Lydgate’s Fabula duorum mercatorum [The Tale of Two Merchants]¹ is a 910-line poem that exemplifies the extraordinary friendship between two merchants. Lydgate’s source is a short, straightforward twelfth-century exemplum which becomes in Lydgate’s hands a courtly and philosophical romance shot through with allusions — both implicit and explicit — to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.² Although the poem stands apart from Lydgate’s other short narrative poems³ in its narrative sophistication, and its survival in seven medieval manuscripts suggests some contemporary popularity, it has received little critical attention.⁴ Yet it is one of the best medieval treatments of the popular theme of male friendship, and in its rhetorical complexity and overall quality, it deserves to be better known.

The tale centers on two merchants, one from Egypt and the other from Baldac (in Syria),⁵ who become acquainted through trade. Knowing each other only by hearsay, they are delighted to meet when the Syrian travels to Egypt on business. After eight days of entertainment and socializing, the visitor falls ill. All the doctors of the land are summoned, who, after much deliberation, diagnose love sickness. After bringing forth all the women in his household, the Egyptian finally summons a woman he has brought up in his house with the intention of marrying her, and his guest confesses that she is the woman he loves. The Egyptian unhesitatingly gives her to the Syrian, along with her dowry and the gifts he had intended for her when she became his wife.

Some years later, the Egyptian, having lost all of his wealth, travels to Baldac, seeking his friend’s help. Arriving in the middle of the night, ashamed of his penury and afraid of being turned away, he spends the night in a mosque where, during the night, a man is murdered. In despair, the Egyptian confesses to the murder. As he is led to the gallows, his friend recognizes him and seizes the opportunity to repay the Egyptian’s previous kindness by crying out that he himself is the murderer. As the Egyptian is taken to the scaffold, the real murderer feels such contrition and guilt that he confesses, and all three are brought before the king, who marvels at this extraordinary display of loyalty, love, and friendship. The Egyptian, after receiving half his friend’s goods, then chooses to return home, although his friend has offered him a home in Baldac.

SOURCE AND NARRATIVE CONTEXTS

Lydgate’s narrative source is the second tale from the Disciplina Clericalis, a collection of exempla compiled and translated from Arabic to Latin in twelfth-century Spain by Petrus Alfonsi, a Jewish doctor and scholar.⁶ This collection of thirty-four didactic tales is, according to Eberhard Hermes, the “oldest collection of novelle in the Middle Ages,”⁷ and it became well known throughout Western Europe, serving, as “a sort of bridge or literary medium through which Eastern, predominantly Arabic popular stories, proverbs and sayings, [were] transmitted or transplanted to Europe.”⁸ The Fabula is based on the second tale of the collection, “The Perfect Friend.”⁹

This tale became the source for a number of continental and English tales of friendship, which developed along two different but analogous lines. One of these is represented by Boccaccio’s prose tale of Titus and Gisippus in the Decameron (eighth day, tenth story). While Alfonsi’s tale remains at the core, Boccaccio made some significant changes and additions to plot details and setting,¹⁰ and his version of the story became itself a source for many subsequent retellings. In fact, English writers treated it in verse, prose, and drama up until the nineteenth-century,¹¹ and it seems still to be the best known version of Alfonsi’s story. The other line of development, to which Lydgate’s poem belongs, contains tales that more closely follow the narrative details of Alfonsi’s tale, and examples can be found in many early European and Middle English exempla collections, for example, in the Alphabet of Tales and Caxton’s Aesop (the first of the “Fables of Alfonce”).¹² The version of the tale closest to Lydgate’s is contained in the Gesta Romanorum, a collection of exempla probably compiled in the late thirteenth-century that circulated throughout Western Europe.¹³

GENRE AND THEME

The difference between these very short, didactic, exemplary works and Lydgate’s poem is profound. Lydgate’s thematic concerns go beyond simply illustrating a perfect friendship and extend to an examination of the linked themes of fortune, love, and friendship. The first part of the Fabula — for it falls neatly into two parts, each anchored by a test of friendship — shares with The Knight’s Tale an examination of the claims of friendship and those of love but offers an alternative to the potential clash engendered when two men fall in love with the same woman. In the case of Palamon and Arcite, the clash is deadly, but in the Fabula it is averted when the Egyptian relinquishes to his friend the woman they both love.¹⁴ In the second part of the poem, an even more severe test of the friendship mirrors the first. The Egyptian merchant, finding himself friendless and impoverished, seeks death in his misery and despair. Confessing to a murder he has not committed, he is saved by the Syrian, who offers his own life for that of his friend. There are many Boethian echoes in this part of the Fabula, as the Egyptian merchant moves from despair to consolation and understanding that only true friendship can provide stability in an unstable world. Both parts of the poem are also steeped in allusion to Chaucer’s great romance Troilus and Criseyde, which elevates the doomed love of Troilus to tragedy and provides, like The Knight’s Tale, a Boethian framework within which to understand human experience.

