ABSTRACT
George Gascoigne scholars have reappraised the poet in the last twenty years, transforming him from repentant prodigal to deceitful, self-fashioning courtier. Critics such as Charles Prouty and Richard Helgerson read Gascoigne’s works as straightforward autobiographical statements of reform, for instance identifying him as the Green Knight in his poem ‘The Green Knight’s Farewell to Fancy’.1 In more recent studies though, scholars see Gascoigne not so much as the earnest, reformed prodigal as the deceitful literary provocateur, his authorial poses consistent only in their insincerity.2 This judgement is mostly based on the subtle, misleading revisions printed in his 1575 collection The Posies that corrected his 1573 A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, after the latter had been found offensive and seized by Her Majesty’s High Commissioners. Gascoigne’s ‘corrections’ however have been revealed as ruses, changing little if any of the offensive material but instead shifting it around and
1 The traditional line of criticism on Gascoigne includes Ivor Winters, who characterizes Gascoigne’s moral assertions as earnest and direct in ‘The Sixteenth-Century Lyric in England: A Critical and Historical Reinterpretation’, Poetry 53 (1939) 258-72, 320-35; Charles Prouty, who argues that Gascoigne was a reformed prodigal by referring to the story told in ‘The Green Knight’s Farewell to Fancy’ as autobiographical on Gascoigne’s part, in George Gascoigne, Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); C. S. Lewis, who sets him above the poets he characterized as ‘drab’, but the label nevertheless stuck with Gascoigne, in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973); and Richard Helgerson, who asserts that the speaker in Gascoigne’s various works is Gascoigne himself, narrating the reformation of his own prodigality, in The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 45.
