Alain Renoir

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ALAIN RENOIR ON THE DATE OF JOHN LYDGATE'S MUMMING AT HERTFORD John Lydgate's Mumming at Hertford ia of great importance to stu· dents oE English literature. Not only is it an entertaining1 and highly representative2 piece of work by the most significant poet of immedia­tely post-Chaucerian England, but it is in several respects alandmark in the history of the english drama. In contras! to the morality plays. Lydgate's mummings may be considered the dircct ancestors of the Re· naissance and later theater.3 Specifically, the Mumming at Hertford acts as a bridge between two eras: it looks back to Walter Map and Chaucer,4 and forward to Gammer Gurton's Needle.5 It was among ,he very first English drarnatic works to make use of classical allegory,6 and perhaps the first to import the technique of the French debat. i Despite the obvious importance of the Mumming, scholars have thU9 far failed to assign a specific date to its composition. Eleanor P. Harn­mond has dismissed any attempt at dating it as almost necessarily futi ­le,8 and Francis Lee Utley's statement, that »certainly the poem is be­fore 1448-9, when Lydgate died, «9 is perforce as useless as it is authori· I For abrief critical discussion of the Mumrning at Hertford, sp.e my »The Bind­"ng Knot: three Uses of One Image in Lydgate's Poetry,« Neophilologus, 1957, p. '202 H. 2 I have discussed the ideologieal relationship of the Mumming at Herford to other works of Lydgate in »Attitudes Toward Wornen in Lydgate's Poetry,« to appear in a forthcoming issue of English Studies. 3 See E .K. Charnbers, The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford, 1903), I, 397 and 400; Roben Withington, English Pageantry (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), I, 106 ff; and Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: e :n Kulturbild aus dem 15. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1952) , p. 84 H. , See Rudolph Brotanek, Die englischen Maskenspiele (Vienna, 1902), pp. 9 8nd 13; Caroline Spurgeon, Five HUlIdred Years 01 Chuueer Crilieism ulld Allusioll (Lon. don, 1914), I, 35; and Fred N. Robinson, ed., The Wor"s 01 Geollrey Chaucer {Boston, 1933). 6 See P. Reyber, Les Masques Anglais (Paris, 1909), p. 113. e See 	Witbington, op. eil., I. 107. See ibid., I, lU, and Schirmer, op. eit., p. 89. Eleanor P. Hamrnond, »Lydgate's Mumming st Hertford,« AngUa, XXII, 364 ff. • 	 Francie Lee Utlcy, The Crooked Rib (Columbus, 1944), p. 196. 141 tlltive. The only cue available to us occurs in the· prose introduction to the work: »Nowe folowethe here the maner of a bille by wey of suppli­cacion putte to the kyng holding his noble feest of Cristmasse in the Castel 0/ Hert/ord as in a disguysing of the Rude upplandisshe people compleynyng of hir wyves with the boystous aunswere of hir wyves devysed by Lydd'egate at the Request 0/ the Count re ROlLllour Brys slayne at Loviers.«lO We do not know the date of Roullour Brys' death, but we know that Henry V stoT'Dled Louviers in 1418, that the French retook it in 1430, and that the English besieged it in 1431. Of these date5, the first may be safely dismissed. Henry V spent only four Christrnasses of his reign in England, and only those of 1414 and 1415 could possibly - though by no m eans neeessarily - have been at Hertford,u Since he could not have been .11t Hertford for Christrnass, 1418, and the Mumming was explicitly ,meant to be acted there, it logieally follows that the date of comrosition eannot weIl be set as 1418. Both Rudoloh Brotanek and E. K. Chambers have suggested dates posterior to 1431, that is to say, after the last siege of Louviers and the late;st possible date of Roullour Brys' death. 12 Robert Withington and Walter F. Schirmer have settled for either 1430 or 1431.13 So far, all the attempts at dating the Mumming seem to have neglee­ted two k ey facts: (1) although RouIlour Brys had to be dead to be re­ferred to as »slayne at Loviers« in the prose introduction, he had to be alive to request the composition of a mumming, so that the work under consideration may weIl bave been com.posed before 1430; and (2) nothing teIls us that the pro·se i.ntroouetion was written at the same time wi.th the rest of the text - and, for ought we know, it may not be Lydgate's work at aIl. Since there are only two extant manuseripts ­Briti ~h Museum MS Additional 29729 and Trioity College Cambridge MS 600 - and both of them are from the seeomI half of the fifteenth century, we cannot reasonably dismiss the possibility that the introduc­hon may have been a later addition. The dating of the Mumming amI the dating of the prose introduction are, aceordingly, two different, thou.gh clearly related, problems. Of course, one may wish to suggest the possibility of Lydgate's having composed the Mumming years after Roullour Brys' death; but the me­chanics of the patronage system, as weil as Lydgate's own practices over more than fifty years of literary life, argue against the validity of such an argument. On the contrary, the chances are that he wrote the piece before Brys' death or at least before he had learned of it, and then po,ssibly added the introouetion. It is still impossible to give an exaet tO The M,'nor Poems 0/ lohn Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MaeCracken (London, EETS, 1934), 11, 675. The emphas>i.s i8 supplied, and arch.aic symbols have been Bltered in accoI'danee with eUI'·rent practiee in edi ting la.te m.ediaeval Engllih tex11. 11 See Hammond, op. cit., p. 366. 11 Brolanek, op. cie., p. 306, snd Chambera, op. cu., I. 398. u Withington, op. cie., I. 89. 142 date for the compasülOn, espccially if we consider that the text must of necessity have been composed before - even if immecliately belor" - its first performance on Christmass day. Yet, the foregoing argument makes it possible to detennine the probable date of the wflüng with far greater precision than has hithe~to been don e : (1) the Mumming at Hert/ord must have been composea during 14,30-1 or immediately be­fore, and (2) the prose introduction was necessarily composed in 1430-1 or later. Alain Renoir University of California Berkeley 4, California, U. S. A. U svojoj rasprnici Alajn Renoir utvrduje datum prikazanja Mumming at Hertf" rJ' od enr,leskog pjesnika lohna Lyclgatea iz XIV 8toljeca. 143: 

ON THE DATE OF JOHN LYDGATE\u27S MUMMING AT HERTFORD

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