While Lydgate sticks to the basic narrative details of his original, he elevates it significantly with the addition of a variety of material. He infuses the first part of the poem with romance convention, casting the merchants as noble lovers and the object of their affection as a courtly lady, and creating, then solving, a conflict between the duties of love and friendship that was not present in Alfonsi’s version. He also adds a good deal of contemporary medical lore, mainly on the symptoms and diagnosis of the Syrian merchant’s illness, that may seem out of place. Yet the merchant’s malady, lovesickness, is at the heart of this part of the poem, and the very experience of falling in love and nearly dying from the condition, as well as the noble friendship that allows the Egyptian to relinquish the object of his affection, contribute to the elevation of the poem to romance. In the second part of the poem, Lydgate’s expanded descriptions and additions of detail impart a clear Boethian sensibility to the whole, contrasting worldly instability with the enduring quality of the merchants’ friendship: in the face of sublunary change and the fickleness of fortune, true friendship is the only thing that can be counted upon. Lydgate’s skilful synthesis of a variety of materials — romance and courtly love convention, classical and medieval friendship ideals, medieval medical lore, and Boethian ideals — effectively transforms the original short, simple exemplum on perfect male friendship into an elaborate and complex narrative linking the themes of friendship, fortune, and love.

ROMANCE AND FRIENDSHIP

The Fabula’s closest literary relative is the romance rather than the exemplum. Defining just what constitutes a romance is notoriously difficult, but this definition by D. S. Brewer remains one of the most helpful:

Romances are idealistic in moral tone and physical setting; they are usually about noble love and brave adventure concerning knights and ladies in exotic settings and culminating in marriage; and they are often elaborately written.¹⁵

In the Fabula, Lydgate creates a highly idealized tone and setting, elevating his merchants to the status of courtly lovers and noble friends, and placing them into an explicitly romance setting. The poem is peopled with noble characters who move within a courtly landscape, in evidence from the opening stanza, which places us immediately into the exotic and faraway land of Egypt, and indeed recalls the opening of both Chaucer’s Knight’s and Squire’s Tales:

In Egipt whilom as I reede and fynde, Ther dwellyd a marchaunt of hih and gret estat, Nat oonly riche but bounteuous and kynde, As of nature to hym it was innat. For alle vertues in hym wern aggregat, Of vices voyd, pitous, and merciable And of his woord as any centre stable.16 (lines 1–7)

once (long ago) generous gathered together kind and merciful

The merchants themselves are immediately characterized in noble terms: the Egyptian is wealthy, generous, and kind, and the Syrian too is honest and worthy. Further, this friendship is also idealized in terms that remind us of romance, particularly romances of male friendship. The theme of male friendship had some currency in medieval continental and English romance literature,¹⁷ as evinced by such works as Amis and Amiloun and its many analogues,¹⁸ Sir Amadace, Eger and Grime, and Guy of Warwick,¹⁹ and by its popularity as a subject for discussion in such works as Gower’s Mirror de l’Omme (13693–740) and de Meun’s Roman de la Rose (lines 4680–4762 and 4865–4974).²⁰ The protagonists’ relationships in the romances are based on chivalric ideals of knightly brotherhood as well as classical friendship ideals, and although Lydgate’s merchants are hardly knights, they are nevertheless elevated beyond their bourgeois status by their virtue and innate nobility. They can be ideal friends because of their virtue, and the friendship in turn ennobles them. When this friendship is threatened first by a courtly love triangle and then by despair and imminent death, they choose friendship: each gives up that which is most valuable to save the life of the other.

Lydgate draws heavily on classical and medieval ideals to portray the relationship between the two merchants, invoking Aristotelian and especially Ciceronian ideals that emphasize virtue as the basis for friendship.²¹ In the Fabula, virtue is immediately emphasized in the opening stanza. The Egyptian is entirely free of vice, innately generous and kind. The equally virtuous Syrian is worthy, beloved, and honest (lines 43–44). Virtue draws them together (line 47) and they become fast friends without ever having seen each other:²²

Withoute siht, ech is to othir deere Love hath her hertys so soore set affyre. (lines 90–91)

When they meet, it is as established friends: “Wolcom my feithful freend so deere!” (line 140) exclaims the Egyptian. In its development and subsequent testing, the two merchants’ friendship demonstrates several key components of the ideal, summarized usefully by Reginald Hyatte:

[P]erfect friendship exists only between virtuous men who love virtue in one another for its own sake; amici veri [true friends] are like a single soul in two . . . bodies; they have all possessions in common, and their affection is reciprocal; their characters, tastes, and opinions are in complete agreement; while growing closer to one another in intimacy, they also grow in virtue and wisdom that benefit others besides themselves; vera amicitia [true friendship] . . . is worth pursuing and even dying for; it requires a long period of maturation and testing; it lasts for a lifetime or even beyond life; and finally, there are exceedingly few, if any, living examples to which to refer.²³

The merchants’ own virtues and their ennobling friendship²⁴ elevates them from their bourgeois status and fits them for courtly romance. Their manners, their speech, their behavior, and the world within which they move conform to all the conventions that govern this world of romance. They conduct themselves nobly and courteously at all times, enacting patterns of gentil behavior that govern, for example, greeting and leavetaking,²⁵ feasting and reveling, hawking and hunting — a particularly aristocratic pursuit — and, especially, falling sick with love.

