Chapter 14 - Gower’s Business: Artistic Production of Cultural Capital and the Tale of Florent

Summary

The prologue to the first recension of the Confessio Amantis describes the now-famous patronage scene, wherein King Richard commands that the narrator ‘som newe thing I sholde boke’ (Confessio, Prol., line 51). This scene takes place upon the Thames, ‘under the toun of newe Troye’, after the narrator has left his own boat and come aboard the royal barge at the king's request. It is one of the few literal manifestations of London we have in Gower's poetry and remarkable also in its representation of literary patronage. As Robert Epstein states, ‘It becomes difficult to find in Gower's writing any association with the City of London or its suburbs.’ Rather, Epstein continues, comparing Gower's separation from London with the famous portrait of Gower removed from the globe, Gower ‘is of the world but not in it’. So too is the Thames passage a representation of this, since the narrator is looking upon London, but is separate and apart from it in the river. I am not so much interested here in the historical veracity of this event, something which has been much debated in the past, and which will probably never be verified. Instead, I am interested in addressing why Gower chose to narrate this section of the poem in the way that he did, both in the body of the poem and in the attendant marginal notations. Gower, on the barge, traverses a river that, like contemporary cartographic representations of the globe, splits his world in three: suburban Southwark and its melange of professions, the courts of Westminster, and the economic, artistic and political hub of the city of London itself. In this opening scene Gower, rather than inhabiting the margins, becomes the poetic centre for this urban environment, and that centre (the Thames) is unabashedly commercial.

Whether or not the meeting ever happened, or actually happened in the way narrated, in this opening scene Gower capitalizes upon the cultural and economic role of the Thames to position himself, as poet, apart from the confines of London and yet able to comment upon the various political and social machinations of his mercantile urban environment.