SOURCE: Pearsall, Derek A. “John Lydgate: The Critical Approach.” In John Lydgate, pp. 1-21. London: Routledge, 1970.

In the following essay, Pearsall provides a critical overview of Lydgate's work and reputation and examines how one might answer the charges of dullness and prolixity that have been levelled at him by readers over the past five centuries.

John Lydgate achieved an extraordinary pre-eminence in his own day. His origins were comparatively humble, and his life as a monk may seem to some an unlikely training-ground for a secular poet, yet by 1412 he was being commissioned by the Prince of Wales, later Henry V, to translate the story of Troy into English. In 1431 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, commissioned the translation of Boccaccio's De Casibus Illustrium Virorum which was completed eight years later as the Fall of Princes. These were tasks of magnitude and high seriousness, and were regarded as such by...