Stephen Hawes was an English poet at the dawn of
the Tudor age whose poetic inspirations were his
major medieval predecessors in English poetry:
CHAUCER, GOWER, and the dominant 15th-century
poet, John LYDGATE. Hawes, who was groom of the
chamber to King Henry VII, is best known for his
allegorical love poem The Pastime of Pleasure, or The
Historie of Graunde Amoure and La Belle Pucel (ca.
1506).
Little is known with certainty of Hawes’s life.
Probably he was born in Suffolk. He seems to have
been educated at Oxford, and to have learned languages visiting universities on the continent, but
much of what is assumed of his life is conjecture.
Tradition says that Henry VII was attracted by
Hawes’s learning, particularly his prodigious
memory that allowed him to recite by heart long
passages from Chaucer and from Lydgate. Henry
gave him a position in his household, making him
groom of the chamber.
Hawes’s surviving poems all tend to be moral or
love allegories in a medieval courtly style reminiscent of Lydgate and, ultimately, the ROMAN DE LA
ROSE. His Example of Virtue (ca. 1504) is written
in the RHYME ROYAL stanzas popularized by
Chaucer, and is a conventional moral allegory con-
cerning a life spent seeking purity. The Comfort of
Lovers (first printed 1510) is a love allegory, while
The Conversion of Swearers (printed 1509) is a condemnation of blasphemy, particularly the typically
medieval custom of swearing by the body of
Christ. In 1509, Hawes also wrote A Joyful Meditation, his celebration of Henry VIII’s coronation.
But Hawes is known mainly for his Pastime of
Pleasure, which was first printed by Wynkyn de
Worde in 1509, and went through several subsequent editions in the 16th century. The poem is
dedicated to Henry VII, and is conceived as a chivalric romance in an allegorical landscape, in which the
knight Graunde Amoure strives to win the fair Lady
La Belle Pucel. Written, like his Example of Virtue, in
rhyme royal stanzas, Hawes’s poem runs to 45 chapters and almost 6,000 lines. Some half of these describe Graunde Amoure in the Tower of Doctrine,
where he receives a grounding in the seven Liberal
Arts to make him worthy of his beloved. From here
he moves to the Tower of Chivalry and learns what
he will require to battle the allegorical forces he
needs to conquer in order to win his lady’s love.
Most critics see Hawes as chiefly medieval in his
allegorical style and his emphasis on such things as
Fortune’s wheel and earthly life as a pilgrimage,
but see his interest in the education of a prince and
worldly accomplishments as looking forward to
poets of the Renaissance. Indeed Hawes’s text certainly must have influenced Spenser’s Faerie
Queene. But Hawes was not optimistic about the
future of poetry in English: In section 14 of his
Pastime of Pleasure, he depicts himself as the only
remaining devotee of true poetry—certainly he
was the last English poet in the Chaucerian courtly
tradition.
Bibliography
Edwards, A. S. G. Stephen Hawes. Boston: Twayne,
1983.
Gluck, Florence W., and Alice B. Morgan. Stephen
Hawes: The Minor Poems. EETS, no. 271. London:
Published for the Early English Text Society by the
Oxford University Press, 1974.
Mead, William Edward, ed. Pastime of Pleasure. EETS,
o.s. 173. London: Published for the Early English
Text Society by H. Milford, Oxford University
Press, 1928.