SOURCE: Spearing, A. C. “Lydgate's Canterbury Tale: The Siege of Thebes and Fifteenth Century Chaucerianism.” In Fifteenth Century Studies: Recent Essays, edited by Robert F. Yeager, pp. 333-64. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984.

In the following essay, Spearing examines the nature of Lydgate's attitude towards and indebtedness to his great contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer in The Siege of Thebes and goes on to identify the shortcomings and merits of the work.

Poetic history, in the book's argument, is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.

That sentence forms the second paragraph of the introduction to Harold Bloom's provocative book The Anxiety of Influence.¹ Bloom's argument is of great assistance in thinking about English literature in the fifteenth century. If he is right in identifying poetic history with poetic influence, then the fifteenth...