4 The Legacy of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The House of Fame
None of the Ricardian poets had a straightforward approach to political prophecy. Langland invoked it in parody. Gower only fully adopted it after Henry IV came to power. Chaucer avoided the discourse altogether. This may have something to do with his proximity to the royal court. As Larry D. Benson helpfully summarizes, “Chaucer was a soldier, an esquire of the king’s household, a member of diplomatic missions, a controller of customs, a justice of the peace, a member of Parliament, the clerk of the king’s works in charge of building and repair at ten royal residences, and a forest official.”1 During his time in all of these roles, Chaucer was surely aware of political prophecies as well as their potential volatility, both towards the English monarchy and those who perpetuated them. Even though Chaucer kept his distance from political prophecy, he did not completely eschew the role of the prophet. Within all of his dream visions, Chaucer worked extensively with a continental tradition that I term prophetic citation. Prophetic citation occurs when authors depict a dream or vision and, during it, draw attention to past poets who have influenced them. The “vision” of the past poet is a metaphor for artistic inspiration. Prophetic citation began in classical literature but continued in many of the French and Italian medieval works that influenced Chaucer. During his frequent travels to France and Italy, Chaucer had the opportunity to read and acquire literature that was not available in England.2 Fittingly, Chaucer uses the imported act of prophetic citation to reflect on his own role as a creative interpreter and translator of foreign literatures.
In The House of Fame, Chaucer supplements his work with prophetic citation by invoking biblical prophetic roles that were more similar to those of his English peers. When Ricardian authors prominently feature a biblical prophet in their works, they usually select someone whose method of communication or moral message reflects their own. This is why, as the last chapter illustrated, Gower includes the interpretive and apocalyptic prophet, Daniel, within the Vox clamantis and the Confessio Amantis. Michael P. Kuczynski has observed the frequency with which Langland speaks of the prophet David and quotes from his Psalms in Piers Plowman. Kuczynski notes that in doing so, Langland stresses the importance of learning from reflection upon one’s own sins, since Will, like David, is a sinner and his book, like the Psalms, is written to encourage self-correction.3 The Gawain-poet invokes several prophets who give dire admonitions, most notably Jonah in Patience and Daniel in Cleanness, which reflects the poet’s own warnings to readers. In The House of Fame, Chaucer selects Enoch and Eli as his own prophetic proxies because, like them, he has privileged access to information that he must responsibly relay to a chaotic crowd. Chaucer uses Enoch and Eli to reinforce the persona that he has already created through his work with prophetic citation – that of a cool-headed intermediary between disparate social classes, cultures, and sources of wisdom.
Chaucer’s creative work with multiple modes of prophetic self-representation, especially within The House of Fame, has been underappreciated largely because it has been overshadowed by a different prophetic persona that follows Chaucer – that of a rational English hero, ahead of his own superstitious time. This reputation goes back as far as William Thynne’s The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, published in 1532. The Introduction to the Workes, originally written by Sir Brian Tuke, declares all of Chaucer’s talents in poetry before declaring:
It is moch to be marvayled, howe in hys tyme, when doubtless al good letters were layde aslepe throughoute the worlde, as the thynge whyche eyther by the disposition and influence of the bodyes above, or by other ordinaunce of God, semed lyke and was in daunger to have utterly perished, suche an excellent poete in our tonge shuld as it were (nature repugnynge) sprynge and aryse.4
Here, Thynne presents Chaucer as a miraculously bright beacon in an otherwise dark time for poetry and learning. Thynne’s publishers would later famously add the apocryphal Plowman’s Tale to his second edition of The Workes of Geffray Chaucer in 1542.5 This work promoted John Wycliffe’s critiques of the monastic orders and the papacy and shaped perceptions of Chaucer as a religious trailblazer. As Kathleen Forni has observed, “Until the early nineteenth century Chaucer’s identity and reputation were, in part, based on works he did not write.”6 Apocrypha bolstered this image of a proto-Protestant Chaucer, but other pseudo-Chaucerian works like “Chaucer’s Prophecy” (introduced by William Caxton but brought to prominence by Thynne) contributed to the related but much broader and more enduring image of Chaucer as a man ahead of his time.
As Linda Georgianna has noted, because Chaucer’s proto-Protestant reputation depended upon the foil of supposedly superstitious Catholicism, it was a natural predecessor for Chaucer’s later reputation as a secular Humanist and natural sceptic – a reputation that endures to this day.7 Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, critics and biographers have characterized Chaucer as an author whose secularity set him apart from his medieval peers, making him more of a Renaissance author than a medieval one.8 A few critics have pushed back against Chaucer’s secular reputation by reconsidering the prominence of religion within his works.9 One less discussed consequence of Chaucer’s reputation as an early Protestant or secular Renaissance man has been the mischaracterization of his prophetic persona. Critics have long deemed Chaucer’s work with prophetic citation in The House of Fame a “parody” of the Commedia in general and Dante’s prophetic narrative persona in particular. The notion that Chaucer must be correcting and scorning the Italian tradition that he finds in the Commedia is a product of the nationalist, secular reputation that surrounds Chaucer. Recognizing that Chaucer’s work with prophecy extends beyond sceptically mocking it requires us to look at Chaucer as a man within his time rather than ahead of it. The following chapter examines Chaucer’s inventive work with prophetic citation in his dream visions before turning to his most amplified prophetic role in The House of Fame. Finally, to disentangle Chaucer’s self-imposed prophetic role from those that have been attributed to him, this chapter will examine the multifaceted history of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” – an apocryphal prediction that functioned as a “threshold work” in most print editions of Chaucer’s poems from the fifteenth through the late nineteenth centuries.10
Prophetic Citation in Chaucer’s Dream Visions
When engaging in prophetic citation, a poet refers to another earlier poet during a literary dream or vision. The other poet may be depicted as the inspiration for the dream but could also be the guide, someone encountered, mentioned, or even alluded to during the vision. In all cases, the citation draws attention to the author’s own inspiration for the literary work at hand. Prophetic citation often occurs in chains, honoring several different generations of influence. For instance, in his introduction to the Aetia, the third-century BCE Greek poet, Callimachus, describes a dream of having met the Muses at the River Helicon and learning the cause of things. This is an imitation of the eighth-century BCE Greek poet, Hesiod’s description of a similar moment of inspiration in the Theogony. Virgil later imitates this episode from Callimachus in his sixth Eclogue. Prophecy is inherently a borrowed authority, and yet the prophet is also a special, divinely elected figure. In this sense, prophecy incisively represents the paradox of literary authority that is at once imitated and unique. It lends itself well to moments in which authors wish to acknowledge the derived nature of their work but also to announce themselves as singularly important in their own times.
Prophetic citation persists in medieval works that draw from the classics. At the beginning of his Latin epic, the Africa, Petrarch includes the story of the dream of Scipio. This story is inspired by the Somnium Scipionis, a portion of Cicero’s longer work, De re publica (54–51 BC). In Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, the Roman general, Scipio Aemilianus, dreams that he meets his grandfather, Scipio Africanis. Africanis takes his grandson into the sky and shows him Carthage, prophesying that Aemilianus will conquer it in two years and will be transported to the firmament of the stars after he dies. From the sky, however, Aemilianus sees how small Rome is in comparison to the vast universe and humbly understands that his future accomplishments are relatively insignificant. Petrarch takes the story back another two generations. The Africa’s hero is Scipio Africanis, the deceased Roman general who traditionally appears to his grandson, Aemilianus, in Cicero’s telling of the story. In his dream, Petrarch’s Scipio Africanis encounters his father, who prophesies to his son about the future of Rome. Both Cicero and Petrarch use the Dream of Scipio to depict an elder, deceased military hero advising the younger descendant seeking military fame. Yet, by reworking of the dream, its characters, and its timeframe, Petrarch places his wisdom before that of the elder author. Cicero wrote the wisdom of Scipio Africanis, but Petrarch writes the wisdom that inspired Scipio Africanis. In this way, Petrarch approaches prophetic citation in a way that acknowledges influence but also undercuts it, suggesting early roots of Harold Bloom’s concept of the anxiety of influence.11 Nevertheless, in this epic famous for its numerous allusions, Petrarch still uses prophecy as a metaphor for his literary inspiration.
Petrarch places himself more traditionally at the end of a chain of prophetic citation in Book 9, when a fictionalized version of the poet Ennius, who famously wrote of Scipio Africanus’s fame after serving in his army, has his own dream. In this dream, the Greek poet, Homer, guides Ennius. Here, Petrarch is imitating the prologue of Ennius’s Annales, wherein Ennius dreams that he meets Homer, who informs Ennius that he is actually the reincarnation of Homer’s soul. Petrarch’s version of the dream in the Africa does not include Homer’s claim to share a spirit with Ennius. Instead, Homer prophesies to Ennius the coming of Petrarch himself:
Hic ego nam longe clausa sub valle sedentem
Aspexi juvenem: dux o carissime, quisnam est
Quem video teneras inter consistere lauros,
Et viridante comas meditantem incingere ramo?
Nescio quid, nisi fallor enim, sub pectore versat
Egregiumque altumque nimis. (9.216–21)
[There in the distance I could see a youth seated within a valley closed by hills. I asked: “O cherished guide, disclose, I pray, who is it I behold taking his rest under the tender laurel? Lo, he seems about to bind his locks with those green fronds, I know not what he ponders in his heart, but surely it must be, unless I err, some high and noble purpose.”]12
The fact that Homer is predicting the coming of Petrarch becomes more and more apparent as Homer describes the youth as hailing from Florence and predicts that “titulusque poematis illi Africa” (9.235–6) [he will call his poem Africa]. In this way, Petrarch depicts Homer as anticipating the existence of the very poem within which he appears.
