of vernacular writing that Chaucer followed but did not invent. Both these strains illustrate Clanvowe's participation in a lively vernacular literature that relies on a variety of traditions, both native and continental, that continue in later English poetry. Clanvowe is a tradition maker who writes as part of a cohort of imagination and wit - a cultural imagination and a cultural wit - that culminates in the English Renaissance among other devotees of language and wit.

At the beginning of Book 6 of The Faerie Queene Spenser, just such a devotee, invokes the delights of poetry as a therapeutic pleasure terrain for sophisticated audiences well versed in literary scenery:

The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde,
In this delightfull land of Faery,
Are so exceeding spacious and wyde,
And sprinckled with such sweet variety,
Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye,
That I, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts delight,
My tedious travell doe forget thereby;
And when I gin to feele decay of might,
It strength to me supplies, and chears my dulled spright. (6.Proem.1)

The restorative pathways through which Spenser would guide himself and his audience nearly two centuries after Chaucer are both old and new - perpetually fresh: a kind of literary playground with the power to "ravish" ardent tourists who peruse its lines. Some think of the English Renaissance as that time when classical literature was rediscovered, but Spenser is not thinking of rebirth in that way. He is celebrating vernacular poetry, as his praises of Chaucer show, and the riches of this English literary tradition are occupied by a burgeoning "Chaucerian family," of which Clanvowe was, perhaps, the eldest (if largely forgotten) son. To be sure, Spenser is much attuned to continental literature, both French and Italian, just as Chaucer and his circle were, but it is the vernacular language - his language and the language of his people - that he celebrates. At the same time, with his archaisms and borrowings from French and Latin, Spenser perhaps seeks to gain his own place in English poetry even as he pays tribute to Chaucer; his deliberately artificial language, akin in its polyglot resonances to the "quaint" verse of Chaucer, in effect suggests a "new" past for English poetry that includes his own efforts alongside those of his beloved "Dan Chaucer."¹⁴ Indeed, Dryden remarked in his Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern that "Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body; and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease."¹⁵

As poets participating in a vibrant field of literary effort, Clanvowe and Spenser have much in common: they write poetry for and amidst poets. But the "Dan Chaucer" Spenser follows is comprised of Chaucer, Clanvowe, Hoccleve, Scogan, Lydgate, and a whole host of anonymous writers enjoying a Chaucerian fashion in poetry. In his Boke of Cupide Clanvowe is one of the first to respond to and borrow from the playing field of Chaucer's poetry. Writing even as Chaucer was beginning work on The Canterbury Tales,¹⁶ he walks the well-sanded paths¹⁷ of The Tale of Palamon and Arcite (which would become The Knight's Tale), The Parliament of Fowls, The Legend of Good Women, and The Romance of the Rose, and he does so with the audacity and delight of a proto-Spenser, an acolyte in the court of love poetry and its servants, who slyly reinvents his master's work even as he celebrates it through impersona-tion. The self-stimulated paths of this adventurer, whose reading causes him to lie awake at night yearning for bird-talk, lead his eyes and ears into groves where nightingales might speak to him. His is a knowing voyeurism realized in the waking world of language and poetry.

From its inception, The Boke of Cupide inhabits a Chaucerian landscape, accompanied by the rhetoric of French dream visions. Clanvowe's poem is written for an audience that has a well-defined set of expectations and a highly developed taste for Chaucerian style, an audience that included Chaucer himself. Chaucer provided much of the background for the Clanvowes, Hoccleves, and Scogans (and, later, the Lydgates) who extended and reinvented his work. This explains why these poets begin to appear alongside their "original" (Chaucer) in Chaucerian anthologies; this begins even as early as Oxford, Bodleian Library manuscripts Fairfax 16 (c. 1430-50) and Tanner 346 (third quarter of the fifteenth century), and continues in William Thynne's 1532 edition of "Chaucer" and all subsequent printed editions for the next several hundred years. These Chaucerian writers, like the later poets of The Flower and the Leaf and The Assembly of Ladies, are all folded into "Chaucer" and adorn the paths of Spenser's "delightfull land of Faery," with its "sweet variety / Of al that pleasant is to eare or eye."

