The Siege of Thebes (called in some manuscripts The
Destruction of Thebes) is a long MIDDLE ENGLISH
poem by the 15th-century poet John LYDGATE, finished
in about 1420, and presented as a continuation
of CHAUCER’s CANTERBURY TALES. The prologue to
Lydgate’s poem is modeled after the GENERAL PROLOGUE
to Chaucer’s work, and presents Chaucer’s
pilgrims, having reached the holy shrine of Thomas
BECKETT at Canterbury, meeting the monk Lydgate.
Having visited the shrine himself, Lydgate now becomes
a member of their party and tells the first tale
on the pilgrims’ trip back to London.
Lydgate presents himself as the new poetnarrator
of the text, Chaucer having been dead for
some 20 years. Certainly it was Lydgate’s sincere
admiration for Chaucer that led him to frame his
tale as he did, and also to imitate Chaucer’s style by
writing his tale in the decasyllabic (or 10-syllable)
couplets that Chaucer had introduced into English
verse. Most readers find Lydgate’s use of the form
less skillful than Chaucer’s, and they find his tale
somewhat tedious by comparison. Indeed at 9,400
lines, The Siege of Thebes is more than four times as
long as The KNIGHT’S TALE, Chaucer’s longest Canterbury
tale in verse. The centerpiece of the tale is
a three-part, 4,540-line exemplum illustrating
Thebes’s fate under three disastrous rulers: Edippus
(Oedipus), the incestuous patricide; his sons
Ethyocles and Polymyte, whose enmity and thirst
for power lead to the siege of the city; and finally
Creon, whose unnatural rule leads to the destruction
of the city itself by the forces of the Athenian
king Theseus. Lydgate, conscious of the relationship
between his tale (the first on the return trip
from Canterbury) and The Knight’s Tale (the first
on the trip to Canterbury), is careful to end his tale
in a way that dovetails with the beginning of
Chaucer’s, which picks up the narrative immediately
after the events of The Siege of Troy. Lydgate
even borrows phrases from Chaucer’s tale to make
the transition smooth.
Lydgate’s debt to Chaucer in the poem is clear
throughout. He also alludes to Boccaccio’s influence,
and seems to have based the plot of the story
on the French Roman de Thèbes (ca. 1175), but also
used some classical Latin writers, such as Seneca and
Martianus Capella. One of his best-known works,
the poem was written about midway in Lydgate’s
long career, which spanned the entire first half of
the 15th century. The English king Henry V seems
to have been the intended audience of Lydgate’s
poem, and the poem’s allusion to the Treaty of
Troyes, which named Henry heir to the French
throne in 1420, suggests that The Siege of Thebes
must have been written between 1420 and 1422,
when Henry died. There are 29 extant manuscript
versions of the poem, five of which actually appear
at the end of texts of the Canterbury Tales. Even one
of the early printed versions of Chaucer’s work—
John Stowe’s from 1561—appends Lydgate’s text to
the Tales. One of the tale’s most authoritative early
manuscripts (British Museum Arundel 119) is
known to have belonged to William de la Pole, the
duke of Suffolk—husband of Chaucer’s only known
grandchild, Alice Chaucer.
Bibliography
Allen, Rosamund S. “The Siege of Thebes: Lydgate’s
Canterbury Tale.” In Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century
Poetry, edited by Julia Boffey and Janet
Cowen, 122–142. London: King’s College, Centre
for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991.
Bowers, John M., ed. The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-
Century Continuations and Additions. Kalamazoo,
Mich.: Published for TEAMS in association with
the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute
Publications,Western Michigan University, 1992.
Lydgate, John. Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. Edited by
Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall. 2 vols. EETS e.s.
108 and 125, 1911 and 1930. London: Published
for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford
University Press, 1960.
———. The Siege of Thebes. Edited by Robert R. Edwards.
Kalamazoo,Mich.:Medieval Institute Publications,
2001.
Schirmer,Walter F. John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture
of the XVth Century. Translated by Ann E.
Keep. London:Methuen, 1961.