SOURCE: Burrow, John. “Hoccleve's Series: Experience and Books.” In Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, pp. 259-273. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984.

In the following essay, Burrow reviews the structure of Hoccleve's collection of writings titled the Series. Burrow emphasizes similarities to Chaucerian works, especially the Canterbury Tales, and examines Hoccleve's tendency toward self-reference.

Criticism has hardly begun to do justice to the poetry of Thomas Hoccleve. The names of Hoccleve and Lydgate are often coupled together, like Gray and Collins, or Moody and Sankey; but the two poets are different in many ways. Lydgate is, in my judgment, distinctly inferior to his contemporary as a writer—in his command, that is, of English idiom, syntax, and meter. Yet ever since the fifteenth century the massive bulk of Lydgate's work has overshadowed Hoccleve and obscured the qualities and merits of his work. To define his qualities and merits is not easy...