Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception (Chaucer Studies) (Chaucer Studies, 43) [Illustrated] 1843844079, 9781843844075

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Isabel Davis is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Birkbeck, University of London; Catherine Nall is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributors: Joanna Bellis, Alcuin Blamires, Julia Boffey, Isabel Davis, Stephanie Downes, A. S. G. Edwards, Jamie C. Fumo, Andrew Galloway, Nick Havely, Thomas A. Prendergast, Mike Rodman Jones, William T. Rossiter, Elizaveta Strakhov.

Chaucer AND Fame

REPUTATIO N AND RECEPTION

ISABEL DAVIS AND CATHERINE NALL (EDS)

Cover image: A historiated initial from a Canterbury Tales manuscript, depicting Geoffrey Chaucer. © The British Library Board. London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 851, f. 2.

Chaucer and Fame

F

ama, or fame, is a central concern of late medieval literature: where fame came from, who deserved it, whether it was desirable and how it was acquired and kept. An interest in fame was not new but was renewed and rethought within the vernacular revolutions of the later Middle Ages. The work of Geoffrey Chaucer collates received ideas on the subject of fama, both from the classical world and from the work of his contemporaries. Chaucer’s place in these intertextual negotiations was readily recognized in his aftermath, as later writers adopted and reworked postures which Chaucer had struck, in their own bids for literary authority. This volume tracks debates on fama which were past, present and future to Chaucer, using his work as a centre point to investigate canon formation in European literature from the late Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period.

Chaucer Studies Boydell & Brewer Ltd

PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620–2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

CHAUCER AND FAME 9781843844075 v4.indd 1

EDITED BY ISABEL DAVIS AND CATHERINE NALL

13/11/2014 15:11

CHAUCER STUDIES XLIII

Chaucer and fame

CHAUCER STUDIES ISSN 0261–9822

Founding Editor † Professor Derek S. Brewer Editorial Board Dr Isabel Davis Professor Robert Meyer-Lee Dr William T. Rossiter Since its foundation, the series Chaucer Studies has played a highly significant role in the development and promotion of research on Chaucer and his many cultural contexts. It is an ideal forum for the publication of work by both younger and established scholars, comprising innovative monographs and essay collections together with indispensable reference books. Chaucer scholarship just would not be the same without it. Professor Alastair Minnis Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English, Yale University The publisher welcomes new proposals for the series; monographs are particularly encouraged but volumes of essays will be included when appropriate. All submissions will receive rapid, informed attention. They should go in the first instance to Caroline Palmer, Editorial Director, at the following address: Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this book

Chaucer and fame Reputation and Reception

Edited by Isabel Davis Catherine Nall

D. S. BREWER

©  Contributors 2015 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2015 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN  978 1 84384 407 5

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii



List of Contributors

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction Isabel Davis

1

1 Chaucer Joins the Schiera: The House of Fame, Italy and the Determination of Posterity William T. Rossiter

21

2 ‘I wolde … han hadde a fame’: Dante, Fame and Infamy in Chaucer’s House of Fame Nick Havely

43

3 ‘And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace’: Reconstructing the Spectral Canon in Statius and Chaucer Elizaveta Strakhov

57

4 ‘I nolde sette at al that noys a grote’: Repudiating Infamy in Troilus and Criseyde and The House of Fame Alcuin Blamires

75

5 The Early Reception of Chaucer’s The House of Fame 87 Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards 6 Fame’s Penitent: Deconstructive Chaucer Among the Lancastrians 103 Andrew Galloway 7 After Deschamps: Chaucer’s French Fame Stephanie Downes

127

8 ‘Fresch anamalit termes’: The Contradictory Celebrity of Chaucer’s Aureation Joanna Bellis

143

9 Chaucer the Puritan Mike Rodman Jones

165

10 Revenant Chaucer: Early Modern Celebrity Thomas A. Prendergast

185

11 Ancient Chaucer: Temporalities of Fame Jamie C. Fumo

201

Bibliography 221 Index 245

Illustrations Andrew Galloway, ‘Fame’s Penitent: Deconstructive Chaucer Among the Lancastrians’ Figure 1. Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Regiment of Princes by Thomas 117 Hoccleve; London, British Library, MS Harley 4866, fol. 88. © British Library Board. Figure 2a. Face of John Gower in The Bedford Psalter and Hours; 124 London, British Library, MS Additional 42131, fol. 209v. © British Library Board. 124 Figure 2b. Face of Geoffrey Chaucer in The Bedford Psalter and Hours; London, British Library, MS Additional 42131, fol. 51v. © British Library Board. Figure 2c. Face of King Richard II in The Bedford Psalter and Hours; 124 London, British Library, MS Additional 42131, fol. 210. © British Library Board. Figure 3. Old Amans beginning his confession in the Confessio 126 amantis; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902, fol. 8v. By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Jamie C. Fumo, ‘Ancient Chaucer: Temporalities of Fame’ Figure 1. Frontispiece to Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of our 218 Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, Newly Printed, ed. Thomas Speght (London: Printed by Adam Islip, at the charges of Bonham Norton, 1598), STC 5078 (B); Harvard University, Houghton Library. Figure 2. Chaucer, The House of Fame (Nabu Public Domain 219 Reprints, 2011). The editors, contributors and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Contributors Joanna Bellis is the Harry F. Guggenheim research fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, working on war literature from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Her current projects include a critical edition of John Page’s The Siege of Rouen (forthcoming, Middle English Texts) and a monograph on accounts of the Hundred Years War in medieval and early modern literature (provisionally entitled The Word in the Sword: Writing the Hundred Years War, 1337–1600). Alcuin Blamires is Professor Emeritus at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he worked from 1999 until retirement in 2011. His career has focused on medieval debates about women (notably an anthology and the monograph The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (1997)) and on Chaucer (most recently Chaucer, Gender, and Ethics (2006)). Julia Boffey is Professor of Medieval Studies in the Department of English at Queen Mary, University of London. Her interests include Middle English verse, especially lyrics and dream poetry; and the relationships between manuscript and print in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Isabel Davis is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages (2007) and has articles in Speculum, Textual Practice and Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Stephanie Downes is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne in the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She has published on aspects of late medieval AngloFrench literary and manuscript culture and its modern reception. A. S. G. Edwards is Professor of Medieval Manuscripts, School of English, University of Kent. Jamie C. Fumo is Associate Professor of English at McGill University, specializing in Chaucer and his period. She is the author of The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority, and Chaucerian Poetics (2010) and recent articles in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Chaucer Review and Modern Philology. She is currently completing a monograph on the textuality and reception of The Book of the Duchess.

