Laid out in the introduction and followed consistently throughout the following chapters, the principal argument of Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt is compelling in its fundamental simplicity. In the fifteenth century, English poets who addressed courtly audiences posed as crowned laureates, humble beggars, or some combination of these two roles. The laureate and the beggar are two closely related identities, both produced by the same dynamics of fifteenth-century patronage, propaganda, and cultural authority. The laureate's supposed transcendence of historical contingency and the begging poet's self-proclaimed subjection simply reflect two mirroring responses to the demands of power, each closely resembling the other: "The laureate pretends to possess independence while being, in extreme cases, a patent propagandist; the beggar pretends to grovel when most opposing his own desires to those of his patron."
The first chapter, "Laureate poetics," begins where all discussions of English ideas of the poet laureate must begin, with Petrarch and his crowning as laureate in Rome in 1341. Petrarch's public address for the occasion imagines laureates as the Caesars of culture, claiming an authority that is entirely independent of (but in close cooperation with) the power of the real Caesar. The remainder of the chapter addresses the major instances of self-naming in English verse before the fifteenth century. The suggestion is that self-naming is a necessary first step before self-laureation. Broadly speaking, this chapter stresses the originality of Lydgate's self-naming by emphasizing the tentativeness of prior English examples. Chaucer's self-naming, Meyer-Lee suggests, "actuates a presumption that must be checked with ridicule," Langland's is too mysterious to garner imitation, and Gower's refuses to make the final connections between the named poet within the text and the historically specific poet outside it.
The second chapter, "John Lydgate: the Invention of the English Laureate," locates the inspiration for both the Lancastrian investment in public writing and Lydgate's self-appointed role as laureate in an unexpected source: Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea. In Christine's work, Meyer-Lee argues, Lydgate found the techniques he was to employ over the course of his career, including the epideictic mode (i.e. poetry of praise or blame) that elevates the authority of both patron and poet. Meyer-Lee, more strongly than previous readers, reads Lydgate's repeated gestures of humility as barely concealed moments of self-authorization. By employing his aureate terms to protest his inability to match the eloquence of Cicero or Chaucer, Lydgate actually represents himself as the natural inheritor of both. Overall, this attributes much more dexterity and self-awareness to Lydgate's writing than it has usually been granted, and while Meyer-Lee sees him as mystifying some of the contradictory forces at work in his self-laureation, his Lydgate creates a cultural moment rather than simply submitting to its logic.
Hoccleve plays the role of Lydgate's barely suppressed alter-ego in the third chapter, "Thomas Hoccleve: Beggar Laureate." In Hoccleve, the contradictions of the laureate role--authority and subjection--are foregrounded rather than concealed, and Meyer-Lee grants to Hoccleve a greater awareness of these conflicts than Lydgate seems to have possessed (though this difference is not made fully explicit). A crucial difference between these two Lancastrian poets is their different social standing, and Meyer-Lee rightly ascribes Lydgate's relative self-confidence to his secure identity as a Benedictine monk, whereas Hoccleve, a paid servant of the crown, could never fully elide the terms of his own dependence on power. Hoccleve's Series, in this reading, becomes the work of a "failed" laureate, and this failure prompts an ironic, self-conscious retreat into a newly represented form of interiority. This in turn allows for more daring criticism of the powerful than a laureate performance would ever encompass.
Though some aspects of these readings of Hoccleve and Lydgate are familiar from previous studies, Meyer-Lee's dialectical juxtaposition of the beggar and the laureate makes for a genuinely original and important argument. This dialectic also structures the remaining three chapters of the book. Chapter 4, "Lydgateanism" discusses two early responses to Lydgate, those of Benedict Burgh and the author of A Reproof to Lydgate (thought to be William de la Pole). The chapter then moves on to George Ashby, reading A Prisoner's Reflections and his Active Policy of a Prince as both Lydgatean laureate performances and Hocclevian exercises in subjectivity.
Henry VII, responsible for so many other innovations, was the first English king to establish something like an official poet laureate, the Latinist Bernard Andr; the fifth chapter traces the effects of this institutionalization on three ambitious poets, Stephen Hawes, Alexander Barclay, and John Skelton. In the Tudor court, the subjection demanded of poets was clearer than ever before, and all three thus exhibit a certain ambivalence about the laureate pose. All three also rode the wheel of courtly fortune. Hawes lost his place upon the accession of Henry VIII, and Meyer-Lee reads his Conforte of Lovers as "a narrative of erotic failure that serves as an analogy for the poet's alienation from power." A Benedictine monk, Barclay had all the makings of a Lydgatean laureate but seems to have decided that moral authority and the laureate role were no longer fully compatible. Meyer-Lee emphasizes Barclay's disdain and envy of his rival, Skelton, who habitually refers to himself in his verse as "Skelton Laureate, Orator Regis"--an epithet that neatly captures the duality of authority and subjection that came with the role. Yet Skelton's bombast stems in part from genuinely threatening rivalries with Cardinal Wolsey and others, and long periods of exile from the court forced him to see himself as both insider and outsider. Thus Skelton's poetry continually "grapple[s] directly with the contradictions contained within laureate poetics," making the roles of beggar and poet-prince ever more explicit.
The epilogue offers what may be the book's most surprising claim, that Wyatt may be deeply indebted to Lydgate and fifteenth-century poetry. Wyatt's aristocratic origins naturally made him a poet of Petrarchan fin'amor rather than Petrarchan laureate performance, but the suggestion here is that in poems such as "Who So List to Hunt," Wyatt rewrites the mutual dependence of laureate and sovereign as an erotic competition.
Meyer-Lee does not claim to provide a master narrative for a hypothetical "long" fifteenth century, and he makes clear that his has restricted his study to the poets most involved in the dynamics of laureate poetics as set up by Lydgate and Hoccleve. Some readers may be somewhat frustrated with this restriction, though it preserves the argument's laudable coherence. Were the discussion expanded, more interesting candidates for inclusion would not be those Meyer-Lee regrets leaving out (e.g. Osbert Bokenham, John Capgrave, and the Scottish Chaucerians) but the anonymous authors of the "Piers Plowman tradition" or the poems of MS Digby 102. An unexpressed possibility is that by refusing to give up their anonymity and by not foregrounding their own subjectivity, the authors of works like The Crowned King managed to define a relationship to power free from the paradoxes of the Lydgate/Hoccleve model (if undoubtedly hampered by its own limitations). The endurance and evolution of these alternatives into the later decades of the fifteenth century deserves recognition, and comparing self-named laureates to other politically-minded writers, including those operating in prophetic modes, could deepen the study's analysis of the laureate role.
Nevertheless, despite a certain narrowness of scope, Meyer-Lee's account of the generations of writers from Chaucer to Wyatt deserves to be placed alongside the very best and most influential recent histories of this same span, especially those of Richard Firth Green, David Lawton, and Seth Lerer. Many of his readings of lesser-known texts, such as Burgh's Letter to John Lydgate, supersede anything else in print in their depth and insight, and his articulation of the dialectical relationship between Hoccleve and Lydgate ought to have a profound effect on subsequent scholarship. Well written and consistently argued, it is literary history of the first order.