Chapter 13 - Inside Out in Gower’s Republic of Letters

Summary

In I Henry IV Shakespeare found the perfect metaphor to stage the political tumult of Gower's England. Facing off against his erstwhile supporters in the climactic battle of Shrewsbury, Henry, the traitor turned king, spreads confusion by disguising several lieutenants in his own coat of arms, so that the rebels cannot recognize the true king. The Earl of Douglas's military frustration adumbrates Henry IV's political problem as well:

DOUGLAS   Another king? They grow like Hydra's heads.

                      Iam the Douglas, fatal to all those

                      That wear those colors on them. What art thou

                      That counterfeit’st the person of a king?

                    (I Henry IV, V. 4. 26–9)

To Henry's reply, ‘I will assay thee’, Douglas responds, ‘I fear thou art another counterfeit, | And yet in faith thou bearest thee like a king’ (I Henry IV, V. 4. 35, 36–7). The interchange offers counterfeiting – the illicitly multiplied image of the king's face struck in metal – as a metaphor for the crisis of legitimacy after Henry's deposition of Richard has allowed many claimants to spring up in place of one.

Under the metaphor lies the language of alchemy: Douglas expects ‘colors’ to reveal the true king, while Henry ‘assays’ Douglas's true mettle/metal. Since alchemical colours are unreliable signs of identity, Douglas resolves to kill all who bear the king's coat of arms. Shakespeare's alchemical metaphor recasts the political problem as epistemological: not just a matter of illicit multiplication, more fundamentally it suggests the loss of a whole world of sacramental continuity in which the face of things had made visible their invisible inward identities.

In linking alchemical language to the tumultuous changes of the late fourteenth century, Shakespeare was anticipated by Gower. Gower's commitment in the Confessio Amantis to the reformation of individual and public governance, and to a poetic language that refers plainly and truly, will not surprise readers of this volume. What is surprising, however, is that his model for plain, truthful transformation is alchemy. Gower's endorsement of alchemy in Confessio book IV is at odds not only with the usual exposes of transmutation, but also with his own intolerance of fraud in language and deed.