x  Contributors

Andrew Galloway is Professor of English at Cornell University. He has written frequently on Piers Plowman, Chaucer and Gower, as well as on chronicles, Latin poetry and mercantile account books. His books include The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman: Volume 1 (2006), Medieval Literature and Culture (2006), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture (edited, 2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (co-edited with Andrew Cole, 2014). He is currently working on a history of Middle English literature. Nick Havely is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York. His most recent publications include a revised edition of The House of Fame (2013) and Dante’s British Public: Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present (2014). Mike Rodman Jones teaches later medieval and early modern literature at the University of Nottingham. He has published a monograph, Radical Pastoral, 1381–1594: Appropriation and the Writing of Religious Controversy (2011), as well as articles in journals such as The Review of English Studies, New Medieval Literatures and The Sixteenth Century Journal. Catherine Nall is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Reading and War in FifteenthCentury England: From Lydgate to Malory (2012) and articles on book history and the English reception of Alain Chartier. She is currently completing an edition (with Daniel Wakelin) of William Worcester’s Boke of Noblesse. Thomas A. Prendergast is Professor of English at the College of Wooster. He is the author of Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (2004) and Poetical Dust: Poets’ Corner and the Making of Britian (forthcoming). He has recently completed a book with Stephanie Trigg entitled Medievalism and Its Discontents. William T. Rossiter is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses primarily on Anglo-Italian literary and cultural interaction from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, with an emphasis upon the divergent practices of translation in this period. He is the author of Chaucer and Petrarch (2010) and Wyatt Abroad (2014), among various other studies and edited collections. Elizaveta Strakhov is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. Her current project, entitled Politics in Translation: Lyric Form and the Francophone Author in Late Medieval Europe, is on the role of formes fixes lyric within Anglo-French literary exchange. Her forthcoming publications include a portion of this project, a piece on Chaucer and Machaut, and a co-written chapter on the literary history of the Burgundy region.

Acknowledgements This volume had its origins in the fourth London Chaucer Conference, ‘Chaucer and Celebrity’, which was held at the Senate House, University of London (7–8 April 2011). We are grateful to everyone involved in that conference, especially to the Institute of English Studies, who hosted the event (and particularly Jon Millington, the events officer there); to Alfred Hiatt, who co-organized it with us; and to Alcuin Blamires, who was a helpful consultant. We would also like to thank all the many speakers and delegates who are not represented in this book but who made the conference such a successful event. We are grateful to Ardis Butterfield, who kindly helped us prepare the book proposal. We want to thank Caroline Palmer, Rohais Haughton, Rosie Pearce, Hester Higton and Rob Kinsey, at Boydell and Brewer, for their patience and assistance, and the anonymous readers commissioned by the press for their generous comments and help with shaping this volume. Finally, we are grateful to all the contributors, of course for their contributed essays, but also for their willingness and forbearance. Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall, 2014

Introduction Isabel Davis

W

hat did Geoffrey Chaucer really do to Dido (to paraphrase the title of C. S. Lewis’ seminal essay on Chaucer’s indebtedness to and independence from Boccaccio’s Filostrato, in Troilus and Criseyde)?1 In the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, Dido’s entry into the cave of Aeolus with her lover, Aeneas, unwittingly conjures up a monstrous personification of Fama, halfwoman and half-bird with many eyes and mouths, of whom Dido herself is the first casualty. Dido’s sexuality and her ethical conduct thus unleashes the theme of fame in one of the foundational (indeed, one of the most reputed) texts of Western literature. Philip Hardie has said of this episode that it is ‘[t­]h­ e central text for the history of fama in the Western literary tradition’; not only is it a ‘major intertextual ingathering … of the prior traditions of fama’, including those from Hesiod and Homer, but also it ‘creates an image that determines much of the future course of the representation, both verbal and visual, of fama’.2 Here, before an overview of the volume and its contents, I shall explore the intertextuality of Chaucer’s discussion of fame; more particularly I am interested in gendered reputations, including that of Dido. My concern is to demonstrate many of the themes which are considered in the essays in Chaucer and Fame, questions raised around fama in its many medieval senses: of name, reputation and fame.3 I intend to bind up, in the same way as do the essays that this introduction prefaces, the issues of fame with Chaucer’s engagement with other literature, both old and much newer.4 I shall start by selecting, as C. S. Lewis does, Chaucer’s engagement with Giovanni 1 2 3

4

C. S. Lewis, ‘What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato’, Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 27–44 (first published 1932). Philip Hardie, Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 67 and 78. For a discussion of the meanings of the word fama, in Greek, Latin and then Middle English, see Hardie, Rumour and Renown, p. 2; Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 23, 159. Other studies of fame in Chaucer’s writing have also foregrounded the poet’s intertextuality. See, for example, Helen Cooper, ‘Poetic Fame’, Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford, 2010), e.g. p. 366; and Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, e.g. pp. 7 and 101.