AMOR HEREOS AND ITS SOURCES

The love-stricken Syrian merchant in Lydgate’s poem suffers from an illness that Lydgate, drawing upon a long medical and literary tradition, identifies as “Amor Ereos” (line 336). Suffered perhaps most famously by Arcite in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, “the loveris maladye / Of Hereos” (CT I [A] 1373–74) is the medical condition of lovesickness, an acute melancholia brought about by excessive love that, if left untreated, could be life-threatening.²⁶ The conventional symptoms of lovesickness included a changed appearance, insomnia, and melancholy, and are well-illustrated by the love-stricken Arcite in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale:

His slep, his mete, his drynke, is hym biraft, That lene he wex and drye as is a shaft; His eyen holwe and grisly to biholde, His hewe falow and pale as asshen colde, And solitarie he was and evere allone, And waillynge al the nyght, makynge his mone; And if he herde song or instrument, Thanne wolde he wepe, he myghte nat be stent. (CT I[A] 1361–68)

Like Arcite, the Syrian merchant suffers so acutely from melancholy that his life is in danger. The first part of the poem is replete with medical details concerning the Syrian’s symptoms, the doctors’ struggles to identify the causes of his illness, their diagnosis of lovesickness, and the causes of this disease. Lydgate draws so heavily on medical terminology and current medical knowledge to describe the symptoms and diagnosis of this illness that this abundance of medical detail threatens at times to derail the poem. However, these details, in combination with numerous allusions, both explicit and implicit, to Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, place the Syrian firmly in the company of other noble sufferers like Arcite and Troilus.

As both Marion A. Wells and Mary Wack explain, the term “Amor Hereos” and the idea of acute lovesickness seem to have their roots in Arabic medical lore, transmitted to Western Europe in the eleventh-century by Constantine the African, whose chapter on lovesickness in the Viaticum “was the most widely-read text on the subject” until a translation of Avicenna’s Canon medicinae became available in the late thirteenth-century.²⁷ It is not known how Constantine’s “amor qui et eros dicitur” became amor hereos, but the term seems to have arisen by a conflation of the words eros, erotic love, and hero. As Wells explains, “The conflation of [these] two distinct etymological lines . . . seems to have provided sufficient opportunity for the coining of the hybrid term amor hereos.”²⁸ Wack notes that eros seems to have become heros very early in the tradition, and suggests that love and nobility were linked as early as the twelfth-century.²⁹ Gerard of Berry’s twelfth-century commentary on the Viaticum, the earliest to survive, explicitly links the medical and the social in his description of the sufferers of “amor qui heros”: “Heroes are said to be noble men who, on account of riches and the softness of their lives, are more likely to suffer this disease.”³⁰ The association between nobility, love, and love-melancholy had become firmly established not only in medical treatises but also in such literary works as Andreas Capellanus’s twelfth-century Art of Courtly Love, in which Andreas describes love as “a certain inborn suffering” and takes as a given that it is both noble and ennobling.³¹ At the same time, commentaries on the Viaticum as well as other numerous medical treatises³² discuss the causes, symptoms and treatment of lovesickness as they would any other disease. By the fourteenth-century, lovesickness as a specific medical condition that could be suffered only by the noble was well established.

THE CAUSES OF AMOR HEREOS

Lydgate provides an abundance of sometimes bewildering medical detail to establish the diagnosis of lovesickness, drawing heavily on contemporary medical knowledge and terminology to describe in detail the causes and effects of the particular illness known as amor ereos. Though it is difficult to say whether Lydgate had an exact source for his lengthy description of the process whereby a lover falls prey to the malady (see lines 330–50), one close contemporary description comes from the Lilium Medicinae of Bernard of Gordon, a well-known fourteenth-century physician.³³ This popular medical treatise contains a description of amor hereos which is very close to Lydgate’s:

The cause of this passion is a corruption of the virtus aestimativa on account of a firmly fixed form and figure. Thus when anyone is overcome by love [philocaptus], with reference to any woman, he so conceives her beauty and figure and manner that he thinks and believes that she is more beautiful, more venerable, more attractive, and more gifted in nature and conduct than any other; and thus he ardently desires her without method or measure, thinking if he could attain his end it would be his felicity and blessedness . . . .³⁴

This description depends on our understanding of medieval theories of how the mind works. Mental activity was explained in terms of three main ventricles, or cells, in the brain, each given over to a particular task. According to John Trevisa, translating the work of the early encyclopedist Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the first cell is the ymaginativa, or imagination, which forms images delivered to it by sense impressions. The middle ventricle is where logic is found, wherein “Þe vertu estimatiue is maister”; and the third and last is memoratiua, memory.³⁵ The imaginative faculty³⁶ receives images which are examined and judged by the middle cell, the estimative, while the third ventricle “retains such forms as pass this examination and so is the seat of memory.”³⁷

Lovesickness is caused when the estimative faculty malfunctions, overestimating an excessively pleasing form and judging it to be better and more beautiful than any other. The estimatyfe then orders the imaginative faculty “to fix its gaze on the mental image of the beloved” — it “ovirlordshipith / his imagynatif” (line 340) — and this faculty “in turn orders the concupiscible faculty to desire that person alone.”³⁸ The process leads to melancholy solitude and can even result in madness (“manye,” line 344) as the lover’s soul becomes fixated on the object to the exclusion of all else.

