In this elegant and engagingly written study, Robert J. Meyer-Lee examines the figure of the laureate poet from the first overt English translation of Petrarch's verse in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde to the second, roughly one hundred and fifty years later, in the work of Thomas Wyatt. This is hardly untrodden territory; over two decades ago Richard Helgerson's Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) effectively charted the significance of the laureate title for the poetry of the later Renaissance, while the rehabilitation of the poetry of the fifteenth century, to which Poets and Power powerfully contributes, has already been driven forward by the work of Paul Strohm, Seth Lerer, James Simpson and others. But, despite these [End Page 263] impressive forebears, Meyer-Lee's study boldly carves out a place for itself, and brings much that is new and insightful to the field.

Central to the Meyer-Lee thesis is the self-presentation of the laureate, or would-be laureate, in his own verses, prologues, and epilogues, and the claim that in the fifteenth century this self-presentation saw a new, focused association of the poetic I with a historically specific, empirical author (p. 230). Thus, in the work of Lydgate (in many ways the heroic innovator of the book) and Hoccleve (his more idiosyncratic shadow), we see English poets for the first time attaching their historically specific persons to authoritative first-person speakers (p. 230). In response to the particular pressures brought about by the demands of the new Lancastrian regime for political and cultural legitimation though literature, these poets began to fashion for themselves a new form of poetic subjectivity as a means of addressing and seeking to negotiate with their patrons. The figure of the laureate, as articulated by Petrarch, provided their model, but it was one pinioned by a potentially disabling paradox. Even as it allowed the poet to claim divine inspiration for his creative endeavors and so suggest an apparent independence from mundane political concerns, the position of the laureate at the same time foregrounded the writer's inevitable and extreme subservience to that mundane political world: "The laureate is always someone's laureate, and, to a degree that the possessive pronoun indicates real possession rather than mere association, the theoretical self-determination of the laureate falls away to reveal his subjection" (p. 17). Thus the laureate is always haunted by his shadow, the figure of the beggar-poet, forever in thrall to the power he celebrates or criticizes, dependent on the generosity of princes or noble patrons for both material sustenance and his very sense of selfhood itself.

A writer like Lydgate might, thanks to the relative independence afforded him by his monastic vocation and the particular circumstances of his relationship with the Lancastrian regime, finesse the contradictions between self-determination and thralldom with a degree of success, but Hoccleve, whose professional identity as a clerk of the privy seal proclaimed his dependence upon the court, could almost do no other than write his status as beggar-poet into the works he produced. Subsequent authors negotiated between these archetypal models with more or less success, either, like Benedict Burgh, craftily inserting themselves into the genealogy of laureation via modesty topoi that ostensibly proclaimed their inadequacy for such a role, or, like Stephen Hawes, lamenting their exclusion from the charmed circle of the court. John Skelton, that most idiosyncratic and yet also archetypal laureate, even managed to do both at once.

This is a sprightly, intelligent book that deals with major political themes, but always keeps the poetry at the center of its analytic gaze. Thus while it engages with history throughout, for the most part it is with the broader themes rather than the fine detail of the period that it deals. Meyer-Lee does not offer a complete survey of his fascinating theme. He is clear that there is not room here for the Scottish Chaucerians, for example, whose inclusion would have added...