CHAUCER:
DEALING WITH THE AUTHORITIES

OR, TWISTING THE NOSE THAT FEEDS YOU

At one point early in what is perhaps Geoffrey Chaucer's first extended narrative poem, The Book of the Duchess (BD), the narrator describes reading a story in a book that he has picked up to drive the night away during a bout of insomnia that has lasted, he tells us, for eight years and left him pretty much a nervous wreck. The story freely adapts the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone from book 11 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which Ceyx is drowned on a sea voyage while Alcyone prays to Juno for his safe return. Upset by her futile entreaties, the goddess sends a messenger to the realm of Morpheus, god of sleep, with instructions to him to bring before Alcyone in her slumber a vision of Ceyx bearing news of his death. After reading the story, the narrator expresses wonder at the idea of gods who could make a person sleep, “for I ne knew never god but oon.” He continues,

And in my game I sayde anoon	at once
(And yet me lyst ryght evel to pleye)	I had no desire
Rather then that y shulde deye
Thorgh defaute of slepynge thus,
I wolde yive thilke Morpheus	give this
… the alderbeste	very best
yifte that ever he abod hys lyve.	that he ever had in his life

(BD 238–42, 246–47)

That is: a complete, luxurious bedroom set in a chamber newly painted with gold and hung with expensive tapestries. No sooner has he made this extravagant, and obviously impossible, promise than he falls asleep and dreams his own dream—a tribute to the recently dead Blanche, duchess of Lancaster, presumably intended for her husband and Chaucer's sometime patron, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster.1

I offer the lines I have quoted as a kind of exhibit A because they describe a moment of serious import for the narrator, whose sleeplessness (implicitly the result of his loss, paralleling Alcyone's, of an object of desire) has, by his own admission in lines preceding those quoted above, brought him to a point of moral and emotional paralysis. And yet his response to this crisis is a “game,” even though he hardly feels like playing: the game of imagining what would make a suitable, and suitably luxurious, bribe to a god of sleep, if there were one for a Christian to bribe. Furthermore, this serious play works: no sooner has the narrator constructed his extravagant fantasy than “such a lust [desire, wish] anoon me took/To slepe that ryght upon my book/Y fil aslepe” (BD 273–75)—a statement that suggests, simultaneously, the inspirational, the problem-solving, and the somniferous qualities of a book in which

were written fables
That clerkes had in olde tyme,	scholars
And other poetes, put in ryme
To rede and for to be in minde,
While men loved the lawe of kynde.	nature

(BD 52–56)

This description constitutes a miniature, irony-tinged description of, and tribute to, a major part of Chaucer's literary heritage: stories inherited from an earlier time, transmitted for both their moral and aesthetic worth—hence the role of learned men (“clerkes”) as well as poets in the transmission—and designed not simply to be read for pleasure but to be stored away in the reader's memory as an authoritative repository of truths, including truths about the correct objects of human desire—in this case, the natural law that should govern both emotions and behavior. The neat and economical intertwining of issues of desire and authority in these few lines sets the tone for my examination, in the following pages, of some of the crises of desire and authority confronted, with comic virtuosity, at several moments that I've chosen from among Chaucer’ s major writings.

Chaucer was born in London early in the 1340s, the son of a well-to-do London wine merchant who was able to place him by his midteens in at least part time service to the nobility. This was the beginning of Chaucer's long career under two successive English kings, Edward III and Richard II, as royal official, diplomat, and civil servant, a series of positions that brought him into contact with great nobles like John of Gaunt; with the powerful merchant oligarchy that ruled London; and, most to our benefit, with a circle of midlevel court officials, London literati and members of literate professions whom he most likely saw as the target audience for his complicated, ironic, and frequently oblique seriocomic poetry.2 He lived through the tumultuous reign of Richard II, saw Henry Bolingbroke depose Richard in 1399, becoming Henry IV, and died in October 1400. His burial in Westminster Abbey appears not to have been a recognition of his poetic prowess, which only became an article of literary faith in the decades after his death.³

Chaucer's poetry suggests that he perceived two major challenges to its success: one was to master, and communicate effectively to his audiences, the complex relationship between love as a crisis-ridden human experience and love as a convention-driven literary subject; the other was to deliver a comic truth about the nature of both literary (or, more broadly, cultural) and political authority: their power, limits, and challenges or dangers to those (like himself) under their sway. The two interests came into an alignment particularly fruitful for his poetry in the authoritative literary discourses of desire that he inherited from both recent French and Italian poets—his familiarity with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio was unique among English writers of his day—and their predecessors of ancient Rome: Vergil, Statius, and especially Ovid. This latter group achieved an exalted status in medieval education as auctores, a term connoting not just authorship but also, and more importantly, cultural authority based on the possession of exemplary moral and philosophical value as well as aesthetic excellence.⁴

Several of Chaucer's poems contain seriocomic theorizations of the problematic relationship between an authoritative poetic heritage and the “modern” poet's imaginative engagement with human desire. (In Helen Cooper's lapidary formulation, Chaucer “did not accept auctoritas on trust”.)⁵ His preferred narratorial persona for such matters is humble and not overly bright; often he's a non-lover grappling with how to understand, or to write effectively about, love.⁶ The most desperate statement of the obstacles involved comes in the opening, seven-line stanza of The Parlement of Foules (PF), that is, “The Debate Among the Birds,” about which I'll shortly have more to say:

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Th'assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge,
The dredful joye alwey that slit so yerne:	slides away quickly
Al this mene I by Love, that my felynge
Astonyeth with his wonderful werkynge	that so completely
	dazes my understanding by its strange ways
So sore, iwis, that whan I on hym thynke
Nat wot I wel wher that I flete or synke.	I don't even know
	whether I'm floating

(PF 1–7)

Note how cleverly this stanza intertwines the generic difficulties of the poetic vocation, evoked in the opening line, with its obvious echo of Horace's “ars longa, vita brevis est” (i.e., life's too short to master art's challenges), and the particular challenge of that vocation's favorite subject, “Love,” the centrality of which is underscored by the word's placement at the exact midpoint of the stanza.

A much fuller, more comprehensive statement of the pitfalls confronting the would-be love poet occupies the first seven stanzas—in some manuscripts labeled prohemium (Prologue)—of the second book (of five) of Chaucer's greatest complete poem, Troilus and Criseyde (TC), identified by its narrator as a “tragedye” (5.1786), but shot through with comic moments, including this apologia for the problems the narrator encounters in attempting to bring an old story to a potentially critical audience of his contemporaries.

The first book of Troilus and Criseyde has recounted the sudden love of the Trojan prince Troilus for Criseyde, the widowed daughter of a Trojan priest of Apollo who has defected to the Greek host besieging Troy. The onset of desire immobilizes Troilus until Pandar, his close friend and Criseyde's uncle, arouses him by offering to act as his go-between, a project to which the prince consents as book 1 concludes. There follow forty-nine lines that exemplify the Chaucerian narratorial voice at its most subtle, comic, and provocative:

Owt of thise blake waves for to saylle,

O wynd, o wynd, the weder gynneth clere,

For in this see the boot hath swych travaylle,

Of my connyng, that unneth I it steere.

This see clepe I the tempestous matere

Of disespeir that Troilus was inne;

But now of hope the kalendes bygynne.

O lady myn, that called art Cleo,

Thow be my speed fro this forth, and my Muse,

To ryme wel this book til I have do;

Me nedeth here noon other art to use.

Forwhi to every lovere I me excuse,

That of no sentement I this endite,

But out of Latyn in my tonge it write.

Wherfore I nyl have neither thank ne blame

Of al this werk, but prey yow mekely,

Disblameth me if any word be lame,

For as myn auctor seyde, so sey I.

Ek though I speeke of love unfelyngly,

No wondre is, for it nothyng of newe is;

A blynd man kan nat juggen wel in hewis.

Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge

Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho

That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge

Us thynketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,

And spedde as wel in love as men now do;

Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages,

In sondry londes, sondry ben usages.

And forthi if it happe in any wyse,

That here be any lovere in this place

That herkneth, as the storie wol devise,

How Troilus com to his lady grace,

And thenketh, ‘So nold I nat love purchace,’

Or wondreth on his speche or his doynge,

I noot; but it is me no wonderynge.

For every wight which that to Rome went

Halt nat o path, or alwey o manere;

Ek in som lond were al the game shent,

If that they ferde in love as men don here,

As thus, in opyn doyng or in chere,

In visityng in forme, or seyde hire sawes;

Forthi men seyn, ‘Ecch contree hath his lawes.’

Ek scarsly ben ther in this place thre

That have in love seid lik, and don, in al;

For to thi purpos this may liken the,

And the right nought; yet al is seid or schal;

Ek som men grave in tree, som in ston wal,

As it bitit. But syn I have bigonne,

Myn auctor shal I folwen, if I konne.

(TC 2.1–49)

The opening stanzas of the prohemium establish a dialectic of involvement and detachment in the narrator's attitude toward his story. He begins with a gesture of emotional engagement by metaphorically assimilating his artistic enterprise to the changing fortunes of his protagonist: he describes “the boot… of my connyng” laboring, almost beyond control, on a “see” constituted by “the tempestuous matere/of disespeir that Troilus was inne.” Yet he sees his own weather begin to clear as (and because) his protagonist sails out of stormy despair toward a new season of hope. Then, as if sensing potential danger in too close an involvement with his characters, he quickly strikes a more detached pose, defining his goal as the purely technical one, “to ryme wel this book til I have do,” and excusing himself to lovers (the poem's imagined audience) as a mere translator by noting “that of no sentement I this endite, / But out of Latyn in my tonge it write.” Accordingly, he continues in stanza 3, he can accept no responsibility for faults of diction (“if any word be lame”), since his will be a most exact translation: “as myn auctor seyde, so sey I.” As for lack of affect, his ignorance about love excuses him there: “A blynd man kan nat juggen wel in hewis” (with a pun on rhetorical colors, techniques that add bite to declamation).

The reason for all this backpedaling is now revealed: the narrator is worried about the potential for disaffection in some lover who, hearing the poem's representation of Troilus's words and deeds in wooing Criseyde, will judge them negatively on the basis of his own experience—“I wouldn't do it that way!” (2.33). So he adds more sandbags to the levee holding off an expected flood of criticism, adducing both the instability of language over time—words once current now sound silly, but in their day they were effective in wooing (2.22–26)—and the variability of both amorous discourse and behavior, across space (“sondry londes”) and time (“sondry ages”). There's more than one way to get to Rome, the narrator counsels, but he then pushes his self-exculpatory argument to an extreme that would seem to deny to a literary text any validity as a general statement about amorous behavior (or any other human behavior, for that matter) in the face of such universal variety (2.43–46; note the parallel between this admission of disabling variety and the Ovidian magister's admission, at end of book 1 of the Ars amatoria, of the variety of women, which necessitates a protean strategy.)

In a final metaphoric move, the argument turns away from the variety of sexual experience to the variety of media in which to record it—“ek som men grave in tree, som in stone wal, as it bitit [happens]”—and this move allows the narrator to dodge the questions he has raised about the limits of language as communication and literature as mimesis, returning meekly to his self-appointed task of translation “out of Latyn in my tonge.” Or rather, almost to dodge them because some shred of understanding what a Pandora's box he has opened underlies the conditional clause he appends to the final line of his Prologue: “Myn auctor shal I folwen, if I konne” (emphasis added). This confession contrasts with and undermines his earlier insistence, already quoted, that “as myn auctor seyde, so sey I.”

This last line requires contextualization. Both the notion of “following” an auctor and the broader significance of “if I konne” occur elsewhere in Chaucer's poetry. The introductory “Invocation” to Anelida and Arcite, a short, perhaps incomplete text, announces the narrator's intention

in Englyssh to endyte	compose
This olde storie, in Latyn which I fynde,
Of Quene Anelida and fals Arcite
That elde…	the passage of time
Hath nygh devoured out of oure memorie.

(Anelida, 9–12, 14),

The “Invocation” concludes with the line, “First folowe I Stace, and after him Corinne” (Anelida, 21). The opening lines of the story of Dido in The Legend of Good Women (LGW)—an anthology of victimized women (about which more later) adapted from Ovid's Heroides and other classical sources—echo more precisely the last line of the Prologue to book 2 of Troilus and Criseyde:

Glorye and honour, Virgil Mantoan,	of Mantua
Be to thy name! and I shal, as I can,
Folwe thy lanterne, as thow gost byforn,
How Eneas to Dido was forsworn.
In thyn Eneyde and Naso wol I take	from your Ovid
The tenor, and the grete effectes make.

(LGW 924–29; emphasis added)

These three passages allude to but also disguise Chaucer's dealings with and attitude toward the textual foundations upon which he erected his poetic edifice. In the mouth of the Troilus narrator, to “folwen” an auctor suggests translational fidelity limited only by lack of ability. (In this case, however, Chaucer treats his actual auctor—not the fictitious Latin author, “Lollius,” mentioned elsewhere in Troilus and Criseyde [1.394, 5.1653], but Chaucer's near-contemporary, the Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio—with a great deal of freedom, translating the Italian's Il Filostrato closely in some parts of the poem but inserting massive amounts of new material and altering the tone and spirit of his predecessor time and time again.)7 The narrator of Anelida, notwithstanding his claim to resurrect a neglected “olde storie” in Latin, admits almost at once that he is following not one but two sources: the Latin epic poet Statius and a more elusive “Corinne” (perhaps a deliberately misleading reference of Ovid's Amores). Despite the fact that a few lines of Statius's post-Vergilian Thebaid—the epic tale of the destruction of Thebes through fraternal strife betweeen the two male offspring of Oedipus's incestuous union with his mother—are quoted and closely translated shortly after the narrator's avowal, there is nothing else of that auctor in the poem, which settles instead into a brief tale of the betrayal of a naively virtuous woman by a two-timing cad. As for the “Legend of Dido,” it borrows its image of following the auctor's lantern from Dante's Purgatorio 22, where that same Statius, appearing to Dante and Vergil, praises the latter, though himself a pagan, for leading his poetic successor to Christianity, even as a man walking in the darkness may shine a lantern behind him so that its light, which cannot benefit him, aids those who follow him. (This medieval appreciation of Vergil as a proto-Christian derives from the fact that many commentators of that era believed that Vergil's fourth Eclogue contained a thinly veiled prophecy of the birth of Christ.)⁸ The Chaucerian narrator appears to place himself into an analogous, albeit non-creedal, status of dependency on “Virgil Mantoan,” at least with respect to the story of Aeneas's love for and abandonment of Dido in Aeneid 4. But the real significance of “as I can” is immediately revealed by the succeeding lines, in which the narrator admits he will fabricate a general outline from not one but two classical poets (who offer opposing perspectives on Dido, by the way) while adding the “grete effectes” (the high points? the special details? the real meaning?) himself.

What these examples teach us is not so much that Chaucer makes fraudulent claims about his fidelity to his poetic antecedents—although he does that, certainly—as that “folwen if (or as) I konne” seems to mean something like, “faced with the stature of both classical and modern auctores, I will appropriate them in the way that best serves my poetic needs.” Behind the mask of humble servitude to the auctor lurks the eye of the opportunist, ready to appropriate auctorial achievement to his own devices.9

The supple, irreverent ways in which Chaucer dealt with his culture's auctores, and with issues of literary and cultural authority alluded to in Troilus and Criseyde, are on view in two earlier poems cast in the then-popular literary form of the dream vision. The Troilus narrator's insistence on the fragility of authority across time and space, owing to changes in language—“wordes tho/That hadden pris now wonder nyce and straunge/Us thynketh hem” (TC 2.23–25)—and customs—“forto wynnen love in sondry ages, / In sondry londes, sondry ben usages” (TC 2.27–28)—is anticipated in The House of Fame (HF), a highly skeptical meditation on the reliability of all authority, indeed all information and knowledge, transmitted by language from age to age or place to place.¹⁰

The inspiration for HF is impeccably auctorial: it is the depiction of Fame's dwelling in book 12 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which in turn adapts Vergil's description of Fame, in book 4 of the Aeneid, as a malevolent creature of many eyes and ears who rushes around the world, spreading the harmful news of Dido's love affair with Aeneas:

Extemplo Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes,

Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius ullum.

mobilitate viget virisque adquirit eundo;

parva metu primo, mox sese attollit in auras

ingrediturque solo et caput inter nubila condit.