AMOR HEREOS, FEVER AND TROILUS

The Syrian’s main symptom, a “brennyng fever” (line 202) is not usually the most prominent feature of the literary lover nor a well-attested symptom in medical treatises. But Lydgate may have found this detail in the work of Giles de Corbeil, or Aegidius Corboliensis, the “Gyles” of line 308.³⁹ Lydgate’s description of the three different sorts of fevers the Syrian might have, Effymera, Putrida, and Etyk, closely resemble Giles’s discussion.⁴⁰ An explanation for the connection between lovesickness and fever can be found in both the medical and literary traditions which fix the seat of emotions in the heart and not the brain.⁴¹ According to medieval physiology, the heart was not an organ which pumps blood but a furnace “from which heat and vital spirits spread outwards along the arteries, to warm and vivify all the members.”⁴² A fever is the natural heat of the body gone out of control, as Bartholomaeus explains: “Feuer cometh of distemperaunce of the herte, for as Constantinus seith, a feuer is an vnkynde hete that cometh out of the herte.”⁴³ And this is the source of the Syrian merchant’s fever: Cupid’s arrow has stricken him in his breast (line 225), and he feels it “hoolly” in his “herte” (line 232).

Love is also conventionally described in literary tradition in terms of fire and heat. In the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose and Troilus and Criseyde, fever is connected with the pains of love. In the Romaunt, the God of love warns the young lover about the many pains of love he is bound to suffer:

Thou shalt no whyle be in o stat
But whylom cold and whilom hat,⁴⁴
Now reed as rose, now yelowe and fade.
Such sorowe, I trow, thou never hade;
Cotidien ne quarteyn,
It is nat so ful of peyne. (Frag. B, lines 2397–2402)⁴⁵

The comparison of love’s pains with those of “cotidien” or “quartan” fever is taken a step further in Troilus, when the young Trojan, in order to hide the pains of love by which he is suddenly smitten,

a title . . . gan him for to borwe
Of other siknesse, lest men of hym wende
That the hote fir of love hym brende,
And seyde he hadde a fevere and ferde amys. (Troilus and Criseyde, 1.488–91)

Troilus’s choice of fever as an appropriate cover for his illness would be a natural one, since both fever and love are hot. It would have been a small leap from the consideration of fever as an appropriate disguise for lovesickness to the treatment of it as an actual manifestation of the disease.

Book 1 of Troilus may have provided Lydgate his inspiration for the Fabula’s explicit connection of lovesickness and fever. Lydgate would have recognized the similarity between the situations of Troilus and the merchant, who both suffer from a love which they feel compelled to keep secret. Both suffer alone and in agony, and both are wounded by the “fyr of love” (Troilus, line 436), but while Troilus feigns fever to cover his symptoms, the Syrian merchant actually experiences a serious fever. In Troilus, the descriptive focus is on the general imagery of love’s fire and heat: love’s fire burns Troilus so that he loses his color “sexti tyme a day”; he wishes to see Criseyde, “his hote fir to cesse” (line 445) but the “ner he was, the more he brende” (line 448). In the Fabula, Lydgate converts the imagery of love’s burning fire into the literal fact; his merchant becomes ill with a real, “brennyng fevere” (line 202) which threatens his life. In his employment and description of this fever, Lydgate skilfully synthesizes medical theory and literary convention.⁴⁶

THE FABULA AND THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY OF BOETHIUS

The Consolation of Philosophy of 6th-century philosopher Boethius provides a significant background for understanding the Fabula. In the Consolation, Lady Philosophy appears to Boethius,⁴⁷ who, imprisoned and facing execution for treason, bewails the loss of his riches, position, and friends, blaming his present unwarranted adversity and the injustice of his situation on bad fortune. Through a series of dialogues, Lady Philosophy leads Boethius to an understanding of the nature of Fortune, happiness, free will, evil, and God’s providence. One of her first lessons is that bad fortune is actually good fortune because it reveals that only things of true value — virtue, love, friendship — are not subject to the mutability characteristic of the sublunary world ruled by Fortune.⁴⁸ This is, of course, also the lesson learned by both merchants in the second part of the poem, which traces the Egyptian’s fall from prosperity into poverty, his bitter complaints against Fortune, his despairing bid for death by confessing to a murder he did not commit, and his redemption, brought about by the same friendship he thought he had lost. Lydgate ties the Egyptian’s losses to the theme of worldly instability and sharply contrasts the stability of friendship with the instability of the sublunary world. Only when the Egyptian is at his lowest point can he be rescued from despair and certain death by the Syrian’s selfless act of friendship, which act in turn prompts the true murderer to confess his guilt, thereby saving the Syrian through the virtue of truth.

That Lydgate may have drawn on the Consolation to shape the Fabula is not surprising; this popular and enormously influential work was readily available in Latin and had been translated several times into both French and English by the fifteenth-century.⁴⁹ Three of the most significant were the French translation of Jean de Meun, continuator of the Romance of the Rose, Chaucer’s English prose translation, Boece, and John Walton’s 1410 English verse translation.⁵⁰ Lydgate’s own monastic library at Bury St. Edmund’s had at least a partial Latin copy of the Consolation, British Library, MS Royal 8.B.4, as well as a copy of Nicholas Trevet’s commentary.⁵¹ This library, one of England’s largest and best, almost certainly would have had a complete copy as well. Yet Lydgate seldom mentions Boethius. In the vast corpus of his work, Lydgate refers to Boethius only four times, just twice as the author of the Consolation.⁵² And in the Fall of Princes, Lydgate shortens the tragedy of Boethius to only five stanzas and makes no reference to the Consolation, though he does mention Chaucer’s Boece briefly in the Prologue to the work.⁵³ This led Henry Bergen, the Fall of Princes’s editor, to remark rather dryly that “Lydgate’s knowledge of Boethius as a philosopher . . . does not seem to have been very profound. He must have known something about Chaucer’s [Boece] . . . yet he may never have read it.”⁵⁴ It may have been this comment to which Richard Dwyer refers in the only article of which I am aware on Lydgate’s specific use of the Consolation.⁵⁵ The Fabula may now provide a similar example. Lydgate may have turned to the Consolation to provide gravitas to his romance, particularly in the light of its resemblances and persistent allusiveness to Chaucer’s two great philosophical romances, The Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. Like these, the Fabula examines virtue, love, friendship, and human experience within a philosophical context provided by Boethius.