2  Isabel Davis

Boccaccio as both a centre point and a sore point among other intertextual tussles. That relationship is particularly strained by Chaucer’s decision to leave his Italian contemporary unnamed, left out of his catalogues of influence. Alcuin Blamires and Elizaveta Strakhov, in their contributions to this book, also consider Chaucer’s relationship to Boccaccio, but all these essays together investigate a full range of intertexts for Chaucer’s work, finding rich networks of allusion, both between Chaucer’s works and his sources, and also between the work of those who came after him, forming and framing Chaucer’s own literary fame. The question of fame in Chaucer’s work is part of the negotiation over his own place in the canon of Western literature. He styles himself as the natural inheritor of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan and Statius (to use his own list from the close of Troilus and Criseyde), but he conversed about that place and inheritance with medieval authors, such as Boccaccio, Dante and Petrarch, Jean de Meun and Machaut. The essays in this volume variously chart this diachronic and international exchange. So, for example, Elizaveta Strakhov demonstrates Chaucer’s interest in Statius’ Thebaid, but as an intertextual dialogue with Boccaccio’s Filostrato; William Rossiter argues that Chaucer reaches back to Virgil and Ovid but through a dispute that he saw waged between Dante and Petrarch and their competing models of humanism. In essays which look ahead to Chaucer’s later reception, Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards argue that ‘Chaucer’s exploration of Virgilian fama was to be a significant point of reference for a number of later English discussions of the topic of literary reputation’ (p. 93), while Jamie C. Fumo charts the way in which Chaucer’s self-conscious appropriations of Ovid, and particularly the fact of Ovid’s antiquity, successfully shaped his literary renown for writers of later periods. In this introduction I shall look particularly at The Legend of Good Women, even though it might be more obvious to begin with The House of Fame, a text which features prominently in the essays which follow.5 As A. J. Minnis has noted, the two poems are more connected than is often acknowledged; The Legend is just as concerned with fame as it is with women and just as concerned with fame as is the earlier House of Fame.6 In the opening lines of his Legend of Dido in The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer acknowledges Virgil’s fame and canonical place: ‘Glorye and honour, Virgil Mantoan, / Be to thy name!’ (lines 924–5), pledging with all humility to ‘as I can, / Folwe thy lanterne’ (lines 925–6).7 However, as William Rossiter notes in his essay 5 6 7

See particularly the essays by William Rossiter, Nick Havely, and Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards. A. J. Minnis, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford, 1995), p. 387. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1988); all references to Chaucer’s writing in this introduction will be to this edition and will hereafter be cited by work and line number in the text.



Introduction  3

(as others have done before him), Chaucer’s second acknowledgement, of Ovid, is more apt given that, on the characterization of Dido, Chaucer is always more inclined to follow the light that shone in the Heroides than in the Aeneid.8 In The House of Fame, and eventually in The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer does that by giving over the narration to Dido herself, just as Ovid’s epistolary poem did.9 In The Legend of Good Women, although part of Dido’s story is kept for and related by an authorial persona, that part is nonetheless told with an Ovidian sympathy for her perspective. The Heroides offered a corrective to the Aeneid’s rigorism on Dido’s conduct which charged her with moral failure in public office and self-serving mendacity: ‘coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam’ [she calls it marriage and with that name veils her sin (Book 4, line 172)].10 For Ovid, on the other hand, Dido’s words and deeds were sincere, and only made false in retrospect by Aeneas’ betrayal. Marilynn Desmond has noted that there is little critical consensus on the exact nature of the relationship which is formed in Virgil’s cave scene, adding that unofficiated unions could be valid in Roman marriage practice.11 Chaucer’s poem, however, is less equivocal, and he more evidently uses the medieval practice of clandestine marriage to structure his description of events: And there hath Eneas ykneled so, And told hire al his herte and al his wo, And swore so depe to hire to be trewe For wel or wo and chaunge hire for no newe; And as a fals lovere so wel can pleyne, That sely Dido rewede on his peyne, And tok hym for husbonde and becom his wyf For everemo, whil that hem laste lyf. (Legend of Good Women, lines 1232–9)

There are clear echoes here of the marriage service, as it is laid out in the

8

9

10 11

Helen Cooper, for example, notes that Chaucer sets these Roman poets ‘at loggerheads’: ‘Poetic Fame’, p. 366. See also Laura Kellogg, Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s Cressida (New York, 1995), p. 16; Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley, CA, 1994), p. 198. See also the essay by William Rossiter in this volume and, for a discussion of Gavin Douglas’ response to Chaucer’s treatment of Virgil, that by Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards. There are good accounts of the way in which Ovid’s intervention saw Dido’s part overtake Aeneas’ in the reception history of the story recounted by the Aeneid. See, for example, Suzanne C. Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004), pp. 3, 174. Virgil, Vol. 1: Eclogues; Georgics; Aeneid Bks. 1–6, ed. and trans. H. R. Fairclough, revised G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 432–3. Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (Minneapolis, MN, 1994), p. 29.

