SOURCE: Scanlon, Larry. “The King's Two Voices: Narrative and Power in Hoccleve's Regement of Princes.” In Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530, edited by Lee Patterson, pp. 216-47. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

In this essay, Scanlon considers Hoccleve's Regement of Princes in terms of medieval English thought on kingship and authority. Drawing from Ernst Kantorowicz's work on political theology, The King's Two Bodies, Scanlon looks at how Hoccleve's poem constructs and critiques the voice of the king. For Scanlon, the Regement reflects the increasing power of vernacular literature to influence and disseminate political ideology.

Prologue: the Deposition of Richard Ii

Thomas Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, written between 1410 and 1412 for the future Henry V, is something of a forgotten masterpiece.¹ A witty, subtle, and relentlessly self-conscious poem, its language is magisterial, modulating effortlessly between the philosophical and colloquial with a Chaucerian fluency. Its numerous exempla and...