…pedibus celerem et pernicibus alis,

monstrum horrendum, ingens, cui, quot sunt corpore plumae,

tot vigiles oculi subter (mirabile dictu),

tot linguae, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit auris.

Nocte volat caeli medio terraeque per umbram,

stridens, nec dulci declinat lumina somno;

luce sedet custos aut summi culmine tecti,

turribus aut altis, et magnas territat urbes,

tam ficti pravique tenax quam nuntia veri.

(Aeneid 4.173–77, 180–88)

(Then, swiftest of all evils, Rumor runs/straightway through Libya's mighty cities—Rumor, / whose life is speed, whose going gives her force. / Timid and small at first, she soon lifts up/her body in the air. She stalks the ground; / her head is hidden in the clouds. / … fast footed/and lithe of wing, she is a terrifying/enormous monster with as many feathers/as she has sleepless eyes beneath each feather/(amazingly), as many sounding tongues/and mouths, and raises up as many ears. / Between the earth and skies she flies by night, / screeching across the darkness, and she never/closes her eyes in gentle sleep. By day/she sits as sentinel on some steep roof/or on high towers, frightening vast cities; / for she holds fast to falsehood and distortion/as often as to messages of truth.)

(Mandelbaum trans., 87)

Ovid's adaptation—less overtly hostile, more focused on social interchange—stresses the instability of fama, or what we would call news and rumor, as it passes from mouth to mouth, growing and changing as it goes:

Orbe locus medio est inter terrasque fretumque

caelestesque plagas, triplicis confinia mundi;

unde quod est usquam, quamvis regionibus absit,

inspicitur, penetratque cavas vox omnis ad aures:

Fama tenet summaque domum sibi legit in arce,

innumerosque aditus ac mille foramina tectis

addidit et nullis inclusit limina portis;

nocte dieque patet: tota est ex aere sonanti,

tota fremit vocesque refert iteratque quod audit;

nulla quies intus nullaque silentia parte,

nec tamen est clamor, sed parvae murmura vocis….

Atria turba tenet: veniunt, leve vulgus, euntque

Mixtaque cum veris passim commenta vagantur

Milia rumorum confusaque verba volutant;

e quibus hi vacuas inplent sermonibus aures,

hi narrata ferunt alio, mensuraque ficti

crescit, et auditis aliquid novus adicit auctor….

Ipsa [i.e. Fama], quid in caelo rerum pelagoque geratur

et tellure, videt totumque inquirit in orbem.

(Metamorphoses 12.39–49, 53–58, 62–63)

(There is a place/At the world's center, triple boundary/Of land and sky and sea. From here all things, / No matter what, are visible; every word/Comes to these hollow ears. Here Rumor dwells, / Her palace high upon the mountain-summit, / With countless entrances, thousands on thousands, / And never a door to close them. Day and night/The halls stand open, and the bronze re-echoes, / Repeats all words, redoubles every murmur. / There is no quiet, no silence anywhere, / No uproar either, only the subdued/Murmur of little voices…. / The halls/Are filled with presences that shift and wander, / Rumors in thousands, lies and truth together, / Confused and confusing. Some fill idle ears/With stories, others go far-off to tell/What they have heard, and every story grows, / And each new teller adds to what he hears. / … [A]nd she, their goddess, / Sees all that happens in heaven, on land, on ocean, searching the world for news.)

(Humphries trans., 286–87)

Chaucer's poem proceeds to enlist these representations of Fame for use in a variety of ways as ammunition against the elevated cultural status of their creators (remember what I said about comic poets biting the feeding hand). In book 1 of HF, for example, the narrator dreams of wandering alone in a temple of Venus, on the walls of which he finds graven (HF 157, 193; the word can mean “written” or “engraved”) the story of the Aeneid:11

But as I slepte, me mette I was	I dreamed
Withyn a temple ymad of glas,
In which ther were moo images	more
Of gold, stondynge in sondry stages,	variously mounted
And moo ryche tabernacles,
And with perre moo pynacles,	precious gems
And moo curiouse portreytures,	skillful paintings
And queynte maner of figures	clever types
Of olde werk, then I saugh ever.
For certeynly, I nyste never	had no idea
Wher that I was, but wel wyste I
Hyt was of Venus redely,	truly
The temple;…
But as I romed up and doun,
I fond that on a wall ther was
Thus writen on a table of bras:	plaque
‘I wol now synge, yif I kan
The armes and also the man
That first cam, thurgh his destinee,
Fugityf of Troy contree,
In Italye, with ful moche pyne	suffering
Upon the strondes of Lavyne.’	shores

(HF 119–31, 140–48; emphasis added)

The poem's rendering of Vergil's famous opening line, “Arma virumque cano,” as “I wol now singe, yif I kan, / The armes and also the man,” suggests that Chaucer cannot resist transfering to Vergil his own sense of the contingencies of translation. Indeed, HF's version of the Aeneid is an exercise in following an auctor “as I konne,” for it inserts into the account of Aeneas's affair with Dido a segment of the pathetic lament Ovid wrote for her in his Heroides, casting the Trojan hero in a much less favorable light. The Chaucerian narrator also interrupts the Vergilian narrative to add a warning to women—beware the verbal trickery of false lovers!—that owes a general debt to similar admonitions directed at the elegant young women of Rome by Ovid's magister amoris in book 3 of the Ars amatoria:

Therfore be no wyght so nyce	no one should be so foolish
To take a love oonly for chere,	looks
Or speche, or for frendly manere,
For this shal every woman fynde,
That som man, of his pure kynde,	from his very nature
Wol sheweth outward the fayreste,	will make the best posible
	impression
Tyl he have caught that what him leste;	what he wants
And thanne wol he causes fynde	excuses
And swere how that she ys unkynde,
Or fals, or privy, or double was.	has guilty secrets
	duplicitous

(HF 276–85)

The result is a Vergil-Ovid amalgam that testifies, among other things, to the instability, dubious integrity, and unverifiability of transmitted stories. The narrator speaks later of “Aventure/That is the moder of tydynges [spreader of rumors]” (1982–83), reminding us of the role chance inevitably plays in the transmission, suppression, or distortion of narratives, that is, in the process that constitutes fama.

In a wry, albeit implied, comment on the inscrutability of fame, the narrator's dream version of the Aeneid shows Dido lamenting the damage done her reputation by her affair with a man who has abandoned her, convinced that “wikke Fame” will insure her condemnation by future ages. Meanwhile, the very text that reports this despairing comment passes a negative judgment not on her but on Aeneas. Finally, as if to illustrate the process of transmission plus addition that Ovid attributes to all the information that comes to and is circulated in Fame's palace (Metamorphoses 12.57–58), the narrator puts some words in Dido's mouth for which only he is responsible, not Vergil or Ovid:

In suche wordes gan to pleyne	lament
Dido of hire greete peyne;
As me mette redely;	I truly dreamed
Noon other auctor allege I.

(HF 311–14)

This hybrid version of the Aeneid is a multimedia presentation, in pictures as well as words—see, for example, HF 209–11: “Ther saugh [saw] I such tempeste aryse/That every herte myght agryse [shudder]/To see hyt peynted on the wal”—that, together with its architectural setting, presents the classical tradition as a living, multiply communicating structure of great beauty and complexity, into which the modern poet ventures by acts of individual and cultural memory (here conventionally figured as dreaming). In addition, the dream temple's dedication to Venus suggests the continuing impact of classical story on late-medieval representations of desire (such as Troilus and Criseyde), but the poem suggests that this pervasive influence is not without its downside. The fact that the temple is empty except for the narrator, and is located in a huge sandy desert, inscribes the dreamer's fear that paraphrasing classical poetry in the vernacular (as he has just done with the Aeneid) is a sterile exercise in venerating literary traditions that, for all their “noblesse” and “richesse,” remain the fantasies of an abandoned “chirche”—cultural illusions that shut the poet off from a lived experience fertile with potential for the narrative imagination:

When I had seen al this syghte
In this noble temple thus,
‘A, Lord,’ thoughte I, ‘that madest us,
Yet sawgh I never such noblesse
Of ymages, ne such richesse,
As I saugh graven in this chirche:	drawn/written
But not wot I whoo did hem wirche,	who made them
Ne where I am, ne in what contree….’
When I out at the dores cam,
I faste aboute me beheld.
Then sawgh I but a large feld,	nothing but
As fer as that I myghte see,
Withouten toun, or hous, or tree,
Or bush, or grass, or eryd lond;	cultivated
For al the feld nas but of sond….	consisted of nothing but sand
Ne no maner creature
That is yformed be Nature
Ne sawgh I, me to rede or wisse.	to advise or guide me
‘O Crist,’ thoughte I, ‘that art in blysse,
Fro fantome and illusion
Me save!'

(HF 468–75, 480–86, 490–94)

Having skewered the auctoritee of classical antiquity's greatest Latin epic in its first book, HF delivers a deathblow to historical and poetic authority in book 3 via its depiction of the hit and miss way in which information is actually disseminated from the dwelling place of Fame, a site high in the sky to which all sounds uttered in the world must inevitably rise. Fame sits enthroned in her temple built on a hill of ice (with the result that the names of noteworthy people engraved on its sunny side quickly melt away, while those on the side shaded by the temple long remain sharp and clear); the temple's facade teems with niches containing all manner of popular performers “that tellen tales/Both of wepinge and of game, / Of al that longeth unto Fame” (HF 1198–1200)—quintessentially unauthoritative entertainers who provide a ubiquitous conduit for the spread of gossip, rumors, and outright fabrications—and, in its great hall, on either side of Fame's throne, pillars of nonprecious metal depict the epic poets and historians of antiquity supporting, by their writings, the fame of various peoples and civilizations (HF 1419–1512). As the dreamer summarizes, with a touch a distaste:

What shulde y more telle of this?
The halle was al ful, ywis,	as full certainly
Of hem that writen olde gestes	those who stories
As ben on trees rokes nestes;	rooks’ nests
But hit a ful confus matere	it would be very confusing
Were alle the gestes for to here	to hear all the stories
That they of write, or how they highte.	were named

(HF 1513–19)

The record of the past—its “fame” through the ages—is here reduced to a disorienting babel, the accuracy of which is far from assured (hence the baser metals of the columns?): in the most notorious instance, the fame of Troy is borne (or, as we would say, propagated) by a phalanx of poets who are at odds about the truth of the matter:

Betwex hem was a litil envye.	between ill-will
Oon seyde that Omer made lyes,
Feynynge in hys poetries,
And was to Grekes favorable:
Therfor held he hyt but fable.	a fiction

(HF 1476–80)

Meanwhile, suppliants who arrive at Fame's temple seeking a good reputation for deeds performed are variously rewarded by the fickle goddess with good fame, no fame, and evil fame, based on no evident criteria except her momentary pleasure: responding to the plea of those suitors who request good reputations

In ful recompensacioun
Of good werkes,…
‘I werne yow hit,’ quod she anon;	deny
‘Ye gete of me good fame non,
Be God, and therfore goo your wey.’	by
‘Allas,’ quod they, ‘and welaway!
Telle us what may your cause be.’
‘For me lyst hit noght,’ quod she.	because I don't want to

(HF 1557–64)

The same inscrutable fate awaits those seeking ill-fame, or mere oblivion. The result is to establish the complete amorality and unreliability of fame's judgments. (That such judgments are in direct opposition to those of the deity is suggested by the implicit comparison between Fame and the enthroned Christ in the Book of Revelation [see HF 1381–85: “For as feele eyen [many eyes] hadde she/As fetheres upon foules [birds] be, / Or weren on the bestes foure/That Goddis trone gunne honoure [honored, worshipped], / As John writ in th'Apocalips”].) And this arbitrariness of authority on Fame's part clearly underscores the crisis of authority for those empillared poets and chroniclers, already mentioned, whose back-breaking labors the text of HF places in fatal proximity to the fickle goddess. (It should be noted that some years after Chaucer composed HF, a similar arbitrariness of judgment was attributed to Richard II in the “Articles of Deposition” drawn up by supporters of his supplanter, Henry Bolingbroke, to justify the latter's usurpation of the throne.)12

After leaving Fame's palace, the narrator visits a huge (“sixty myle of lengthe” [HF 1979]), whirling house of wicker construction, crammed full of people and their stories. This is the place to which all news from earth first ascends—“and eke [also] this hous hath of entrees/As fele [many] as leves ben in trees/In somer” (HF 1945–47; cf. Metamorphoses 12.44–45)—before proceeding to Fame's throne room to be judged. I take the liberty of quoting myself:

The bizarre, revolving house stands in relation to Fame's temple as an outbuilding to a manor house: it is a depot or workshop where the raw materials are received and prepared. Chaucer has taken certain Ovidian details—the chain of retellings by which Fama pursues her ever-expanding existence; the multiple openings into Fama's dwelling; its crowdedness—and augmented them (to out-Ovid Ovid), creating the enormous, grotesque space in which Fame actually begins to breed.¹³

 

Here in this “workshop of Fame,” the process of spreading and distorting the word seems to be in the hands of the lowest rank of tale tellers—shipmen, pilgrims, pardoners—who move about the earth collecting and transmitting news, gossip, rumor, what have you. (They will, eventually, become the dramatis personae of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.) The narrator watches as a true and a false “tydyng [story, report]” engage in a shoving match, while each attempts to squeeze first out of a narrow window in order to proceed to the fickle goddess's summary judgment. Their strife ends with an agreement to combine; after this Ovidian moment of metamorphosis, the new entity, “soth [true] and fals compouned,”¹⁴ exits, leaving behind no doubt whatsoever as to the value of information gained from any link in the chain of narration that extends from bit of juicy gossip, through heraldic genealogy, to classical epic.

The sudden appearance of someone who seems “a man of greet auctoritee” in a corner of the whirling house causes a stir among its sardined occupants, but at that point the poem breaks off, having by now rendered effectively null and void any viable idea of historical or cultural authority.

The Parlement of Foules offers another good example of Chaucer's aptitude for (to paraphrase a medieval bon mot on the subject) twisting the wax nose of (poetic) authority.15 This poem also supports, proleptically, the narrator's contention to his audience in Troilus and Criseyde that “forto wynnen love in sondry ages, / In sondry londes, sondry ben usages,” and, furthermore, that “scarsly ben ther in this place thre/that have in love seid like and don in al.” The Parlement uses materials as diverse as a philosophic dream vision, Italian erotic allegory, bird lore drawn from the bestiary tradition, and sociopolitical antagonisms aired through a comic simulacrum of parliamentary debate to dramatize divergent perspectives on the satisfaction of desire.

I've already quoted the opening stanza of PF in which its narrator expresses wonder and fear at the “wonderul werkynge” of love, which, like the Troilus narrator, he knows about only from reading, as the poem's second stanza makes clear:

For al be that I knowe nat Love in dede,
Ne wot how that he quiteth folk here hyre,	repays people for their service (to him)
Yit happeth me ful ofte in bokes reede
Of his myrakles and his crewel yre.