In its first two lines, The Boke of Cupide, God of Love, decked out in spring in its most colorful (rhetorical) dress, broadcasts its affiliation with the subject of love and, more specifically, with Chaucer's love poetry. As soon as we read them, we know this is the world Chaucer enjoyed - the love world of The Parliament of Fowls, of Cupid - "'God save swich a lord!' - I can na moore" (PF, line 14); the world of The Knight's Tale:

The God of Love, a benedicité! How myghty and how grete a lorde is he! (lines 1-2)18

ah bless you

But these borrowed lines are more than straightforward reproductions. The wit and humor of Clanvowe's poem depends on playing with and redeploying materials Chaucer provided; its deft retuning of phrases that have been used in other contexts shows that The Boke of Cupide is a full participant in a literary game requiring a good sense of fun, written for a vernacular, literate audience. Though for Clanvowe it was new, from our perspective this is a long-standing tradition, and the Chaucerian reverberations of Clanvowe's poem mark him as the first to shape this tradition by turning Chaucer into a reciprocating audience.

Clanvowe's plot is deliberately perplexed, given to self-agitation, as the narrator attempts to imagine himself into Chaucer's love world, desirous of a May experience with "feveres white," where one would sleep "but a lyte" (lines 41-42). Even though he feels "olde and unlusty," he works himself into a "hote and colde" state (lines 37, 39) that leaves him tossing and turning with love-longing on the "thirde nyght of May" (line 55).¹⁹ Although he recognizes the arbitrary nature of Love, who makes some laugh and others sigh, some glad and others sad (lines 18-19), the narrator still yearns to hear the song of the nightingale, Love's messenger. Pondering a lovers' saying that "hit wer good to her the nyghtyngale / Rather then the leude cukkow syng" (lines 49-50), he decides to go out in search of the nightingale's song.

Outside, the meadows are "poudred with dayse" (line 63),²⁰ and the birds are preening, dancing, and leaping "on the spray . . . evermore two and two in fere [together]" (lines 77-78), having chosen their mates back in March. The birdsong is of such a soothing harmony that the narrator quickly falls into a swoon between sleeping and waking. But as soon as he succumbs to this half-sleeping state, instead of the thrilling trill of the nightingale, he hears the cuckoo's cry - for lovers an inauspicious sign indeed.²¹ Angry that his lover's swoon yields only the song of "[t]hat sory bridde, the lewde cukkowe" (line 90), he grumbles, "who was then evel apayed but I!" (line 92). As if in answer, he hears a nightingale reply to the cuckoo and finds that in his self-induced state he is able to understand the two birds. The cuckoo and the nightingale at once begin an argument about the nature of their respective cries. The narrator, perhaps hoping to be lucky in love, favors the nightingale and prays that the cuckoo might suffer: "I prey to God that evel fire him brenne" (line 105).

The cuckoo argues that his own cry is "trewe and pleyn" (line 118), easily understood by all, and accuses the nightingale of speaking obscurely. The nightingale responds by suggesting in her cry - "Ocy! Ocy!" - that she very much wishes "[t]hat al tho wer shamefully slayne, / That menen oght agen Love amys" (lines 129-30), adding:

"And also I wold al tho were dede, That thenk not her lyve in love to lede, For who that wol the God of Love not serve, I dar wel say he is worthy for to sterve, And for that skille 'Ocy! Ocy!' I crede." (lines 131-35)

wish all those; dead plan not their lives; lead will die reason; cry

The cuckoo rejects the nightingale's "queynt lawe, / That eyther shal I love or elles be slawe" and announces his refusal either to die or, while he lives, to put himself under "Loves yoke" (lines 136-37, 140). These responses, together with the cuckoo's dismissal of lovers as diseas-ed and weak, rouse the incensed nightingale to a vociferous defense of love. She catalogues the virtues of the God of Love's service, arguing that it produces all goodness, honor, nobility, pleasure, heart's desire, perfect joy, trust, happiness, delight, cheerfulness, humility, faithful companionship, graciousness, generosity, courtesy, and fear of shame or doing wrong. Finally her list culminates in the claim that "he that truly Loves servaunt ys, / Wer lother to be scham-ed then to dye" (lines 159-60).

