The two narrative poems in this volume by John Lydgate (ca. 1371–1449) might at first seem an unusual pairing. The Fabula Duorum Mercatorum, an English poem despite its Latin title, has at its narrative core the conflict between amor and amicitia, love and friendship. Drawing on medical lore, courtly love convention, and Boethian philosophy,¹ it is a polished and accomplished romance. Guy of Warwick, on the other hand, relates in chronicle fashion the final episode in the life of the titular pilgrim knight, one of England’s greatest and most familiar heroes. The Fabula is set in the exotic east, its central characters presented as courtly lovers; Guy is firmly anchored in England, its central character presented as a real-life Warwick ancestor and his story as part of “real” history. Although they differ in subject matter, style, and genre, the two poems have several features in common. Both are relatively short, accessible narrative works that deserve to be better known but have received little scholarly scrutiny.² Both are very likely from the same period in Lydgate’s career, the 1420s; both exhibit typical features of Lydgate’s style, though to different effect; and both exhibit a mixture of genres. Both have at their heart an exemplary thrust and both are based on an earlier source, the Fabula on a very brief twelfth-century exemplum and the Guy on a Latin prose chronicle.³ In each case, Lydgate’s treatment of his source governs his purposes, style, and approach.

In the Fabula, Lydgate completely transforms his source, expanding a short didactic tale exemplifying the perfect friend into an elevated narrative. In its literary allusiveness and its treatment of love, friendship, and fortune, the Fabula takes up a number of significant medieval themes and bears comparison with the best works of its type. In its resolution of the love triangle, it can be seen as an answer to Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, for example,⁴ and in its explicit evocation of the Consolation of Philosophy it invites comparison to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. In genre it most closely resembles a romance, as I have termed it above, but it retains something of the exemplum it is based on, and it is often described under the label of a fable or didactic poem,⁵ though it is certainly more complex than these labels imply. The poem’s exemplarity and moral thrust arises from the conduct of the two merchants who rise above their own self-interest in the service of a larger ideal, which at poem’s end elicits a murderer’s confession and prompts a “wise, worthy king” (line 857) to see into the truth of things and render true justice. In Guy of Warwick, by contrast, the tone and approach are meant to evoke history and chronicle. Here, Lydgate does not so much transform as shape his source to articulate the political desires of a patron. The poem is, at least in part, designed to assert the Warwick ancestral claims of Margaret de Talbot, daughter of Richard Beauchamp, thirteenth Earl of Warwick. A number of its significant features are attributable to this patronage, including the choice of a chronicle rather than a romance source, an insistence on the authority of the chronicler,⁶ and the presentation of Guy himself as noble hero, brave knight, devout pilgrim, and Warwick ancestor in equal measure. He is an exemplar of all that is best in a particularly English hero. The exemplary and moral thrust of the poem arises from this balanced presentation as well as from its warnings about pride and tyranny, against which only the virtuous, with God’s help, may stand. Like the Fabula, Guy of Warwick is also difficult to pin down generically. Many medieval versions of the Guy legend were romances that often had strong hagiographical elements, but Lydgate’s Guy, based on the chronicle tradition that had inserted Guy into actual history, downplays hagiography.⁷ The poem resists categorization into one particular genre; it is neither romance nor saint’s life, though in the view of A. S. G. Edwards, it contains “elements of both.”⁸

The rhetorical style of each poem suits its subject matter and purpose. The Fabula is a good example of Lydgate’s elaborate, rhetorical style, consisting of — though not necessarily limited to — elevated, aureate diction, amplification, didactic digression, wide-ranging, often encyclopedic references and allusions, and loose, paratactic syntax.⁹ In the Fabula, Lydgate successfully harnesses these devices to transform the original exemplum into something new. The poem is, as Pearsall says, a superb exercise of style.¹⁰ In the Guy, on the other hand, the digressions and amplifications are often more overtly didactic, and the syntax is particularly problematic. Sentences are loose and paratactic in the extreme and often substitute infinitives or participial phrases for finite verbs. Josef Schick’s oft-quoted criticism of Lydgate’s excessive anacoluthon uses an example from Guy: “There is . . . no instance of the anacoluthon in [the Temple of Glas] quite so bad as the beginning of Guy of Warwick where . . . not only the predicate of the sentence is wanting, but the subject as well.”¹¹ This difficult syntax may be due in part to Lydgate’s source, which Lydgate was translating from convoluted medieval Latin prose into English poetry. The style and approach suit a poem that seeks to embed its hero firmly in history and underline Margaret’s ancestral claims.