Echoes of Boethius lie behind the Egyptian merchant’s plunge from prosperity to poverty. At the nadir of his fortunes, he resembles those figures whose falls from high to low form the de casibus tradition of which Lydgate’s monumental Fall of Princes is the fullest (and lengthiest) fifteenth-century English expression.⁵⁶ De casibus narratives like Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale are based on a concept of tragedy that comes ultimately from Boethius: “What other thynge bywaylen the cryinges of tragedyes but oonly the dedes of Fortune, that with an unwar strook overturneth the realmes of greet nobleye.”⁵⁷ The merchant is not a noble, though both friends have been presented as such over the course of the poem, but perhaps that is the point: all who live under the sway of the blind goddess are subject to the turning of her wheel. Like the eminent men whose falls are recorded by de casibus literature, he too has been blind-sided by the “unwar strook” of Fortune; and like them too he is an exemplar of those who think their positions can be secure in a sublunary world. Lydgate spells this out for us: “Take heed, ye ryche, of what estat ye bee / For in this marchaunt your myrour ye may see” (lines 664–65). The merchant is a mirror as much as are those “pryncis” of the Fall of Princes, whose stories show “a merour how al the world shal faile / And how Fortune . . . Hath vpon [them] iurediccioun.”⁵⁸

But although the Fabula may gesture toward de casibus tragedy, the Egyptian merchant’s story does not end at the bottom of Fortune’s wheel. Unlike the unfortunates whose falls are permanent, and unlike Boethius himself, the merchant is restored to happiness. Paradoxically, it is in his redemption and the means by which it is achieved that the influence of the Consolation can most clearly be seen. The Fabula demonstrates in the Egyptian’s downward plunge and restoration that when the illusory gifts of “worldly blisse” (line 565) are withdrawn, all that remains is friendship, a virtue which, existing outside of Fortune’s domain, is the only thing each merchant has that is truly valuable. This is exactly what Lady Philosophy points out to Boethius in the Consolation of Philosophy at the end of Book 2: “Now pleyne the [thee] nat thanne of rychesse ylorn, syn thow hast fouwnden the moste precyous kynde of rychesses, that is to seyn, thi verray freendes.”⁵⁹

The Egyptian merchant’s situation in particular recalls that of Boethius. Having lost his wealth, his position, and, most importantly, his friends, the Egyptian wanders alone and homeless in the wilderness, his misery made more acute by the remembrance of “oold prosperité” (line 533). Like Boethius, who explains to Philosophy that “in alle adversites of fortune the moost unzeely kynde of contrarious fortune is to han ben weleful [i.e. prosperous],”⁶⁰ the merchant blames fortune for his desperate condition, bewailing his situation in a long lament (lines 549–88) decrying the instability of the world. Both men at this stage understand their situations in terms of the “sodeyn turn” (line 566) of Fortune’s wheel. Each is more acutely aware of his misery because he was formerly fortunate, and each blames fortune for his desperate condition.

Both Boethius and the merchant move toward enlightenment through wise philosophical counsel. Philosophy teaches Boethius that so-called bad fortune reveals what is truly worthwhile, and the Fabula’s narrator, addressing the merchant, counsels patience in adversity. Quoting Seneca,⁶¹ the narrator explains that no one can be virtuous “withouten assay” (line 609), particularly if he has been weighed down by too much plenitude and “fals felicité” (line 614). The merchant now recognizes that the world is “ful unstable” (line 622). Having achieved this insight, he falls to his knees, putting himself under God’s protection and praying for hope. Significantly, he does not ask for his riches to be restored. He receives immediate “consolacioun” (line 640) in the form of a new understanding about those fleeting gifts, and he determines to seek his friend’s help. Like Boethius, the merchant has moved from misery and complaint to the beginnings of recognition that friendship is outside of Fortune’s domain.

Yet the Egyptian suffers a further setback. Arriving in Baldac, he suddenly feels deeply ashamed and finds that he cannot, after all, forget his former wealth and position. Shrinking from the possibility that his friend might turn him away, he resolves to spend the night in a temple where he witnesses a murder. In deep despair, he confesses, hoping death will bring a final end to his suffering. Here we encounter a striking parallel between the Fabula and the Consolation in the words of the merchant as he is led to the gallows:

O deth, desyred in adversité, Whan thu art callyd, why nylt thu wrecchys heere? And art so reedy in felicité To come to them that thee nothyng desire? O com now, deth, and maak of me thy feere! (lines 743–47)

adversity happiness (prosperity) partner

As Eleanor Hammond recognized, these lines appear to be a “close and spirited translation”⁶² of several lines from the opening meter of the Consolation of Philosophy.⁶³ Chaucer translated the lines in the Boece⁶⁴ and adapted them in the Troilus,⁶⁵ but Lydgate’s lines are closer to the original than they are to either the literal prose of the Boece or the eloquence of Troilus. Lydgate’s version captures, at a dramatically and contextually appropriate moment, the fervency and emotion of the original, drawing a contrast that emphasizes death’s cruel irony: it too often comes unbidden but too seldom comes to those who desire it. The lines aptly parallel those of the Consolation in context and tone, and their appearance here is strongly suggestive.⁶⁶