The cuckoo, on the other hand, argues that love is the cause of misfortune, sorrow, care, sickness, resentment, debate, anger, envy, reproof, shame, distrust, jealousy, pride, mischief, poverty, and madness. "Lovyng is an office of dispaire," he warns (line 176) that only leads to abandonment as soon as one turns one's back. The cuckoo's sniping against love finally provokes the nightingale to a personal attack - "Fye . . . on thi name and on thee!" (line 186) - but her defense reveals the liabilities of Love's service. Although she argues that lovers gain something from surrendering to Love, "[f]or Love his servant evermore amendeth [improves], / And fro al tachches [blemishes] him defendeth" (lines 191-92), it is equally clear that Love is the source of a lover's pain, since that is what "maketh him to brenne as eny fire" (line 193). Further, when she says that the God of Love "whom him likes, joy ynogh him sendeth" ("sends plenty of joy to whomever he likes," line 195), the nightingale echoes the narrator's observa-tions at the beginning of the poem that Love is an arbitrary and willful master.

Willfulness is, in fact, the charge that the cuckoo levels next against Love, and it is one the nightingale cannot answer. After first contending that "Love hath no reson but his wille" (line 197) the cuckoo proceeds to expose the consequences of such willfulness. According to the cuckoo, Love is not worthy to be followed because "ofte sithe [frequently] untrew folke he esith, / And trew folke so bittirly displesith, / That for defaute of grace hee let hem spille [die]" (lines 198-200). This is because, like Fortune, Love "is blynde and may not se" (line 202) and in the court of Love truth seldom does any good, "[s]o dyverse and so wilful ys he [Love]" (line 205). After this attack the nightingale bursts into tears, through which, despite her assertion that she "can for tene [sorrow] sey not oon worde more" (line 209), she pleads with the God of Love for help in avenging herself on the cuckoo. Not one to hesitate when Love's duty calls, the narrator catches up a stone that he casts "hertly" (line 218) at the cuckoo, who flies away calling out, "Farewel, farewel, papyngay" (line 222) as he soars out of sight.

At the end of the poem the nightingale thanks the narrator for chasing away the cuckoo and promises to try to be the first singer he hears the next May (if she is still alive and not afraid). In the meantime, she hopes that the narrator will not believe anything the lying cuckoo said and suggests that looking at the daisy will ease the pain of lovesickness. The nightingale then sings a song to the narrator, "I shrewe hem al that be to Love untrewe" (line 250), before flying away to complain to the other birds about the cuckoo. The poem ends with the promise of a parliament to judge the cuckoo on the next Valentine's Day, after which the nightingale's song, "Terme of lyve, Love hath withholde me" (line 289), awakens the narrator abruptly.

Clanvowe's poem, conceived and performed in the rarified environs of the Chaucer circle, immediately takes residence in manuscripts that serve as anthologies - bouquets of like-minded verse for a poetry-hungry audience.²² The three earliest collections that include the poem, Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Fairfax 16, Tanner 346, and Bodley 638, are closely related in their selection of contents. In Fairfax 16, the largest and earliest of these, The Boke of Cupide lives in the company of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, as well as his dream visions, complaints, and most of the shorter poems.²³ The manuscript also contains poems by Lydgate (including A Complaynte of a Lovers Lyfe and The Temple of Glass), Hoccleve (including The Epistle of Cupid), Richard Roos (La Belle Dame sans Mercy), and a few anonymous pieces.²⁴ Tanner 346 contains a smaller but very similar lineup, with Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, Anelida and Arcite, Complaint of Mars, Complaint of Venus, and Complaint unto Pity; Hoccleve's Epistle of Cupid; Lydgate's Complaynte of a Lovers Lyfe and Temple of Glass; and some anonymous pieces.²⁵ Bodley 638 reproduces many of these same works, including Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Parliament of Fowls, Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, Anelida and Arcite, Complaint unto Pity, An ABC, and Fortune; Lydgate's Complaynte of a Lovers Lyfe²⁶ and Temple of Glass; Hoccleve's Letter of Cupid; and some anonymous pieces.²⁷ In their focus on dream visions, complaints, and the shorter lyrics, these three anthologies seem primarily interested in Chaucer as a courtly love poet.²⁸