4  Isabel Davis

Sarum missal. Aeneas takes an oath to be true for better or worse (‘For wel or wo’); kneeling, then as now, was also part of the marriage rite.12 In Chaucer’s Legend, Dido acts in relation to faith and as if she were married, rather than disingenuously renaming sinful conduct as marriage, as she does in Virgil’s Aeneid. Chaucer’s narrator is coy about whether or not the couple are chaperoned and their marriage witnessed: ‘The autour maketh of it no mencioun’ (line 1228). Sheila Delany points out that Virgil actually does make mention: scandalously in the Aeneid the couple go alone into the cave, and the only witnesses to their marriage are the heavens (‘Aether’; Book 4, line 167).13 She argues that Dido’s marriage is invalid in both Chaucer’s and Virgil’s accounts because of this lack of human witnesses.14 However, in the medieval consistory courts, while unwitnessed clandestine marriages might be unprovable and unenforceable, they were not actually invalid. If words of present consent were exchanged, a marriage did take place; perjured plaintiffs might escape having those valid marriages enforced but would still have to answer to their own consciences. In this way, what was said and upheld in court – what was reputed – might be falsified by the, albeit unprovable, fact of a binding contract having been made. Delany is rather alone in thinking that the events described by Chaucer do not constitute a valid marriage. Even critics such as Minnis and Susanne C. Hagedorn, who are inclined to read Dido’s plea ‘And, so ye wole me now to wive take, / As ye han sworn’ (lines 1319–20) as an acknowledgement that only a vow of future consent was made in the cave, are inclined to conclude that a valid marriage is then contracted on consummation.15 If one of the central lessons of Virgil’s cave scene was the importance of giving things their right names, Chaucer is sure to make the name of marriage stick to an infamously equivocal relationship and thus effects an Ovidian recovery of Dido’s ‘name’.16 In The Legend of Good Women Chaucer’s intervention in the dispute between Virgil and Ovid on the topic of Dido’s reputation is refracted through his readings of the work of Boccaccio. Indeed, I suggest that Chaucer styles himself as a latter-day Ovid to Boccaccio’s Virgil. This might seem odd to say on the topic of Dido because Boccaccio avoids the scene in the Aeolian cave by following a non-Virgilian version of Dido’s story, an alternative biography in which Aeneas plays no part, a choice that Marilynn Desmond

12 13 14 15 16

For a description of the rite, see Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia, PA, 2006), pp. 42–7. Delany, Naked Text, p. 197. Ibid., pp. 197–8. Minnis, Shorter Poems, pp. 418–19; Hagedorn, Abandoned Women, p. 182. On other interesting changes which Chaucer made to his Virgilian source, see Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Ithaca, NY, 1983), pp. 126–8.



Introduction  5

suggests was prompted by his friendship with Petrarch.17 Boccaccio takes the Roman historian Justin as his source and, in his Genealogia deorum gentilium, contrasts it with what he read in the Aeneid.18 Boccaccio claims that, in the true historical life, unlike in Virgil’s fiction, Dido is pressed into a political remarriage with the king of Massitani by the Carthaginian elders, a marriage which she resists by committing suicide, thus protecting her chastity. Boccaccio sums up starkly: ‘Quod etiam longe aliud est a descriptione Maronis’ [this is very different from Virgil’s description].19 In De mulieribus claris Boccaccio revisits the story again and states that, by returning to this ‘true’ biography, he hopes to recover Dido’s sexual reputation: ‘ire libet, si forte paucis literulis meis saltem pro parte notam, indigne obiectam decori sue viduitatis, abstergere queam’ [I hope that my modest remarks may cleanse away (at least in part) the infamy undeservedly cast on the honour of her widowhood].20 It is to this end that he chooses an account of Dido’s life which avoids the problems presented by the scene in the Aeolian cave and particularly the question as to whether Dido and Aeneas contracted a lawful marriage there. For Boccaccio, widows’ remarriages are morally indefensible; no form of words could offer a legitimating framework for a love affair with Aeneas. In De mulieribus Dido stands, a chaste pagan, as an embarrassment to contemporary Christian widows who produce specious arguments in an attempt wrongfully to justify remarriage: O viduitatis infracte venerandum eternumque specimen, Dido! In te velim ingerant oculos vidue mulieres et potissime christiane tuum robur inspiciant; te, si possunt, castissimum effundentem sanguinem, tota mente considerent, et he potissime quibus fuit, ne ad secunda solum dicam, sed ad tertia et ulteriora etiam vota transvolasse levissimum! [O Dido, venerable and eternal model of unsullied widowhood! I wish that women who have lost their husbands would turn their eyes upon you and that Christian women in particular would contemplate your strength. If they can, let them meditate upon how you shed your chaste blood –

17

18

19 20

Desmond, Reading Dido, pp. 23, 58. Desmond is sure that Chaucer would have known this non-Virgilian version of the story and most likely from his reading of Boccaccio (see pp. 129, 161). See William Rossiter’s essay here for a consideration of Chaucer’s position in relation to Petrarch. Desmond, Reading Dido, gives full accounts not only of the sources for Dido’s life, including Justin’s (pp. 24–55), but also of its many medieval retellings, including Boccaccio’s (pp. 58–73). Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon (Cambridge, MA, 2011), pp. 282–3. Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA, 2001), pp. 166–7; hereafter cited by page numbers in the text.