Petrarch may have been inspired by the twelfth-century French author, Jean de Meun, who had the character the God of Love prognosticate his own authorship in a section of Le Roman de la Rose that is already ripe with prophetic citation. The God of Love laments that the Roman love poets Tibullus, Gallus, Catullus, or Ovid cannot be there to write his story before predicting that Jean de Meun will be born and that he, the God of Love, will visit him to inspire his work.13 In having the author Homer prophesy his coming, Petrarch folds Jean’s practice of self-announcement through prognostication into the tradition of prophetic citation. Homer foretells that “Iste senescenti tantum illo in tempore Romae / Carior annosae quantum contingere matri / Filius ille solet, quem post lacrymosa sepulcra / Natorum viduae sterilis tandem attulit alvus” (9.246–9) [he by aging Rome shall be more cherished than a late-born son, fruit of a womb long barren of a mother by death bereft of earlier progeny]. Here, Homer presents Petrarch as a figure akin to John the Baptist – a prophet whose birth to an older mother was itself prophesied despite being unexpected by many. Exploiting a chain of prophetic citation, Petrarch clarifies the authorial identity that he would like to promote – that of the restorer of classical Roman literature. By making himself the culmination of a prophecy passed from a Greek bard to a Roman one, Petrarch makes the case that his poetic status, like those of his predecessors, was divinely inspired and affirmed. Petrarch also implies that Rome’s military and literary legacies were preordained by God.
This is a prophetic tradition that Chaucer engages with in his dream visions, but rather than advancing a national narrative, Chaucer emphasizes the diversity of his sources and his power to transform them. For instance, Chaucer begins The Parliament of Fowls by depicting himself, the narrator, reading Cicero’s The Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipionis). This is not only a nod to Cicero but also to the beginning of Guillaume de Lorris’s portion of Le Roman de La Rose, wherein Guillaume begins by citing The Dream of Scipio. Upon falling asleep, Chaucer encounters the character of Affricans from The Dream of Scipio, who will serve as his guide to the enclosed garden or hortus conclusus, also borrowed from Le Roman de La Rose. Furthermore, Affricans mirrors Dante’s depiction of Virgil – a guide taken from literary history who explains the structure of the universe and God’s place in it. This is even more pronounced when Chaucer reads the inscription on the gate to the garden, which begins with the repeated phrase, “Thorgh me men gon,” repeating Dante’s language from the gate to the Inferno, “Per me si va” (III.1). Chaucer uses dreams as a space to draw attention to his written inspiration but also to play with that inspiration in the way that only a dreamer can. The dream is Chaucer’s oft repeated metaphor for poetic creativity – something that pulls its content from various disjointed aspects of life and knits it into a new reality in the mind of the inspired individual.
Chaucer is explicit about the influence implied by prophetic citation when he associates the act of reading with visionary experience in his dream visions. Both The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls begin with Chaucer reading before falling asleep, only to dream of characters and images present in the material that he has just read. In The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer awakens within a chamber whose windows are decorated with images from books on Troy and classical romances. Lisa J. Kiser has read this scene, noting that, “Roman art is inextricably linked with the light that fills the ‘room of dreams,’ the place where all of a poet’s work begins.”14 Yet, it is not simply Roman art. The walls contain the content of The Romance of the Rose (Le Roman de la Rose), which Chaucer had already translated at the earliest stages of his literary career. Often configuring classical and influential continental works within the ekphrasis of his dream imagery, Chaucer gestures to his inspiration while ultimately placing it under the jurisdiction of his own subconscious, free to bend the facts and details of these works of art, newly imagined.15 Within the dream, Chaucer’s influences are literally the walls, supporting the structures that surround him but standing in the background. The dream vision was a well-established poetic genre, but Chaucer is remarkable in the degree to which he is willing to conflate multiple spaces within one scene, mimicking the kinds of spatial slippage that occur in actual dreams.
Prophetic Citation in The House of Fame’s Ekphrasis
In The House of Fame, Chaucer not only incorporates his classical literary sources into the ekphrasis in his dream but also imitates Dante’s use of prophetic citation. Both authors identify the first-person speakers of their poems as reflections of their authorial personae. Beatrice refers to the narrator of the Commedia as “Dante,” and the eagle in Book II of The House of Fame refers to the narrator as “Geffrey.” In Book I, Chaucer describes falling asleep and finding himself in a temple of glass that is dedicated to Venus. A brass tablet on the wall recounts the story of Aeneas. This is at once a prophetic citation of Dante and Virgil. Like Dante, Chaucer adopts a role originally inhabited by Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid. Whereas Dante mimics Aeneas’s journey to the Underworld, Chaucer puts himself in the position of Aeneas in the Temple of Juno (although in The House of Fame, it is Venus’s temple), looking at pictures that recount the Trojan War. Within the Commedia, Dante imitates and inhabits a much more obviously prophetic moment of the Aeneid. Being a privileged witness to the conditions of the afterlife and returning home with news of it is obviously prophetic. Chaucer’s imitation of Aeneas’s trip to Juno’s Temple in Dido’s Carthage is prophetic insofar as it requires Chaucer to receive and interpret information as an intermediary.
Chaucer is joining in a chain of classical prophetic citation by focusing on Aeneas’s time in the temple. As Steven Lowenstam has observed, Aeneas’s moment in the temple is prophetic because, “All six reliefs on Dido’s temple depict events of the Trojan War that will be echoed by incidents occurring in the Italian War as described especially in Books 9–12 of the Aeneid.”16 Virgil took his inspiration for this ekphrasis in the temple from Demodocus’s songs in the eighth book of Homer’s Odyssey.17 The songs tell of Odysseus’s past suffering in the war, eliciting sadness from the main character. In this way, Virgil takes part in the tradition of melding prophecy with allusion. In making the pictures portray the past while revealing the future to Aeneas, Virgil imitates Homer but crafts an entirely new story about an Italian war. The prognosticating element of the pictures carved in the temple is self-referential, drawing attention to Virgil’s own role in reshaping past tropes into his new epic. Chaucer, in turn, alters the prophetic component of the moment. Rather than an episode that predicts and foreshadows the future of the narrative to a character, Chaucer portrays this time in the temple as a revelation, seen by the author himself in a dream sent by the gods. Like Virgil before him, Chaucer contributes to the chain of prophetic citation, in which each new author in the chain links himself to and distinguishes himself from his predecessor.
Chaucer repurposes Virgil’s moment of ekphrasis, which already reflects on the cruelties of fame, to ponder the responsibilities of authorship. As Deborah Beck has pointed out, Virgil’s Dido views the Trojans as gens inimica and presumably commissioned carvings of the Trojan defeat to bring her joy.18 Yet Virgil’s Aeneas sees these carvings and, while weeping at them, says to his friend, Achates, “solue metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem” [Forget your fears; this fame will bring you some deliverance] (I.463). The carvings move Aeneas, leading him to assume that, despite the sorrow that they bring him, they reflect a redeeming fame that will honor him for his sacrifices in war. He never considers that the carvings could elicit rejoicing from others and that his fame could bring him something other than honor. Chaucer, however, does consider this. In another work, The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer’s Aeneas sees the carvings on the temple and laments, “Allas, that I was born! … Thourghout the world oure shame is kid so wyde, / Now it is peynted upon every syde. / Been now desclandred, and in swich degree” (1027–31).19 Chaucer’s Aeneas can see the dark edge of fame, but Virgil’s Aeneas naively assumes it to be a comfort. While Virgil never comments upon this naivety himself, the ironic sting of mistrusted fame is easily observable (certainly to Chaucer) in Aeneas’s hopeful reaction. This potential for misinterpretation extends to all art, including the Aeneid itself, and this episode in the Aeneid highlights Aeneas’s and Virgil’s precarious positions at the whims of fame. In a moment of dramatic irony, Aeneas observes both his past and future battles on a wall and fails to recognize what either truly means. Aeneas’s ignorance is a nod to Virgil’s self-awareness as he looks upon the past work of the Odyssey and the future legacy of the Aeneid. By situating himself in the position of Aeneas as the character observing these carvings and stories, Chaucer pushes Virgil’s self-reflection a step further, making it the central subject of his poem. In this moment usually demonstrating multiple layers of vulnerability, Chaucer reflects intensely upon his own power to shape and even correct fame.
The temple that Chaucer sees not only shows Aeneas’s defeat but also Dido’s part in Aeneas’s story, which Chaucer has taken from both Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Heroides. Chaucer directs his audience to his sources, telling us to “Rede Virgile in Eneydos / Or the Epistle of Ovyde” (I.378–9) to know more about what Dido said and did in the story. Putting himself in this role of passive, dreaming observer does not erase Chaucer’s role in the production of the text but draws attention to it. Whereas Aeneas merely had to see the temple walls and accept that his story had been told by others, the slumbering author Chaucer is also the mind creating his temple and carving the stories contained therein. Within the framework of a vision, Chaucer smooths together two narratives, one by Ovid and one by Virgil, without the need to articulate where and how he borrowed each aspect of the story. Although Chaucer’s words acknowledge Virgil and Ovid as the authorities on Dido’s story, his presentation of their influence as a vision boldly accentuates his poetic license with the tale. He even claims to speak Dido’s actual words:
In suche words gan to pleyne
Dydo of hir grete peyne,
As me mette redely –
Non other auctour alegge I. (I.311–14)
His claim to access her words directly, without even the intermediary of an auctor – a source informing him – playfully displays his creative position within the work and his authority to fabricate detail.
Chaucer’s “dreamed” version of the story retains portions of Virgil’s account, which are more sympathetic to Aeneas, along with portions of Ovid’s version, which are more sympathetic to Dido. Chaucer plays the role of a rational adjudicator of fame, hearing both sides out. He defends Dido, citing, “How he [Aeneas] betrayed hir, allas, / And lefte hir ful unkyndely” (294–5) and comparing her to Demophon and Phillis, who were similarly betrayed. Nevertheless, he also defends Aeneas, reminding us:
But to excuse Eneas
Fullyche of al his grete trespass,
The book seyth Mercurie, sauns fayle,
Bad hym goo into Itayle,
And leve Auffrikes regioun,
And Dido and hir faire toun. (I.427–32)
While Ovid’s Dido continuously harps on Aeneas’s wrongdoings, Chaucer’s Dido reserves her greatest disdain for Fame:
For thorgh yow is my name lorn,
And alle myn actes red and songe
Over al thys lond, on every tonge.
O wikke Fame! – for ther nys
Nothing so swift, lo, as she is! (I.345–50)
Dido points to literature and song but also to spoken gossip, fearing, “And that I shal thus juged be: ‘Loo, right as she hath don, now she / Wol doo eft-sones, hardely” (I357–8). Chaucer represents spoken and written words as equally capable of destroying a reputation, collapsing the two meanings of “fame” as renown and rumor. Yet in giving Dido a voice to lament this cruelty, much as he will later give Criseyde a voice to do the same in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer presents an alternative mode of storytelling – one that reports rumor but also presents it with dignity.