(PF 8-11)

After perusing the “Somnium scipionis” (“Dream of Scipio”), a Stoic-Platonic parable that concludes Cicero's De republica by inculcating detachment from worldly concerns and service to “the commun profyt” (PF 75) or res publica, the narrator dreams that Affrican (Scipio africanus), the wisdom figure from Scipio's dream, brings him to a garden, on the gate of which are inscribed starkly contrary messages. One promises joy and pleasure within while the other (modeled on the inscription over the entrance to hell in Dante's Inferno) warns of disaster and counsels avoidance. Together they suggest proleptically (though from a different perspective) the debates to follow within:

‘Thorgh me men gon into that blysful place
Of hertes hele and dedly woundes cure;	well-being
Thorgh me men gon unto the welle of grace,
There grene and lusty May shal evere endure.
This is the wey to al good aventure.	fortune
Be glad, thow redere, and thy sorwe of-caste;
Al open am I—passe in, and sped thee faste!'
‘Thorgh me men gon,’ than spak that other side,
‘Unto the mortal strokes of the spere
Of which Disdayn and Daunger is the gyde,	(the lady's)
	resistance guide
Ther never tree shal fruyt ne leves bere.
This strem yow ledeth to the sorweful were	stream weir (fish trap)
There as the fish in prysoun is al drye;
Th'eschewing is only the remedye!'

(PF 127–40)

Reassured by his guide that the messages are not intended for nonlovers, the narrator enters and passes in quick succession through a beautiful landscape of perpetual spring, vibrant with animal life and harmonious bird song (PF 172–210), and then a temple of love and desire, staffed by allegorical abstractions who represent facets (mostly discouraging) of a lover's experience, presided over by Venus and the lustful phallic god Priapus (his scepter in his hand, we are euphemistically informed) and populated by troops of famous, mostly tragic lovers (PF 211–94). Each of these phases of the dream represents a literary response to the fact of desire: the beautiful landscape is borrowed from The Romance of the Rose (RR), an influential French allegory of love; the allegorical temple of Venus and Priapus from Boccaccio's epic-romance, the Teseide; the figure of Priapus, portrayed at the moment he is prevented by the wake-up bray of a jackass from raping a sleeping nymph, from Ovid's Fasti; and the catalogue of lovers from Dante's Commedia, Inferno 5. In effect, the narrator, awake and asleep, is reading his way through his library of auctores, old and new, in search of what he calls early in the poem “a certeyn thing,” a delightfully ambiguous phrase that can mean either, “something or other,” or “certainty,” presumably as a relief from his confusion about love (“Nat yoore [long]/Agon it happede me for to beholde/Upon a bok, was write with lettres olde/And therupon, a certeyn thing to lerne, / The longe day ful faste [eagerly] I redde and yerne [PF 17–20]).

One last book remains to be opened: the dreaming narrator now comes upon a kind of natural temple of shade trees (as opposed to Venus's shrine of brass) amid which, surrounded by birds of every species arranged in large categories according to their eating habits, sits the goddess Nature, looking “ryght as Aleyn, in the Pleynte of Kynde, / Devyseth [shows] Nature of aray [dress] and face” (PF 316–17; The De planctu naturae, [The Plaint of Nature] by Alan of Lille, a late-twelfth-century grammarian and theologian, was a widely disseminated dream-vision allegory about fallen human sexuality, supposedly as exemplified by clerics and courtiers.)16 The birds have assembled to choose their mates on St Valentine's Day, under Nature's supervision. Does their orderly disposition around “Nature, the vicaire [deputy] of the almighty Lord, / That hot, cold, hevy, light, moyst, and dreye/Hath knit by evene noumbres of accord [combined in coordinated proportions]” (PF 379–81), mean that the narrator's quest for certainty about love has ended at last in a bookish epiphany of marital harmony as the “commun profyt” at which desire must aim?¹⁷ Nature now announces her “ryghtful ordenaunce… that he that most is worthy shal begynne” the mating process, and calls on the noblest bird present, “the tersel [male] egle… the foul royal above yow in degre [rank, status]” to choose a mate first, “and after hym by ordre shul ye chese [you will choose in order], / After youre kynde, everich as yow lyketh [each of you as it pleases you]” (PF 390, 392–94, 400–401). By this exercise of her authority, the goddess imposes a social hierarchy—proposed as an expression of the natural order, not just a human construct—on the universal pursuit of desire's satisfaction, along with the “condicioun… / that she [i.e., the female chosen] agre to his eleccioun [choice of her], / Whoso he be that shulde be hire feere [wants to be her mate]” (PF 409–10). Accordingly, the royal tercel chooses the beautiful female eagle, perched in a privileged position on Nature's wrist; in an extended speech conforming to the discourse of courtly wooing, he bases his plea for his lady's mercy on his exemplary devotion and service (PF 416–41). So far, so good; but not to be outdone, two other tercels, lower in rank, counterpropose their merits in equally hyperbolic speeches (PF 449–83), introducing division and uncertainty where harmony was to reign: which suitor will the female eagle choose?

The narrator, catching the tone of the proceedings, praises what he has heard, in some extravagant rhetoric of his own: “So gentyl ple [such refined pleading] in love or other thing/Ne herde never no man me beforn [i.e., until now],” while admitting that the high-toned speeches lasted “from the morwe [morning]… / Tyl downward went the sonne wonder fast,” that is, all day (PF 485–86, 489–90). At which point, all avian hell breaks loose: the fowl of lower ranks make their impatience felt, both at the delay in their satisfying their desires and at the elaborate quadrille of avowals and counter-avowals by which each of the formel's three suitors has been seeking to outdo his rivals:

The noyse of foules for to ben delyvered
So loude rong, ‘Have don!, and lat us wende!'	go (now)
That wel wende I the wode hadde al toshyvered.	woods shattered
'Come of!’ they cride, ‘allas, ye wol us shende!	hurry up
	you're ruining us
Whan shal youre cursede pletynge have an ende?’	arguing

(PF 491–95)

This intervention transforms a natural occasion (birds mating) into a sociopolitical one, with status difference expressed in different idioms—no self-respecting tercel, we are sure, would allow himself to say “Have don!” or “Come of!” no matter how upset—but also in different perspectives on wooing strategies. The humbler birds regard courtly rhetoric as “cursede pletynge,” and lengthy expressions of devotion as detrimental to their own quite urgent interests, as well as being susceptible to a pointedly rational skepticism: “Howe sholde a juge [ judge] eyther parti leve [believe]/For ye or nay withouten any preve [proof]?” (PF 496–97). That is, on what grounds can the formel choose among these three windbags who offer no supporting evidence for their extravagant claims? (The question has a sting in its tail for the repute of auctores, between whose contradictory claims—e.g., Vergil and Ovid on Dido's innocence or guilt—Chaucer and his contemporaries would have no way of adjudicating.)

This is not to suggest that the poem necessarily takes the side of the lesser ranks in their dissent, or endorses their idiom, which it repeatedly refers to as “noise,” the preferred term of hostile chroniclers to describe the outcry of the rebels in the Great Rising (aka the Peasants’ Revolt) of 1381, soon after which the Parlement of Foules may have been written.¹⁸ In addition, PF depicts the spokesbirds for the anti-courtly view as prone to salting their arguments with mere birdspeak:

The goos, the cokkow, and the doke also	duck
So cryed, ‘Kek! Kek! kokkow! quek quek!’ hye
That thourgh myne eres the noyse wente tho….
And for the water foules tho bigan	then
The goos to speke, and in hire kakelynge
She seyde, ‘Pes’…	peace
‘Ye queke!’ seyde the goos, ‘ful wel and feyre.’

(PF 498–500, 562–63, 594)

Nonetheless, despite these signs of entrenched class snobbery, the poem allows the avian “lewednesse [uncultured ignorance],” as it is called at one point (PF 520), to make several telling critiques of the eagles’ modus operandi in wooing: to one tercel who claims he will love the formel until he dies, even if she refuses his pleas to take him as her mate, the goose replies, self-interestedly but with unexceptionable logic: “my wit is sharp; I love no taryinge; / I seye I rede [advise] him, though he were my brother, / But [unless] she wol love hym, lat hym love another!” (PF 565–67). To such admittedly unromantic suggestions the tercels can only reply with the scorn of lords for revolting (in both senses of that word) peasants and by recourse to what might be called playing the class card, but with no good counterargument:

Lo here a parfit resoun of a goos!
… Nevere mot she thee!	thrive
Lo, swich it is to have a tonge loos!	loose tongue
Now parde, fol, yet were it bet for the	by God
Han holde thy pes than shewed thy nycete.	folly
It lyth nat in his wit, ne in his wille,
But soth is seyd, ‘a fol can not be stille.’…	it's true what they say
Thy kynde is of so low a wrechednesse
That what love is, thow canst nouther seen ne gesse.’	neither see

(PF 568–74, 601–2)

So the poem, and the mating session, reach a standoff : no agreement on moving forward can be reached because the two sides in the dispute have irreconcilable perspectives on what should happen, and completely different discursive registers in which to express them. Nature attempts to break the logjam by proposing that the formel choose which of her three suitors she prefers, thereby enacting a major new erotic paradigm, replacing the one in which men choose and women can only agree or refuse to be chosen. But the formel rejects Nature's advice—another auctor dismissed—and all her three suitors, at least for the next year:

‘Almyghty quene, until this yer be don,
I axe respit for to avise me,
And after that to have my choys al fre….
I wol nat serve Venus ne Cupide,
Forsothe as yit, by no manere weye.’	yet, in truth

(PF 647–49, 652–53)

Nothing in this plea for deferral guarantees that her “choys al fre” will be one of the tercels. But it does clear the way for the rest of the birds quickly to choose their mates in a joyful and sensual process that contrasts sharply with (as it turns out) the eagles’ sterile exercise of courtly wooing—

To every foul Nature yaf his make	mate
By evene acord, and on here way they wende.	mutual their
And Lord!, the blisse and joye that they make!
For ech of hem gan other in wynges take,
And with here nekkes ech gan other wynde

(PF 667–71)

—an irrepressibly comical but nonetheless touching accommodation of human love embraces to avian bodily configurations.

As they fly away, their desires (except, of course, for the eagles') happily satisfied, the birds sing a “roundel”—a lyric of French origin—in praise of springtime and love, recalling the harmonious birdsong that greeted the dreamer on his entrance into the garden that has offered him so many perspectives on desire, filtered through so many culturally authoritative texts. Within these melodious parentheses, however, there remains an unanswered question. Specifically, PF ends with no resolution of the difference between two contrasting approaches to mating—two “sundry usages,” as the Troilus narrator would say—and no auctor who can leave the narrator with any “certain thyng” to hold on to (except, perhaps, that love is humanity's—and Nature's—most complex experience), though this outcome will not deter him from what seems likely to be a long, ultimately vain search for further enlightenment:

I wok, and othere bokes tok me to,	awoke
To reede upon, and yit I rede alwey.
I hope, ywis, to rede so som day
That I shal mete som thyng for to fare	meet (or dream)
The bet, and thus to rede I nyl nat spare.	better

(PF 695–99)

After composing Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer turned his attention to two projects, each as different from the other as both are from TC: The Canterbury Tales and The Legend of Good Women, collections of short tales embodying divergent organizing principles and source materials. (He may have had the collections in mind even while or before writing TC; our information about the dating and sequence of the Chaucerian canon is exiguous nearly to the point of nonexistence.) Crises of desire and authority figure centrally in each collection, providing ample opportunities for comic treatment of cultural and political issues of obvious importance to the poet. Although understandably overshadowed by the brilliance and variety of The Canterbury Tales, The Legend of Good Women (LGW)—a compendium of stories adapted from Ovid, Vergil, Livy, and other classical (or supposedly classical) auctores, all depicting women whose faithfulness to their men is often not reciprocated and in any case leads to their suffering—has a special claim on my attention in this chapter, because its Prologue (unusual for its two extant versions, offering unique evidence of extensive Chaucerian rewriting) features a complex, amusingly oblique juggling of relevant concerns, including a “modern” poet's responses and responsibilties to cultural antecedents, both ancient and more recent; a court poet's obligations to (and anxiety about) the power of princes and patrons; and any poet's need to balance inspiration and audience expectation in the course of an evolving career. My comments are based primarily on the so-called G version of the Prologue, usually considered the later of the two, because I believe it contains Chaucer's latest extant comments on these important issues.19

A brief summary of the Prologue will give an initial idea of the number of balls Chaucer is keeping in the air. The first 103 lines constitute a waking “Prologue within the Prologue”: the narrator begins (G 1—28) by praising books (especially “olde bokes”) and the learning they contain, as “keys of remembrance” and necessary complements to lived experience. Despite his “reverence” for books, however, he abandons them in “the joly tyme of May” (G 36) to walk in the fields and take special pleasure in observing his favorite flower, the daisy, “of alle floures flour, / Fulfyld of vertu and of alle honour” (G 55–56), as it opens with the coming of day and closes again when the sun sinks to rest. After a day of daisy watching, late in May, he returns home, has a bed made up for him in his garden, and falls asleep outdoors.

In his dream, the narrator, while seeking daisies in the meadow, encounters the God of Love, accompanied by his queen, whose green cloak, golden hairnet, and white crown—a single pearl—“made hire lyk a dayeseye [daisy] for to sene” (G 156), and a substantial courtly entourage of women “trewe of love” (G 193). The god's stern look and subsequent angry words—“it were better worthi [it would be more worthwhile], trewely, / A worm to comen in my syght than thow” (G 243–44)—make clear his displeasure with the dreamer, whom he accuses of slandering and hindering the god's servants by translating the Romance of the Rose and “the bok/How that Criseyde Troilus forsok,” (G 264–65). For such acts of betrayal, the God of Love now demands repentance.20

At this awkward moment, the Queen intervenes on the Dreamer's behalf, counseling her lord against hasty, unjust judgment of his subject and proffering a number of possible reasons to explain and excuse the latter. Her lawyerly defense shades off into a lecture on the difference between good and bad rulership, and, after rehearsing a catalogue of the poet's previous works as evidence of his meaning well, the Queen proposes that the God of Love not punish the poet, who will promise never to trespass again and to make appropriate amends, in the form of stories “Of women trewe in lovynge al here lyve” (G 428).

The god acquiesces, granting his consort authority over the Dreamer, whose belated protestation of innocence she quickly squelches, assigning him, as a “lyte” [little] penance (G 485), the task of writing “a gloryous legende/Of goode women,” and of “false men that hem [them] betrayen” (472–76).²¹ When the Dreamer confesses his ignorance of his intercessor's identity, the God of Love refers him to “a bok, lyth [lying] in thy cheste” (498), by one Agaton, which tells the story of classical antiquity's Queen Alceste, savior of her husband from the underworld, who for her loyal wifehood was transformed into a daisy. The Dreamer expresses surprise that “this goode Alceste” is also “the dayeseye and myn owene hertes reste [heart's comfort]” (506–7), who was later “stellified” [turned into a star]—a second metamorphosis—by Jove (513). The God of Love instructs the dreamer to make the tale of Alceste the climax of his legend of good women, which is to begin with Cleopatra. At this word, the dreamer awakes and, as we might say, hits the ground writing.

The Prologue to LGW is a complex and provocative document. Some questions immediately present themselves: Was Chaucer really criticized by important members of his audience for having translated RR and TC? Is the God of Love a stand-in for Richard II, and could the real monarch actually have become annoyed at the real Chaucer, whether for how he wrote about love or for other statements, spoken or written, that the king considered divisive and threatening to the peace of the realm? Is Alceste a coded version of Richard's queen, Anne of Bohemia (to whom, at the royal palaces of Eltham or Shene, Alceste, in the F Prologue, instructs the dreamer to deliver his completed “glorious legende of goode wommen” [F 483–84, 496–97]), and did Anne really intercede for Chaucer with her husband?²²

In seeking to answer such questions, and arrive at a coherent interpretation of the Prologue, we must, I think, begin by recognizing what it owes to and how it differs from the most important antecedent to both it and the tales that follow it in LGW, namely The Judgment of the King of Navarre (Jugement du roi de Navarre [JKN; after 1350]), a poem by Guillaume de Machaut, a major, widely influential fourteenth-century French poet and composer.

The English poet was familiar with a broad range of Machaut's secular lyric and narrative poems (or dits)—Machaut also composed church music, including a Mass that has been widely performed and recorded within the early music revival of the last forty years—and had adapted significant aspects of the latter's popular dit The Judgment of the King of Bohemia (Jugement du roi de Behaigne [JKB; 1340s]) for The Book of the Duchess, with an excerpt from which the present chapter began. Since the central conceit of JKN makes it a (forced) response to and revision of JKB, I must first devote a few words to the latter poem.