Striking imagery that seems rooted in the Consolation prepares for and underlines this turning point in the text. Just before the merchant witnesses the murder, the forward movement of the narrative is halted for a digression on Fortune and the movements of the stars. Fortune’s assaults on both “free and bonde” (line 670) are vividly described, setting up two stanzas implicitly suggesting that Fortune does not, after all, rule the world. There is a plan, and the universe is orderly, despite our inability to maintain a constant awareness of this truth:

For by exaumplys Nature doth declare, Which is of God mynystir and vikeer, Withoute tonge she biddith us beware By thylke sterrys that shynen briht and cleer, Which, by her concours and mevyng circuleer In her discens, westyng undir wavys, Us to enfourmen by chaungyng of hir lawys. And fewe of hem alway to us appeere, But yif it be the bere briht and sheene In thilke plow that Arthow doth it steere; For yit Boetes, that twynkelith wondir keene, Somwhile is dym that men may nat hym seene; Eek Lucifeer, at morowhil prymycere, By nyht hym hidith undir our empeere. (lines 673–686)

minister and vicar be aware those their courses and circular motion inform us Unless it is the bear (the Big Dipper) Arcturus In addition; Boötes; wonderfully bright Sometimes the morning star hides himself under the empyrean

In imagery and context, these stanzas are very close to Meters 5 and 6 of the Consolation’s Book 4, which reassure Boethius that the stars and constellations move according to God’s plan. They are orderly, even if they do not always seem so: “Whoso that ne knowe nat the sterres of Arctour, ytorned neyghe to the sovereyne centre or poynt . . . and wot nat why the sterre Boetes passeth or gadreth his waynes and drencheth his late flaumbes in the see; and whi that Boetes, the sterre, unfooldeth his overswifte arysynges, thanne schal he wondryn of the lawe of the heie eyr.”⁶⁷ The courses of the stars are designed to ensure concord: Ursa “nis nevere mo wasschen in the depe westrene see, ne coveyteth nat to deeyen his flaumbes in the see of the Occian, although it see othere sterres iplowngid in the see. And Hesperus the sterre bodith and telleth alwey the late nyghtes, and Lucyfer the sterre brygneth agein the clere day.”⁶⁸ It is not just the striking similarity in image; in context, too, the references are appropriate. Philosophy is responding to Boethius’s question of why the good are punished and the evil rewarded in what appears to be a random universe. The Fabula’s narrator is likewise signaling that Fortune’s power is limited — and it is significant that Fortune is not mentioned again in the poem.

This cluster of images is immediately followed by an extended reference to Jupiter’s two casks, one filled with honey and the other with gall, an image also found in the Consolation.⁶⁹ The figure is a medieval commonplace,⁷⁰ and Lydgate used it several times, most significantly for this discussion in his “Disguysing at London.”⁷¹ In her cogent analysis of how Lydgate’s conception of tragedy is articulated in the “Disguysing,”⁷² Maura Nolan shows how the topos of the two casks connects Fortune with Boethian tragedy. When Philosophy in the voice of Fortune asks Boethius somewhat mockingly what right he has to complain if he has consumed too much from the cask of sweetness, the question, Nolan notes, “is consistent with the providential vision of the Consolation, in which lament is repeatedly set aside in favor of a philosophy of world rejection, a turning away from earthly matters and toward the divine, toward a universe bound up by love.”⁷³ In the Fabula, the two tuns are also intimately connected with worldly rejection and universal harmony. After hearing of the reassuringly orderly universe, we are urged to “despise . . . erthly lustys” (lines 691–92) and are reminded that we cannot have the sweet without the bitter: “who that wil swetnesse first abroche, / He mot be war, or bittir wol approche” (lines 706–07). The Egyptian has drunk deeply from both (line 708) and is about to utter the despairing lament translated from Boethius. Thus both the “Disguysing” and the Fabula make use of the same cluster of Boethian images and to the same ends. Nolan recognizes Boethius as one of Lydgate’s three main sources for the “Disguysing,” along with Chaucer and Jean de Meun.⁷⁴ It is significant that Fortune, who no longer has any power over either merchant, disappears from the Fabula at this point. The Syrian’s enduring friendship rescues the Egyptian from the gallows and prompts the true murderer to confess, causing the king, amazed at the willingness of one friend to die for another, to release all three men. The power of this friendship to redeem and remove the men from the unstable world governed by Fortune has been aptly demonstrated.

DATING THE FABULA

A date for the composition of the Fabula has not been satisfactorily established. The manuscript texts of the poem contain no headings, marginal glosses, or other notations that might indicate an occasion, a commission, or a patron for the poem. Only Pearsall and Schirmer address the question,⁷⁵ and Pearsall considers it a non-issue. Grouping the poem the poem with Lydgate’s “Fables and Didactic Poems,”⁷⁶ Pearsall says, “the moralistic and didactic preoccupations of these poems are the permanent preoccupations of Lydgate . . . and the manner in which he wrote changed little through the years.”⁷⁷ Schirmer, treating the Fabula in the last chapter of his book on Lydgate’s last works, clearly thought that the Fabula was a very late work, after 1440, but he offers little reliable support. His assessment of Lydgate’s later style is clearly influenced by his interest in depicting Lydgate as a forerunner of humanism,⁷⁸ and his description of the poem itself is flawed by several inaccuracies.⁷⁹ Speculations about date on the basis of style and theme must be treated cautiously.