Chaucer speaks back to Virgil and Ovid not only with his own voice but also with that of the English public. He conspicuously inserts a number of sententious or proverbial sayings, explicitly moralizing the tale. For instance, he reminds us, “Hyt is not al gold that glareth” (I.272) when describing how Dido was too easily won over by Aeneas’s fine appearance. Likewise, he declares, “He that fully knoweth th’erbe / May saufly leye hyt to his yë – / Withoute drede, this ys no lye” (I.290–3), using Dido’s rash acceptance of the stranger, Aeneas, almost as an exemplum in the manner of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Yet, rather than overt Christian moralizing, or even classical sententiae attributed to an authority, Chaucer turns to public conventional wisdom for his exegesis. Gower’s own telling of Dido and Aeneas’s story places the blame on Aeneas, in Genius’s lesson on sloth. Chaucer’s retelling is a measured parsing out of multiple wrongdoings and human errors, rendered universal by the inclusion of common sayings. Sheila Delany has referred to Chaucer’s use of these proverbs as a form of “obvious narrative incompetence” in the manner of his “Tale of Sir Thopas” in The Canterbury Tales, signaling “a parodic intention.”20 Yet, the folk sayings insightfully illuminate the story, mitigating each character’s guilt while also providing a clear lesson. As Teresa Tinkle observes, in this context, these proverbs serve “as a wryly sufficient commentary on pagan literature.”21 Chaucer answers the damaging wounds inflicted by idle gossip with the salubrious balm of public wisdom. Inhabiting Aeneas’s position within a prophetic dream world, Chaucer presents himself as a mediator between the worlds of chatter and literature, using each to correct and comment upon the other.
If this were indeed a poem written to announce an occasion or speak of a recent controversy, as several early critics have suggested, Chaucer’s performance of the role of a wise but reasonable judge and presenter of human behaviour would have been noteworthy to his audience.22 Much of the text serves as a reassurance that Chaucer sees no sense in dragging anyone’s reputation through the mud as well as a demonstration of his ability to present an objective and fair perspective on personal affairs, salacious as they may be.23 This is, of course, in sharp contrast to Dante, who maligns the fictional and real subjects inhabiting the Inferno.
While Dante was already exiled as he wrote the Commedia, Chaucer was working and living well within the circles of the English royal court, inspiring a much more diplomatic prophetic persona. In The House of Fame, Chaucer observes judgment in the scope of history rather than judgment in the afterlife. While Dante consults the dead, Chaucer consults art. Yet, both return to their respective worlds to convey their messages. In this way, Chaucer presents the act of translation as a form of prophecy. As a witness to a dream that he obviously created, Chaucer is distinct from Dante, who puts himself into a Christian prophetic scenario that makes him a kind of poet-theologian. Authors engaging in prophetic citation always simultaneously acknowledge and distance themselves from the poets from whom they draw inspiration. However, critics have tended to overemphasize Chaucer’s intentions to distance his prophetic persona from Dante’s, going so far as to claim that The House of Fame mocks the Commedia.
The Satirical Reading of The House of Fame
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several continental critics theorized that The House of Fame was a kind of comedic reworking of the Commedia, and this opinion found its way into Skeat’s edition of Chaucer’s Works.24 By the 1960s, the suggestion that The House of Fame was an extended adaptation of the Commedia had temporarily fallen out of favour. B.G. Koonce acknowledged similarities between the works but argued that they “reflect a common body of Christian doctrine connecting Chaucer’s imagery with the spiritual meanings of Dante’s pilgrimage.”25 In light of this, Paul G. Ruggiers commented in a 1968 essay on “The Italian Influence on Chaucer,” “We have come a long way, it is clear, from the assumptions of a hundred years ago that Chaucer was writing a parodic version of Dante’s great poem in a parodic vein.”26 Nevertheless, this perspective returned in the 1970s, with the advent of nominalist and postmodern readings of the poem, which deemed The House of Fame, as Sheila Delany put it, “a literary statement about the unreliability of literary statements.”27 Because prophetic authority implies access to categorical truth, those who have viewed Chaucer as a nominalist have assumed his perspective on prophetic authorial subject positions to be cynical. For instance, John M. Fyler has influentially argued that The House of Fame is “a sustained inversion of Dante’s vatic pretensions.”28 Paul Strohm has even more boldly referred to the work as “a poem of his midcareer written, among other motive, to twit his illustrious predecessor Dante as a fame-seeking windbag.”29 Although not the only reading of the poem, Chaucer’s supposed correction of Dante, especially his grandiose prophetic position, has remained a popular contemporary interpretation of The House of Fame.30
Chaucer distinguishes his authorial voice from that of Dante, but his respective invocations of Hypnose, Venus, and Apollo at the beginning of each book of The House of Fame do not constitute a parody of Dante’s engagement with the prophetic authorial role. Rather, as Jamie C. Fumo has argued in her discussion of Chaucer’s invocation of Apollo, “Chaucer was in fact more fascinated by the vatic ideal of inspired prophetic truth – a model of poetry specifically associated with Apollo, god of the vates – than he has been given credit for.”31 The House of Fame is not an outright rejection of classical or Dantean modes of authorship so much as it is Chaucer’s opportunity to articulate his own position in relation to his predecessors and his readers.
Knowledge of Dante in Fourteenth-Century England
The notion of a “parody” or “mock version” of the Commedia is especially suspect when considering that Chaucer could never have expected his original audience to be familiar with Dante’s work. The first record of sale of Dante’s Commedia in England does not appear until 1451, and the text was not translated into English until the nineteenth century.32 Chaucer’s fourteenth-century English audience would have primarily known of Dante by reputation – a reputation to which Chaucer refers in The House of Fame when he says,
And every torment eke in helle
Saugh he, which is longe to telle;
Which whoso willeth for to knowe,
He moste rede many a rowe
On Virgile or on Claudian,
Or Daunte, that hit tell kan.
Winthrop Wetherbee has argued that “for Chaucer Dante is not only a model but a standard by which the quality and seriousness of his own future work may be measured.”33 Chaucer was intimately familiar with Dante’s work. Yet, at no point does he appear to be writing for an audience that knew Dante by more than his reputation or would understand an extended critique of his magnum opus. Paul Strohm has posited Chaucer’s awareness “both of an immediate audience for his oral presentations and an audience of posterity for his written texts.”34 It would not be preposterous to assume that Chaucer imagined that later readers might look at The House of Fame alongside the Commedia, given the stature that Dante had already achieved. Nevertheless, it would be misguided to assume that Chaucer wrote The House of Fame primarily with this future audience in mind.
Rather, it is more accurate to say that, like his classical antecedents and Dante himself, Chaucer uses prophecy to simultaneously situate himself within and distinguish himself from existing authorial paradigms. Chaucer borrows a number of prophetic images and phrases from Dante that aid him in articulating the nature of his authorial persona. While Chaucer alters those images and phrases in a manner that makes it clear that he is developing a different literary subject position from that of his Italian predecessor, he does not do so in a way that eschews the prophetic tradition. Chaucer’s role as a witness within The House of Fame thoughtfully reflects the degree to which his authorial role involves reception of and access to famed literature. The parodic view of The House of Fame ignores this aspect of Chaucer’s persona. William Franke has argued that, in The House of Fame, when Chaucer “ostensibly addresses himself to transcendent subjects, he resorts to parodic mode, spoofing the solemn, spiritually serious treatment of Dante.”35 While Dante is certainly more “spiritually serious” than Chaucer is, one can still read Chaucer’s prophetic role as a genuine self-representation. Privileged in real life to edify himself of classical and contemporary works through foreign travels and to know various members of the English royal court, Chaucer presents this unusual artistic access as a sort of visionary experience. In this way, prophecy is a useful metaphor for developing Chaucer’s authorial persona rather than a joke aimed at spiritual authors.
Eli and Enoch: Prophets of the Public
The House of Fame is one of the rare works in which Chaucer expands on the persona that he develops via prophetic citation by including biblical prophets as proxies of self-representation. This is a prophetic mode that Chaucer would have been familiar with both through his reading of his English contemporaries and Dante. Building on his persona as an author careful with reputations and slander, Chaucer depicts his voice as one intended to quell and inform a group or crowd by associating himself with the biblical Eli and Enoch at the moment when the eagle appears to transport Chaucer at the end of Book I of The House of Fame. This is an imitation of the moment when an eagle swoops into the Purgatorio after Dante has fallen asleep at the gates of Purgatory and places him at the base of the mountain that ultimately leads to Paradiso. The sleeping Dante remarks the he seemed to be in the very spot where the Trojans were “abbandonati i suoi da Ganimede, / quando fu ratto al sommo consistoro” [abandoned by Ganymede, when he was carried off to the highest consistory] (Purg.IX.23–4).36 In this way, Dante parses out one of the many classical allusions that he is making in using the image of the eagle. Chaucer expands upon this by borrowing from other lines of the Commedia. After speaking with the eagle for some time, Chaucer’s narrative persona, Geoffrey, says,
I neyther am Ennok, ne Elye,
Ne Romulus, ne Ganymede,
That was ybore up, as men rede,
To hevene with daun Jupiter,
And mad the goodys botiller. (587–92)
Chaucer uses Dante’s reference to Ganymede to accompany the image of the eagle but also borrows the syntax of these lines from the second book of the Inferno, wherein Dante protests that he is unworthy to see the realms of the afterworld. Dante declares, “Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono,” [I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul] (Inferno.II.32). Dante’s reference to Aeneas appears at this moment because he is going to visit the Inferno, and Aeneas visits the Underworld in Book VI of the Aeneid. Dante mentions Paul because Augustine, Aquinas, and others believed Paul’s reference in 2 Corinthians 12.2–4 to a man who was taken to heaven to be a reference to the biblical author himself. Thus, Dante alludes to one man who has been to hell and another who has been to heaven to reflect his own experience within the Commedia. In drawing the comparison while denying it, he likens himself to a classical figure and a Christian one, classifying his work as intricately connected to both traditions. Dante’s reference to Paul in particular draws to mind Paul’s role as God’s messenger to highlight Dante’s own position as a divine emissary or Christian vates to his audience. Chaucer adapts this aspect of the Inferno to frame his own prophetic persona.