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24, a Scottish anthology, begins with Chau-cer's Troilus and Criseyde, followed by a number of short proverb-style poems;²⁹ and also includes Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Parliament of Fowls, Complaint of Mars, and Complaint of Venus; Lydgate's Complaynte of a Lovers Lyfe; Hoccleve's Mother of God and Letter of Cupid; two short religious lyrics;³⁰ The Kingis Quair; and a number of pieces unique to this manuscript, including The Quare of Jelusy (included in the present volume), several only a few stanzas in length.³¹ Although the contents seem not quite as cohesive as in the other three manuscripts, this may reflect in part a different scheme of unification, that of Chaucer as author. In fact, Arch. Selden. B. 24 seems concerned with producing an anthology not just of courtly love poetry, but more specifically of Chaucer's works; thus, of the first fourteen items, which contain the Middle English selections, six are by Chaucer, and another five are inaccurately identified as his, while only three, including The Boke of Cupide, remain unattributed.³² This is in contrast to manuscripts Fairfax 16, Tanner 346, and Bodley 638, discussed above, which note the authorship of Chaucer's shorter pieces, such as Fortune, Truth, or The Complaint to His Purse, but leave the dream visions and longer complaints without attribution. By the same token, the poems by Lydgate, Hoccleve, and others are just as likely to be presented anonymously in these collections.

In the Findern manuscript (Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6), discussed in the General Introduction to this volume,³³ the major Chaucerian poems (Chaucer's Complaint unto Pity, The Parliament of Fowls, extracts and some of his shorter poems; Hoccleve's Letter of Cupid; and Richard Roos' La Belle Dame sans Mercy) are interspersed with a number of selections from Gower's Confessio Amantis, various works by Lydgate (e.g., "The Wicked Tongue"), and many anonymous short lyric poems and carols, a significant number of which appear as unique copies in Findern. What is notable is that Findern's collection does not group the usual set of Chaucerian poems as closely to one another as the other manuscripts discussed here. Each of the "major" contributions is surrounded by smaller anonymous pieces that form a significant portion of the manuscript.³⁴ In Findern an interest in lyric and complaint forms seems to drive most of the selections, giving The Boke of Cupide a less unified and less Chaucerian context. While certainly having a stake in the "game of love," the collection seems to display less of an interest in Chaucer's work than the others, with only six of the 62 items by Chaucer, a number equaled by selections from Gower's Confessio Amantis, while there are four items by Lydgate. By far the largest selection of works (more than half the items) comes in the form of short lyrics, carols, and complaints, most of which are anonymous.³⁵ Findern, like the other anthologies, reflects the interests and needs of its audience, and The Boke of Cupide and other Chaucerian pieces seem to have occupied a different space in their literary imagination - that, perhaps, of inspiration, if the arguments for some of the anonymous lyrics "represent[ing] original contributions by the compilers" are to be believed.³⁶

That The Boke of Cupide is Chaucerian there can be no doubt, and that it was written by Clanvowe is virtually certain. In the Findern manuscript the poem ends with the attribution "explicit Clanvowe,"³⁷ and most scholars agree on this basis that the poem was written by Sir John Clanvowe, one of Chaucer's contemporaries who died in 1391.³⁸ Lee Patterson is doubtless right in his assertion that Clanvowe was a friend and "literary colleague"of Chaucer.³⁹ Retained first by Edward III and then by Richard II, Clanvowe was one of a group of knights who were, if not outright Lollards, at least Lollard sympathizers.⁴⁰ Not yet condemned as heretics in the late 1380s, the Lollards were a group of religious dissidents whose arguments reflected the thought of John Wyclif, an Oxford theologian. Concerned with the increasing signs of Church decadence, the lack of education amongst the clergy, and the dependence of the laity upon clerical authority, Wyclif and his followers argued for a direct relationship between each individual and God, without the need for mediation by a priest. Wyclif began translating the Bible into English as a part of an attempt to make the interpre-tation of God's word available to everyone.⁴¹ That Clanvowe had such interests is suggested by his composition of a prose tract The Two Ways, "a treatise which shows some sympathy with Lollard positions."⁴²

Of the four poems included in this volume, Clanvowe's is not only closest in time to Chaucer, but also arguably has the most "Chaucerian" flavor. The poem is heavily indebted to The Parliament of Fowls as well as The Knight's Tale, and the reference to the meadow of daisies in the beginning of the poem hints at the possibility that he wrote it after Chaucer had composed the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (c. late 1386). The poem's resonances with Chaucer's poetry point to its intertextual richness, displaying a deep pattern of allusion to Chaucer and, to a lesser extent, to the French marguerite poetry on which Chaucer himself drew, as well as earlier English bird debates.⁴³ In fact, The Boke of Cupide was not excluded from the Chaucer canon until the late nineteenth century, a fact that John Conlee notes "is not at all surprising" because of its overt use of Chaucerian components and "its wryly comic treatment of love and lovers," which gives it a particularly Chaucerian tone.⁴⁴ Though William McColly argues on the basis of a statistical comparison between The Boke of Cupide and some of Chaucer's best known poetry that Clanvowe's poem is "nothing more than a primitive imitation" of Chaucer,⁴⁵ David Chamberlain's view of the poem as a witty font of "literary jokes involving Chaucer"⁴⁶ is the more common perception amongst scholars.