It may, however, be reasonable to make some suggestions about audience and period of composition if the poem is seen, as the foregoing introduction has suggested, as a philosophical romance rather than a fable or purely didactic work. The treatment of love, the contextualizing of the merchants’ behavior within a courtly setting, and the Boethian shape of the narrative all suggest connections with Lydgate’s courtly poems such as “A Complaynt of a Lover’s Life” and the Temple of Glas as well as his mummings, including the “Disguysing at London,” works probably written before 1430.⁸⁰ Also belonging to this period are “The Mumming at Bishopswood,” “The Mumming for the London Goldsmiths,” and “The Mumming for the Mercers of London.” Wealthy merchants would certainly have been part of the audience for these performances.⁸¹ It might not be unreasonable to suggest a similar audience and date in the late 1420s for the Fabula, which, in its portrayal of merchants’ noble, virtuous, and gentle behavior, might have spoken to the aspirations of the merchant class.

There is what seems to be a contemporary reference near the poem’s end. The king, reflecting on the virtue and faith of the merchants, wishes

that thoruh his regioun Were ful affermyd an obligacioun Of such enteernesse fro man to man aboute; Of tresoun than ful litil wer to doute. Ful hard it were tacomplisshen his desyr, Or in his rewm such a bargeyn dryve, The aeyer infect, the wedir is nat cleer, Ne nevir ne shal whil tresoun is so ryve. For now, of trowthe, no man can contryve A verray seel, or thenpreent igrave, Withoute a label his armes hool to save. (lines 858–68)

complete loyalty It would be hard realm is infected nor will it be; rife produce (create) A true seal or engraved imprint

While the complaints about treason seem generalized⁸² and could refer to any number of events during the reigns of Henry V or VI (including his minority), they are coupled here with some fairly specific concerns about creating and preserving seals, their imprints, and coats of arms. Seals were used to authenticate official letters and documents and were often engraved with armorial bearings or heraldic devices; and labels refer to marks of cadency on heraldic arms that usually indicated the bearer as the eldest son.⁸³ The use of seals and armorial bearings was not limited to kings, nobility, or the knightly classes; the merchant class and the newly emerging gentry had been increasingly adopting armorial bearings of their own volition throughout the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and imprinting these on their seals.⁸⁴ Whether the lines above refer to the upper or middle classes is not clear; nor is it clear whether the treason spoken of might refer to a case of counterfeiting or forging. At this point, no particular historical occurrence or set of circumstances can be identified that would help explain the context of these lines, though they would seem to point to something specific and current.

MANUSCRIPTS, AUTHORSHIP, AND DATE

The Fabula is indexed in IMEV 1481. The poem is found in seven fifteenth-century manuscripts: London, British Library, MS Harley 2251 (Ha); London, British Library, Additional MS 34360 (A); London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 699 (L); Leiden, University Library, MS Vossius Germ. Gall. Q. 9 (V); Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry F. 32 (R); Cambridge, University Library, MS Hh.4.12 (C); and London, British Library, MS Harley 2255 (H). The text is complete in only three of the manuscripts, H, C, and V. L is missing eight stanzas, Ha and A are missing one each, and R is missing the final two. Five of these manuscripts (Ha, A, L, V, and H) are part of a larger group of interrelated fifteenth-century English manuscripts. Many are Lydgate anthologies, a number are directly or indirectly connected with John Shirley, and several significantly overlap in terms of the number and order of their Lydgate items, which in some cases are also strikingly similar in text and textual variants.⁸⁵ With respect to our group, L and V, often called “sister manuscripts,” share closely similar Lydgate texts and variants; Ha and A, both derived from Shirley manuscripts, share the same scribe and a number of Lydgate items; and H has twelve Lydgate poems in common with Ha.

London, British Library, MS Harley 2251 (Ha): 293 leaves, on paper, dated by Manly and Rickert after 1464 and by Hammond to “during or after the reign of Edward IV.”⁸⁶ Both this volume and A belong to a group of manuscripts which in whole or in part were copied by the Hammond scribe, so called because he was first identified by Eleanor Hammond. This scribe was active in London between the 1460s and 1480s and copied a large variety of works, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, Fortescue’s Governance, Lydgate’s and Burgh’s Secrees, and many others.⁸⁷ Harley 2255 contains 133 religious and secular items, most of them Lydgate’s. The Fabula appears on fols. 55r–70r and ends with this colophon: Explicit ffabula duorum mercatorum De et super gestis Romanorum. Lines 100, 171, 214, and 484–90 are missing, and stanza 17 appears after stanza 12.

British Library, MS Additional 34360 (A) (olim Phillips 9053): 116 leaves, on paper, with a terminus ad quem of 1485.⁸⁸ This MS, also copied by the Hammond scribe, contains 24 items in common with Ha, eleven of which appear in the same order in both. Like Ha too, it contains mostly Lydgatian works. The Fabula appears on fols. 4r–18v and ends with the same colophon as appears in Ha. The text is also missing the same lines, with the exception of 171, and stanza 17 is also misplaced.