In claiming that he is not Enoch or Eli, Chaucer takes advantage of another allusion inherent to Dante’s image of the eagle – that of carrying a mortal upward to the heavens. Enoch and Eli are the only two people in the Old Testament who are taken to heaven without dying first. Genesis 5:24 says that Enoch “walked with God and was seen no more because God took him,” which early exegetes interpreted as meaning that Enoch was taken into the heavens.37 Several apocryphal Books of Enoch have existed, recounting Enoch’s journey.38 Although none of these books were in circulation in England in the fourteenth century, Enoch’s reputation as a prophet who had been taken into heaven finds its way into a great deal of English biblical literature such as the Trinity Poem on Biblical History, English translations of the Polychronicon, Genesis and Exodus, Old Testament History, Caxton’s Golden Legend, The Harrowing of Hell and the Destruction of Jerusalem, Stanzaic Life of Christ, and the Ormulum.39 Eli’s ascent into the heavens is mentioned directly and dramatically in the Fourth Book of Kings 2:11: “And as they went on, walking and talking together, behold a fiery chariot, and fiery horses parted them both asunder: and Elias went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” Based on interpretations of the “two witnesses” mentioned in the Book of Revelation (11:3–12) as being Enoch and Eli, the two prophets appear together in numerous late medieval English sermons, poems, and plays relating the coming of the Antichrist.40 For instance, the fifth part of the popular English mystical poem, The Pricke of Conscience, makes predictions about Doomsday, describing the coming of the Antichrist and the role of Enoch and Eli in returning to combat him:
He shal come fyrste in myldenesse
And preche ageyne ryghtwysnesse,
By hym suche wondres shul be don
That resseyve hym shul Jewes sone
And to hym turnen alle hooly.
Ennok shal come then and Ely
To preche ageyne Antycryste ful harde
As ye moun heren afturwarde.41
In this role, it seems that Enoch and Eli were assumed into heaven in order to return someday, as still living prophets, in order to combat the most dangerous disseminator of misinformation, the Antichrist. The Pricke of Conscience characterizes the Antichrist’s followers as Jewish, making Enoch and Eli’s role as one of “correcting” their fellow Jews who have yet to accept Christ. While there was a wide swathe of anti-Semitic Antichrist literature, it was just one of many traditions associated with the Antichrist. Most late medieval Christians believed that the Antichrist would be a person who would act as an agent for Satan during the last days, converting people with his teachings.42 Chaucer’s allusion to Enoch and Eli refers to his ascent to higher realms but also to his role on the ground, speaking carefully to his audience, even during chaotic times of dangerous rumor.
While Ganymede and Romulus are classical figures who were chosen by the gods to enter the heavens as privileged individuals, Enoch and Eli are parallel figures who also return to the public to guide them. Chaucer borrows Dante’s method of comparison to otherworldly travelers but selects prophets more known for directing a crowd. This is a role that we have already seen Chaucer fulfil in Book I, where he carefully informs his audience of the love affair of Aeneas and Dido, despite the fact that Dido fears how her acts will be “red and songe” (I.347). While Dido fears infamy, a concern echoed by Aeneas’s own position in the temple walls scene that Chaucer borrows from Virgil, Chaucer demonstrates that he can use fame responsibly, even harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to tame harmful rumors. It is, perhaps, why Jupiter rewards him as a love poet in Book II. If this poem were finished, we might even see Chaucer fulfil this role again.
The Eagle’s Access to Heights and Depths
Although Chaucer borrows Dante’s image of the prophetically chosen individual selected to travel upwards into the heavens, Chaucer also takes advantage of the eagle’s reputation within bestiaries as one who can fly both high and low to represent his own position as a prophetic mediator between famed literature and the gossiping crowd. Book I demonstrates how Chaucer handles the fame of his subjects, but Books II and III extrapolate on how and why he gains access to those subjects. Prophetic subject positions allow authors to articulate the sources of their inspiration. As Chaucer’s vehicle to the House of Fame, the eagle is a personification of the author’s own literary and social education. As John M. Steadman and John Leyerle have both noted, the medieval bestiary tradition surrounding the eagle focused on its acute eyesight, its closeness to the sun, and its propensity for testing its offspring.43 Medieval exegesis often allegorized these characteristics of the eagle to represent contemplative thought. Pope Gregory repeatedly referred to the eagle approaching the sun when describing one whose mind ascends to approach the divine.44 Alexander Neckham and Berchorius further argued that the eagle’s keen eyesight made it a symbol of philosophy and intellectual pursuits.45 Chaucer’s eagle is therefore demonstrably learned. William S. Wilson has noted that the eagle pays particular attention to the art of rhetoric, organizing his own speech into exordium, narration, proof, and epilogue.46 The eagle is also preoccupied with his own rhetorical skill as he asks Geoffrey:
Tell me this now feythfully,
Have y not preved thus simply,
Withoute any subtilite
Of speche, or gret prolixite
Of termes of philosophie,
Of figures of poetrie,
Or colours of rethorike?
For hard langage and hard matere
Ys encombrous for to here
Attones; wost thou not wel this? (II.853–63)
Like any of the Canterbury pilgrims, the eagle is a proxy of self-representation for Chaucer but also a distinct character, not necessarily reflective of its creator. In this moment, Chaucer plays with the notion of reception and creation, drawing attention to both. The self-congratulatory eagle brags, “So I can / Lewedly to a lewed man / Speke, and shewe hym swyche skiles / That he may shake hem be the biles” (II.865–8). Of course, the “lewed man” is Chaucer – the one who crafted these words. The eagle, for all his attention to avoiding cumbersome prolixity is, as many critics have noted, rather long-winded. Yet the erudition of his speeches speaks to his role as the embodiment of Chaucer’s education and learnedness.
The eagle, like Chaucer, is at once a translator and bold inventor of new truths, patched together. The eagle tells Chaucer that the journey “is for thy lore and for thy prow” (II.579). He vaguely refers to “thyn oune bok” (II.712) as his source for information about the House of Fame, but like Chaucer, who has knit together two narratives about Aeneas and Dido into his own version of the story, the eagle pieces together portions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses related to Fame with ideas of “kyndely enclynyng” from Aristotle and Augustine’s writings, along with theories of sound from Boethius and Vincent de Beauvais. As he ascends to the realms of learning, the eagle alludes to a series of classical antecedents for the journey like Icarus and Phaethon, as well as sources on astrology like Boethius and Alan de Lille. While the eagle knows a great deal from books, he is aware of another important source of literary inspiration that Chaucer has been missing, that of “tydynges” (II.645, 648). The eagle scolds Chaucer:
That is, that thou hast no tydynges
Of Loves folk yf they be glade,
Ne of noght elles that God made;
And noght oonly fro fer contree
That ther no tydynge cometh to thee,
But of thy verray neyghebores,
That duellen almost at thy dores,
Thou herist neyther that ne this;
For when thy labour doon al ys,
And hast mad alle thy rekenynges,
In stede of rest and new thynges
Thou goost hom to they hous anoon,
And, also domb as any stoon,
Thou sittest at another book
Tyl fully dsewed ys thy look;
And lyvest thus as an heremyte,
Although thyn abstinence ys lyte. (II.644–60)
The erudite eagle is in no place to critique Chaucer for the act of reading itself, but he seems to be chastising Chaucer for not knowing when to put books away and engage with the world. In addition to associating the eagle with learning, the bestiary tradition highlights the eagle’s ability to approach nearest the sun but also to see fish within the waters below. Steadman summarizes Berchorius’s allegorical reading about the eagle’s ability to ascend and descend in this way:
Just as the sea-eagle possesses such clear sight that even in its loftiest flight it can discern fishes in the sea, so the prelate should be able to remain on the height of contemplation and yet behold with the clear sight of discretion whatever exists in the sea of this world. Again, just as the eagle perceives its prey from on high and immediately returns to the skies after seizing it, so the prelate needs clear discretion and knowledge in order to discern from afar whatever occurs among his subordinates.47
Although Steadman includes this in his helpful explanation of the bestiary tradition surrounding the eagle, he summarizes Chaucer’s engagement with the eagle as a “contemplative symbol,” overlooking the ways in which the eagle’s mobility exemplifies Chaucer’s flexible mediating narrative persona. Chaucer implies that, like the eagle of bestiary traditions, he can soar between worlds. He is not merely privy to divine knowledge but to worldly knowledge as well. His ability to travel between these worlds is necessary for the thriving of his art, just as it is necessary for the eagle’s survival. The eagle will reinforce this message later in the poem when he raises Geoffrey up to the House of Fame and then lowers him carefully into the House of Rumor.
Chaucer gestures to the eagle’s allegorical meaning as the embodiment of Philosophy as he recalls Boethius’s words:
And thoo thought y upon Boece,
That write, “A thought may flee so hye
Wyth fetheres of Philosophye,
To passen everych element,
And whan he hath so fer ywent,
Than may be seen behynde hys bak
Cloude” – and al that y of spak. (II.972–8)
Philosophy is useful for gaining a better perspective on the world. High above the earth, Chaucer can see its various features from a distance and remarks at all that he can behold before observing all of the features of space that he can also behold. Chaucer’s eagle is the physical embodiment of these “fetheres of Philosophye.” The higher he flies, the more Chaucer can see, and the more both Chaucer and the eagle recall the works of various auctores. The eagle reminds Geoffrey that he is flying higher than Alexander of Macedonia, Daun Scipio, or Dedalus. Chaucer’s moment of recalling Boethius demonstrates exactly what it declares: philosophy, particularly studying its greatest practitioners, elevates the mind to higher realms. Chaucer finds himself on the threshold of a vision, alluding to Paul by saying, “Y wot wel y am here, / But wher in body or in gost / I not, ywys, but God, thou wost” (II.980–2). Here, Chaucer alludes to the passage of 2 Corinthians 12:2, wherein Paul hears the “secret words” that he may not repeat and ascends to the third heaven. Yet, for Chaucer, this vision involves recalling great works on space: “And than thought y on Marcian, / And eke on Anteclaudian” (II.985–6). Chaucer’s prophetic ascent and his ecstatic vision are both learning, specifically reading. His literal perspective on the world and its place in the universe are gained through his reading, embodied by the eagle who takes him into the air. Yet the eagle is also there to place Chaucer within crowds, and to await him so that he is not lost. The eagle allows Chaucer to enter and exit his sources of inspiration, reminding him, “And here I wol abyden the” (II.1086).