6  Isabel Davis e­ specially women for whom it is a trivial matter to drift into second, third, and even more marriages. (pp. 174–5)]

The arguments which Boccaccio ventriloquizes for modern widows include the social and financial pressures to which, no doubt, many medieval women found they yielded. Also (and interestingly because it is what Chaucer’s Wife of Bath will later do in The Canterbury Tales) Boccaccio’s widows mobilize the authority of St Paul (specifically 1 Corinthians 7:9: ‘better to marry than burn’) to defend themselves and their, in his view, unacceptable unions. The scriptural quotation is horribly apt given that, in Boccaccio’s version, Dido chooses to burn rather than marry. In fact, the modern widows described by Boccaccio do something similar to Virgil’s Dido, falsely using the name of marriage to cover shameful misdeeds (Boccaccio’s phrase is ‘sub ficto coniugii nomine’ [under the false name of matrimony; pp. 180–1]). While Dido’s reputation might thus be ‘cleansed’, by redrawing the moral frame to discredit and disown remarriage as an ethical option, Boccaccio’s retelling serves to produce a more austere line even than Virgil’s on the sexuality and sexual reputation of widows. Boccaccio’s reshaping of Dido’s story purports to evict Virgilian influence but cannot quite shut the door behind it. Effectively he readmits the ethical crux established by Virgil but this time as a live issue for contemporary widows. He uses his readers’ knowledge of the Aeneid and, while ostensibly telling a different – indeed opposite – story, confusingly reminds them of Virgil’s account. He says: ‘atque adveniente Enea troiano nunquam viso, mori potius quam infringendam fore castimoniam rata’ [Thus, even before the arrival of the Trojan Aeneas (whom she never saw), Dido had already decided to die rather than violate her chastity (pp. 174–5)]. This odd specification about what does not happen in Dido’s story, especially with the extra clarification ‘nunquam viso’ which might have been inferred from what precedes, seeks to manage the alienation effect experienced by readers familiar with Dido’s story from the Aeneid. In order to make Dido virtuous and a potential embarrassment to modern women, Boccaccio pretends to repress the Virgilian narrative, but instead he draws attention to it by imagining Aeneas landing at Carthage hors de texte. Boccaccio keeps the dishonour which has clung to Dido in his readers’ memories; he was right when he claimed to be undertaking only a partial clean-up job (see the parenthesis in the prefacing statement cited above). Furthermore, he effectively spreads out that dishonour so that it newly besmirches the reputations of Boccaccio’s many female contemporaries who were forming new and perhaps serial unions in a time of repeated and devastating bouts of plague. Widows occupied an intriguing social and sexual position in medieval society and their real-life dilemma about remarriage offers a dramatic crux for Chaucer (as for Boccaccio) but, in addition, the sexuality of widows as topic had been marked out in Boccaccio’s work as a potential way to



Introduction  7

harness literary fama.21 Both Alcuin Blamires and Andrew Galloway discuss in their essays the way in which Chaucer’s female characters, and especially Criseyde, are the most serious commentators on the ungovernability of fame; in this view, Chaucer’s engagement with Boccaccio was as much about puncturing his confidence on literary authority as refusing his negative assessment of feminine virtue. While Boccaccio’s variant version of Dido’s life is not the central influence on Chaucer’s depiction of Dido, the De mulieribus claris more broadly is evidently a key (although typically an unacknowledged) source for The Legend of Good Women and also, as its title loudly suggests it might be, for the theme of fame more broadly.22 Of course, Boccaccio’s emphasis upon famousness, in his collection of female lives, ostensibly differs from Chaucer’s designation of the women in his Legend as ‘good’. Despite its dedication to a woman, Andrea Acciaioli, and its wished-for proximity to Joanna of Naples, and despite an opening which at first suggests that what follows is a volume in praise of women (‘muliebris sexus laudem’), De mulieribus claris, as Boccaccio goes on to say in its preface, is dedicated to women’s infamy as much as their good repute (pp. 2–3). Readers should not be surprised, he says, that he includes Penelope and other virtuous women alongside Medea and her infamous sisters: ‘Non enim est animus michi hoc claritatis nomen adeo strictim summere, ut semper in virtutem videatur exire’ [It is not in fact my intention to interpret the word ‘famous’ in such a strict sense that it will always appear to mean ‘virtuous’ (pp. 10–11)]. Piero Boitani has described Boccaccio as ‘perhaps the first Christian writer to explicitly disregard the link between fame and virtue’, developing a ‘new [and amoral] conception of claritas’.23 While the Latin word claris and its cognates convey a quality of light, of brilliance, as well as renown, Boccaccio nonetheless feels able to include women of ill-repute: after all, bright lights throw dark shadows. As we have seen, he also manages to trounce feminine reputations even while rewriting biographies of women such as Dido as paragons of virtue. Virginia Brown has pithily described Boccaccio’s panegyric style as ‘praising with faint damns’, to reflect this metamorphic quality.24 As if in recognition of this back-handed compliment, in the early fifteenth century Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des dames, which reworked 21

22

23 24

There is, of course, much critical work on the question of widows. See, for example, Kathryn Jacobs, Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage (Gainesville, FL, 2001), esp. chapter 4. For a discussion of the influence of De mulieribus on Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, see Carolyn P. Collette, Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Woodbridge, 2014), e.g. p. 35; David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA, 1997), p. 337. Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, p. 101. Virginia Brown, ‘Introduction’ to Boccaccio, Famous Women, p. xix.