Guy of Warwick also illustrates Lydgate’s position as a sought-after poet who wrote many poems on commission for some of the most important and powerful people in England. Lydgate wrote several of his lengthiest and most important works for members of the royal family, for example: the Troy Book for the future Henry V, the Fall of Princes for Henry’s brother, Humphrey of Gloucester, The Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund for the young Henry VI.¹² He also wrote in a variety of genres for other nobility, gentry, civic officials, and merchants; as Robert Meyer-Lee puts it “[n]o other English poet was patronized so consistently by the dominant political figures of his day nor by so broad a spectrum of society.”¹³ Margaret’s father, Richard, Earl of Warwick, was himself a patron of Lydgate’s. A powerful political figure and guardian of the infant Henry VI, Richard commissioned The Title and Pedigree of Henry VI, designed to demonstrate Henry’s rightful kingship over England and France. Lydgate’s Guy implicitly alludes to Richard in its praise of the “Olde erle of Warwik” (line 316).¹⁴ The Fabula, by contrast, offers no evidence with respect to a possible patron, circumstances of composition, or occasion, aside from a possible suggestion of a contemporary situation in its final lines.¹⁵ Both poems were probably written during the decade of the 1420s, and though more is known about the context and occasion of Guy than of the Fabula, there is no real certainty about the specific date of either one.

If both poems do belong to the 1420s, they were written during a particularly busy and productive period of Lydgate’s life, after he had written the massive Troy Book, Life of our Lady, and the Siege of Thebes, all complete by 1422, and before he began the Fall of Princes in 1431.¹⁶ During the 1420s, Lydgate produced many shorter works on commission, shorter political and occasional poems as well as the dramatic entertainments known as mummings or disguisings. During this period, as Pearsall says, Lydgate “had the de facto status of an ‘official’ poet . . . who could be relied upon to produce something appropriately dignified for any occasion.”¹⁷ Lydgate seems to have led “an active and public life.”¹⁸ Born in about 1371 in the small village of Lydgate, Suffolk, and becoming a Benedictine monk when he was about fifteen at the great monastery of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, he attended Gloucester college in Oxford where he met the future King Henry V, traveled to Paris, spent time in London, and was for several years prior at Hatfield Broad Oak.¹⁹ His poetic output is extraordinary for its quantity (over 145,000 lines)²⁰ and its variety. Lydgate wrote in every genre: historical epic, de casibus tragedy, saints’ lives, dramatic entertainments, courtly works, political poetry, religious verse, and numerous short didactic poems. His long career — he seems to have died in 1449 — is punctuated by many major works, among them the Troy Book (1412–20), the Siege of Thebes (1421–22), the Fall of Princes (1431–38), and the Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund (1434–36) and of SS Albon and Amphibalus (1439).²¹ These achievements cannot be underestimated, but as John Norton-Smith has remarked, “it is the shorter, occasional poems treating public and private matters that show Lydgate at his best.”²² It is not the purpose of this edition to maintain that these two shorter poems do indeed show Lydgate at his best — though I would argue that the Fabula comes close to fitting the bill — but rather to present two works that are each in some way representative of Lydgate and that together illustrate some of his most characteristic moves.

Editorial Procedure

The Fabula and the Guy of Warwick survive in seven manuscripts each,²³ suggesting that both enjoyed some contemporary popularity.²⁴ In preparing this edition, I have examined all of the manuscripts, either in person or by means of digital, online, or microfilm copies. Both poems were first edited in the late nineteenth century, Guy in 1873 by Julius Zupitza (though this is not a critical edition) and the Fabula in 1897 by Zupitza and Schleich.²⁵ The standard critical edition of both poems is that of H. N. MacCracken, who included both works in his 1934 edition of Lydgate’s shorter poems.²⁶ None of the previous editions collate all seven of the extant manuscripts for each poem.²⁷ Though I have followed H. N. MacCracken in my choice of base texts, I have newly edited each poem from the manuscript, collating the text with the other six manuscripts in each case. I have checked the texts and collations against MacCracken, from whose readings I sometimes differ.

I have tried to present each poem in an accessible, readable form, following modern English capitalization and punctuation conventions, and providing what I hope are helpful glosses and commentary. Each text follows the reading of the base manuscript, in each case the best of the seven manuscripts within which each poem is extant; these choices are explained in the “Notes on the Text” in each individual introduction. I have emended each text very little and only when not to do so would compromise meaning or cause confusion. These few emendations are recorded in the textual notes to each work, which also record substantive variants from all other manuscripts. In accordance with METS editorial guidelines, I have used modern English spelling conventions for words with v/u and i/ j, and have provided modern equivalents for thorns, yoghs, and eths. I have also brought into conformity with modern English spelling y/g, f/ff, w when it is a vowel, the/thee and of/off. Where they occur at the beginning of a word and signal a capital letter, double ffs become F, and when e at the end of a word receives syllabic value it is marked with an accent (e.g., cité). Where the scribe has used Roman numerals, I have spelled them out. Word division is also regularized; examples specific to each text are detailed in the individual “Notes on the Text.”