In JKB, the poet-persona (a lineal descendent of the dreamer in the Roman de la Rose) overhears a debate between a knight and a noblewoman over whose grief is greater: his, for a beloved who has deserted him for another, or hers, for a faithful lover who has died. The narrator offers to resolve the dispute by bringing the contestants to the court of the noble and virtuous king of Bohemia (obviously Machaut's patron at the time), who, assisted by a courtly council of allegorical virtues, hears both sides and decides that the knight's is the greater grief, since he has been unjustly betrayed; the monarch also assures the noblewoman that her grief will pass and another lover may come into her life.

JKB constitutes a contribution by Machaut to the medieval genre, both courtly and learned, of debate poetry descended from the controversiae of Roman rhetorical schools, by which patrician young men were taught, among other things, to argue both sides of any legal case—however fictional, however outrageous—posited by their teachers, using every trick available to the well-trained lawyer or orator. (In the preceding chapter, I placed the Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris within the context of these disputationes ad utramque partem [arguments on either side].) Returning to the genre some years later in JKN, Machaut offers a seriocomic, deliberately unconvincing correction to the earlier poem's judgment, and thus a further proof of his virtuosity in scripting a disputatio ad utramque partem. But he complicates his model by making himself a participant in a debate that turns out to be more like a legal action with himself as the defendant, although what is ultimately on trial is the denouement of JKB.

Early in JKN, the narrator, while out hunting rabbits,23 is summoned by a noble lady who, after some preliminary persiflage, angrily accuses him of having “sinned against women” (811), explaining that “the case against you is something/You've written in one of your books” (866–67). When the narrator (addressed as “Guillaume” by his accuser) denies recalling any such affront, the lady summarizies JKB and assures the narrator that he judged incorrectly, and to the detriment of women, in awarding the palm for greater grief to the man in that poem. Note that it is the poet, not his surrogate, the king of Bohemia, whose judgment is faulted; within the fiction of JKN, that is, the poet is held accountable for the opinions expressed by his characters. (Guillaume accepts this responsibility [1068–70].)

The lady now asks “Guillaume” to reverse his judgment (1034–36), which he refuses to do (1044–46; 1065–70), although this is precisely what Machaut the poet will undertake, through “Guillaume's” opponents, in the remainder of JKN, with a view to entertaining an audience (presumably courtly) that appreciates debates pursued with more virtuosity than scrupulosity, as, in a nicely ironic touch, the noble lady's subsequent indictment of “Guillaume” to the king of Navarre makes clear: “You see there Guillaume de Machaut. / He's a man who doesn't concern himself/With upholding either wrong or right; / In fact he'd just as soon sustain/The wrong as the right” (1499–1503).

Once the noble lady nominates and Guillaume accepts the king of Navarre (obviously Machaut's current patron) as the ideal judge to hear and decide between their arguments, the remainder of the poem becomes a distinctly (and amusingly) one-sided forensic exercise, with Guillaume on trial and under attack by the twelve allegorical virtues (Reason, Understanding, Generosity, and so on), who, having been introduced as the noble lady's entourage, are subsequently borrowed by the king of Navarre as his councillors, thereby making their support of their mistress's claim, and their consistent denigration of Guillaume's, a foregone conclusion. The pleasure of the situation arises from the kinds of exemplary material drawn on by both sides to support their positions and the rhetorical tricks—twisted reinterpretations of the opponent's arguments (known as colors—cf. chapter 1, page 55), incomplete citations of supposedly corroborative sources, and others—they deploy to bolster their own position and discredit the opposing one. Thus the debate becomes a comic exercise in sleazy declamation.

After a good deal of such eloquent byplay, Reason pronounces threefold judgment on Guillaume, confirmed to the kneeling poet by the king himself: he has not only judged incorrectly the relative priority of love-inspired sorrows but also acted foolishly in not repenting of his errors when the noble lady censured him (3800–3804); finally, Reason asserts,

‘I know of no high personage,

So far as the world extends,

No prince or duke, no count or king,

Who would dare perpetrate such an outrage,

Guillaume, as did you,

When you entered into debate against her….

And thus you have stripped your mind

Of courtesy and due respect.’

(3819–24, 3828–29)

The real significance of Guillaume's trial becomes clear when the noble lady is named, at last, as the personification of Bonneürté—Good Fortune, or Success—clearly not a personage, that is, a condition, with which a poet can afford to be at odds in the conduct of his career. In sum, JKN ruefully but lightheartedly proposes that a poet working in courtly genres and a courtly ambience—where, according to Reason, Bonneurte resides, summoned by honor—has to be ready to make adjustments, to find new subjects or revisit old ones from new, even opposing, perspectives if he is to remain on good terms with Fortune, that is, to enjoy success over time (which the historical Machaut did). Within the fiction of JKN, Guillaume, by arguing in JKB against (his own) Good Fortune—that is, his popularity with women—has erred badly; you can't quarrel with success, as that argument will always, even if unfairly, be stacked against you.

The king, his deliberations complete, informs Guillaume of his threefold penitence (4047): he is to compose, without grumbling, a compensatory lai, chanson, and balade: “Now don't act like you're sick about this, / But respond happily” (4190–91). Machaut concludes the poem with Guillaume's statement that he will now offer it to madame, “Li priant que tout me pardoint [begging her to pardon me]” (4205)—in other words, in full recognition that nothing succeeeds like success—and set to work at once on “a lay about love” (4212).

JKN is a lighthearted meditation on the twists and turns of a poet's road to repute, replete with risks and obstacles—a road, moreover, on which looking backward is often a necessary part of moving forward. Judging from its impact on the Prologue to LGW, Machaut's dit attracted Chaucer by raising the issue of a poet's reception, specifically his being challenged about his earlier writings on women and love by powerful figures whose favor he needs—an extension up the sociopolitical ladder, we might say, of the concerns about reception comically articulated in the Proem to book 2 of Troilus and Criseyde. Such a representation of the poet's potential responsibility, at any given moment in his career, for all his works—Alceste, in defending the Dreamer to the God of Love includes a catalogue of Chaucer's works (perhaps including some he had not yet written or circulated) ostensibly as proof that “he hath maked lewed [humble, ignorant] folk to delyte/To serven yow, in preysynge [praising] of youre name” (403–4)—has as its corollary that this poetic career constitutes an important part of his identity,24 albeit one that leaves him open to judgment from the perspective of both cultural and political authority. (Were the god to acquaint himself with this Chaucerian bibliography, he would find little to support Alceste's claim, though he might have taken the translation of “Orygenes upon the Maudeleyne” [418], if Chaucer in fact ever undertook it—It is in any case not extant—as a hopeful portent, as its theme is repentance for sinful deeds.)

Beyond this catalogue, and building on JKN's revisionary recourse to an earlier Machaudian text, the Prologue to LGW contains verbal or thematic recalls, revisions, and theoretical justifications of several earlier Chaucerian texts—a technique perhaps best compared with Beethoven's brief quotations of themes from the first three movements of his Ninth Symphony in the early measures of its last movement. In both cases, the recalls prepare us for more complex or profound statement of artistic endeavor; for Chaucer, I'd argue, the Prologue offers—with characteristic comic nuancing—mature considerations of the challenges presented to a poetic career by established traditions of representing desire and by the often competing claims of cultural and political authority, as well.

The narrator's dream begins with his perambulation through the meadow where, waking, he sought out the daisy. It is springtime and the birds

[songen clere/Layes] of love…
In worshipe and in preysyng of hire make;	mates
And for the newe blysful somers sake,	springtime's
[They] sungen, ‘Blyssed be Seynt Valentyne!
For on his day I ches yow to be myn,
Withoute repentynge, myn herte swete!'
And therwithal here bekes gonne mete,	their beaks met
Yelding honour and humble obeysaunces;	deference
And after diden othere observaunces
Ryht longing unto love and to nature.	appropriate to

(LGW G 127–37; emphasis added)

These lines recapitulate the end of the dream in PF, where the lower avian ranks, in keeping with the purpose for which Nature has assembled them on Valentine's Day, engage in joyful mating, once the courtly wooing of the nobler eagles has come to naught. Here, however, the scene initiates, rather than concluding, a dream, and instead of sending the waking dreamer back to his books in search of the elusive “unified theory” of love, as in the Parlement, the birds’ expressions of mutual affection spark his attention and comprehension: “This song to herknen I dide al myn entente [tried my hardest], / For-why I mette I wiste [because I dreamt I knew] what they mente” (139–40). This act of recollective metamorphosis on the dreamer's part is also an act of acquiescent reception, both of the poet's own earlier work, and of the Romance of the Rose, ultimate literary ancestor of this preparatory, springtime-and-birdsong dreamscape. As such, it provides a contrast to what will immediately follow: the resistant, indeed, outraged reception of the God of Love—thus a foil to the benevolent goddess Nature—of the dreamer's translation of this same Romance of the Rose. On the other hand, the marital harmony of the birds anticipates the central presence in the dream of Alceste, the famous exemplar of marital devotion, whose trip to the underworld to rescue her husband is in turn recapitulated by her rescue of the dreamer from the “hell” of the God of Love's condemnation.25

By contrast with its textual citation of PF, the Prologue's recall of the translations of RR and TC is inserted not so much as a reference to those texts but rather to trigger seriocomic consideration of matters of importance, and indeed potential risk, to a poet working in a court milieu or, in any case, within the purview of superior political authority: issues of choice of subject, reception, reputation, and patronage. The God of Love, presented throughout the Prologue as a king, takes umbrage at those translations, which he understands as exercises in slander, disloyalty, and the denigration of women:

‘Thow art my mortal fo and me werreyest,	(you) wage war
	against me
And of myne olde servauntes thow
mysseyest,	slander
And hynderest hem with thy translacyoun,
And lettest folk to han devocyoun	prevent from having
To serven me, and holdest it folye
To truste on me. Thow mayst it nat denye,
For in pleyn text, it nedeth nat to glose,	no need to gloss it
Thow hast translated the Romaunt of the Rose,
That is an heresye ageyns my lawe,
And makest wise folk fro me withdrawe;
And thynkest in thy wit, that is ful col,	completely dull
That he nys but a verray propre fol	true and complete fool
That loveth paramours to harde and hote….	with too intense a
	romantic passion
Hast thow nat mad in Englysh ek the bok
How that Criseyde Troylus forsok,
In shewynge how that wemen han don mis?’	wrong

(G 248–60, 264–66)

The Dreamer's crime, according to this resistant monarchic reader, is treason, or even heresy, and it demands his public repentance—or else:

‘By Seynt Venus, of whom that I was born,
Althogh thow reneyed hast my lay,	have denied my
	creed
As othere olde foles many a day,
Thow shalt repente it, so that it shal be sene!'26

(G 313–16)

The God of Love's diction suggests that he has brought a distinctly religious perspective to his reading (and condemnation) of the Dreamer's efforts: “the Romaunt of the Rose/… is an heresye ageyns my lawe;… / But yit, I seye, what eyleth the [is wrong with you] to wryte / The draf [chaff] of storyes and forgete the corn?… / thow hast reneyed my lay/… Thow shalt repente it” (255–56, 311–12, 314, 316; the reference to “draf” and “corn” borrows a well-established metaphor from biblical exegesis to distinguish between the surface meaning and true, inner significance of a scriptural passage.) Nor is his animus placated by the repentance that Alceste claims for the Dreamer and the penance, on the god's behalf, that she assigns him; even after agreeing to this settlement, the testy monarch cannot resist getting in one last dig at a subject who has managed to avoid the royal punishment he deserved, asking him if he knows who the woman is “that hath so lytel penaunce yiven the [imposed on you], / That hath deserved sorer for to smerte [to suffer greater pain]?” (489–90). The wording suggests that the God of Love, thinking as much like a bishop as a king, would relish the idea of a long stay in Purgatory for the Dreamer.²⁷

Since the offending texts are English translations, it may well be that Chaucer is using RR, TC, and the God of Love as covers for a pointed critique of the condemnation, by the contemporaneous institutional religious establishment, of those religious dissenters—collectively and derogatorily called “Lollards” by their detractors—whose reforms included translating the Bible into English, to make it available for direct study by layfolk. (Another, probably later Chaucerian Prologue, to his Treatise on the Astrolabe, defends English translations in language that closely approximates similar arguments by his contemporary, John Trevisa, chaplain to the powerful Lord Thomas Berkeley, translator of several Latin texts and widely presumed suppporter of the religious reformers.)28

Or could Chaucer even be casting his poet-persona as a latter-day Ovid, threatened by the God of Love as a latter-day Augustus? The Ovidian presence throughout the Prologue and Tales of LGW makes this latter possibility a tempting one. Beyond these hypotheses, another should be acknowledged, namely, that the decision to translate into English poetry about love that, even if not specifically written with the court in mind, might be read (or even presented orally) in a court milieu where French was the preferred language of social intercourse, was a decision that entailed the risk of raised eyebrows and a less than enthusiastic reception (if not one as hyperbolically hostile as the God of Love's).

Besides serving as a comically inflected figure of political authority who interprets the poet's poems about the vagaries of desire in a narrowly self-interested and threatening manner (Kiser calls him an “incompetent literary critic” who exhibits “demanding stupidity”),²⁹ the God of Love also has his own, politically correct (or at least personally palatable), agenda for what the Dreamer should have written:

‘But natheles, answere me now to this:
Why noldest thow as wel han seyd goodnesse	good things
Of wemen, as thow hast seyd wikednesse?
Was there no good matere in thy mynde,
Ne in alle thy bokes ne couldest thow nat fynde
Som story of wemen that were goode and trewe?'

(G 267–72)

I'll return to the kinds of stories the god is promoting; first I want to examine what the Prologue has to say about the Dreamer's possible reasons, and responsibility, for what he wrote instead, thereby earning his sovereign's displeasure. The spectrum of opinions offered by the God of Love, Alceste, and the Dreamer himself is comic in tone and diction but also, I believe, indicative of heightened ambiguity within Chaucer's England about who actually exerts ultimate authority over the reception of new (perhaps audaciously new) English versions of love stories already well established in other languages: the translating poet or his multifaceted, multilingual audience?

The God of Love has emphatic answers for his own question: the Dreamer's putative condemnation of “paramours” as folly (257–60) is the result (or manifestation) of a senescent denial of lost libido:

‘Wel wot I therby thow begynnyst dote,	to be senile
As olde foles whan here spirit fayleth;	vitality
Thanne blame they folk, and wite nat what hem ayleth.’	don't know what ails them

(G 261–63)30

The same notion of failing powers of judgment underlies his preference for the story of faithless Criseyde over more wholesome tales of “trewe wyves and of here labour” (G 306): “But yit, I seye, what eyleth the to wryte/the draf of storyes, and forgete the corn?” (G 311–12). And then there is his final dig at the dreamer's expense, for writing about Criseyde instead of Alceste, the “calandier… of goodnesse”: “Thy litel wit was thilke [at that] tyme aslepe” (G 533–34, 537; an ironic comment, addressed as it is to a dreaming poet by a character in his dream).