Lady Fame and the Apocalyptic
The eagle, both Chaucer’s access to and escape from the House of Fame, is a symbol of the gospel author, John. In Book III, Chaucer portrays himself as a literary version of the Apostle John, prophet of the Book of Revelation, looking forward to the defeat of the Antichrist signaled by Lady Fame. Lady Fame is a monstrous embodiment of literary auctoritas, hosting her own perverse version of the Last Judgment. Chaucer’s earlier mention of Enoch and Eli together is evocative of beliefs surrounding the Apocalypse, and Chaucer continues to allude to the events of the Book of Revelation in Book III, when Geoffrey arrives at the House of Fame. He lists the various minstrels and magicians that he sees therein, and declares, “What shuld I make lenger tale / Of alle the pepil y ther say, / Fro hennes into domes day?” (III.1282–4). Chaucer uses “domes day” to describe the exaggerated amount of time that it would take him to list the people in the House of Fame. Yet, his choice of words also foreshadows the entrance of Lady Fame, whom he describes with imagery of Doomsday:
But certyn y hem never tolde,
For as feele eyen hadde she
As fetheres upon foules be,
Or weren on the bestes foure
That Goddis trone gunne honoure,
As John write in th’Apocalips. (III.1381–5)
Chaucer’s description of Fame’s appearance is taken from Virgil’s description of Fama in the Aeneid (IV.173–90), wherein she has eyes beneath each of her many feathers. Yet Chaucer pulls in a Christian comparison alongside his classical allusion, mentioning the beasts of the Apocalypse who “had each of them six wings; and round about and within they are full of eyes” (Revelation 4:8). The beasts to which Chaucer alludes are traditionally associated with the four Evangelists. Revelation catalogues the beasts: “The first living creature was like a lion: and the second living creature like a calf: and the third living creature, having the face, as it were, of a man: and the fourth living creature was like an eagle flying” (Revelation 4:7). Within medieval art, the lion is Mark, the calf (or ox) is Luke, the man is Matthew, and the eagle is John. They are frequently represented as one single entity or tetramorph, which Lady Fame seems to embody through Chaucer’s comparison. At the same time, she is a pagan figure, taken from Ovid’s description of the House of Fame in chapter 12 of the Metamorphoses and Virgil’s physical description of Fama’s appearance in the Aeneid.
Compiled from the scraps of antiquity and modified into a Christian authority in the form of the Evangelistic tetramorph, Lady Fame personifies literary auctoritas. Within medieval universities, literary theory revolved around the study of auctores, authors who were considered authoritative enough to be studied and quoted at length. As Alistair Minnis has noted, only authors of the classical and scriptural traditions were considered literary auctores.48 Lady Fame embodies the most revered literary traditions and the dangerous powers they wield. Of the first group of people that approach Lady Fame, Chaucer attests, “For of this folk ful wel y wiste / They hadde good fame ech deserved, / Although they were dyversly served” (III.1544–6). Chaucer watches as Lady Fame capriciously doles out her rewards to some of this worthy group and not to others, and he declares her to be as impulsive as her sister, Dame Fortune (III.1547). Lady Fame’s presence within the story draws attention to the fact that there is, in actuality, no person in charge of discerning who attains fame, rightfully or not, within the literary world. Fame, especially as it is passed down through the centuries, is left up to a great deal of chance.
Chaucer breaks with traditional portrayals of Lady Fame’s house by describing its pillars as topped with famed historians and poets: Josephus, Statius, Homer, Dares and Dictys, Guido delle Colonne, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Claudian. These are auctores of the classical tradition, providing the support for Lady Fame’s pronouncements within her house. Yet, as Chaucer notes, the sources are not infallible or impartial:
Betwex hem was a litil envye.
Oon seyde that Omer made lyes,
Feynynge in hys poetries,
And was to Grekes favorable;
Therfor held he hyt but fable. (III.1476–80)
Here, Chaucer refers to the attacks on Homer’s pro-Greek perspective made by authors sympathetic to the Trojans such as Dares Phrygius and Guido delle Colone. This disagreement among auctores represents a portion of Lady Fame’s inconstant disposition. However, Lady Fame’s injustice also derives from her willingness to pronounce the reputation of those whom she encounters.
As the piecemeal of both classical and biblical auctoritas, Lady Fame is a monster who engages in a perverse form of the Last Judgment. B.G. Koonce has observed,
Chaucer’s ‘wynged words,’ rising in the likeness of their earthly speakers and petitioning Fame before her throne have a doctrinal basis in the words of prayer or devotion which fly to God. In the Apocalypse the prayers themselves are presented to God by one of the angels (Christ, the High Priest), who offers them with incense upon the altar before the throne. The implicit personification of these prayers, which are said to be ‘seen’ as well as ‘heard’ by God, is applicable to all speech – ‘foul or fair,’ ‘privy or apert’ – which, together with one’s works ascends to God to be recorded in the books of judgement and to be manifested before Christ the Judge at the end of the world.49
Lady Fame is not Christ but a strange manner of beast, and her judgment is not everlasting but worldly. Nevertheless, she conducts her court with the same ceremony and importance. Steve Ellis and Karla Taylor have drawn attention to this facet of The House of Fame as Chaucer’s critique of Dante’s Inferno, since Dante engages in the sentencing of literary and living figures alike while Chaucer problematizes this literary conduct through the character of Lady Fame.50 Nevertheless, Lady Fame appears to cast aspersions on a far wider body of literature than Dante’s Commedia. This includes moralistic works like Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which uses classical tales to preach moral lessons, in the process condemning many of its characters to Christian judgment. Lady Fame is, more broadly, the embodiment of capricious reputation, as it is passed down through time, but specifically, she is also the personification of the tradition spawned by texts like the Ovide Moralisé, literally damning the subjects of its stories.
It is significant that, although Lady Fame uses only her whims to determine the outcome of her devotees, the narrator, Geoffrey, seems able to assess whether or not she is correct in her estimations. For instance, when Lady Fame sentences the second group appealing to her with slander, the narrator laments:
“Allas,” thoughte I, “what aventures
Han these sory creatures!
For they, amonges al the pres,
Shul thus be shamed gilteles.” (III.367)
Nominalist readings of the poem have emphasized Chaucer’s message of the impossibility of access to categorical truth, and yet within the world of Chaucer’s dream, from the vantage point of Fame’s house, the narrator, Geoffrey, has this access. Chaucer’s engagement with the story of Dido and Aeneas in Book I draws our attention to the fact that his works raise questions about appropriate conduct and make suggestions about the flaws of others, but rarely does he condemn a character, particularly a historical one, with overt moralization. As Helen Cooper has noted, “Chaucer’s Ovid is curiously modern in comparison with the moralized Ovids so prevalent in his century.”51 While Chaucer was acquainted with the Ovide moralisé and perhaps even worked from it as a source, he borrows from Ovid throughout his works purely as a narrative source, not drawing from any popular moralizations of his tales.52 Chaucer, like most medieval authors, combines pagan and Christian traditions, but he seems keen to be careful with how he wields classical and Christian auctoritas. Most notably, Chaucer presents the oft slandered Criseyde in a sympathetic light. Joseph S. Graydon once characterized “the writer’s determination to defend the lady’s reputation; to assault, if I may say so, the entrenched line of century-old slander.”53 Just as Chaucer as the narrator frets over the reception of his book throughout Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde laments the fragility of her own reputation. Chaucer not only sympathetically links the precariousness of his position with Crisyede’s but he also refuses to slander her, declaring, “That al be that Criseyde was untrewe, / That for the gilt she be nat wroth with me. / Ye may hire gilt in other bokes se,” (V.1774–6). Chaucer very prominently declares his narrative persona to be one that responsibly reserves extreme judgment, and his numerous efforts to articulate the practicality and desperation of Criseyde’s compromised position in Troy buttress this perspective.
The Legend of Good Women is the one work in which Chaucer very notably moralizes classical tales and pronounces extreme judgment upon the male characters who abandon the suffering heroines of each of the ten tales. Yet, Lisa J. Kiser has argued that the poem can be read as a parodic rejection of irresponsibly reductive Christian interpretations of classical literature. In the Prologue of The Legend of Good Women, the God of Love condemns Chaucer’s translation of Le Roman de la Rose as well as his retelling of the story of Troilus and Criseyde because, presumably, “people have actually been changing their behaviour as a result of reading Chaucer’s poems.”54 People no longer want to serve Love because of The Romance of the Rose, and men no longer trust women because of Troilus and Criseyde. In his complaints, the God of Love is speaking for a crowd of bad readers, who “are finding in Chaucer’s works simplified morals along the lines of ‘Love is folly’ and ‘Women are untrue,’ … Instead of viewing these texts as vehicles for philosophical truth, they are seeing them as exempla.”55 Kiser reads The Legend of Good Women as an extended parody of the kind of moralizing literature that trains readers to read in this reductive manner. In satirically using classical sources as exempla in The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer illustrates how this type of reading ultimately results in the unsettling celebration of “martyrs” who flagrantly sinned in committing suicide. Lady Fame embodies this kind of disturbing judgment. As his measured response to the story of Dido and Aeneas within Book I of The House of Fame makes clear, Chaucer combines classical and Christian authority in a way that is antithetical to the whimsical and unsympathetic Lady Fame.
