Other literary forms
John Lydgate (LIHD-gayt) wrote only one significant piece of prose, The Serpent of Division. Scholars are uncertain as to its exact date of composition, but Walter Schirmer, in his John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the Fifteenth Century (1961), suggested the year 1422. Drawing on Lucan’s Pharsalia (c. 80 c.e.) and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Historiale, Lydgate here presents the first comprehensive account of the rise and fall of Julius Caesar ever written in English. As in other writings, Lydgate uses this story as an exemplum, a story used to teach morality. Here Lydgate’s lesson had to do with civil war.
Certain of Lydgate’s poems are very intimately connected with later English dramatic forms, especially the masque. His “mummings” were meant to accompany short pantomimes or the presentation of tableaux vivantes. For example, in 1424, Mumming at Bishopswood was presented at an outdoor gathering of London’s civic officials. A narrator presented the verses while a dancer portrayed the Goddess of Spring with various gestures and dance steps. The lesson of the poem is conveyed through allegory, where immaterial entities are personified. Here Spring represents civil concord, and Lydgate argues that just as the joy, freshness, and prosperity of Spring replace the heaviness and trouble of winter, so too the various estates, the nobles, the clergy, and the commoners, should throw off their discord and work together in their God-given roles. Success in these “mummings” probably helped prepare Lydgate for his part in the preparation of the public celebrations for the coronation of Henry VI in 1429, and for the triumphant entry into London of the same king with his new queen, Margaret, in 1445.