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John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes is a singular poem surprisingly rich in literary and cultural contexts. The only Middle English poetic treatment of the Theban story, evidently written without a patron, it is the complement to the Troy Book commissioned immediately before it by Henry V.1 Its medieval and modem fame rests in part on being a consciously spurious Canterbury Tale. One scribal rubric describes the Siege implausibly as "[a] Mery conseyte" joining "[thorn]e sege of Thebes to the mery tallys of Caunterburye."2 Others identify the poem by the fictional frame Lydgate creates for it in the prologue, as "the laste tale of Cauntirbury tolde homward."3 The earliest textual witnesses place the Siege in aristocratic reading circles; by the mid-fifteenth century, it circulated among country gentry, urban merchants, and women's religious communities.4 Richard III owned a copy of the Siege in a collection of romances designed to shape the morals and judgment of young princely readers.5 The continuing presence of Lydgate's poem in English Renaissance literature depends on another context-John Stow's 1561 edition of The Workes of Geffrey Chaucer-that has much to suggest about the reconfigurations of poetic meaning and political imagination in early-modern culture.6 By including Lydgate's poem among his "diuers addicions" to Chaucer, Stow clearly intends to "increase" the Chaucer canon.7 The effect of this editorial decision, however, is to translate Lydgate's Theban poem to a new framework of literary and political imagination. Stow reinscribes a work of Lancastrian propaganda about kingship in an early-Elizabethan discourse of monarchy, nationhood, and debated political authority.
In his edition of Chaucer, Stow operates within a sixteenth-century "tradition of reprint-with-augmentation," based on William Thynne's 1532 Chaucer.8 The Chaucer text he works from is a 1550 reprint of Thynne's edition. Stows specific influence can be detected beginning with his additions to what Thynne had printed, rather than his interventions in Thynne's text of the poem. In other words, "Stow's Chaucer" is what Stow adds to Chaucer and what those additions mean in the logic of a composite edition. The impulse to make a collection of Chaucer as comprehensive as possible began, as Aage Brusendorff pointed out long ago, with the fifteenth-century scribes of Chaucer manuscripts.9 In this respect, Stow follows the ordinatio of late-medieval manuscripts, which place the...