8  Isabel Davis

the idea of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus to make a more clearly pro-feminist biography collection, not only set out to praise good women but also included more examples of contemporary and Christian women than Boccaccio had done.25 In the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, Alceste requests that Chaucer’s narrator write a book of praise, as Christine de Pizan would do in her Livre, of the kind that Boccaccio deliberately did not write, and part of that brief is an emphasis upon goodness, rather than the potentially more ambiguous stress upon fame. While this implies an apparent shift away from Boccaccio’s work, an interest in fame nonetheless pervades Chaucer’s poem; similarly, although conversely and in spite of its professed amoral reinterpretation of claritas, De mulieribus claris is concerned to sort vicious from virtuous femininity all the same. Chaucer’s dedicatee in The Legend is Alceste and she inspires a meditation on the imagery of light (F, lines 64–7, 84–5), which the authors of the essays in this volume continually pick out as an abiding metaphorical field within the discussion of fame.26 Indeed, William Rossiter argues that the ‘language of illumination, informed by the etymology of claritas (brightness, splendour), is … a crucial part of the discourse of early humanism’ (pp. 22–3). Rossiter and also Joanna Bellis, in her essay on Chaucerian English, identify luminescence as a constant theme within Chaucer criticism of the fifteenth century. And both Rossiter and Bellis connect the language which was used of Chaucer after his death with the language which he used himself to praise Petrarch, ‘the lauriat poete’ who ‘Enlymyned al Ytaille of poetrie’ (Clerk’s Prologue, lines 31, 33). As if in anticipation of his own eulogies, in The Legend of Good Women Chaucer re-affixes virtue to light, mending the broken link that he found in Boccaccio’s collection of women’s biographies. Whatever the prior reputations of Chaucer’s subjects in The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer is charged by Alceste with making them good. To make all these women ‘good’ and good in similar ways, he has to elide some aspects of their stories. In a parallel technique to that which Boccaccio deploys in his story of Dido, the sometimes counter-textual amelioration in Chaucer’s Legend asks readers to forget (although really they cannot) the mettle and/or unrighteousness that some of these female characters exhibit in other stories. This is most notably the case in Chaucer’s account of Jason’s abandonment of Medea. As Florence Percival has said of the Medea Legend: ‘Chaucer alone … censored his Legend of all the detail which makes Medea’s story interesting or worth telling’.27 For example, he suppresses Medea’s 25

26 27

Collette, Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, pp. 69–70; Kevin Brownlee, ‘Christine de Pizan’s Canonical Authors: The Special Case of Boccaccio’, Comparative Literature Studies 32 (1995), 244–61; Minnis, Shorter Poems, p. 427. See, for example, the essays by Nick Havely, William Rossiter and Joanna Bellis below. Florence Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge, 1998), p. 210. I am not, as others have argued, suggesting that this makes the poem dull. See, for example, Carolyn

Introduction  9



murder of their children, the part of Medea’s story with which readers would be most familiar and which appears in any number of versions including Boccaccio’s, where Medea is described as ‘sevissimum veteris perfidie documentum’ [the cruellest example of ancient treachery (pp. 174–5)]. Yet, at the same time, Chaucer also half reminds his readers of those murders by mentioning that Jason also ‘lafte his yonge children two’ when he betrayed their mother (lines 1657–8), emphasizing Jason’s fault but, at the same time, jogging memories of the danger represented by Medea’s care. Medea’s name is infamous and that infamy precedes and exceeds the censorship policy of Chaucer’s Legend. A central technique, which Chaucer saw in and borrowed from Boccaccio’s work, was to establish a tension between an expurgated version and the ‘rest of the story’ as it existed in the popular imagination, the fullness of which was indexed by oblique, vestigial preservations in an otherwise radically abridged text. The essays in this volume are everywhere concerned with omission, as much as inclusion. Indeed, the idea of the missing, as opposed to the materialized, body particularly concerns the essays in this volume by Andrew Galloway and Thomas Prendergast. Galloway considers, for example, the way in which Chaucer’s ‘afterimage’ was sculpted in the generation after his death in a way which makes the author peculiarly alive, while Prendergast makes a case about the importance of absent bodies for the development of a personal cult of celebrity, which he sees emerging around the figure of Geoffrey Chaucer in the sixteenth century. Moreover, many of the essays in Chaucer and Fame identify the importance of omission in the self-conscious naming practices within Chaucer’s work.28 For example, in The Legend of Good Women the narrator is careful to avoid naming himself; even when he is explicitly asked who he is: The god of Love on me his eyen caste, And seyde, ‘Who kneleth there?’ And I answerde Unto his askynge, whan that I it herde, And seyde, ‘Sir, it am I,’ and com him ner, And salwed him. Quod he, ‘What dostow her So nygh myn oune floure, so boldely?

28

Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI, 1989), p. 75. I think a more productive approach is taken by those critics who see The Legend of Good Women as part of a culture of courtly games which relied on readers to know the full story of each of Chaucer’s women. See, for example, Minnis, Shorter Poems, p. 443; Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, pp. 299–324; Nicola F. McDonald, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Ladies at Court and the Female Reader’, Chaucer Review 35 (2000), esp. 33. See, for example, the essays by Nick Havely, Andrew Galloway, Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, Jamie C. Fumo, William Rossiter, Elisaveta Strakhov, Stephanie Downes, and Alcuin Blamires.

