In some ways, reading Knapp's monograph was an intimidating experience. The level of analysis, scholarship, and rhetorical flourish shines in this very well written book. What's specifically intimidating is that this text was written by the guy who will not only be the chair of my candidacy exam but of my whole dissertation. As a whole, Knapp's text read the work of Thomas Hoccleve with a careful consideration of bureaucratic culture. As Knapp argues, the shifting role of the bureaucracy in the fifteenth century has a profound effect on Hoccleve's writing, as these positions transition out of the sphere of the royal household and, often, are less stable as a result, the bureaucrats left on unstable economic grounds. Knapp does a careful job of plotting previous scholarship on Hoccleve, pointing out that while previous scholars considered the role of documentary culture in these texts that "bureaucratic identity and practice" provides "a way of calling attention to not only the technical but also the social dimensions of relation between literature and bureaucracy" (5). In sum, Knapp intends to demonstrate the role of bureaucratic in Lancastrian literature, using Hoccleve as a case study (9). While Knapp's book has a great deal of interesting readings of Hoccleve, I will focus on a few below that were of specific interest to me.
In his chapter on "La Male Regle," Knapp argues that the economic instability of the Lancastrian bureaucrats directly impacts the form and rhetorical approach of Hoccleve's poetry. In "La Male Regle," Hoccleve laments his economic state and the youthful practices that landed him in these straights. Knapp points out, however, that rather than directly petitioning his lord to provide better pay to better his condition, Hoccleve presents himself as a piteous figure, a "cravor" who outlines his own miserable state and appealing to the king's generosity rather than directly making his request. Knapp argues that this is a very intentional and careful rhetorical move; "he explains his resort to the petition through a progressive trio of causes, moving from the growth of custom, to proverbial wisdom, and then to the doctrine of the clerks--a progression surely meant to remind the audience of his own dignity and intellectual status as a clerk even at the moment at which he seems to be accepting the humble role of the craver" (43). For Knapp, these moves constitute a game that clerks in Hoccleves would be familiar with as they navigate their own somewhat liminal positions in the transitioning government.
Knapp expands the role of occupational uncertainty in Hoccleve's writing in his reading of the Regiment of Princes, reading the inability for a clear Boethian solution in the text as indication that while the clerk strives for a stable role of their labor it is in the end fragile and fragmentary in light of the changing historical conditions of the fifteenth century. Knapp caries the issue of instability into Hoccleve's Series, reading the fragmentation of psyche as coming from the same uncertainty. Knapp suggests that the narrator in the series is one that has never stopped writing through his madness and "that in this poem madness is never truly surmounted" (163). Instead, Knapp argues that the Series forms "a sophisticated meditation upon the irresolvable fragmentation of the self and the intricate connections between [Hoccleve's] poetic project and the specific cultural milieu of the Privy Seal" (163). The self, as Knapp suggests, is elusive in Hoccleve's poetry, the clerk's very identity coming to contain the same uncertainty as his profession.
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