Lady Fame’s appearance harks back to Chaucer’s parallels to Aeneas. When Aeneas visits the blissful groves of Elysium within the sixth book of the Aeneid, he sees the poets and prophets dwelling in one place, including Orpheus, whom Chaucer spots first in Fame’s house. Rather than being in the company of priests, however, the bards of the House of Fame are in the company of conjurers, sorcerers, witches, and magicians, including Simon Magus, who, according to medieval traditions, deceived the early church by challenging Peter and imitating Christ’s miracles. Early exegetes recognized Simon Magus as being akin to the Antichrist, whom Enoch and Eli would decry and banish with their preaching.56 In placing bards alongside sorcerers (rather than prophets) at the entrance to the Lady Fame’s house, Chaucer implies a deeply flawed foundation within her literary background as well as the dangerous messages that he mediates as a privileged visitor to this less accessible world of famed literature. Likewise, the literal foundation of her house is built upon the “feble fundament” (III.1132) of ice – a detail that Chaucer adds to Ovid’s description of Fame’s dwelling. While only a few names etched into the sides of her dwelling have faded, eventually the foundation will melt enough to turn the house asunder. In this way, Chaucer presents Lady Fame and the tradition of literature that she represents as a parody of Jesus’s return for the Last Judgment rather than the genuine event. Her authority veers dangerously towards that of the Antichrist or the Whore of Babylon as a false authority worshipped by the masses. Yet, Chaucer most directly compares her to the more benign beasts of the Apocalypse, who merely presage the return of Christ. Lady Fame’s judgment is not the true or final word, but the authority that it temporarily wields is troublesome to many. If she is not indeed the Antichrist, she certainly paves the way for him – perhaps the figure who enters at the end of the unfinished poem, who seems to be “a man of gret auctorite” (III.2158). Especially because the poem is unfinished (some have argued intentionally so), the Apocryphal identities of Lady Fame and Chaucer are flexible. Nevertheless, Chaucer has loosely aligned Lady Fame with the Antichrist and himself with Enoch and Eli, the prophets who return to earth to reason with the crowd and resist her influence.
Chaucer as Vates
Chaucer presents his own voice as an alternate kind of authority, separate from the literary auctoritas and moralization represented in the House of Fame. Essentially, he is the Eli and Enoch to the Antichrist of The House of Fame. To call Chaucer’s authority detached from or disdainful of Dante’s vatic authority is to ignore the inherently privileged position in which Chaucer places himself as narrator of this dream vision. Chaucer also likens himself to the prophet John when saying that Lady Fame resembled the four beasts “as John writ in th’Apocalips” (III.1385). As John wrote of the beasts, Chaucer writes of these quasi-Apocalyptic events. Chaucer’s main distinction from the auctoritas of the House of Fame comes in his ability to escape it to face yet another source of authority, the House of Rumor.
Playing on the double-meaning of the word “fame,” which can mean both “renown” and “rumor,” Chaucer depicts two different dwellings of fame. When asked by a stranger whether he came to the first house, presided over by the Lady Fame, for fame himself, Chaucer declares, “Nay, for sothe, frend … I cam noght hyder, fraunt mercy, / For no such cause, by me hed!” (III.1875). He then clarifies that he only came for “Somme newe tydynges for to lere” (III.1886), seeming to take advice from the eagle’s earlier chastisement that he only pays attention to books. At this point, Geoffrey accepts the aid of this “frend,” who brings him to the House of Rumor. If the eagle represents Chaucer’s education, bringing him to the high realms of literary auctoritas, the anonymous friend represents the social circles to which Chaucer’s learning have indirectly exposed him. Yet the eagle is still there to warn him, “That but I bringe the therinne, / Ne shalt thou never kunne gynne / To come into hyt, out of doute / So faste hit whirleth, lo about” (III.2003–6). Chaucer is clearly in the House of Rumor as a visitor – not one who plans to get swept away. The eagle, who ties Chaucer to elevated learning, is both his means of access to and his escape from this world of rumors. As Susan E. Phillips has noted, “At first glance, the House of Fame appears to be an exemplum on the dangers of idle talk,” particularly in reference to Dido’s reputation in Book I. 57 Yet, she points out, “The House of Fame voraciously pursues gossip, dwelling not on how destructive it is but on how productive it might be both socially and narratively … Chaucer does not exclude idle talk from the domain of poetry; rather he embraces it as fundamental.”58 Chaucer willingly escapes the orderly but unjust House of Fame for the chaotic yet lively House of Rumor. Interestingly, Chaucer characterizes the manner of gossip that he hears without specifying any of it:
And over alle the houses angels
Ys ful of rounynges and of jangles
Of werres, of pes, of mariages,
Of reste, of labour, of viages,
Of abood, of deeth, of lyf,
Of love, of hate accord, of stryf,
Of loos, of lore, and of wynnynges,
Of hele, of seknesse, of bildynges. (III.1960–6)
Chaucer continues on and on without giving any particular detail, never himself engaging in the gossip at hand, either for those around him or for his reader. Rather, he acknowledges it as a source of literary inspiration. In this House of Rumor, Geoffrey demonstrates himself to be capable of digesting the chaos of the crowd without being drawn in. As an Eli or Enoch figure, he is potentially able to address the “congregacioun of folk” (III.2035) which he finds in the House of Rumor but also capable of distilling their own wisdom, much as he did in Book I. In his retelling of Dido’s story, Chaucer quelled her ruinous, gossiping detractors while also speaking to her situation with sage words of folk wisdom. Sowing the seeds of his later persona in The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer presents himself as proficient at extracting the wisdom of a wide range of people for a wide range of people.
Despite being among the people, Geoffrey is always a separate, prophetic figure within The House of Fame, with unique access to and perspective upon all of the areas that his dream shows him. Critics have long asserted the essential difference between Chaucer, the poet creating the work at hand, and Geoffrey, the dreamer, adrift in the work. However, in this work about access to stories and their retelling, wherein the eagle acknowledges Geoffrey’s literary occupation, this distinction is not so clear. Geoffrey’s ascent into the heavens and his ability to mingle with the crowd speak to Chaucer’s own writing talents. His invocations of the Muses at the beginning of each book reinforce his prophetic stance as a mediator between the classics and the public, using one to correct the other when necessary. Yet, the tendency to read Chaucer in contrast to Dante has led to a near dismissal and denial of Chaucer’s assumption of the vatic subject position within his dream visions. The prophet is not a role that Chaucer inhabits in every work. For instance, as Lee Patterson has pointed out, prophets like Cassandra and Calchas, who are associated with the tradition of Troilus and Criseyde as told by Boccaccio and Guido delle Colonne, are hapless witnesses to history who, much like the audience reading retrospectively, stand powerless to change the story that they know will unfold.59 In this context, the prophetic subject position is less natural and useful to Chaucer as a means of developing his authorial persona. However, it is not a role that he neglects and certainly not one that he mocks. Much like his predecessors, including Dante, Chaucer uses the role of the prophet to articulate his own perspective on his approach to authorship.
Caxton’s Ending
When printing the House of Fame in 1483 (STC 17015), William Caxton provided his own ending to the presumably unfinished work, and in doing so, he took care to gesture back to Chaucer’s prophetic role:
And therwithal I abrayde
Out of my slepe half a frayed
Remembring wel what I had seen
And how hye and ferre I had been
In my ghoost and had gret wonder
Of that the god of thunder
Had lete me knowen and began to wryte
Lyke as ye have herd me endyte
Whefore to study and rede always
I purpose to doo day by day
Thus in dremyng and in game
Endeth thys lytyl book of Fame.60
Caxton returns to the notion that “the god of thonder” has allowed Chaucer privileged access to this vision. He also reinforces the quintessentially authorial image of Chaucer beginning “to wryte” and emphasizes Chaucer quest “to study and rede always” as an essential part of his authorial identity. Caxton’s decision to add an ending to the poem, while brazen, was not necessarily the violation of The House of Fame’s message that contemporary critics have portrayed it to be. Rather, it is a summary of the poem’s major themes of Chaucer’s role as a conduit between the written words of the past and his readers.
Despite having added his own ending, Caxton then takes the opportunity to explain to readers that Chaucer left the work unfinished:
I fynde nomore of this werke to fore sayd
For as far as I can vnderstŌde
This noble man Gefferey Chaucer fynysshyd at the sayd conclusion of the metyng of lesyng and sothsawe
where as yet they ben chekked and maye not departe
whyche werke as me semeth is craftyly made
and dygne to be wreton & knowen
For he towchyth in it ryght grete wysedom & subtyll vnderston|dynge.61
In doing so, Caxton grants himself the opportunity to draw attention to Chaucer’s authorial craft. He ends the volume with this continued praise:
And so in alle hys werkys he excellyth in myn oppyny|on alle other wryters in our Englyssh
For he wrytteth no voy|de wordes
but alle hys mater is ful of hye and quycke senten¦ce
to whom ought to be gyuen laude and preysynge for hys no|ble makyng and wrytyng
For of hym alle other haue borowed syth and taken
in alle theyr wel sayeng and wrytyng
And I humbly beseche & praye yow
emonge your prayers to remem|bre hys soule
on whyche and on alle crysten souls I beseche al|myghty god to haue mercy Amen.62
Caxton valued the work so much that he printed it in a larger folio format, and it stood alongside The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde as one of Chaucer’s most famous independently circulating works throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Early print scholars have drawn attention to the irony of Caxton’s choice to emphasize Chaucer’s authorial prestige in a work that supposedly decries the continued endorsement of authorial fame.63 Yet, it is not so strange that Caxton and other early editors like Richard Pynson should focus on The House of Fame as Chaucer’s third major work, as it is the one work in which he comments on his own position as an author and marries the dream vision genre to related discourses of the authorial vatic tradition. Caxton developed his view of Chaucer’s prophetic persona in The House of Fame without knowledge of the reputation of proto-Protestant and sceptical Humanist that would later come to characterize Chaucer. Yet, he ironically contributed to this reputation through his accidental inclusion of “When feythe failleth…” in the Chaucerian canon.
The Inadvertent Introduction of “When feythe failleth…” into the Chaucerian Canon
Before being known as “Chaucer’s Prophecy,” “When fethe failleth…” (IMEV 3943) circulated as an anonymous saying.64 It typically read as follows:
When fethe failleth in prestes sawes
And lordes hestes ar holden for lawes,
And robberie is holden purchas,
And lecherie is holden solas
Then shal the londe of Albion
Be brought to grete confusion.