10  Isabel Davis Yt were better worthy, trewely, A worm to neghen ner my flour than thow.’  (F, lines 311–18)

Rather than giving his name, the narrator offers only ‘I’ in answer to the god’s question. Because this does not identify him, he also makes a physical approach, whereupon he is recognized as the translator of the Roman de la Rose and author of Troilus and Criseyde, writings which are, according to Love, offensive to lovers and, more particularly, women. These textual offences can be somehow seen by looking at his person (which purports the sort of physical presence that Galloway describes); there is no need for him to give his name. When she later intercedes with Eros on the narrator’s behalf, Alceste provides a catalogue of his other writings (one of the several ‘self-catalogues’ that feature regularly in Chaucer’s oeuvre and which are discussed by Jamie C. Fumo in her essay in this volume). Chaucer’s prior writings constitute him; they answer the question ‘who?’ In the absence of his proper name, the reader must identify Chaucer’s textual persona from his oeuvre. Alceste is a somewhat dubious champion and, in the F Prologue at least, she is unable to commend the work particularly: ‘Al be hit that he kan nat wel endite’ (F, line 414). Indeed, she agrees with Love that the Romaunt of the Rose and Troilus and Criseyde are problem works, although she softens her judgement by speculating about their writer’s extenuating circumstances: perhaps he is so foolish that he has no idea what he is doing or, alternatively but not more flatteringly, he may have been forced into doing it by somebody else. When the narrator tries to defend Troilus and Criseyde and his translation of the Roman de la Rose, he is rebuffed: ‘[l]at be thyn arguynge’ (F, line 475; G, line 465). According to Alceste, then, not only is some of the narrator’s previous work obnoxious, but also most of it is not very good. In place of a name is a (decidedly mixed) literary reputation. As well as suppressing his own name, Chaucer also refuses others their rightful place in his poetry. Desmond notes that ‘Chaucer’s narrators are often much less generous about citing medieval pre-texts than citing the auctores’; with this remark, she rather understates the case.29 This habit of omission is mentioned several times in the current volume, including in discussions of the most famous example: the suppression of Boccaccio’s name – for that of the probably fictive Lollius – in Troilus and Criseyde, despite that poem being a close translation of Il Filostrato. Elizaveta Strakhov has referred to this practice in Chaucer’s verse, and Troilus and Criseyde in particular, as a ‘poetics of disavowal’ (p. 73), which she argues is in part a legacy of Statius’ treatment of Ovid, whose name and influence is elided in the Thebaid. Jamie C. Fumo suggests, in a complementary argument, that the conversion of Boccaccio into the antique Lollius testifies to the pose of antiquity which

29

Desmond, Reading Dido, p. 129.



Introduction  11

new, medieval writers were obliged to adopt.30 Nick Havely, on the other hand, wonders about the suppression of Dante’s name in The House of Fame and whether Chaucer’s half-identification of himself as the ‘Englyssh Gaunfride’ recalls ‘Dante’s indirect and quickly qualified claim to fame as the successor to a line of vernacular poets’ in Purgatorio (p. 49). These essays severally find that silences and opaque partial identifications are paradoxically central to Chaucer’s habits of naming, and on the good but un-cited authority of Dante, Boccaccio and others. The Legend of Good Women, like others of Chaucer’s works, is also preoccupied with the fortunes of its characters’ names and the question of ‘name’ in both its senses: of someone’s proper name and of their reputation, a duality which is also discussed in Alcuin Blamires’ essay.31 ‘[M]y name is lost thourgh yow’ (Legend of Good Women, line 1361), Dido complains in her letter to Aeneas in the Legend, echoing a similar statement from the Dido in The House of Fame: ‘thorgh yow is my name lorn’ (line 346). Whereas in the one story in his collection with a good male protagonist, that of Piramus and Thisbe, Chaucer stuck closely to the version that he found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, newly in The Legend of Good Women the lovers learn each other’s names from local gossip: The name of everych gan to other sprynge By women that were neighboures aboute.  (lines 719–20)32

The Legend’s readers, too, learn of the lovers’ names by report: This yonge man was called Piramus, Tysbe hight the maide, Naso seyth thus; And thus by report was hire name yschove That, as they wex in age, wex here love.  (lines 724–7)

Chaucer oddly acknowledges his source in Ovid for the bald fact of the lovers’ proper names. The repetition of ‘thus’ in the third line excerpted here suggests that their mutual and maturing love, presumably also to be read about in Ovid, is offered as an afterthought because their names do already convey and stand in for their true love. On the other hand, in the Legend of Medea and Hypsipyle, Jason’s name stands in for pretended love:

30 31

32

See also the discussion of Lollius in William Rossiter’s essay. Other critics have noted this interest in the question of name in The Legend of Good Women, although they have discussed it in different ways. See, for example, McDonald, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women’, p. 35. For a discussion of Chaucer’s embroidery on his source, see the explanatory notes to the poem in The Riverside Chaucer.

12  Isabel Davis Yif that I live, thy name shal be shove In English that thy sekte shal be knowe!

Have at thee, Jason! Now thyn horn is blowe!  (lines 1381–3) The proper name, Jason, is given a special prominence in the centre of the last line cited here. Whereas Piramus’ and Thisbe’s names were ‘yshove’ as synonyms for true love, Jason’s ‘shal be shove’ as its antonym in Chaucer’s work. In an episode from The House of Fame considered in a number of the essays in this volume, Eolus trumpets the names of Fame’s petitioners; he has two trumpets – one of gold, ‘Clere Laude’, the other black, of ‘Sklaundre’ (lines 1575, 1625) – and sounds them in an entirely arbitrary relation to the petitioners’ conduct and, so, desert.33 In contrast, with the blowing of the horn in the quotation from The Legend above, the narrator sounds confident that ill-repute will stick to Jason’s name and that he can be the instrument which effects that just attachment. Perhaps he takes a cue here from Dante’s assurance in the Inferno that he will be able definitively to ‘name and shame’ the traitor Bocca degli Abati, which is discussed by Nick Havely in his essay below. In The Legend of Good Women, however, the narrator’s confidence is destabilized not only by the mismatch between desert and repute in Chaucer’s other works (such as The House of Fame and perhaps, as Alcuin Blamires suggests, Troilus and Criseyde) but also by the humour in this passage from The Legend itself.34 With its impossible direct address (it is issued from the safe distance afforded by time and geographic space), this threat amounts to a futile and pantomimic fist-shaking which is hardly likely to scare the longdead and securely heroic captain of the Argo. Indeed, after thus threatening Jason, the narrator goes on to acknowledge that there is no easy relation between goodness and the regard of others: But certes, it is bothe routhe and wo That love with false loveres werketh so; For they shal have wel betere love and chere Than he that hath abought his love ful dere, Or hadde in armes many a blody box. For evere as tendre a capoun et the fox, Thow he be fals and hath the foul betrayed, As shal the good-man that therfore hath payed.

