John Lydgate

John Lydgate (1370 – 1449)

1. A benedictine monk
2. Works:
   1. Prose
      1. The Serpent of Division (1422)
   2. Poems
      1. The Troy Book (1412-20)
         1. Written at the behest of The Prince of Wales, later King Henry V.
         2. An attempt to recount the story of the Trojan War
         3. The poem is a translation and expension of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, a Latin Prose account written in 1287.
      2. The Siege of Thebes (1420 -22)
         1. Written in his midlife, and completed before the death of Henry V.
         2. The work is based on some version of the French Roman de Thebes (c.1175).
         3. The main body of the work is an elaborate 4540-line exemplum chronicling the disastrous careers of a series of deeply flawed kings: Oedipus, his sons Eteocles and Polynices and finally Creon.
         4. Lydgate imagines himself joining Chaucer’s pilgrims in Canturbury and narrates a tale that is meant to be a companion piece to The Knight’s Tale.
      3. The Fall of Princes (1431 – 38)
         1. Charts the rise and fall of the fortunes of famous people.  Similar to Boccacio.
         2. It begins with the fall of Adam and Eve and ends eight books later with the account of the capture of King John of French at Battle of Poitiers in 1356. Containing 36365 lines, his longest poem
   3. Courtly Poems:
      1. The Complaint of the Black Knight
      2. The Foure of Courtesye and The Temple of Glas (1403)
   4. Saints’ Lives
      1. The Man of Law’s Tale
   5. Devotional Poems:
      1. The Life of our Lady
      2. The Dance of Death