Taking up the cudgels for the Dreamer, Alceste urges the God of Love to listen before condemning:

‘God, ryght of youre courteysye	because of
Ye moten herkenen if he can replye	must
Ageyns these poynts that ye han to hym meved.’	things you've accused him of

(G 318–20)

In other words, the audience, however powerful its authority and set in its opinions, should take into account the poet's aims in writing. She then traverses a broad spectrum of exculpatory hypotheses: first, the Dreamer's intentions have been misrepresented through envy:

‘Al ne is nat gospel that is to yow pleyned;	every complaint you
	receive isn't true
The god of Love hereth many a tale yfeyned.
For in youre court is many a losengeour,	flatterer
And many a queynte totelere accusour,	clever peddler of slander
That tabouren in youre eres many a thyng	who drum
For hate, or for jelous ymagynyng,
And for to han with you som dalyaunce.’	in order to get on your good side

(G 326–32)

Envy is a constant resident of “the grete court,” she adds; hence “this man to yow may wrongly ben acused, / Wheras by ryght him oughte ben excused” (G 338–39). The omnipresence of envy within the climate of competiton at any “grete court” and its role as a stimulus to backbiting and false accusations, with a view to advancement at another's expense, is a commonplace of medieval and Renaissance considerations of court life. Its possible effect on the attempt of a poet writing in English to gain favor at Richard II's court could be of concern to Chaucer, whether or not he felt himself to be victimized there by “jelous ymagynyng.”³¹

Second (and hardly flattering to her client), he pays no attention to the meaning of what he translates:

‘Or elles sire, for that this man is nyce,	foolish
He may translate a thyng in no malice,
But for he useth bokes for to make,	because he's used to writing
And taketh non hed of what matere he take,
Therfore he wrot the Rose and ek Criseyde
Of innocence, and nyste what he seyde.’	didn't know

(G 340–45)

Behind this outrageous claim of heedlessness lies a question of potentially vital interest to any translator: To what extent can he (or she) be held responsible for the content and perspectives of the work translated? Can allowance not be made for motives other than coincidence of viewpoint that might induce a poet to render in English “classic” representations of desire's peaks and perils? Indeed, one such motive (of obvious relevance to Chaucer's society) could be patronage: “Or hym was boden make thilke tweye [he was ordered to compose those two]/Of [by] som persone, and durste it nat withseye [dared not refuse]” (G 346–47).

Or perhaps these translations are just pardonable aberrations:

‘For he hath write many a bok er this.
He ne hath nat don so grevously amys
To translate that olde clerkes wryte,	what
As thogh that he of maleys wolde endyte	out of malice compose
Despit of love, and hadde hymself ywroght.’	scorn of his own making

(G 348–52)

And even if the Dreamer did translate out of “maleys” this time—“I not wher he be now a renegat [apostate],” his lawyer admits (G 401)—

‘The man hath served yow of hys konnynge,
And forthered wel youre lawe with his makynge.	poetry
Whil he was yong, he kepte youre estat….	was loyal to your dignity
He hath maked lewed folk to delyte	simple
To serven yow, in preysynge of youre name.’

(G 398–400, 403–04)

There follows the already mentioned catalogue of Chaucer's own works.

Having mounted this not entirely consistent defense of the (more or less) innocent Dreamer, Alceste ends her argument to the God of Love with a plea bargain, proposed without even consulting her suddenly guilty client:

‘I axe yow thys man, ryght of youre grace,	(concerning)
	this man
That ye hym nevere hurte in al hys lyfe;
And he shal swere to yow, and that as blyve,	right away
He shal no moore agilten in this wyse.’	be guilty

(G 423–26)

Instead, he will make amends by writing about

‘women trewe in lovynge al here lyve,…	their lives
And fortheren yow as much as he mysseyde	support
	slandered (you)
Or in the Rose or elles in Criseyde.’

(G 428, 430–31)

That is, a poet writing under the eye of those in political authority may find such attention playing a role, welcome (as patronage) or not (as disapproval), in how he shapes his career.

The last word on motive and responsibility in undertaking translations belongs to the narrator, who, after thanking Alceste for rescuing him from royal displeasure—“Foryelde yow [may you be rewarded] that ye the God of Love/Han maked me his wrathe to foryive [have made the God of Love abjure his anger toward me]” (G 447–48)—nonetheless demurs from her admission of his guilt:32

‘But trewely I wende, as in this cas,
Naught have agilt, ne don to love trespas.	that I'm not guilty
For-why a trewe man, withoute drede,	because an honest
	man
Hath nat to parte wyth a theves dede;	shouldn't share blame
Ne a trewe lovere oghte me nat to blame
Thogh that I speke a fals lovere som shame.	say shameful things
	about
They oughte rathere with me for to holde	be on my side
For that I of Criseyde wrote or tolde,
Or of the Rose; what so myn auctor mente,	whatever my source
	intended
Algate, God wot, it was myn entente
To forthere trouthe in love and it cheryce,	fidelity
And to be war fro falsenesse and fro vice	[to tell others] to avoid
By swich ensaumple; this was my menynge.’

(G 452–63)

To depict evil is not to sympathize with it; the translator-poet's aim may in fact be to offer it as an exemplary warning, even if in doing so he he may ignore (or even distort) the intention of the original “auctor.” Stepping back from this somewhat overdetermined exercise in self-exculpation, we can, I think, take a larger view of it as an indirect suggestion that the relationship between a translator and his original may be complicated and difficult to fathom, in which case sweeping and moralistic judgments of intention (such as the God of Love's) are of dubious merit.³³

In any case, the ambiguous impact of political authority on poetic practice shines through two adjacent comments by Alceste to the Dreamer. First, after announcing “what penaunce thow shalt do/For thy trespas,” namely, spending most of his time each year composing the “gloryous legende/Of goode women,” she summarizes her (and the God of Love's) unrefusable commission: “Spek wel of love; this penaunce yeve I thee” (G 469–70, 473–74, 481). This is the great and defining comic line of the Prologue, and of LGW as a whole: to write about women and love in a consistently and seriously encomiastic mode—to sacrifice exploring the human complexities of desire in favor of a monochromatic, ideologically inspired and sponsored catalogue of exempla uniformly praising one sex and condemning the other—would indeed be a penitential exercise for a poet of Chaucer's humane interests and comic abilities, but one he circumvents, throughout the tales constituting LGW, by narrational and narratorial methods that effectively undermine the fictive obligation under which the Prologue, through its figures of political authority, places him.

Alceste then follows her assignment of penace with compensatory promise:

‘And to the God of Love I shal so preye
That he shal charge his servaunts by any weye	any way they can
To fortheren the, and wel thy labour quyte.’	advance reward well

(G 482–84)

In other words, the political powers that be also have potentially vast powers of direct or indirect patronage that can bring rewards and career enhancements to the compliant poet. There may be a joke hidden in these lines about Chaucer's own experience, or lack of it, with patrons; aside from the somewhat cryptic remark in the so-called F Prologue of LGW that the Dreamer should present his completed “legend” to “the Queen,” that is, to Anne of Bohemia, Richard's queen—he did receive various rewards from Richard II for his political and civil service—The Book of the Duchess, with its obvious link to John of Gaunt, is the only putative case of poetic patronage we can find in Chaucer's career, and we do not even know whether Gaunt actually solicited that poem or Chaucer wrote it on spec.34

Different again from Chaucer's citational recall of The Parlement of Foules and his use of his translations, RR and TC, as the trigger for a consideration of crises of political authority—potentially initiated by translating into English texts with (contested) cultural authority in other vernaculars—is the poet's more submerged but important recourse to The House of Fame in his construction of the Prologue to LGW, specifically with respect to the question of the cultural authority of “olde bokes,” that is, the classical auctores from whom most of the Legend's stories are appropriated. (LGW's idiosyncratic concern with and use of stories derived from classical antiquity pobably reflect Chaucer's recognition of the comic potential in Machaut's manipulative use of old, exemplary stories, including those of Ariadne, Medea, Thisbe, and others who reappear in the English collection.)35

From the Prologue's opening lines onward, the importance and authority of such books is almost constantly under discussion. The narrator begins by noting that the limitations imposed on knowledge by experience—we have no direct evidence of “joye in heven and peyne in helle” (G 2)—can only be transcended by recourse to books:

Thanne mote we to bokes that we fynde,	we must [turn]
Thourgh whiche that olde thynges ben in mynde,
And to the doctryne of these olde wyse	teachings savants
Yeven credence, in every skylful wyse,	reasonable way
And trowen on these olde aproved storyes….	believe in
And if that olde bokes weren aweye,
Yloren were of remembraunce the keye.	the key to
	remembering would be lost

(G 17–21, 25–26)

The last lines of this prologial exhortation sum up the narrator's position, but in doing so, slightly diminish, it seems to me, the actual authority of books by reversing the order of priority established a few lines before: First we are warned, “But Goddes forbode but men sholde leve [that we not believe]/Wel more thyng than men han [have] seyn with ye! [(their own) eyes]” (10–11); but less than twenty lines later, the narrator's message has moderated to, “Wel oughte us thanne on olde bokes leve [believe], / There as there is non other assay by preve [evidence from experience]” (27–28). This more cautious assessment appears to elevate “preve” above “olde bokes,” and in retrospect supports the general skepticism implied in the lines just after those stressing the importance of believing what one has not seen: “Men shal nat wenen [assume] every thyng a lye/For that he say [saw] it nat of yore ago [in the past]” (G 12–13; emphasis added). Just such a skepticism about the truthfulness and thus the authority of information transmitted from the past (“fame” in the form of written record) is the hallmark of HF.

The subject returns once the narrator, abandoning the “bokes” for which he has such “reverence” (G 30–31), ventures into the meadow to pursue his voyeuristic relationship with the daisy. Distancing himself from the courtly poetry, or “making,” associated with the botanical denizens of beautiful landscapes—a career strategy requiring our proximate attention—he restates both his faith in and, paradoxically, underlying skepticism of the cultural authority residing in “olde bokes,” noting that taking sides in the supposed rivalry between the flower and the leaf

nys nothyng the entent of my labour.	not at all
For this werk is al of another tonne,	comes off a different shelf
Of olde story….
But wherfore that I spak, to yeve credence
to bokes olde and don hem reverence,	offer them
Is for men shulde autoritees beleve,
There as there lyth non other assay bypreve.	[cf. line 28, almost identical]
For myn entent is, or I fro yow fare,	before I leave you
The naked text in Englysh to declare	literal
Of many a story, or elles many a geste,	(historical) deed
As autors seyn, leveth hem if yow leste.	believe if it pleases you

(G 78–88; emphasis added)

There is even a hint, in the last line quoted, that “autoritees” only have exalted cultural status because people may believe they do, not because of any inherent truth value.

Within the narrator's dream, his (apparently ambivalent) commitment to the stories told by classical auctores manifests itself in new, ultimately oppressive ways, even as their putative cultural authority becomes compromised by its intersection with, and appropriation by, political power intent on defending its reputation and authority As the Dreamer encounters the God of Love, his queen, Alceste, and their courtly entourage of women “trewe of love” (G 193), the latter group sing a balade in praise of the Queen while dancing around the daisy (Alceste's metamorphic avatar, as the Deamer will later discover), the point of which is that Alceste outshines in virtue the heroines (and one hero, the biblical Jonathan) whose excellence (and indeed whose identity) can only be known through “olde story.” Many of the names on this list will become (or, reading backward from tales to explanatory, justificatory Prologue, have become) the subject of the tales that make up LGW proper. In terms of the poetic logic behind the Active dream, this balade represents the seeds or initial inspiration of a project that will transform the narrator's general reverence for old books and their auctores into the “many a story” of which he will soon declare the “naked text in English.”

The project is further defined and its function clarified (or distorted) by the God of Love, as part of his angry chastisement of the Dreamer for having translated RR and TC into English. In a passage that may or may not tell us something about Chaucer's library, the god asks peevishly,

‘In al thy bokes ne coudest thow nat finde
Som story of wemen that were goode and trewe?
Yis, God wot, sixty bokes olde and newe
Hast thow thyself, alle ful of storyes grete,
That bothe Romayns and ek Grekes trete	in which
Of sundry wemen, whych lyf that they ladde,
And evere an hundred goode ageyn oon badde.’	opposed to one

(G 271–77)

He proceeds to offer yet another list, this one of (mostly) classical authors who created the record of “clene [pure] maydenes,” “trewe wyves,” and “stedefaste widewes” so faithful to their lovers

‘that, rathere than they wolde take a newe,	new (man)
They chose to be ded in sondry wyse,
And deiden, as the storye wol devyse.’

(G 282–83, 289–91)

Although heathen, the monarch insists, these women were so dedicated to

‘verray vertu and clennesse	true purity
… That in this world I trowe men shal nat fynde
A man that coude be so trewe and kynde
As was the leste woman in that tyde.’	at that time

(G 297, 302–4)

Since “al the world of autours maystow here [you may hear], / Cristene and hethene, trete of swich matere [such themes]” (G 308–9), what could possibly have led the Dreamer to choose “draf” over “corn,” thus meriting the (strangely ecumenical) God of Love's negative judgment and summons to swift repentance?

The point of this royal exercise in literary history and advocacy is to suggest that within a poetic career a work may be undertaken in expiation, correction, or (to put it less judgmentally) balancing of a previous one, but also that the auctoritas of “olde bokes” can be pressed into service supporting the ideological predispositions of those possessing political power, potentially compromising its supposed objectivity as a conduit of truth.

The potential damage to the status of “olde bokes” is actualized when the God of Love's queen, as already noted, ends her defense of the Dreamer by promising her lord that, in return for the remission of punishment for past misdeeds (“in the Rose or elles in Criseyde”), her client will tell tales “of women trewe in lovynge.” This arrangement requires the effective recasting of a considerable portion of the classical literary inheritance—its tales of desire and passion—into a set of variations on a theme: women are good; men are evil. The Dreamer's resistance is futile: “For Love ne wol nat counterpletyd be [be argued against]” (466), warns Alceste, and neither will she. In a situation of power imbalance, political authority trumps, and controls to its purposes, cultural authority. Put differently, the result of the God of Love's intervention is to render cultural authority moot.

This point is made repeatedly in the tales that follow the Prologue. The very fact that the collection is called a “legend” (see note 21), and that in some manuscripts the women whose tales are told are called martyrs,36 reminds us of the God of Love's theologically and exegetically inflected condemnation of the Dreamer's previous translations. By contrast, these translations will be tailored to reflect the orthodoxy the god and his consort have imposed, as penance, on the errant poet.³⁷ The narrator's references to his auctores—“But who wol al this letter have in mynde, / Rede [should read] Ovyde, and in hym he shal it fynde” (LGW 1366–67)—are invitations by Chaucer to discover how his narrator is editing his sources to make them conform to the God of Love's agenda.³⁸

Two instances from “The Legend of Philomela” must suffice to support my estimate of how the tales of LGW serve as exempla not only of virtuous women and vicious men but of how fragile the cultural authority of “olde bokes” can be. In Ovid's version (Metamorphoses, book 4), Tereus, though married to Procne, rapes her sister, Philomela, and then cuts out her tongue so that she cannot reveal her assailant. The muted sister communicates the truth to Procne by weaving it into a fabric; as a result, the two sisters conspire to kill Tereus and Procne's young son, dismember and cook him, and serve him as dinner to his father, only revealing the truth after the act of unwitting cannibalism. Chaucer's version omits this barbaric revenge entirely; after Procne finds her “dombe sister” in Bacchus's temple, the two mistreated women embrace in sorrow, “And thus I late hem [leave them] in here [their] sorwe dwelle,” the narrator announces, “The remenaunt is no charge [not my duty] for to telle” (LGW 2382–83)—and, indeed, must necessarily be omitted if the two women are to be presented, as prescribed from on high, as good women martyred by an evil man. The narrator's moralitas to his (supposedly) female audience comically exudes what might be called qualified indignation:

Ye may be war of men, if that yow liste,	if you're smart
For al be it that he wol nat, for shame,	a man will not
Don as Tereus, to lese his name,	behave like Tereus lest
	he ruin his reputation
Ne serve yow as a morderour or a knave,
Ful litel while shal ye trewe hym have—	faithful
That wol I seyn, al were he now my brother—	even if he were
But if so be that he may have non other.	unless he can find no one else

(LGW 2387–93)

In other words, your lover/husband is sure to be a louse; don't feel good if he's faithful to you; it's not because he's virtuous or finds you attractive and lovable but only because no one else is available with whom he can betray you (hardly words designed to make a woman feel good about herself or her partner).

