John Oldcastle Hoccleve
It may seem counterintuitive to queer Hoccleve’s highly normative and religiously orthodox Addresse to Sir John Oldcastle. The Addresse is a 450 line poem in which Hoccleve remonstrates the knight Sir John Oldcastle into leaving his heretical, Lollard beliefs and potential rebellion against King Henry V. He encourages the wayward soldier to return to religious orthodoxy and loyalty to the king. Like traditional medieval gender expectations, the poem itself falls neatly into two parts. In the Address to Sir John Oldcastle, the first half of the poem, lines 1-264, Hoccleve directly addresses Oldcastle. In the second half, lines 273-491 Hoccleve changes of tone and strategy and indicts the mass of unnamed Lollards who have lead the previously
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In fact, a queer reading of the poem exposes a great deal about the social and political operations of the text. Using queer theory we can unpack the hegemonic culture to understand the heterodoxy of the early fifteenth century. For all its demands of normality, the Addresse illustrates the problematics of gender performance, sexual identity and fifteenth century panic about religious non-orthodoxy. Hoccleve’s portrayal of the knight is delightfully queer. Oldcastle is spiritually castrated inside the yonic “snare” of Lollardy, and Oldcastle’s campy behavior that allows two mutually exclusive positions to operate at the same time are threats to Hoccleve and the Lancastrian body politic’s masculinity. Moreover, and perhaps most surprising, queering the poem can show us that Hoccleve’s gendered frame proves more self-referential and recursive than he would have us believe. What we may initially read the poet as a reducing orthodoxy/heterodoxy to a gendered binary becomes more interesting and problematic when we look at Hoccleve’s own gender performance at poet. Hoccleve’s hectoring, nagging, fretful, repetitious concerns in his Address to John Oldcastle are in themselves highly feminized. In the Address Hoccleve developed an elaborate coded body that relies on the feminine collapsing into and reconstituting the masculine in an infinite
In fact, a queer reading of the poem exposes a great deal about the social and political operations of the text. Using queer theory we can unpack the hegemonic culture to understand the heterodoxy of the early fifteenth century. For all its demands of normality, the Addresse illustrates the problematics of gender performance, sexual identity and fifteenth century panic about religious non-orthodoxy. Hoccleve’s portrayal of the knight is delightfully queer. Oldcastle is spiritually castrated inside the yonic “snare” of Lollardy, and Oldcastle’s campy behavior that allows two mutually exclusive positions to operate at the same time are threats to Hoccleve and the Lancastrian body politic’s masculinity. Moreover, and perhaps most surprising, queering the poem can show us that Hoccleve’s gendered frame proves more self-referential and recursive than he would have us believe. What we may initially read the poet as a reducing orthodoxy/heterodoxy to a gendered binary becomes more interesting and problematic when we look at Hoccleve’s own gender performance at poet. Hoccleve’s hectoring, nagging, fretful, repetitious concerns in his Address to John Oldcastle are in themselves highly feminized. In the Address Hoccleve developed an elaborate coded body that relies on the feminine collapsing into and reconstituting the masculine in an infinite