Gower, John

Gower, John (?1330–1408), lived at the priory of St Mary Overie's in Southwark, from about 1377 to his death, devoted to his writing. He was a friend of Chaucer and (jointly with Ralph Strode) the dedicatee of Troilus and Criseyde (see V. 1856).

Gower's considerable learning is attested by his writing with accomplishment in three languages. In French he wrote his Cinkante Balades (written in Anglo-Norman before 1374) and his first large-scale work, the Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis), an allegory written c.1376–8, in octosyllabics, concerned with fallen man, his virtues and vices. His second major work was the Latin Vox Clamantis (c.1376–81), an apocalyptic poem of seven books in 10,265 lines of elegiac couplets, containing reflections on the disturbances of the early years of Richard II and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. In English he wrote the poem ‘In Praise of Peace’ in 55 stanzas of rhyme-royal, as well as his principal work, the Confessio Amantis, which exists in three manuscript versions. The first of these (published 1390), and the most commonly attested, contains 141 stories in octosyllabic couplets which are handled with a metrical sophistication and skill unsurpassed in English. The framework of the poem is the confession of a lover, Amans, to Genius, a priest of Venus; the confessor tells him exemplary stories of behaviour and fortune in love, organized under the headings of the Seven Deadly Sins and drawing widely on classical story (most prominently Ovid) and medieval romance. There are eight books: one for each of the sins, and one (Book VII) which gives an encyclopaedic account of philosophy and morals. This work is as interesting for its Prologue and admirable Epilogue, and for its exchanges between the priest and lover, as it is for the narratives themselves.

Several of the exemplary tales are paralleled by stories in The Canterbury Tales and other works of Chaucer: for example, the story of Florent (i. 1,407–1,861) corresponds to ‘The Wife of Bath's Tale’ (CT, 6); Ceix and Alceone (iv. 2,927–3,123) to The Book of the Duchess (62–220). Up to the 17th cent. almost every writer who praised Chaucer coupled his name with Gower's; he has more examples than any other writer in Jonson's Grammar, and he speaks the Prologue to Shakespeare's Pericles, part of the story of which is taken from Gower's ‘Apollonius of Tyre’. Perhaps his significance as an English writer is to have brought into the mainstream of the canon of the literature the disparate narratives of the classics and the popular romances. (See also Anglo-Latin literature.)