Despite his initial resistance, the narrator eagerly embraces his role as spokesperson for the God of Love. For example, in setting out to tell the legend of Jason and Hypsipyle, he adopts toward Jason a tone of strident animosity modeled on the god's toward him in the Prologue, even imitating his patron's penchant for religious terminology:

O, often swore thow that thow woldest dye
For love, whan thow ne feltest maladye
Save foul delyt, which that thow callest love!	but lust
Yif that I live, thy name shal be shove	spread about
In English that thy sekte shal be knowe!	(heretical) sect
Have at thee, Jason! Now thyn horn is blowe!	your infamy is published

(LGW 1378–83; emphasis added)

Indeed, at the end of the “Legend of Phyllis,” the narrator assumes the role of an earthly alter ego of Eros—or perhaps of a latter-day Ovidian praeceptor amoris:

Be war, ye wemen, of youre subtyl fo,
Syn yit this day men may ensaumple se;
And trusteth, as in love, no man but me.

(LGW 2499–2501)39

The damage done to the authority of “olde bokes” by the imposition on them of such partisanship illustrates, and thus confirms, the point Chaucer is making in the Prologue to LGW about the misuse of auctores to shore up despotic political authority, resulting in the diminution of their cultural status.⁴⁰

Beyond the recalls of his earlier poems that I've just catalogued, Chaucer includes in the Prologue a recollection of a key feature of Machaut's JKN: the lady Bonneurte, whose reconception by the English poet as Queen Alceste provides a seriocomic focus for his meditation on actual or hypothetical tensions between representations of desire, on the one hand, and exigencies of cultural and political authority, on the other, in the shaping of a poetic career. Machaut, you will recall, uses Bonneurte to figure the poet's sometimes fraught relationship with success, the inevitable goal of his efforts. By contrast, Alceste represents not success as a goal but appropriation and metamorphosis as a strategy, as well as a metaphor for the peculiar nature and function of poetic inspiration.⁴¹

The key to Alceste is precisely her many identities, or manifestations, in the Dreamer's waking and dreaming life. She first appears as an alternative to—one might say, a relief from—his profound attachment to the “olde bokes” to which he attributes such probative value in LGW's opening lines but which, as I've suggested, the remainder of the poem genially undercuts, or at least puts in question:

On bokes for to rede I me delyte,
And in myn herte have hem in reverence,
And to hem yeve swich lust and swich credence	give such pleasure
	and belief
That there is wel unethe game non	hardly any
	amusement
That fro my bokes make me to gon,
But it be other upon the halyday,	either
Or ellis in the joly tyme of May….	lovely
Farwel my stodye, as lastynge that sesoun!…	as long as that
	season lasts
Thanne love I most these floures white and rede,
Swyche as men calle dayseyes in oure toun.

(G 30–36, 42–43)

What most attracts the narrator to the daisy is its heliotropism:⁴²

To sen these floures agen the sonne sprede	responding to
	open
Whan it up ryseth by the morwe shene….	clear
And whan the sonne gynneh for to weste,	set
Thanne closeth it, and draweth it to reste,
So sore it is afered of the nyght,	afraid
Til on the morwe that it is dayes lyght.

(G 48–49, 51–54)

This characteristic and description of the daisy both prefigures and oversimplifies the role played by Alceste in the narrator's dream. There, as queen to the God of Love—whose face, like the sun, shines so brightly that the dreamer cannot directly behold it (G 162–65)—and daisy lookalike (G 146–57, summarized earlier, page 125), she does indeed symbolically bend toward her lord, in order to plead for the Dreamer's escaping punishment for his translations, but also to counsel him against tyranny and other unjust forms of rulership. Moreover, as her name, “daisy (= day's eye), suggests, in mimicking the sun she in effect becomes one her self: the eye of the day. As such, she sheds light (perhaps rather too much light) on the poet's possible motives for composing the translations offensive to the God of Love, and also enlightens the poet/Dreamer as to which his next poetic task will be. In effect, she is an externalization of the poet's strategy of fabricating reasons for writing what he does—and thus escaping patronal displeasure or danger—and also of his processes of deciding what his next composition will be.

These are not the only ways in which Alceste seems to represent the Dreamer's—and, by extension, Chaucer's—Muse.⁴³ In her guise as the daisy, she represents his debt to, distancing from, and transformation of the French tradition of courtly poetry, or “making.” At the beginning of the Prologue, the narrator's admiration for the daisy introduces a gesture at popular fashions in this poetry: he wishes to praise the daisy,

if I coude aryght;
But wo is me, it lyth nat in my myght.
For wel I wot that folk han here beforn	have before this
Of makyng ropen, and led awey the corn;	i.e., harvested all the
	good poetry
And I come after, glenynge here and there,	[cf. the idea of “folwing” an “auctor” in TC]
And am ful glad if I may fynde an ere	a stalk
Of any goodly word that they han left.

(G 59–65)

He adds that if he should happen to repeat what these forerunner poets have composed, he's to be forgiven, for such imitation is an homage to “hem that eyther serven lef or flour” (G 70); which is not to say, he adds hastily, that he has taken sides in the rivalry between partisans of flower or leaf:

For, as to me, is lefer non, ne lother.	I prefer neither one
	nor the other
I am witholde yit with never nother;	I'm a paid retainer
	of neither party
I not who serveth lef ne who the flour.
That nys nothyng the entent of my labour.

(G 75–78)

Rather, his poetry will be “Of olde story, er swich strif [such rivalry] was begonne” (G 80).

The Prologue here alludes to daisy poems composed by Machaut (Dit de la marguerite) and other French court poets, and to poems celebrating a suppposed rivalry between court factions allied to the flower or the leaf.⁴⁴ The narrator's suggestion that he might “rehersen” some of the poetry involved (as Chaucer adapted French lyric and narrative poems in English throughout his career) but cannot undertake “the naked text in English to declare” (G 86) of any of it, supposedly out of belatedness or ignorance, is Chaucer's typically oblique and self-mocking way of ruling out any wholesale, uninflected imitation of this kind of writing in LGW. (Both “flour” and “lef” are literary quibbles as well as poetic subjects, the former alluding to the “flowers,” or devices, of rhetoric, the latter to the leaf, or page, of a manuscript.)⁴⁵

Instead, by means of the narrator's dream, the Prologue plots a journey toward a comic poetry richer in irony and complexity than any straightforward recapitulation of established French forms. Initially, the Dreamer's search for the daisy leads him through a paysage ideale, complete with harmoniously singing birds, clearly inspired by the Romance of the Rose and its many subsequent French imitators. This spatial encoding of French influences incorporating, as I've already noted, a glance backward at the Parlement of Foules, prepares for the arrival of Alceste, whose regalia, combining daisy colors with the great pearl that is her crown (G 153–54) materializes the double significance of the French word “marguerite,” meaning both daisy and pearl, while her “real habyt al of grene” (G 146) not only completes the daisy effect—“the white coroun above the grene/Made hire lyk a dayesye for to sene” (G155–56)—but contributes to her embodiment and harmonization of “flour” and “lef.” But she is more than the sum of these parts: she is also Alceste, superior to all other virtuous and “trewe” women of classical antiquity, whom Hercules rescued from the underworld, preparing for her double metamorphosis into daisy and then star (a Chaucerian invention, as is Agaton [cf. G 514], supposed chronicler of at least the latter change). Alceste thus signifies both the poet's debt to Ovid and his uniquely humorous synthesis, in English, of French courtly and Latin learned materials—an ingenious metamorphosis of Machaut's JKN.

Alceste's significance does not end with this intertwining, in her person, of her poet's major cultural authorities, and her resultant status as an emblem of what he accomplishes in “translating” his Machaudian antecedent. It's through her, in her manifold and changing relationship to both the Deamer and the God of Love, that Chaucer places his poetic production in the context of a literarily distorted Ricardian court and monarchy (his self-protective version of the comic mirror?) and limns, always under this cover, the situation and potential perils of a poet working, willingly or unwillingly, within the orbit of political authority at once potentially hostile to and (through patronage) potentially rewarding of his efforts.

Alceste's defense of the Dreamer against the God of Love's angry accusations of slander, treason, and even heresy, committed or encouraged in his translations of RR and TC, is, as I've suggested, rife with comic elements of special pleading, condescension, overdetermination, and downright self-contradiction. Nonetheless, her attempt to placate the miffed monarch also conforms to the widespread late-medieval European assumption that a major responsibility of any queen was to intercede with her spouse, seeking his mercy on behalf of those upon whom, in copious measure, the royal wrath was about to fall.46 Doubtless the most famous instance of such intercession, at least to modern readers, occurs in the Chronicles of Jean Froissart (here adapting an episode in Jean le Bel's Chronicle), when, after Edward III's successful siege of Calais in 1347, the king's pregnant wife, Philippa of Hainault, intervenes, throwing herself at Edward's feet to prevent him from executing its leading citizens—the subjects of Rodin's famous sculpture—for their role in the city's long resistance to the besieging English army.47 Furthermore, there are obvious parallels between this secular intercession by queens and the role widely attributed to the Virgin Mary in high- and late-medieval Christian theology, as intercessor with her son to prevent him from judging humanity with the severity its sinfulness otherwise merits. Given the God of Love's penchant for theologically tinged judgments, and the original Alceste's role in saving her husband from the underworld, a further, implied reference to Mary in the Prologue's portrait of the daisy queen seems to me highly likely.⁴⁸

As imagined by Chaucer, Alceste is not a woman inclined to throw herself at anyone's feet. Instead, in a move that is logically consistent if historically unlikely, she frames her queenly intercession for the Dreamer in some political advice to the God of Love, concerning proper attitudes and behavior toward his subjects:

‘A god ne sholde nat thus ben agreved,
But of his deite he shal be stable,	because of his
	godhead
	even-tempered
And therto ryghtful, and ek mercyable.	just
He shal nat ryghtfully his yre wreke
Or he have herd the tother partye speke….	before has heard
This shulde a ryghtwys lord han in his thought,	just
And nat ben lyk tyraunts of Lumbardye,	not be
That usen wilfulhed and tyrannye.	rely on arrogance
For he that kyng or lord is naturel,	i.e., by birth
Hym oughte nat be tyraunt and crewel….
He moste thynke it is his lige man,	he is dealing with his
	sworn retainer
And that hym oweth, of verray duetee,	it behooves him, as is
	his duty
Shewen his peple pleyn benygnete,	profound good will
And wel to heren here excusacyouns….	their
This is the sentence of the Philosophre,	judgment
A kyng to kepe his lyges in justice;	should preside over
	his subjects
Withouten doute, that is his office….	obligation
And for to kepe his lordes hir degree,	to protect the status of
As it is ryght and skylful that they be	reasonable
Enhaunsed and honoured, and most dere—	advanced
For they ben half-goddes in this world here—
This shal he don bothe to poore and ryche,
Al be that her estat be nat alyche,	even though rank
	equal
And han of pore folk compassioun.’

(G 321–25, 353–57, 359–62, 365–67, 370–76)

Chaucer would have been familiar with these exhortations from the many late-medieval manuals on the instruction of princes—inspired in good part by the recent availability of Aristotle's Ethics and Politics (he is the “Philosophre” of line 365), translated first into Latin, then into various European vernaculars.⁴⁹ Although Alceste's reminder that the god-king should be respectful of the rank of his lords has no relevance for the Dreamer, it would surely have reminded Chaucer's audience of the real King Richard's fraught relationship with many of his barons during the mid-to-late 1380s, leading to his impeachment and near deposition by the so-called Appellant Lords (1388); similarly, the equally commonplace recommendation that the king shall “han of pore folk compassioun” may well have taken on topical resonance in the aftermath of the Rising of 1381, a period of great repression of all those peasants and artisans suspected of being rebels. In any case, the effect of these passages is to endow Alceste with yet another function, as the dream-vision-disguised voice of her creator, a comic poet making a rare (and potentially risky) foray into politics.⁵⁰

The irony of Alceste's advice to her lord that, like a compassionate ruler, he listen patiently and react mercifully to his servant's excuses is that she does not in fact let the Dreamer plead his own case—she is less a traditional queenly intercessor than a none too scrupulous trial lawyer—and, when he finally attempts to argue his innocence, she silences him peremptorily by, in effect, denying that her counsel has had any impact on its intended recipient: “Lat be thyn arguynge,” she snaps,

‘For Love ne wol nat counterpleyted be

In ryght ne wrong; and lerne this at me!

Thow hast thy grace, and hold the ryght therto.’

(G 464–67)

In other words, shut up and be satisfied with what I've gained for you.51 The strict, commanding tone of these words, and the “penaunce” that she now imposes on the Dreamer “for thy trespas”—a lifetime of writing and rewriting the same story, of good women and false men—effect one last transformation of Alceste: into a stern Father (Mother?) Confessor, or (to switch institutional metaphors) a kind of artistic superego at work within a poet's mind and imagination, creating dissatisfaction with what has been accomplished and thus spurring on, as a personal imperative, the next (compensatory? better?) project.

In sum, Alceste is the Muse that helps the poet (some version of the historical Geoffrey Chaucer), as his career unfolds, negotiate the challenges of being a translational, metamorphic poet: one writing in English, hitherto not a courtly vernacular, a love poetry more complex than the French makers (crisis 1), and the challenges of cultural and political authority (crisis 2). She rescues him but also draws him into the courtly circle from his position as an outsider/onlooker (cf. G 234–40: the Prologue's initial situation of the Dreamer on the edge of, rather than of, the dancing, caroling, daisy-praising court of the God of Love may telegraph Chaucer's actual position as someone as much outside as within the court's ambience). Alceste muzzles him and even puts him in a subservient position, where instead of engaging in his translational poetic to tell truths about love and power through poetry, he must distort his auctores in order to meet political/patronal ends and avoid patronal anger. At the same time, each new work becomes “penance” for the one before—an attempt to make up for its shortcomings, hit new highs, avoid previous mistakes, and so on. New work is (always?) an act of “penance” undertaken in response to its predecessors and their reception; in other words, justification of one's past work—to oneself, to others—is a necessary, often fraught part of the gestation of new poems.

In so far as part of the import of LGW as a whole is that the poet's impulse to do more and more satisfactory composing can be complicated by the need to propitiate powerful critics or please powerful patrons, Chaucer's (at least imagined) response operates at two levels: at the first the poet does become the mouthpiece of his patron's or ruler's agenda and ideology,⁵² creating and recreating what his political superior wants said and heard; at the second level, however, the tales that make up LGW are studies in the subversion of ideology by comic indirection, as well as demonstrations of the dubious authority of auctores who can so easily be manipulated to conform to an imposed moralitas, then twisted further into parody through the voice and choices of a fussy, self-important narrator.⁵³

There is no evidence that Richard II knew LGW or, if he did know it, understood its encrypted messages.54

And now for something completely different, namely, Chaucer's other, far more illustrious tale collection, The Canterbury Tales (CT), which differs radically from LGW in its choice of stories that lack a common theme and are drawn from a wide variety of sources: classical auctores; learned medieval writers, both secular and religious; and popular tales, of no fixed authorship or abode, that circulated widely within medieval European culture, both orally and in writing. Across this wide spectrum of material, CT continues to ring inventive, comic changes on crises of desire and of authority, both cultural and political.

Chaucer gathers his tales within the larger, framing fiction of a pilgrimage from the disreputable London suburb of Southwark to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.⁵⁵ Harry Bailly, the large, boisterous, and self-important Host of Southwark's Tabard Inn, establishes the raison d'etre of the storytelling to follow when he tells the pilgrims, during the evening before they set out from his hostelry,

‘Ye goon to Caunterbury, God yow speede.
The blisful martir quite yow youre meede!	reward you for it
And wel I woot, as ye goon by the weye,
Ye shapen yow to talen and to pleye;	you're planning to tell tales
For trewely, confort ne mirthe is noon
To ride by the weye doumb as a stoon.’

