ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some Chaucerian borrowings and echoes in The Regiment of Princes, many of which have been overlooked or little discussed in the heat of these wider debates. Thomas Hoccleve's medieval and modern readers have repeatedly been drawn to the relationship between the Privy Seal clerk and his older and more celebrated contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer. Many critics have underestimated the extent to which Hoccleve adopts the dialogic mode, patterns of speech, and narrative personae in Chaucer's poem, and reformulates them to poetic and strategic advantage. Troilus's impulse to write letters and compose songs as a result of his love, or hope, or despair, provides a complex precedent for Hoccleve's narrator, whose initial private complaining and linguistic impotence turn to more public and profitable enditing.