The Boke of Cupide follows established traditions in combining dream vision with debate, two genres that not infrequently took love as their subject, but also, in their self-consciousness, examined the rigors of debate itself.⁴⁷ More specifically The Boke of Cupide is in a tradition of bird debates, such as the early Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, the thirteenth-century Thrush and the Nightingale, or the later, fragmentary Clerk and the Nightin-gale.⁴⁸ It ostensibly shares with many of these a preoccupation with the nature of love or fidelity; it also partakes to some degree of the debate poet's impulse to use legal discourse and become embroiled in contemporary religious or political issues. In The Owl and the Nightin-gale, for example, the birds both "at times adopt a homiletic style" as they argue about the relationship of their respective songs - and habits of living - to their love of and service to the Church,⁴⁹ and the two birds' arguments further convey a "legalistic flavor" because of the use of "legal tags and terms,"⁵⁰ as well as exempla and proverbs.⁵¹ These tendencies, together with the debate structure, give the impression of "the pleas and counter-pleas of advocates."⁵² In fact, though some critics have tried to downplay the use of legal terminology, the critical wrangling over the poem's connection or lack thereof to the law, court procedure, legal discourse, and so on points to its centrality.⁵³ Clanvowe's poem is to some extent looking beyond Chaucer towards this earlier English tradition of bird debates, though there is certainly plenty of political subject matter in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls.⁵⁴

Where The Thrush and the Nightingale and The Clerk and the Nightingale both center on the nature of women, The Boke of Cupide resembles The Owl and the Nightingale in that the focus of the debate is the birds' respective cries. The uses of legal language in Clanvowe's poem occur mostly on the cuckoo's side, as when he queries the nightingale's cry and calls it a "queynt lawe" (line 136) and claims he will not follow her "counseyl" (line 165), or when he calls loving "an office of dispaire" (line 176), and argues that, although the lover may "beget" a little pleasure from love, as soon as he lets his attention lapse he gets what he deserves ("He may ful sone of age have his eire," line 180), and finally concludes that in Love's "court ful selde trouthe avayleth" (line 204). But ultimately, these gestures towards legal argument seem no more than token, and The Boke of Cupide does not appear as invested in the trappings of legal language as the earlier poem is. For example, where the narrator of The Owl and the Nightingale is called to adjudicate between the two birds, in The Boke of Cupide the narrator is never asked to play the role of judge and in any case clearly takes the nightingale's side before the debate even begins. Where the owl and the nightingale make constant overt recourse to proverbs and hurl legal language at one another, turning their thickets into a courtroom setting, most of the emphasis in the argument between Clanvowe's birds centers on the qualities of love and the duty/fate of its servants, with little interest in legalities. Nevertheless, Clanvowe's poem clearly invokes the pleasures of the debate genre it shares with The Owl and the Nightingale - pleasures that consist of listening to the antagonists and taking sides: it succeeds, in other words, in making readers into contestants themselves.

And critical readings of Clanvowe's poem have been just as heated, investigating both its treatment of courtly love and its more political or religious concerns. Thus, some critics have taken the poem's initial declaration at face value and read it as a poem about love. In this vein, the debate has been interpreted as a contest between concupiscence and marriage⁵⁵ or cynicism and maudlin sentimentality.⁵⁶ But despite the poem's declared focus on love, the alignment of the nightingale and the cuckoo with language use and gender has suggested to other critics that the love debate masks religious or political resonances. Accordingly, some scholars have focused on the historical circumstances surrounding the poem's production, interpreting the debate as a controversy over erotic and divine love,⁵⁷ polyphonic and monophonic music,⁵⁸ courtly language and "truth-telling,"⁵⁹ or the Church and Lollardy.⁶⁰ This variety of responses gives the poem a layered effect, where surface and depth play against each other, and the difficulty of sorting through the possible readings clearly becomes another part of the poem's appeal.