(CT 1.769–74)⁵⁶

To further enliven the trip, Harry proposes that the inevitable tale telling be arranged as a contest with himself as judge (he will come along at his own expense) and the prize for the winner “a soper at oure aller cost/Heere in this place [i.e., the Tabard]… / Whan that we come again fro Caunterbury” (CT 1.799–801). Harry's overt argument is that competitive storytelling is more fun than mere storytelling; his hidden agenda is to get this group of twenty-nine pilgrims to return to his own hostelry to spend more money at the dinner that will reward “which of yow that bereth him [performs] best of alle— / That is to seyn, that telleth in this caas [on this occasion]/Tales of best sentence [instruction] and moost solaas [pleasure]” (CT 1.796–98).⁵⁷ The tales themselves, he makes clear, are to concern “aventures that whilom [once] han bifalle” (CT 1.795), a recipe for popular rather than learned storytelling.

The result of Harry's proposal is an ambulatory community that creates and sustains itself entirely by telling stories (Harry's phrase, “ye shapen yow to talen and to pleye,” features a verb, “shapen,” that can mean “to create”). And this allows the conjecture, at least, that in his last, unfinished work—incomplete as to number of stories, imperfect as to their organization into subgroups (cf. note 56)—Chaucer undertakes to define and exemplify human society not as a putatively stable hierarchy (as it was frequently defined in medieval political and social theorizing, and, by implication, by Nature in The Parlement of Foules) but as an ongoing process—incorporating yet transcending established social and occupational orders—driven by the exchange of fictions—about oneself, others, and the world—and having as its goals successful competition; the outwitting of opponents; the earning of praise, respect, or influence; and the effective expression of or resistance to prejudices and stereotypes. Persuasive narration and critical reception—in ancient Rome the hallmarks of the rhetorical education designed exclusively for a small social eltite—thus become important tasks of all constituent members of society. Such narrative and critical skills are, however, always deployed within—and must therefore be cognizant of—contexts defined by culturally and politically authoritative discourses and traditions.

Perhaps The Canterbury Tales' most interesting and idiosyncratic representat ion of how a poet can respond to the issue of cultural authority comes within the introductory material assigned to the Sergeant of Law—an influential if (according to popular satire) highly self-aggrandizing figure in England's secular legal system—where Chaucer stages what we might call a comically displaced version of literary crisis, casting himself as an (absent) auctor whose writings on love and desire force a would-be teller of similar stories into a position of frustrated belatedness, from which he must take refuge in new sources of inspiration. (The situation parallels, albeit with greatly changed particulars, the frustration of the LGW narrator vis-à-vis the spate of daisy-praising poems produced by courtly “makers.”) In this oblique, irony-laden manner does the poet theorize a new literary form in which crises of desire and authority, articulated via stories of multiple (not just learned, auctorial) origin, function within a social system conceptualized by him as dynamic and contested, rather than as static and simply hierarchical.

The episode in question begins when Harry Bailly, having exhorted the pilgrim compaignye, “Leseth [lose] no tyme, as ferforth as ye may,” because “the tyme wasteth nyght and day” (CT 2.19–20), turns to the Sergeant: “‘Sire Man of Lawe,’ quod [said] he, ‘so have ye blis [salvation], / Telle us a tale anon, as forward is [as you agreed]’” (CT 2.33–34). Despite the Host's ostensible urgency, his twenty-three-line speech of exhortation is in fact a show-off's exercise in rhetorical amplification, or dilatatio—the arch-enemy of expeditiousness; indeed, his appeal to “Senec and many a philosophre” [CT 2.25] to support his contention about the passage of time, like his paraphrase of a statement on the subject in one of Seneca the Younger's letters [CT 2. 27–28], marks the speech as an innkeeper's half-parodic attempt at learned discourse, which he apparently understands as saying little in many words. Similarly, the legal terminology he uses in pressing the lawyer to tell the next tale constitutes both a parody of and challenge to the latter's professional loquacity:

‘Tell us a tale anon, as forward is.
Ye been submytted, thurgh youre free assent,
To stonden in this cas at my juggement.
Acquiteth yow now of youre biheeste,	fulfill your promise now
Thanne have ye do youre devoir atte leste.’	done duty
	(CT 2.34–38)

Like most acts of mimickry, Harry's words to the Sergeant are playful but also antagonistic; they establish a little one-on-one contest within the larger tale-telling competition, with the Host asserting not only his temporary, occasion-specific authority over the otherwise more culturally authoritative legal bigshot—by ordering him, as would a judge, to pay his debt to the pilgrimage society—but also his control over (and skepticism about) his “opponent's” occupational jargon.58

The lawyer mounts a double riposte to the Host's challenge. Acceding to Harry's pro tem authority, he agrees to tell a tale but accepts his obligation with a counterappeal to legal process and precedent, as if to reclaim his professional status:

‘Hooste,’ quod he, ‘depardieux, ich assente;	in God's name I
To breke forward is nat myn entente.
Biheste is dette, and I wol holde fayn	a promise is a debt
	(obligation)
	certainly
Al mi biheste, I kan no bettre sayn.
For swych lawe as a man yeveth another wight,
He sholde hymselven usen it, by right;	abide by it
Thus wole oure text.	says law code

(CT 2.39–45)

He then easily outdoes Harry's exercise in dilation: where the Host of the Tabard took twenty-three lines to say, in effect, “It's your turn to tell the next story,” the Man of Law takes nearly ninety to say, “All right, and here's the only story I can think of” (CT 2.45–133). Adding a further ironic dimension to the moment, this colossal, pompous exercise in deferral by a man whose professional competence consists largely in his ability to cite authoritative precedents (cf. CT 1.323–24) becomes the occasion for an important, if comically couched, two-pronged statement by Chaucer about both his proficiency in appropriating to his needs the authoritative discourse of desire inherited from classical antiquity, and his experimentation in The Canterbury Tales with new kinds of storytelling, based on tales of love and other central human concerns that circulate outside the orbit of the classical auctores.

The Man of Law proceeds to obsess about Chaucer (!) as an impoverishing poetic predecessor:⁵⁹

‘I kan right now no thrifty tale seyn	appropriate
That Chaucer, thogh he kan but lewedly	has only basic knowledge
On metres and on rymyng craftily,
Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan….	hasn't already told them
And if he have noght seyd hem, leve brother,
In o book, he hath seyd hem in another.
For he hath toold of loveris up and doun
Mo than Ovide made of mencioun
In his Episteles that been ful olde.	i.e., the Heroides

He adds, querulously, “What [why] sholde I tellen hem, syn they been [have already been] tolde?” (CT 2.46–49, 51–56), and there follows a recapitulation (CT 2. 57–76) of Chaucer's adaptations of stories of desire (often star-crossed) from Ovid's Heroides and Metamorphoses, mostly in LGW, here refered to as “the Seintes Legende of Cupide” (CT 2.61; the list includes tales of “seintes” he never wrote, or at least that have not survived).

Through the screen of genial Chaucerian self-mockery at the hands of his surrogate, and beyond the self-advertisement implied in this canon of classically derived love poetry, these lines raise serious issues. Line 56, for example, asks us to consider the discomfort of belatedness, vis-à-vis the classical auctores, that any modern poet must eventually, even constantly, confront; it may even suggest Chaucer's growing uncertainty about the personal and cultural benefit of recycling stories long since canonized in medieval Europe's inheritance from classical auctores.60

After granting that Chaucer has at least avoided the “unkynde [unnatural] abhomynacions” of tales centering on incest—“Of swyche cursed stories I sey fy!” the Sergeant harrumphs, allowing Chaucer to offer a friendly (?) poke in the eye to his contemporary, John Gower (and perhaps even to himself)⁶¹—the Man of Law concludes his meditation (and arguably Chaucer's) with these lines, expressing the burdens and options of poetic belatedness in what we might call an externalized inner dialogue:

‘But of my tale how shal I doon this day?
Me were looth to be likned, doutelees,	I certainly don't want
	to be compared
To Muses that men clepe Pierides—	call
Metamorphosios woot what I mene;	knows
But nathelees, I recche noght a bene	I don't give a damn
Though I come after hym with hawebake.
I speke in prose, and lat him rymes make.’

(CT 2.90–96)

The first four lines appear to articulate a refusal to engage in a storytelling contest with Chaucer (yet another one-on-one rivalry, echoing the Host's and Sergeant's), presumably by retelling a tale he has already told (even as Chaucer has retold many of Ovid's stories); such an act of mimickry, the Man of Law suggests, would be akin to the challenge posed to the nine Muses (in Ovid's Metamorphoses, book 5) by the nine daughters of King Pierus, who were punished by being turned into magpies, birds that jabber meaninglessly in other people's voices. But, as Helen Cooper has pointed out, there is a crucial ambiguity in the Lawyer's expression of unwillingness, since the Muses themselves were often called Pierides in classical writings, based on their supposed home (and center of worship), Pieria.⁶² Hence, if the Man of Law's statement, when read from one perspective, implies Chaucer's own reluctance to continue composing poetry that imitates, however freely and ingeniously, the legacy of classical auctores, from another it suggests that all storyteller-poets are at once imitators and innovators: there can be no discoverable point of origin for the human penchant for narration, and therefore no stigma in retelling tales.

But even as the Sergeant resigns himself to belatedness—“coming after” Chaucer; cf. “myn auctor shal I folwen”—he commits himself to a different kind of storytelling, which he characterizes as “hawebake” (an inferior bread made from hawthorn berries) and “prose.” What he means by this only becomes evident after another thirty-four lines of digression and dilation, this time on the horrors of poverty and, by contrast, the many blessings enjoyed by rich merchants, whom he then addresses in lines that form a transition (finally!) to his tale:

Ye seken lond and see for yowre wynnynges;
As wise folk ye knowen al th'estaat	condition
Of regnes; ye been fadres of tidynges	kingdoms
And tales, both of pees and of debaat.	[important descriptors in the “workshop of Fame” in HF]
	peace conflict
I were right now of tales desolaat,	completely lacking
Nere that a marchant, goon is many a yeere,	were it not
Me taught a tale, which that ye shal heere.

(CT 2.127–33; emphasis added)

That is, the merchant-purveyed “hawebake” that the Man of Law has no choice but to offer to the Canterbury pilgrims is, he claims, one of those myriad stories—some little more than jokes—that, lacking any cultural cachet, circulated all over Europe and Asia, transmitted by merchants and other travelers (including pilgrims, of course), and that Giovanni Boccaccio made the basis of his immensely successful tale collection, the Decameron, which Chaucer probably knew through his professional involvement, as a customs officer and the son of a wine merchant, with London's large colony of Italian merchants, arguably Boccaccio's most enthusiastic audience. Many of the Canterbury Tales, including several that deal with desire, are of this unauthorized type, though elevated by Chaucer's art. (The Man of Law's Tale, in a further joke, has folktale antecedents but more immediately came to Chaucer through literate antecedents, both Latin and venacular.) They represent for him an opportunity to demonstrate that as a comic poet of love, he can be more than an Ovidian magpie, and his declaration of independence, as so often by indirection, is couched in the orotund tones of a self-important lawyer.

Chaucer explores the dangers posed to the poet by political authority—an issue, as we've seen, centrally embedded in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women—with characteristic obliquity in several ways throughout CT. He builds it into the poem's framing fiction through his creation of Harry Bailly, who puts himself in charge of this “companye/of sondry folk by aventure yfalle/in felaweship, and pilgrims were they alle/That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde” (CT 1.24–27). After outlining the storytelling contest and the prize, as recapitulated above, Harry continues, “I wol myself goodly [happily] with yow ryde, / … And whoso wole my juggement withseye [contradict]/Shal paye al that we spenden by the weye” (CT 1.803, 805–6). That is, in addition to serving as “juge and reportour” (CT 1.814) of the stories, Harry demands, and receives, the pilgrims’ acquiescence in his being “oure governor” (CT 1.813). Harry's imposition of himself as de facto and de jure ruler of this ad hoc storytelling community represents a major development in its formation as a polity. Early in the so-called General Prologue which establishes the framing fiction, the narrator encounters the other pilgrims “in Southwerk, at the Tabard as I lay, / redy to wenden on my Pilgrimage/To Caunterbury, with ful devout corage [spirit]” (CT 1.20–22); he attaches himself to the nascent “compagnye” in a series of conversations that result in some amicable and quite unhierarchical decision making: the pilgrims “made forward [agreement] erly for to rise/To take oure wey ther as I yow devyse” (CT 1.33–34). Until Harry demands everyone's subordination to his “juggement,” there is no evidence of the need for a ruler. The Host reiterates the absolute nature of his authority the next morning, as the pilgrims set out on the Canterbury road: “As evere mote I drynke wyn or ale, / Whoso be rebel to my juggement/Shal paye for al that by the weye is spent” (CT 1.832–34).

Tension appears early in the Canterbury pilgrimage as Harry's authority is challenged by the drunken Miller, described in the General Prologue by the narrator as a strong, bold, and dishonest fellow with animal-like features. (Such features and deportment were often attributed to the rebels of 1381 by their ecclesiastical and noble detractors.) When the Knight, the highest ranking secular pilgrim, finishes his tale of love, chivalry, and rulership, and Harry calls on the Monk, the ecclesiastic of equivalent status, to tell “somwhat to quite [i.e., accord or match] with the Knyghtes tale” (CT 1.3119), it becomes clear that the Host intends to align the order of the storytelling with the social hierarchy of the pilgrims. But rebellion quickly rears its head:

The Miller, that for dronken was al pale,	who, being drunk
so that unnethe upon his hors he sat,	barely
He nolde avalen neither hood ne hat,	would not doff
Ne abyde no man for his curtesie,	give way to out of
But in Pilates voys he gan to crye,	Pilate's voice (see note)
And swoor, “by armes and by blood and bones,	[Christ's] arms, etc.
I kan a noble tale for the nones,	for this occasion
With which I wol now quyte the
Knightes Tale.

(CT 1.3120–27)63

This outburst not only challenges the ruler and the social order but also the univocity of language: in Robin Miller's mouth, and rage, the locution, “a noble storie” (such as the Knight had just told), becomes an exercise in sarcasm, and to “quite” morphs in meaning from “accord with” to “pay back,” “get even with.”

Harry seeks to put the Miller in his place by a patronizing appeal to his sense of rank—“som bettre man shal telle us first another” (CT 1.3130)—but Robin's response is to issue an ultimatum: “For I wol speke or elles go my wey.” This threat hits Harry where it most hurts, in the pocketbook; not wishing to lose a customer, he gives in with bad grace: “Tel on, a devel way; / Thou art a fol; thy wit is overcome” (CT 1.3134–35). The phrase, “a devel way,” is telling because it alludes to Lucifer, the ur-rebel against an established order, whose attempted usurpation of divine power and authority in heaven resulted in his banishment to hell as Satan, the devil. From one perspective—Harry's certainly, and perhaps every early listener or reader of this passage who remembered the horrors of the Great Rising of 1381—the Miller's disruption of Harry's plan for the pilgrimage embodies the threat posed to English society by lower-class rebels. But there's another, less obvious allusion in this passage, to Ovid in fact, that hints at a different interpretation. Recall the words that introduce Robin: “The Miller, that for dronken was al pale, / So that unnethe upon his hors he sat.” This description of a tipsy, barely stable rider is in fact a close paraphrase of a line in book 1 of Ovid's Ars amatoria describing Silenus, the companion of Bacchus, who follows the wine god riding on a mule from which he keeps threatening to fall thanks to his state of chronic inebriation (“Ebrius, ecce, senex pando Silenus asello/Vix sedet [Here comes plastered old Silenus, barely keeping his own ass on the ass swaying beneath him]” Ars 1.543–44). Taking a hint from this hint, as it were, a different interpretation of the Miller's interruption will see in it a version of Bacchic inspiration—a freeing of the tale telling from a preconceived, socially determined order, substituting instead a principle of reaction and rivalry that links tale telling to a competitive spirit grounded not in Harry's (commerically advantageous) holiday scheme but in the social reality of clashing personal and professional agendas.

