Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic.

Description: Defends the artistic qualities of Thomas Hoccleve as a poet, acknowledging his medieval conventionality, but emphasizing his originality in adapting conventions and source material, the competence of his meter, and the autobiographical elements of his verse, particularly examples of "personal feelings." Surveys Hoccleve's corpus with frequent comparisons of his forms and themes with those of Chaucer, John Lydgate, and others. Also comments on his debt to Chaucer, the presumed friendship of the two poets, and the portraits of Chaucer in three manuscripts of Hoccleve's "Regement of Princes," reproducing the one from Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library, MS 1083/10 (here cited as MS 594).