Most interpretations focus on the differences between the speech of the cuckoo and the nightingale (in effect, their respective cries), and this is in fact what the two birds themselves focus on. As the cuckoo's "trewe and pleyn" singing (line 118) squares off against the nightingale's "nyse, queynt crie" (line 123), the cuckoo establishes the terms of the debate by claiming that his own language is unambiguous, while the nightingale's words are incompre-hensible. In his complaint the cuckoo specifically targets the nightingale's cry "Ocy! Ocy!" (line 124), for which he demands an explanation. The nightingale says that the cry means that whoever is against love will be killed, revealing that the word "ocy" is the imperative form of the Old French verb occier, "to kill." This set of exchanges lies at the heart of the debate between the two birds and marks the heat of the tension.⁶¹

The opposition between transparent and ornate speech suggests a concern over the clarity of language common to medieval poetry. But more than the traditional medieval preoccupation with ambiguity, the poem's concerns would seem to reveal a specific interest in the status or potential of English as a literary language. That is, the poem engages in a debate over the validity of the vernacular that ultimately will help expand the playing field of poetic delight that Spenser so generously imagines. The French root of the nightingale's cry turns the confrontation into one beween "queynt" French and "pleyn" English, where the cuckoo's "trewe and pleyn" song that may be understood by "every wight" (lines 118, 121) suggests its affiliation with the vernacular. English (accessible to everyone), opposes the nightingale's elusive song (courtly/aristocratic French), which the cuckoo implicitly condemns with his references to ornate embellishment: "my songe is bothe trewe and pleyn, / Althogh I cannot breke hit so in veyne / As thou dost in thy throte, I wote ner how" (lines 118-20). Here, the cuckoo lauds his own song as the unvarnished truth, claiming that he lacks the skill to give his melody the kind of pointless frills that the nightingale generates "in veyne."

Although typically the vernacular is gendered female (the "mother tongue"), the fact that the nightingale is female and the cuckoo male (as is clear from the pronouns used for each) suggests a new alignment of English as masculine and French as feminine. The cuckoo's characterization of the nightingale's cry as a "queynt lawe" that invokes the dire conundrum "eyther shal I love or elles be slawe" (lines 136-37) emphasizes both the ornate qualities of the cry and the hidden violence inherent in the God of Love's code. At worst, you die; at best, if you do listen to the nightingale's "queynt crie," the cuckoo seems to suggest, you may end up seduced by her "queynt lawe," a "papyngay" (line 222) like the narrator, good only for rote entertainment at court.⁶² The cuckoo refuses both these possibilities, saying, "For myn entent is neyther for to dye, / Ne while I lyve in Loves yoke to drawe" (lines 139-40). The nightin-gale's answer equates the naturally "gentil" ("noble," line 150) with those who want to enter Love's service, while she condemns the cuckoo for having a "cherles hert" (line 147). Here the nightingale uses the word "churl" as a term of contempt, dismissing the cuckoo not merely as commoner without rank, but more specifically as a scoundrelly fellow who lacks the requisite "gentility" to serve Love. The poem thus sets up an opposition between English, coded as unadorned, true, reasonable, accessible to everyone, even "manly," and French, which is aristocratic, feminized, ornate, excessively emotional, violent, and veiled or secretive.

This encounter between English and French, as embodied in the cuckoo and the nightingale, perhaps expresses a concern about what it means to be writing in the common (non-aristocratic) language of the people. At this moment, just as English was emerging as a full-blown literary language, many practitioners - Chaucer among them - expressed discomfort with writing in English, since it was primarily a spoken language. Latin and French were the languages of privilege - of ecclesiastical, literary, legal, and courtly discourse. Preoccupied with the lack of writing conventions in English, scribes and/or authors of early texts, such as Orm's Ormulum and the texts in the AB dialect (the Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group texts), had made concerted efforts to create consistent dialect and spelling conventions of their own.⁶³ Although Chaucer, Clanvowe, and their immediate contemporaries formed part of a literary movement that was self-conscious and ambitious in unprecedented ways, nonetheless they shared these concerns about the propriety of using English instead of Latin or French in the absence of an English literary tradition, and this formed a central theme of their writing.

