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Compared to the continent, the matter of Troy features relatively late in vernacular English literature. In fourteenth-century Britain, we argue, Troy becomes a privileged site for poetological investigations into the nature of literary and historiographical innovation. Troy assumes this role in insular narratives because of a complex dynamics of literary tradition and innovation already present in the older Troy traditions. Fourteenth-century writers use Troy to construct and question a panorama of competing antiquities –a panorama which sustains a sense of literary competition that foregrounds the construction of temporalities, especially the relationship of "old" and "new". Using Bruno Latour's concept of temporal hybridity, we claim further that Troy continues to be a central discourse to raise meta-poetic questions until well into the sixteenth century. We demonstrate this by readings of Geoffrey Chaucer's "House of Fame" and William Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece". We read Chaucer's "Fame" as a productive confrontation of literary tradition insofar as the poem questions seemingly authoritative knowledge regarding the Trojan War. The poem offers an epistemological legitimization of a poetics of innovation that remains productive at least until the Renaissance. Shakespeare's "Lucrece", for example, is highly traditional, that is, late medieval, in the way it uses Trojan topoi to comment on the relationship of originality and tradition. The poem's Trojan ekphrasis, we argue, demonstrates the complex interactions of different temporalities, as it engages with classical as well as medieval intertexts, especially Chaucer's "Fame".
