Siege of Thebes, The

(The Destruction of Thebes)

   by John Lydgate

(ca. 1420)

   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.