At the same time as it raises issues such as the appropriate use of the vernacular, the poem can also be read as a participant in a rich tradition of similar poetry preoccupied with courtly love. More particularly, I want to suggest that The Boke of Cupide may be a response, not just to Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and The Knight's Tale, but also to his Legend of Good Women.⁶⁴ Although V. J. Scattergood argues that it is unclear whether or not Chaucer's Legend provided inspiration for The Boke of Cupide,⁶⁵ nevertheless, the nightingale's declaration that "he that truly Loves servaunt ys, / Wer lother to be schamed then to dye" (lines 159-60) seems to take up the theme of Chaucer's poem, which suggests the irrationality of such a claim through its dark stories of women who do actually die for their fidelity in love. The Boke of Cupide's dream-setting in the field of daisies, similar to that of the Prologue to the Legend, would seem to affirm such a reading, but, since the daisy cult was also popular among French writers who may also have influenced Clanvowe, it is not easy to make such an explicit connection. More suggestive is the accusation the God of Love makes to the narrator in the Prologue to the Legend. The God of Love calls the narrator his "foo" (F.322) and explains that this is because

. . . of myn olde servauntes thow mysseyest,
And hynderest hem with thy translacioun,
And lettest folk from hire devocioun
To serve me, and holdest it folye
To serve Love. Thou maist yt nat denye,
For in pleyn text, withouten nede of glose,
Thou hast translated the Romaunce of the Rose,
That is an heresye ayeins my lawe,
And makest wise folk fro me withdrawe. (F.323-31)

Although ostensibly the "heresye ayeins my lawe" refers to the poem The Romance of the Rose itself, another possible reading of the line suggests that the "heresye" here is really the translation of what should be hidden into "pleyn text, withouten nede of glose" (in other words exposing the truth about Love by writing about it in English rather than French). This is further suggested by the fact that it is explicitly the narrator's "translacioun" that "hynderest" Love's "olde servauntes," rather than the French poem. If the truth about Love is that "he can make of wise folke ful nyse," as the narrator of The Boke of Cupide puts it (line 13), then knowing that may indeed have the effect of "mak[ing] wise folk fro [Love] withdrawe." And if Love's "lawe" is anything like the nightingale's explanation of the meaning of her cry - "That eyther shal I love or elles be slawe," in the cuckoo's "plain" paraphrase (line 137) - telling such an unvarnished truth might indeed drive Love's servants away. These resonances between the particular details of the Prologue to the Legend and the concerns of Clanvowe's poem suggest that The Boke of Cupide may have taken its inspiration from the issues raised in Chaucer's Prologue.⁶⁶

As in The Owl and the Nightingale, the various readings of Clanvowe's poem hinge on a particular interpretation of the birds and their perceived affiliation with a certain type of speech or language. In the case of The Boke of Cupide, the lighthearted presentation, brisk pace, lively dialogue, and sly humor would seem geared to deflect serious readings of the poem, but the way in which critical responses persist in attempting to decipher the "meaning" of the two figures illustrates one of the primary pleasures of Clanvowe's poem, that of dense and layered analysis. Like Chaucer's Wife of Bath, the two figures of the cuckoo and the nightingale give the impression of "real" speakers producing "natural" dialogue in their spirited repartee⁶⁷ but turn out upon closer examination to invoke a host of literary allusions and invite a variety of complicated, often conflicting readings. The poem itself resembles the debate between its two principals in that its brevity and seeming simplicity mask a complicated array of ambiguous possibilities that lends itself to perpetual interpretation. Kirsten Johnson Otey argues that The Boke of Cupide "poses as a courtly love poem" but is really "ask[ing] provocative questions about dissident theological and ecclesiastical opinions."⁶⁸ Certainly these antitheses do not have to be mutually exclusive. In some ways what makes Clanvowe's poem resonate so well with Chaucer's works is its capacity to uphold a number of readings simultaneously, which is clearly one of the pleasures of such highly literary writing. Of course, this ambiguity is not limited to Chaucer's work, as debate poems such as the aforementioned Owl and the Nightin-gale, or courtly poetry like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, equally able to sustain a variety of possible readings, illustrate.⁶⁹ In Clanvowe's case, it is the combination of allusion and the dual-voicing of the narrative - at once lighthearted and slyly critical - that makes the model of Chaucer resonate so well.⁷⁰