Chaucer also uses Harry to dramatize a worst-case scenario of artistic differences (to put it mildly) with political authority when the Host calls on the narrator of the pilgrimage, Chaucer's stand-in, to tell a tale. The result is the rambling, anticlimactic account of the adventures of Sir Thopas, a parody of popular English “tail-rhyme” romances, albeit with satirical overtones aimed at the Flemish, England's political and commecial rivals.64 After several dozen jogging stanzas, Harry harshly interrupts the performance:

‘Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee!
… for thou makest me
So wery of thy verray lewednesse	weary complete
	stupidity
That, also wisly God my soule blesse,
Myne eres aken of thy drasty speche.’	ache crappy

(CT 7.919–23)

When the narrator asks why he alone of all the pilgrims has been prevented from completing “the beste rym I kan,” Harry replies curtly, “By God… for pleynely, at [in]a word, / Thy drasty ryming is nat woorth a toord!” (CT 7.928–30).

Every reciting poet's nightmare: the most powerful member of his audience exercises his unchallenged authority to interrupt and condemn the performance on the grounds that it is “nat worth a toord.” Such poetic truncation must hurt almost as much as the more physical truncation with which the same Harry Bailey elsewhere, and with analogous excremental emphasis, threatens the (already ambiguous) masculinity of another pilgrim, the Pardoner:

‘I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hand	wish balls
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie	stead reliquary
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
They shul be shryned in an hogges toord.’

(CT 6.952–55)

To return to “The Miller's Tale”: it is the first of several comic contributions to the storytelling contest in which male figures of domestic authority show themselves lacking in prudence and pay the price. Specifically, men who marry unwisely and then, out of sexual jealousy, impose unreasonable restraints on their wives to protect themselves from being cuckolded are condemned to comic complicity in bringing about the very situation they most wish to avoid. As the Miller puts it about old John the carpenter, the butt of his tale (predictably a fabliau, or bawdy story),

‘This carpenter hadde wedded newe a wyf,
Which that he lovede moore than his lyf;
Of eighteteene yeer she was of age.
Jalous he was, and heeld hire narwe in cage,	kept her under tight
	control
For she was wylde and yong, and he was old, And
demed hymself been lik a cokewold.
… Men sholde wedden after hire estaat,	in accord with their
	situation
For youthe and elde is often at debaat.
But sith that he was fallen in the snare,	since he had
He moost endure, as oother folk, his care.’

(CT 1.3221–26, 3229–32)

The key image here is “narwe in cage,” as if the wife were a captive bird. This image, which Chaucer uses more than once in CT to interesting effect, brings together crises of desire—the husband's to have exclusive sexual control of his wife, the wife's to escape from such imprisonment—and of authority, as the husband, as head of the household, attempts, usually without success, to impose his on his spouse.

The caged bird appears literally in “The Manciple's Tale,” as one of Chaucer's innovations in a story that has antecedents as far back as Ovid but exists in a variety of versions in medieval tale collections. The plot is simple enough: a bird distinguished by its bright plumage and ability to communicate directly with human beings tells a powerful man or a deity (usually Phoebus Apollo, god of light and song) that the woman he loves, wife or mistress, is playing him false with another. In jealous rage the distraught man kills her, too late experiences remorse for his hasty reaction, and turns on the bird, blaming him entirely for what has happened and stripping him of his voice, his bright plumage, or both. The lesson usually drawn from this exemplary tale is not to be the bearer of bad news, even if it is true. Other obvious morals—don't take pleasure in revealing other peoples’ faults; don't allow your emotions to get the better of you in ways you'll later regret; don't blame others for your own lack of self-control—seem rarely, if ever, to be drawn.65

Chaucer takes the cynical and incomplete nature of this tale's traditional moralization as the starting point for his placement of it within his Canterbury collection. In his hands, a seemingly straightforward parable of the dangers of truthtelling is bent and subverted in a variety of ways that make plain dealing, irrational power, and counsels of prudence all look bad. He puts the story in the mouth of the Manciple, a dubiously honest purchasing agent, who, responding to the helpless inebriation of another pilgrim, the Cook—who is slated, but unable, to tell the next tale—takes obvious and malicious pride in delivering this brutal, hyperbolical reprimand:

‘Of me, certeyn, thou shalt nat been yglosed….	flattered
Hoold cloos thy mouth, man, by thy fader kyn!	for God's sake
The devel of helle sette his foot therin!
Thy cursed breeth infecte wole us alle.
Fy, stynkyng swyn! Fy, foule moote thee falle!’	you should suffer
	for this

(CT 9.34, 37–40)

The Host exercises his authority to excuse the Cook from his narratorial obligation and substitute the Manciple; but he warns the latter of the Cook's potential retaliation for his attack:

‘I meene, he speke wole of smale thynges,
As for to pynchen at thy rekenynges,	make trouble about
	account keeping
That were nat honest, if it cam to preef.’	might not be legitimate
	when examined

To which the Manciple replies with heavy sarcasm,

‘No… that were a greet mescheef!	would be disaster
So myghte he lyghtly brynge me in the snare.	easily get me into
	trouble
Yet hadde I levere payen for the mare
Which he rit on, than he sholde with me stryve.
I wol nat wratthen hym, also moot I thryve!
That that I spak, I seyde it in my bourde.’	in jest

(CT 9.76–81)

Lest anyone mistake these words for an expression of real worry, he adds that, as “‘a good jape,’” he will now buy the Cook's good will by offering him “‘a draughte of wyn, ye, of a ripe grape,’” which he will not refuse; sure enough, “the Cook drank faste” and even “thanked [the Manciple] in swych wise [however] as he koude” (CT 9.83–84, 88, 93). It is against this backdrop of cynical, insincere regret for indulgence in verbal abuse under the guise of telling unpleasant truths that the Manciple will tell his tale, as a supposed caution against plain speaking but in a manner so parodically excessive as to make clear his scorn for the story's traditional exemplary message.

The tale is set in the period “Whan Phebus dwelled heer in this erthe adoun,” as a compendium of all desirable human qualities:

He was the mooste lusty bachiler	vigorous young man
In al this world, and eek the beste archer….
Pleyen he koude on every mynstralcie,	instrument to
	accompany singing
And syngen that it was a melodie
To heeren of his clere voys the soun.
… Therto he was the semelieste man
That is or was sith that the world bigan….	since
He was therwith fulfild of gentilesse,	a model of refinement
Of honour, and of parfit worthinesse.	excellence
… [the] flour of bachilrie,	noble youth
As wel in fredom as in chivalrie.	generosity knightly
	prowess

(CT 9.105–8, 113–15, 119–20, 123–26)

The household of this paragon contains two other members, a wife and a bird, whom he treats with analogous devotion—and possessiveness:

Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a crowe
Which in a cage he fostred many a day,
And taughte it speken, as men teche a jay.	to speak
Whit was this crowe as is a snow-whit swan,
And countrefete the speche of every man
He koude, whan he sholde telle a tale.
Therwith in al this world no nyghtyngale
Ne koude, by an hondred thousand deel,	fold
Syngen so wonder myrily and weel.
Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a wyf
Which that he lovede moore than his lyf,
And nyght and day dide evere his diligence
Hir for to plese and doon hire reverence,
Save oonly, if the sothe that I shal sayn,	if I'm to tell the truth
Jalous he was, and wolde have kept hire fayne,	gladly have kept her
	under guard
For hym were looth byjaped for to be,	he didn't want to be
	cheated
And so is every wight in swich degree.	as is every man in
	such a place

(CT 9.130–46)

The exact parallel between the line that begins each of these descriptions, “now had this Phebus in his hous a crow/a wyf,”⁶⁶ suggests that the first in some way stands for the second—indeed, in Chaucer's Middle English the word, “bryd,” has both meanings—an interpretation reinforced by the extended simile, available to Chaucer in sources as diverse as Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose, with which the Manciple describes the futility of Phebus's attempt to keep his wife faithful by combining service and constraint:⁶⁷

But God it woot, ther may no man embrace	knows no man can
	succeed
As to destreyne a thyng which that nature	in constraining
Hath natureelly set in a creature.
Taak any bryd, and put it in a cage,
And do al thyn entente and thy corage	ingenuity
To fostre it tendrely with mete and drynke
Of alle deyntees that thou kanst bithynke,
And keep it al so clenly as thou may,
Although his cage of gold be never so gay,
Yet hath this brid, by twenty thousand foold,	would twenty
	thousand times
Levere in a forest that is rude and coold	prefer
Goon ete wormes and swich wrecchednesse.	to go such garbage
For evere this bird wol doon his bisynesse
To escape out of his cage, yif he may.
His libertee this brid desireth ay.

(CT 9.160–174)

As the tale plays out, the Manciple's intrinsic nastiness and sour view of humanity shines through his (and Chaucer's) further additions. The wife's inevitable adultery, the bestiality of which the teller has underscored using comparisons with the base appetites of cats and wolves, is in this version particularly depraved and thus demeaning to Phoebus:

This Phebus, which that thoghte upon no gile,	who had no idea he was
	tricked
Deceyved was, for al his jolitee,	attractiveness
For under hym another hadde she,	of lesser rank than he
A man of litel reputacioun,
Nat woorth to Phebus in comparisoun.

(CT 9.196–200)

The crow's behavior is little better: he's presented first as a voyeuristic spectator to the betrayal who does nothing to dissuade the wife and then as a tattletale who takes obvious delight in rubbing his master's nose in the squalor of it all:

The white crow, that heeng ay in the cage,
Biheeld hire werk, and seyde never a word.
And whan that hoom was come Phebus, the lord,
his crowe sang ‘Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!’
‘What, bryd?’ quod Phebus, ‘What song syngestow?	are you singing
Ne were thow wont so myrily to synge	wasn't it your habit
That to myn herte it was a rejoysynge
To heere thy voys? Allas, what song is this?’
‘By God,’ quod he, ‘I synge nat amys:	I'm not singing badly
Phebus,’ quod he, ‘for al thy worthynesse,
For al thy beautee and thy gentilesse,	nobility
For al thy song and al thy mynstralcye,	music making
For al thy waityng, blered is thyn ye	surveillance you've
	been tricked
	by
With oon of litel reputacioun,
Noght worth to thee, as in comparisoun,
The montance of a gnat, so moot I thryve!
For on thy bed thy wyf I saugh hym swyve.’	screw

(CT 9.240–56)

The literal caging of the bird—whose obvious status as an emblem of a poet who, like Chaucer, can tell tales in many voices,⁶⁸ makes his imprisonment a parable of patronal or royal constraint—like the metaphoric caging of the wife (which the Manciple, on the authority of “olde clerkes” [CT 9.154], deems “verray nycetee [complete stupidity]” [CT 9.152]), liberates in both wife and bird the capacity for despicable behavior that becomes the nemesis to Phebus's hubris in exercising coercive authority over both his paterfamilial possessions.⁶⁹

The remainder of the story follows its preordained path: Phebus in a fury kills his wife, only to undergo an intense emotional reaction in which he not only regrets his hasty action but endows the victim with an entirely unwarranted innocence:

‘O deere wyf! O gemme of lustiheed!	jewel [my] delight
That were to me so sad and eek so trewe,	completely devoted
Now listow deed, with face pale of hewe,	you lie
Ful giltelees, that dorste I swere, ywys.’

(CT 9.274–77)

He then turns on the bird, not only taking away its beautiful voice and white feathers but “out of dore hym slong/Unto the devel, which I hym bytake [to whom I send him]” (CT 9.306–07). Behind the Manciple's ostensible repudiation of the bird who sounds suspiciously like him (see note 68) lies the indisputable fact, to my knowledge first pointed out by David Raybin, that Phebus's actions, for all their punitive harshness, result in the bird's gaining what the Manciple has said all birds wish: “For evere this bird wol doon his bisynesse/To escape out of his cage, yif he may” (CT 9.172–73).⁷⁰ The crisis of Phoebus's desire and authority created by his wife's adultery—her attempted escape from her too narrow “cage of gold”—ultimately, and ironically, fulfills his avian captive's desire for freedom from his literal cage—within which the poetic gift of “counterfeiting” voices has been, it would seem, a function of the bird's subordination to his master's power.

The tale ends with the Manciple's fulsome warning against speech of any kind, put in the mouth of his old mother, who concludes her overlong, overly sententious tirade, “Kepe [restrain] wel thy tong and thenk upon the crowe” (CT 9.362). With such a final flourish of insincerity—or perhaps of indirect praise for the crow's astute use of hurtful language—does the Manciple embellish his cynically reductive appropriation of an oft-told tale, already more celebratory of self-protection than of virtue, through which he repays the insult that Harry Bailley had earlier aimed at him, when, under the guise of counseling prudence in speech, the Host alluded to the Manciple's dishonest business practices. But lurking behind this further instance of pilgrim “quyting,” directed at the Host's authority, is a still darker meditation on the potentially perilous, even fatal, impact of the unbridled exercise of authority on desire and poetic expression.

Let me close on a lighter note, with a crisis of desire in The Canterbury Tales more playful, if no less serious, and again involving birds—in this case talking, anthropomorphic chickens—who live in a cage, or more precisely a coop—that is literally, not metaphorically, too narrow. The “Nun's Priest's Tale” features Chauntecleer, a proud and colorful rooster who has a terrifying dream (that later comes true) in which he's carried off by a fox who sneaks into the barnyard. After he wakes from his dream, Chauntecleer and the favorite of his seven clucking paramours, Pertelote, engage in an argument over its credibility, with the hen insisting that she has no interest in a lover who responds in cowardly wise to a dream—“have ye no mannes herte, and han a berd [have a beard]?” (CT 7.2919), she asks the rooster (thereby, in one line, toppling the creaky superstructure of avian moral fabulation)—especially, she insists, since dreams have no predictive validity; Chauntecleer's has undoubtedly resulted from indigestion, so her advice is, “For Goddes love, as taak som laxatyf!” Her prescription is precious:

‘A day or two ye shal have digestyves
Of wormes, er ye take youre laxatyves
Of lawriol, centaure, and fumetre,	[these are all bad-tasting herbs]
Or elles of ellebor, that groweth there,
Of katapuce, or of gaitrys beryis,	berries
Of herbe yve, growyng in oure yeerd, ther mery is.’	ivy where
	it's pleasant

And the coup de grace, a marvellously onomatopoeic line that catches the rhythm of the cock putatively following her instructions: “Pekke hem up ryght as they growe and ete hem yn [eat them up]” (CT 7.2943, 2961–67).

As a retort to Pertelote's pharmacopeia—he rejects laxatives “for they been venymes [venomous], I woot it weel; / I hem diffye [reject them], I love hem never a deel [not in the least]!” (CT 7.3155–56)—Chauntecleer marshalls an array of auctores who attribute veracity to dreams and offers two exemplary stories in support of that thesis. Having, as he feels, proven his point, the learned rooster then reverses himself completely, jettisoning cultural auctoritas and giving as his reason the inspiration to his courage that comes from his desire for Pertelote—but in the process being forced to confront that desire's ultimate frustration of being held “narwe in cage”: “For whan I feele a-nyght your softe syde—Al be it that I may nat on yow ryde, / For that oure perche is made so narwe, allas—I am so ful of joye and of solas [pleasure], / That I diffye bothe sweven [dream] and dreem” (CT 7.3167–71; emphasis added). As with “The Manciple's Tale,” so beneath the at times convulsive humor of this parodic animal fable run darker currents, and the image of chickens too tightly wedged into their perch—still a problem for twenty-first-century proponents of animal rights!—to be able to make love can stand as a pathetic emblem of the human condition, in which the quest for personal satisfaction is thwarted by the external structures—of political authority? economic imperatives? Augustan legislation against adultery?—imposed upon it. At the same time, a better example of a situation that is always hopeless but never serious than that of Chantecleer, seeking in vain to get a leg up on his libidinal situation, would, I believe, be very hard to find.

As I hope the few examples offered in this chapter demonstrate, Chaucer's poetry is serious play in its comic attention to crises of desire and authority in very human situations (even if the humans sometimes have feathers). The balancing of comedy and concern is an important part of Chaucer's legacy to us; we do well to ponder that legacy.