London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 699 (L): 176 leaves, on paper, quarto, mid to late fifteenth-century. The manuscript consists of two main parts, the first (fols. 1–94) containing Chaucer’s “Fortune,” “Truth,” and sixteen Lydgate items (all of which also appear in V), and the second (fols. 96r–176r) containing Lydgate’s Life of Saint Albon and Saint Amphibalus.⁸⁹ The Fabula appears on fols. 3r–18r. Stanzas 41–48 are missing, owing to a leaf lost between folios 7 and 8.

Leiden, University Library, MS Vossius Germ. Gall. Q. 9 (V): 135 leaves, quarto, late fifteenth-century. Like L, V consists of two parts, distinguishable on the basis of hand, paper, and gatherings. The first part of the manuscript (fols. 1–116) contains the same eighteen items as appear in L, ten of them in the same order. The second part contains Lydgate’s Testament and eight anonymous short works. The parallels with L in the first part of this manuscript, not only in content but also in the frequently similar texts and variants, led Van Dorsten to posit a common ancestor.⁹⁰ The Fabula appears on fols. 49–65.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry F. 32 (R): a small volume, on paper and parchment, dating from perhaps the mid to late fifteenth-century.⁹¹ Its contents are varied, including several shorter religious and didactic pieces, four by Lydgate, and two longer works, Brut and Libelle of English Policy. The Fabula appears on fols. 38r–53v, with the last two stanzas of the poem missing, owing to a lost leaf after fol. 53. (Folio 54r is blank, save for an indecipherable scribble; a new text, the “Prouerbis of Wysdom” (IMEV 3502) begins on fol. 54v.)

Cambridge, University Library, MS Hh.4.12 (C): a quarto volume on paper and parchment, dating from the late fifteenth-century,⁹² with many poems by Lydgate; it also includes Burgh’s Cato and ends with an incomplete copy of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls. The Fabula appears on fols. 61r–77r and is not titled. It ends simply with a scribal ffinit.

London, British Library, MS Harley 2255 (H): Harley 2255 is an illuminated volume of 157 leaves, on vellum, measuring 10 3/4 by 7 5/8 inches. Most of the forty-five items are religious and didactic poems; of these, twenty-five are specifically marked explicit quod Lidgate, and in two more Lydgate names himself as author. This is clearly a quality manuscript, with illuminated capitals flourished with green sprays and gold balls, blue or gold paraph marks, and a clear, well-proportioned fifteenth-century hand.⁹³ Formerly thought to have been produced for Lydgate’s abbot, William Curteys, possibly under Lydgate’s own direction, and thus dating to no later than the 1440s,⁹⁴ the manuscript can now with some confidence be placed in the group of manuscripts written by the “Edmund-Fremund scribe” and dated to the 1460s. It was certainly written at least in part and probably in whole by this scribe, who was responsible for at least ten other manuscripts (including four of Lydgate’s Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund) characterized by hand, decorative program, primarily Lydgatean contents, and probable location in Suffolk, perhaps even in the town of Bury St. Edmunds.⁹⁵ The text of this edition is based on Harley 2255, the earliest of the seven and one of the best authorities for Lydgate’s work. This is also the text upon which the Schleich and Zupitza (1897) and MacCracken (1934) editions are based. However, neither edition takes account of all seven manuscripts, Schleich and Zupitza omitting V and MacCracken C.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

As outlined in the General Introduction, I have followed METS guidelines in preparing this edition of the Fabula. I have based the edition on the text in Harley 2255, emending very little and only when not to do so would cause confusion. I have silently expanded scribal abbreviations, taking the macron to indicate m or n. Strokes ignored as otiose are those occasionally appearing on final r or penultimate r with s, and h with a cross-stroke, which appears frequently but entirely inconsistently. (MacCracken ignores flourished r and generally the crossed h, though not consistently; Schleich and Zupitza are also inconsistent in both cases). I have also silently separated words written as one word where clarity dictates there be two; for example acerteyn (line 26) becomes a certeyn. On the other hand, two-word phrases beginning with for when for is used as an intensifying prefix (see MED for-, pref. 1) have been joined: forwar (line 389), forpossyd (line 532), forblowe (line 563), forwhirlyd (line 574), format (line 662), and fordempt (line 755) on the model of scribal forfareth (line 445), fordoo (line 483) and forwandryd (line 662). For astonyd (line 729), however, as it often appears as a set phrase (see MED astonyd, (ppl)) has been left unaltered. Where the scribe writes the I/i of the past participle signifier as a separate word, I have silently joined these words as well; for example, I fet becomes ifet (line 58). I have also inserted stanza numbers for ease of reference. The textual notes include substantive variants that record significant differences in meaning or form as well as any emendations I have made. I have not included variations in spelling or grammatical form (for example, no/noon, thankyth/thankid), though on occasion I have included an interesting or unusual example. Where the meaning is the same but the form significantly different, I have also included the variant (for example, eke/also). I have ignored spelling differences between variants, including only one form, usually from the sigla that comes first alphabetically. If it is uncertain whether the variant records a different word or simply a different spelling (for example, dool/dulle), I have also included it. I do not make a special point of indicating where my text or collation differs from MacCracken’s or Schleich and Zupitza’s. I have not usually noted whether variants are scribal corrections nor have I included marginalia unless it is of particular interest.