The poem laments the supposedly decaying state of morality in England – something that nearly anyone might agree with, regardless of political or religious opinions. However, like most prophecies, depending upon its context, it could easily be politicized to imply that a particular person or group is or will be responsible for this world turned upside down. Its construction is similar to that of Thomas of Erceldoune’s riddling response to the Countess of Dunbar’s question of when England and Scotland will cease to battle – the same prophecy that Piers Plowman’s Will mimics when predicting the return of Hunger:
When man is mad a kyng of a capped man;
When mon is levere oþermones þyng þan is owen;
When Londyon ys forest, ant forest ys felde
When hares kendles oþe herston
When Wyt and Wille werres togedere. (1–5)65
Thomas of Erceldoune’s prediction describes a series of undesirable or seemingly impossible things. Man loving other men’s things more than his own is a commonplace violation of the tenth commandment, but London becoming a forest is something that one can hardly imagine.
“When fethe failleth…” uses similar syntax to present a world that is so amoral as to seem contrary to logic. However, its more realistic predictions of people failing to listen to priests and stealing rather than buying could lead an audience to believe that it is about the present day rather than the future. Its use of the antiquated word “Albion” implies that the prophecy was composed in an earlier, more moral time, possibly by Merlin (to whom it was sometimes attributed).66 For those who read the prophecy and see it applying to the present, its prophetic format conveys that a voice from the past has predicted and mourned the sad state of contemporary conduct.
In an early 1476 quarto pamphlet (STC 5090), William Caxton first printed “When fethe failleth…” after Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite and “The Complaint of Chaucer unto His Empty Purse” in an attempt to present Chaucer as a figure of national importance. Because Anelida and Arcite is a poem detailing the complaint of one lover to another, Caxton’s decision to follow it with a complaint from Chaucer to his purse as if it were his “lady dere” illustrates his editorial commitment to artistic unity.67 Adding “When fethe failleth…” to the pamphlet has the effect of broadening the scope of complaints to an overall warning of the degradation of morality within England. The prophecy mentions both “lechery” and “robbery” – related to the subjects of the preceding complaints. Both “The Complaint of Chaucer unto His Empty Purse” and “When fethe failleth…” refer to England using the older name, “Albion.” The last stanza of “The Complaint…” shifts from addressing the purse to addressing Henry IV:
O conquerour of Brutes Albyon,
Which that by lyne and free eleccion
Been verray kyng, this song to yow I sende;
And ye, that mowen alle oure harmes amende,
Have mynde upon my supplicacion!
The mention of Albion allows Caxton to find a transition between the two poems, turning from a complaint addressing the leader of the nation to a prophetic complaint about the nation at large.
In adding the poem to the end of the pamphlet, Caxton is mimicking the popular fifteenth-century practice of appending “When fethe failleth…” (and prophecies in general) to the final pages or flyleaves of manuscripts. Before Caxton’s use of it, the poem was sometimes included within collections of gnomic sayings and prophecies.68 However, it was also informally copied into the extra space at the ends of manuscripts – usually manuscripts like the prose Brut whose contents spoke of the fate of the English nation.69 Writing anonymous prognostications at the beginnings and ends of manuscripts was a common practice in the fifteenth century.70 Caxton’s addition of the prophecy participates in this tradition, and it seems that Caxton intended “When fethe failleth…” to go at the end of collections. The poem not only appears at the end of the pamphlet but also at the ends of Sammelbändes containing it.71 Caxton’s pamphlets are presenting Geoffrey Chaucer as a poet of national importance, and Caxton is marking that through the citation of this prophecy about Albion.72
Caxton adds a resolution to the prophecy. The version of “When fethe failleth…” that Caxton prints is followed by an extra stanza, taken from two different verses, “Hit falleth for every gentilman” (IMEV 1618) and “Hit cometh by kynde of gentil blode” (IMEV 1619):
Hit falleth for every gentilman
To saye the best that he can
And the soth in his presence.
Hit cometh by kynde of gentil blode,
To cast away al heuynes.
And gadre to gidre wordes good.
The werk of wisedom herith witnes.
The poem charges readers to prepare for the prophesied catastrophe by refraining from slander – which is arguably the extreme form of a complaint. Printed with this altered prophecy, Anelida’s and Chaucer’s complaints seem to represent the limits of the frustration that one should express, even when the world is at its worst. In this way, the addition of the prophecy and second stanza of verse turns the issues of the text to the audience and leaves them with an instructive message. There is no indication that Caxton was attempting to convince anyone that Chaucer composed the verses. The lack of an attribution of “When fethe faileth…” was not out of the ordinary in the fifteenth century.73 Caxton may have assumed that readers would recognize the popular prophecy and the verses of advice that followed it. Yet, a final poem, added in print by the editor himself, rather than one added by a reader’s hand, has an air of authenticity most likely unanticipated by Caxton in the earliest years of English printing.
Gérard Genette has defined paratext as “other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations” and argues that they “surround [the text] and extend it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book.”74 Philippe Lejeune has similarly referred to threshold works within a book as “a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text.”75 Genette argues that “what the pre-Gutenberg period did not know anything of – precisely because of the handwritten (and oral) circulation of its texts – is the publisher’s implementation of this peritext, which is essentially typographical and bibliographical in nature.”76 Yet the delineation between threshold works in manuscripts and printed books may not be as clear as Genette implies. Works copied into the flyleaves of manuscripts almost certainly affected their reception, and by mimicking a common addition to flyleaves, Caxton demonstrates a transitional period between the reader-supplied annotations of manuscripts and the publisher’s peritext.
William Thynne and Prophetic Relevance
Within his 1532 Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newly Printed, William Thynne also utilizes “When fethe failleth…” as a threshold piece but moves it to the space after his preface. In this space, Thynne uses the poem to characterize Chaucer as a past author from an ignorant and backwards time, whose work nevertheless speaks to the present day. He situates the prophecy after two other poems – the anonymous “Eyght goodly questions, with theyr aunsweres” and John Hoccleve’s “To the kynges most noble grace, and to the lordes and knyghtes of the garter.” All of them appear immediately after the preface to the collection. The preface to Thynne’s Workes (originally written by Sir Brian Tuke) compliments Chaucer’s literary style and implies that it must have been inspired by planetary influences or divine decree because it so excels that of his period.77 Tuke presents Chaucer as a national literary savior, elected by God. The prophecy following this preface reinforces this message, implying that God not only blessed England with Chaucer’s language but also with teachings and warnings relevant to the present day.
Caxton’s use of the poem surely influenced Thynne’s decision to include it, but there is no evidence that Thynne was motivated by a belief that Chaucer composed the poem.78 Instead, it seems that Thynne was implying that the poem might be Chaucer’s in an effort to emphasize the author’s relevance. Greg Walker has argued that both “Eyght goodly questions,” and “To the kynges most noble grace” contain lines that are applicable to Henry VIII’s divorce and his struggles with Rome.79 Walker contends that Hoccleve’s poem in particular advocates for the cessation of religious debate when read in the context of the religious discord of 1532.80 By grouping these two poems with a prophecy of Albion “brought to great confusion” – a prophecy that begins, “When faith faileth in preestes sawes” – the poem seems to warn of chaos within the nation of England, incited by religious debate. This initial phrase of the prophecy could be interpreted in multiple ways. People could be losing their faith in priests’ teachings (sawes) because they are justifiably suspicious of the corrupt priests, or individuals could be failing to lend their faith to sermons because of their attraction to sin. In this sense, the prophecy speaks to the general discord of the time rather than pointing a finger at one side. By associating the prophecy with Chaucer, Thynne makes the author and his work appear to be relevant to readers of his own time.
Thynne appears to have been inspired by Caxton’s ambiguous attribution of the poem.81 He surely knew that the poem was not Chaucer’s, since he situates it next to two poems that Chaucer also did not write and lists none of them in the table of contents. Thynne places the prophecy in such a way that does not falsely attribute it to Chaucer but could cause a reader to mistakenly do so. It is not a stretch to imagine that he did this by design, as he was wont to include texts in the edition that may have been Chaucer’s (based on little evidence other than the date of their composition), in order to shape an image of the poet. “When fethe failleth…” is politically relevant without making a bold statement. Thynne’s aim in including the prophecy may have been less motivated by a desire to inspire peace, as Walker has suggested, than by an aim to present Chaucer as an author whose works still have importance (without taking any political risks to do so).82 Given Tuke’s preface’s disdainful attitude towards the Middle Ages, Thynne could have expected his audience to question whether a medieval author might be worth reading at all. The prophecy builds upon the preface’s image of Chaucer as a beacon, shining within his own supposedly dark time into the present day. This is where the persisting yet evolving idea of Chaucer as a man ahead of his time begins.
Adding “When Faith Faileth” to Chaucerian Manuscripts
Thynne’s editorial decision led to the common attribution of the poem to Chaucer, and records attest to the title “Chaucer’s Prophecy” being popularly given to the poem. In a letter to Lord Burghley, dated 7 July 1586, someone called “A.B.” writes:
Wm. White, a merchant of these West parts, informed the writer that being at St. Malo last month, he heard that 16 of their ships and barks had been rifled or taken by English men-of-war, and that their hatred of the English was such that our merchants dare not walk about in public … Surely Chawcer’s provysey never toke so deepe effect yn yngland & specyally yn the west parts as now, for theaft ys made good purchace.83
This allusion to the prophecy, made in a casual work letter, indicates that it was an aphorism, spoken by many – probably many who had never read Chaucer’s work. London, British Library, MS Additional 24663, a collection of prophecies about England produced in the sixteenth century, begins with “When faythe fayleth…” on the first folio and includes a bracket on the right hand side of the poem, with a note, “Wrytten by Jefferae Chauser.” The unusual spelling of Chaucer’s name, combined with the fact that “It falleth to every gentleman…” is not included, indicates that the copyist did not use the Thynne edition to copy the poem. It appears that the poem continued its broader, more popular tradition of oral and written citation but with the added association with Chaucer.
Sixteenth-century readers continued the fifteenth-century practice of adding “When faithe failleth…” to manuscripts, except that they now added it to manuscripts of Chaucer’s works. For instance, a sixteenth-century hand added the first stanza of “When faithe failleth…” to the margin of the Canon Yoeman’s tale in Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.3.26, f. 161v. The spelling of the prophecy does not follow Thynne’s edition, so it seems to have been copied by memory as a saying about thievery. The line “robberie is holden purchas” directly comments upon the alchemist’s behaviour in the Canon Yoeman’s tale, described on f. 161v. The reader likely remembered the prophecy upon reading that portion of the text and added it, thinking it to be Chaucer’s own maxim. A reader of Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27 likewise added the poem to the beginning of the early fifteenth-century manuscript dedicated to the works of Chaucer.84 This is a case of readers noting their presumed prior knowledge of Chaucer as they encounter his works.
