Short notes on Thomas Hoccleve and his poems

Short notes on Thomas Hoccleve,Thomas Hoccleve and his poems

Short notes on Thomas Hoccleve and his poems

Among the English Chaucerians, Thomas Hoccleve is not as prolific an author as Lydgate, but like him, he is found to imitate Chaucer, without any noticeable success.

Hoccleve is particularly noted for his Regement of Princes, based on the Latin work De Regimina Principum. The poem, of course, a long one, contains some 5500 verses dealing with the matters of varied interests – political, ethical, ecclesiastical, and so on. The poem reveals his gift of story-telling, imitated from Chaucer. There are, no doubt, some dissertations, with illustrations, that make the work didactic.

 

Edward Albert wrote about Hoccleve in his history of English Literature:

Occleve, or Hoccleve (1368 (?)-1450 (?)), may have been born in Bedfordshire, but we know next to nothing about him, and that he tells us himself. He was a clerk in the Privy Seal Office, from which in 1424 he retired on a pension to Hampshire. His principal works are The Regement of Princes, written for the edification of Henry V, and consisting of a string of tedious sermons; La Male Regie, partly autobiographical, in a snivelling fashion; The Complaint of Our Lady; and Occleve's Complaint.

The style of Occleve's poetry shows the rapid degeneration that set in immediately after the death of Chaucer. His metre, usually version of Swerers; and A Joyfull Medytacyon. Of all the poets now under discussion Hawes is the most uninspired; his allegorical methods are of the crudest; but he is not entirely without his poetical moments. His Passetyme of Pleasure probably influenced the allegory of Spenser.

About Thomas Hoccleve from The oxford short history of English Literature:

The poetry of Thomas Hoccleve (?1369-1426) suggests a very different kind of unease. Hoccleve, a scrivener in the office of the Privy Seal at Westminster, certainly never enjoyed the degree of influential patronage accorded to Lydgate, though The Regement of Princes (1411-12), written for the future King Henry V when he was Prince of Wales, was clearly intended to recommend both moral virtue and the poet's talents to the heir to the throne. Despite this and other claims to public attention (such as his Balade after King Richard II’s bones were brought to Westminster), Hoccleve emerges as the most self consciously autobiographical of the poets of the immediately post Chaucerian decades. He was one of the first writers to use the often fraught events of his own life as a subject for his verse. This is especially true of the Prologue to the Regement, a 2,000-line complaint cast in the form of a dialogue with a beggar whom the poet meets as he wanders the streets on a sleepless night (‘So long a nyght ne felte I never non’). Earlier poets had described restless lovers, but for Hoccleve it is thought itself, not thoughts of love, that determines his mental distress: 

The smert [painþ of Thought I by experience 

Knowe as wel as any man doth lyvynge; 

Hys frosty swoot [sweat] and fyry hote fervence, 

And troubly dremes, drempt al in wakynge, 

My mazyd hed sleplees han of konnyng 

And wyt despoylyd, and me so bejapyd, 

That after deth ful often have I gapyd. 

 

The narrator’s nervous melancholy here is quite distinct from the generous resilience of the kind of persona employed by Hoccleve’s ‘dere mayster ... and fadir [father]’, Chaucer. His private and professional dejection has, he claims, been determined by the tedium of his job, the tyranny of his employers, the failure of his eyesight due to poring over scraps of parchment, and the paucity of his remuneration. As a young man about town, he pursued women but had little success with them; now, as an old man, all he has to look forward to is penury. His complaint is more than a conventional diatribe against the moral distortions and abuses of the age (though, as the listening beggar is obliged to hear, those abuses are distressing too); rather, he is dramatically representing a private and unanswerable dilemma 

(though the beggar does attempt to offer some consolatory reflections on the universal fickleness of fortune). Hoccleve endured a severe mental breakdown in the years 1415-20, a distressing period which he recalled in the linked series of poems written in the early 1420s. The sequence opens with the gloomy Complaint (set in ‘the broun sesoun of Myhelmesse [Michaelmas]’) and continues with the more optimistic Dialogue with a Friend, an account of a friend’s  efforts to coax and cajole the poet back into self-confidence and back to the consolations of poetry.