The Canon of John Lydgate Project

The Canon of John Lydgate: Related Papers

The canon of the works of John Lydgate continues to be problematic despite the attempt of Henry MacCracken in 1911 to finalize the question. MacCracken's attempt was challenged immediately by other scholars, such as Eleanor Hammond, on the grounds that a number of his decisions were very subjective. Thus there is a need to reconsider all the evidence in order to establish more firmly the range of works actually written by one who, even on the most conservative estimate, was the single most prolific poets in the English language. Much of the work of the Lydgate Project, then, will be a re-evaluation of the evidence of the manuscripts. However, the manuscript evidence is complicated by the fact that the works of Chaucer and Lydgate were frequently preserved in the same manuscripts, and certain poems have been attributed to both poets. In cases, then, where we cannot resolve the question of the authorship of a particular poem by means of the available internal and external evidence, we will need to examine the language and style of the poem in a search for clues. And, for those poems of dual Chaucer and Lydgate attribution, we need to develop a series of linguistic and stylistic tests whereby Chaucer and Lydgate may be differentiated.

As a starting point, we have taken several works of undisputed authorship and examined them for differentiating characteristics. Sets of three 500-word samples were taken from each of four works (Siege of Thebes, Fall of Princes, Confessio Amantis, and the "Knight's Tale") and subjected to quantitative analysis using the LitStats program, looking for significant differences between the works in terms of word frequencies (the standard "type-token ratio") and word lengths. Each word of these samples was also encoded to indicate its part of speech and syntactic function (using the coding system developed by Louis Milic and refined by Robert Cluett, based upon Fries's structuralist grammar of English): patterns of repetition in the strings of codes, which might help to characterize each author, were sought. Lists of the rhyme words used in the samples were also produced. And the complete texts of each of the four works were examined, using TACT, for certain dialectal features, a "questionnaire" having been developed based upon criteria for differentiating Suffolk English from London English according to the Linguistic Atlas of Middle English. A dual concordance (produced by the use of the Oxford Concordance Package) of the "Knight's Tale" and the Siege of Thebes was examined for lexical and phrasal items which seem to differentiate Chaucer and Lydgate, and the Fall of Princes and Confessio Amantis were then examined for these same features. While we are still far from compiling a list of features differentiating Chaucer and Lydgate, our work to date has produced some interesting preliminary results, reported in full here.

[For the full text of the article, see the above mentioned publication.]

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The Canon of John Lydgate Project

© 1993 Centre for Computing in the Humanities
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Last revised: 6 Nov. 1995

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