Although readers would casually insert the poem into Chaucerian manuscripts, Archbishop Matthew Parker’s library formally added it to an early fifteenth-century manuscript in an effort to cultivate a lengthy history of English Protestantism. In the late sixteenth century, a scribe with the initials T.W., who worked in Parker’s library, copied the three poems that appear after the preface of Thynne’s Workes into the beginning pages of the late fifteenth-century manuscript, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.15, which had originally only included The Canterbury Tales.85 At the same time, T.W. also added an eight hundred fifty-line poem called Pierce the Ploughman’s Creede to the end of the manuscript. Pierce the Ploughman’s Creede, composed sometime between 1393 and 1401, is essentially antimendicant fanfiction of William Langland’s The Vision of Piers Plowman.86 The poem extensively critiques all four orders of friars for being greedy, lecherous, and backbiting. As Lawrence Warner has demonstrated, Parker most likely believed Pierce the Ploughman’s Creede to be Chaucer’s own work.87 He had this rare manuscript revised under the impression that he was reinstating a formerly suppressed religious satire to its rightful place. Yet, this was also a case of Parker and his employees seeing what they wanted to see. Matthew Parker was notable for his “quest for documentary evidence of the unbroken continuity of the English Church from the earliest times,” and he collected early English chronicles such as Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and Nennius’s Historia Brittanum to that end.88 Copying a work wherein Chaucer appeared to anticipate the English Reformation presented a special kind of continuity within the English Church. Little attention has been given to the fact that Parker’s library’s decision to add the three poems from Thynne’s edition before the Canterbury Tales was also one that bolstered this vision of continuity.89 T.W. took the liberty to name “When faith faileth…” “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in the table of contents. The title was likely chosen because of its already popular usage but also because it emphasized Chaucer’s status as an English prophet of the Reformation. Every line of the prophecy – from complaints of lechery to robbery – could be read as an indictment of the fraternal orders and a warning that their continued dominance would ultimately throw England into “confusion.” While Thynne’s printing of the poems was only broadly political, Parker copied them as propaganda in support of a specific cause, implying that faith was justifiably failing “in prestes sawes” because of the abuses within religious orders.
“Chaucer’s Prophecy” Endures
Like Parker’s library, editor John Urry most likely included the title “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1721) due to its popular usage and a desire to present Chaucer as a prophet of the Reformation. His footnote justifies his use of the title by noting, “So this Stanza is entitled in a Book in the Ashmolean Museum, No. 6986.781. P. 162.”90 The manuscript to which Urry refers, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 781 (SC 8113), is a miscellany that was compiled between 1620 and 1630. It contains several verses attributed to famous English figures such as Sir Walter Raleigh and William Perkins, and it is among these verses that “Chaucer’s Prophecy” appears. Urry’s citation of this manuscript is fairly sly. He does not explain that the manuscript was made less than a century ago and could hardly be the basis upon which to add a title or affirm Chaucer’s authorship of the piece (a fact that Urry would have known simply by looking at the other contents of the manuscript). Urry upholds less-than-rigorous scholarly standards because it is convenient to his religious perspective.
The choice to include the title “Chaucer’s Prophecy” in his edition of the author’s works suits the image of Chaucer that Urry paints in his “Life of Chaucer.” Urry imagines a Geoffrey Chaucer who encountered the teachings of John Wycliffe while studying in Oxford. He portrays Chaucer writing poems such as Jack Upland and The Plowman’s Tale to win the public over to Wycliffe’s cause. These misattributed works provide Urry with exciting biographical details. Urry claims that Chaucer “was a Favourer of the Lollards (as were likewise most of his friends, particularly Occleve),” citing the many places in his works (most of them misattributed) in which he “inveighs against the Priests and Fryers.”91 Urry also notes that Chaucer was respected by Gower despite the fact that Gower was “a perpetual exclaimer against Wickliffe and his Followers.”92 Urry’s Chaucer is a man ahead of his time who stands out even among peers like Gower. John Bell’s 1783 edition of the Poetical Works of Geoff. Chaucer similarly titles “Chaucer’s Prophecy” and cites the Ashmolean manuscript as the source of the title.93 Likewise, Bell portrays Chaucer as a bold and outspoken Lollard: “His patron the Duke of Lancaster having spoused the couse of Wickliffe, whom the clergy considered as a heretick, Chaucer inclined the same way, and turned the edge of his satire against lazy monks, ignorant priests, and the insolence of such as belonged to ecclesiastical courts with extraordinary success.”94 Much in the way that the addition of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” gave coherence to Parker’s manuscript containing Pierce the Ploughman’s Creede, the inclusion of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” under this title gives coherence to Chaucer’s persona within Urry’s and Bell’s collections.
Part of why the prophecy continued to have credibility as Chaucer’s poem was due to Parker’s library’s careful alteration of Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.15. In Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer Collected from Authentick Documents, published in 1810, Henry J. Todd writes of the Trinity manuscript: “It is one of those, which Mr. Tyrwhitt describes as having been collated or consulted for the purpose of his publication of The Canterbury Tales, but of which he has given no particular account. It is certainly deserving of further notice. It seems to have been written in the fifteenth century.”95 Todd makes note of Urry’s use of the Ashmolean manuscript but looks to the Trinity manuscript as a potentially more legitimate source for the poem, especially because Tyrwhitt had consulted its other contents.
Yet, editors would turn to virtually any manuscript to affirm the poem and promote the proto-Protestant Chaucer that they wanted to represent. In the 1822 Chiswick series on British poets, “Chaucer’s Prophecy” is the penultimate poem in its five volumes on Chaucer, edited by Samuel Weller Singer. Singer’s biography of Chaucer begins by characterizing him as a “Morning Star” shining in “the shade of night” and ends by likening him to “a genial day in an English spring, after the gloom of a tedious winter.”96 The extended version of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” that he includes, copied from a fifteenth-century note in the flyleaf of what was most likely Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 356 (a), affirms this perspective on Chaucer. 97 It reads as follows:
Qwan prestis faylin in her sawes
And Lordis tirnin Goddis lawes
Ageynis ryt.
Bewar thanne of ille
Than schall the Lond of Albion
Turnin to confusion
As sumtyme it befelle
Ora pro Anglia Sancta Maria, quod Thomas Cantuarie.
Sweete Jhesu heven-king
Ffayr and beste of alle thing
You bringe us owt of morning
To come to the at owre ending.98
A note after the poem in the Chiswick series refers back to the manuscript, saying, “Then follow some Monkish Latin rhymes.”99 The Latin prayer to Mary and the “Monkish Latin Rhymes” combine to place Chaucer within a Catholic English past, but the prayer to Jesus that follows in English, calling him “beste,” expresses a rather Protestant sentiment. When the poem refers to Jesus bringing “us owt of morning” and refers to “owre ending,” it is as if Chaucer is predicting an English future better guided by Christ, through the Reformation and beyond. Like the editions that precede his, Singer describes Chaucer as a follower of Wycliffe and argues, based on the misattributed Testament of Love, that Chaucer was imprisoned for these beliefs.
Furnival finally called “Chaucer’s Prophecy” apocryphal in the preface to his 1868 edition of The Canterbury Tales. Furnivall cites Henry Bradshaw’s study of rhyme to exclude the poem from the Chaucerian canon, but there was never quite the unmasking moment for “Chaucer’s Prophecy” that there was for something like A Testament of Love, revealed by Skeat to be the work of Thomas Usk.100 Editors continued to put it in collections. In 1891, Richard Morris included “Chaucer’s Prophecy” (using the expanded version edited by Singer) as a minor poem within the Aldine edition of the British Poets, offering no caveats.101 Skeat, in his 1888 The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, says of the verses, “Those who think them genuine may thank me for giving them Caxton’s spelling instead of Speght’s.”102 Skeat notes that the prophecy seems to have been a popular saying, evidenced by Shakespeare’s use of it (attributed to Merlin).103 His instinct to include the poem despite this acknowledgment speaks to its following.
To this day, one can find “Chaucer’s Prophecy” online, still ascribed to Chaucer, in various contexts. One webpage includes it in a catalogue of poems about robbery.104 YouTube, Dailymotion, and other video websites host a video that features actress Ghizela Rowe doing a dramatic reading of “Chaucer’s Prophecy.”105 Ostensibly learning-focused sites like CosmoLearning and AllPoetry feature the poem, calling it “Chaucer’s Prophecy” and attributing it to Chaucer. Misattributed prophecies circulate today much in the way that they did in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Many people turn to famous authors not to read their work in depth but to find a quotable sententious statement relevant to a political or personal issue at hand. Such temporary and casual readers tend to pay little attention to provenance or authenticity.
Yet, the idea of a prophetic Chaucer endures within more scholarly circles as well, and it is difficult for any of us to say with real objectivity the degree to which we are forcing relatively contemporary ideas like feminism, Marxism, or postmodernism onto Chaucer because we, like Chaucer’s early print editors, would like to see him as a man ahead of his time, exceptionally relevant to the present day. Although Chaucer the Protestant ahead of his time has disappeared, the image of Chaucer the secular, sceptical Humanist looms larger than is warranted, sometimes obscuring our view of Chaucer as a man of his own fascinating time. The evolution of “Chaucer’s Prophecy” raises a number of questions about how readers want to relate to the past. Thynne seems to have included it in The Workes of Geffray Chaucer to reassure his audience that a medieval author could still have relevant things to say to the present day. Other editors like Urry seem to have turned to “Chaucer’s Prophecy” for the seemingly opposite reason – to affirm religious beliefs of the present by claiming that they were predicted by a great thinker of the past. Reading and writing literature is a form of communication, and those of us who study historical literature surely do so to find meaningful connections to the past. However, we must remember that we are the ones making the biggest leaps for those cross-temporal connections, not the authors themselves. Chaucer used prophetic citation to represent his own authorial subject position metaphorically. Subconsciously, editors and readers may be ascribing prophetic powers to authors as a metaphor for the timeless connection to them that they want to feel.