ABSTRACT
The famous Chaucerian compendium Bodleian MS Fairfax 16, dated to 1450, contains an anonymous group of 20 ballades and complaints that are of significance as one of the earliest English lyric sequences. The author's joining Chaucer in the collection include the fifteenth-century poets John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, to comprise what John Norton-Smith calls the most beautifully produced and textually responsible example of the fifteenth century's desire to collect Chaucer and his disciples'. The group of poems under discussion were first attributed to William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, in a 1911 article by H. N. MacCracken, on the basis of principally circumstantial evidence. Cupid's address additionally details the power, and misuse, of speech, which arguably relates to the dangerous threat of treason that existed at court, and perhaps more specifically refers to those threats directed at the Duke of Suffolk during his own trial, which took place the year in which the Fairfax manuscript was compiled.
