Finally, our author’s popularity and established position as a story-teller is decisively vouched for by the partly Shakesperian play of Pericles. Plots of plays were usually borrowed without acknowledgement; but here, a plot being taken from the Confessio Amantis, the opportunity is seized of bringing Gower himself on the stage to act as Prologue to four out of the five acts, speaking in the measure of his own octosyllabic couplet,

The book was so well known and the author so well established in reputation, that a play evidently gained credit by connecting itself with his name.

The following are the principal references to Gower in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The author of The King’s Quair dedicates his poem to the memory (or rather to the poems) of his masters Gower and Chaucer. Hoccleve calls him ‘my maister Gower,’

John Walton of Osney, the metrical translator of Boethius, writes,

Bokenham in his Lives of the Saints repeatedly speaks of Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate, the last of whom was then still living, as the three great lights[Pg ix] of English literature. Caxton printed the Confessio Amantis in 1483, and it seems to have been one of the most popular productions of his press.

[Pg ix]

In the sixteenth century Gower appears by the side of Chaucer in Dunbar’s Lament for the Makaris and in Lindsay’s poems. Hawes in the Pastime of Pleasure classes him with Chaucer and his beloved Lydgate, and Skelton introduces him as first in order of time among the English poets who are mentioned in the Garland of Laurel,

a testimony which is not quite consistent with that in the Lament for Philip Sparow,

Barclay in the Preface of his Mirour of Good Manners (printed 1516) states that he has been desired by his ‘Master,’ Sir Giles Alington, to abridge and amend the Confessio Amantis, but has declined the task, chiefly on moral grounds. The work he says would not be suitable to his age and order (he was a priest and monk of Ely),

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