SOURCE: Straker, Scott-Morgan. “Deference and Difference Lydgate, Chaucer, and The Siege of Thebes.” The Review of English Studies, New Series 52, no. 205 (2001): 1-21.

In the following essay, Straker argues that previous critics have overlooked two of Lydgate's references to himself in The Siege of Thebes that reveal his attitude toward Chaucer and his own work as a poet within the current political order.

The 176-line prologue to John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes is one of the most remarkable acts of literary appropriation in medieval literature: not only does Lydgate adopt the pilgrimage frame of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but he also inserts himself as a character into his precursor's fiction. The prologue begins with Lydgate musing on the month of April, in which Chaucer set his pilgrimage. He then describes how he once chanced to meet Chaucer's band of pilgrims in Canterbury, where he was himself on a pilgrimage, and...