What the poem finally achieves is the very Chaucerian effect of tensions held in suspended animation. Clanvowe, after the manner of Chaucer, invites us to side with the cuckoo's advocation of "trewe and pleyn" against the "queynt" and perhaps deadly cry of the nightingale and her "papyngay," only to trick us in the end, as the cuckoo in his "plain" way continually "glosses" the nightingale, offering interpretations of her claims and supposedly telling the truth about the God of Love; all the while the literary contest invites us as readers to strive in turn to change the "trewe and pleyn" poem into a "queynt crie" of our own, obsessively spinning more and more complicated readings out of what seems superficially a straightforward debate. Literary writing in English, it seems, is no less "queynt" than the French it claims to best. The multiplicity of possible readings and the way in which the characters and their debate encourage speculation about meaning without ever offering a satisfactory resolution suggest that Clanvowe's joke is on his readers, who insist on taking him seriously despite his invitation to play. It is a "sentence-and-solaas" joke truly worthy of Chaucer himself, one an audience that has developed a taste for such literary play would be sure to appreciate. The allusions to Chaucer's work and the recycling of Chaucerian themes and phrases make The Boke of Cupide even more wittily delightful for initiated readers of Chaucer. Nevertheless, the clear connections to earlier Middle English bird debates, in particular The Owl and the Nightingale, as well as to French poetry, show Clanvowe not simply as an imitator but also as a maker who stamps his own mark on the Chaucerian verse he creates.

Note on the text

The Boke of Cupide appears in the five manuscripts discussed above and listed in detail below.⁷¹ The poem is also incorporated in several early printed editions of Chaucer, those by William Thynne, John Stow, and Thomas Speght. Skeat classifies the extant texts into two groups: A, comprising the Findern manuscript, Tanner 346, and Thynne; and B, made up of Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638, with Arch. Selden. B. 24 apparently as a third group, "which has readings of its own."⁷² Skeat regarded A as the superior set of manuscripts, adding that "MS. Ff. is, in some respects, the most important," giving no explanation for either assumption.⁷³ Scattergood groups the manuscripts similarly, but includes Arch. Selden. B. 24 with the others in Skeat's group A, noting that, though "they have in common 17 errors," the high number of unique errors in each text shows that correspondences between the four versions in this group are not as close as those between the Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638 copies, "which share more than 30 common errors" but have relatively few unique errors.⁷⁴ According to Scattergood's calculations, the Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638 versions are closely related, and "[i]t may be that they derive from a common exemplar; but neither can have been copied from the other."⁷⁵

This edition of the poem is based on the text in Fairfax 16,⁷⁶ with emendations and some alternate readings from the other manuscripts recorded in the textual notes, according to the practices laid out in the General Introduction. I have taken the horizontal stroke above words such as br_ne (line 105) to be an abbreviation for a nasal consonant (n/m) and have expanded accordingly. Other strokes and flourishes are disregarded as otiose. Fairfax 16 is probably the earliest of the manuscripts, though Tanner 346 may be contemporary or only slightly later; the Tanner 346 copy, however, contains a number of errors, including missing and transposed lines, a problem that Thynne's edition shares.⁷⁷ Bodley 638 is somewhat later (third quarter of the fifteenth century),⁷⁸ and would also be a good choice. Arch. Selden. B. 24 is from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century and contains an incomplete copy. ⁷⁹ The Findern manuscript, a largely amateur production, is also among the latest of the extant witnesses.⁸⁰


Indexed in

IMEV 3361.


Manuscripts

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16 (SC 3896), fols. 35v-39v (c. 1430-50). [Base text for this edition.]

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Tanner 346 (SC 10173), fols. 97r-101r (mid- to late fifteenth century). [Adds four stanzas (balade with envoy).]

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 638 (SC 2078), fols. 11v-16r (late fifteenth century).

Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6. (Findern MS), fols. 22r-28r (c. 1500). [Adds two seven-line stanzas after the Explicit.]

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 (SC 3354), fols. 138v-141v (late fifteenth or early sixteenth century). [Lines 1-246 only.]


Early printed editions

Thynne, William, ed. The Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newly Printed: With Dyuers Workes Whiche Were Neuer in Print Before. London: T. Godfray, 1532. [STC 5068. Rpt. 1542, STC 5069; ?1550, STC 5071. Adds balade with envoy. Based on Tanner 346.]⁸¹

Stow, John, ed. The Workes of Geffrey Chaucer: Newly Printed, With Diuers Addicions, Whiche were Neuer in Printe Before: With the Siege and Destruccion of the Worthy Citee of Thebes, Compiled by Jhon Lidgate. London: J. Wight, 1561. [STC 5075. Based on Thynne.]

Speght, Thomas, ed. The Workes of our Antient and Lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chavcer, newly Printed. London: G. Bishop, 1598. [STC 5077. Rpt. 1602, STC 5080; 1687. Based on Thynne.]