33

34

See the essays by Havely, Galloway – who compares Chaucer’s trumpets with Gower’s – and Boffey and Edwards, who track the fortunes of the trumpet image in later works which allude to The House of Fame. For a discussion of Chaucer’s scepticism about fame, see the essays in this volume by Nick Havely and Alcuin Blamires. See also, Cooper, ‘Poetic Fame’, p. 366.



Introduction  13 Al have he to the capoun skille and right, The false fox wol have his part at nyght. (Legend of Good Women, lines 1384–93)

The injustice complained of in love relations here looks a great deal like the unjust workings of Fame in The House of Fame: good opinion may not naturally follow good conduct. The odd analogy in this passage, about the rivalry between the fox and the ‘good-man’, brings the question of entitlement into the contemporary household economy, in a way which hardly fits with the epic register of the rest of the Legend. The extended image pits good masculine conduct against a devious animal force and entirely elides women; ‘love and chere’ – aspects of public reputation and reception – rather than women, precisely, are here compared to the stolen capon.35 The bathos of the image makes this comic, an echo of the many Canterbury Tales where ‘love and chere’, like capons and other things that rightly belong to established patriarchs, are stolen from under their noses. ‘[R]outhe and wo’ it might be, yet in those Tales the readers’ sympathies are rarely recruited for the supposed ‘victims’. What is at stake here is the narrator’s ability unequivocally to dignify and praise goodness (although here the goodness of men, rather than women) and to centralize it in the narrative. Furthermore, the low tone of this quotidian digression raises the question of whether this provincial narrator, preoccupied with the household provisions and objects that are more usually part of fabliaux narratives, really is the man to handle epic material. The enjambment in the quotation I cited previously (‘thy name shal be shove / In English’; lines 1381–2) singles out the word ‘English’ in the second, making it look isolated and weak, as if it is the English language itself which governs the change of subject, and the lowering of tone, into a discussion of poultry security. Jason stands as representative for a ‘sekte’, a word which recalls the Clerk’s dig at the Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales: ‘Whos lyf and al hire secte God mayntene / in heigh maistrie’ (Clerk’s Tale, lines 1171–2), as though the narrator of The Legend might really establish an anti-masculinism as prevalent as the more established tradition of antifeminism in which the Wife is embroiled. Readers will rightly be sceptical, even though the centrality of male perfidy in The Legend suggests a thorough-going attempt. Indeed, The Legend of Good Women explores more fully than Boccaccio had done, male, as much as female, exemplum, and masculine discredit as much as anything else. The question of masculine reputation develops a pronounced reflexive twist in Chaucer’s Legend, where, as others have also suggested, the narrator of the Prologue is partially identified with the men who appear 35

In this way my reading differs from Delany, Naked Text, p. 200, and Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, pp. 216–17, who have both imagined that the capon represents Medea or Woman more broadly.

14  Isabel Davis

later in the stories.36 While Aeneas kneels to Dido in the Aeolian cave, and while several of the other false lovers also fall to their knees, the narrator kneels (F, line 115; see also G, line 198) to Alceste, gesturally imitating those suspect suitors; kneeling in the Legend creates repeated points of male perfidy. Whereas the narrator of The Legend of Good Women proposes to clear his own name by ‘shov(ing)’ Jason’s, the idea of a ‘sekte’ headed up by Jason implicates the male narrator himself. The God of Love is also interested in literary sources and the subject of female reputation to be found there. In the G Prologue, Love baulks: Ne in alle thy bokes ne coudest thow nat fynde Som story of wemen that were goode and trewe?  (G, lines 271–2)

The question is phrased to expect the answer ‘yes’ from the addressed narrator, although he does not immediately give a response in the text. However, Love suggests that the narrator look for examples of good women in some rather unlikely places. Included in his list, for example, is Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum, which, although it included lists of chaste women, such as Lucrece, was notorious for being at the root of an influential tradition of misogyny. The question may also provoke the reader to think, beyond Love’s recommended reading, about the rest of Chaucer’s library. She or he has already been asked to recall the translation of the Roman de la Rose and Troilus and Criseyde and so the question refers alert readers to the sources of those works: the Roman de la rose of Guillaume de Lorris but more particularly its continuation by Jean de Meun and Boccaccio’s Filostrato (if they, like modern readers, also distrusted the reference in Troilus and Criseyde to Lollius). Neither text was famous for its praise of women, of course. Chaucer thus self-consciously pegs his own reputation to those of other male authors – Jean de Meun and Boccaccio – which were possibly ironically, but nevertheless explicitly, made through their contributions to literary antifeminism, a tradition which worked through the issues of reputation in another way. Indeed, given that arguments are put on both sides by Love and Alceste, the Legend seems less inclined to settle the question of Chaucer’s conduct towards women than to use his alleged ambivalence on the ‘woman question’ to place his work in proximity, and to offer a counterblast, to that of others who were more directly implicated. Oddly, and presciently, the ambivalent reactions of Alceste and the God of Love to Chaucer’s work anticipate the confusions of later readers of The Legend. The Legend of Good Women has not always met with a positive evaluation from later readers and critics, who, like Alceste and Eros in The Legend, have also been concerned with whether or not Chaucer has served 36

See, for example, Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, p. 329; McDonald, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women’, p. 24.



Introduction  15

women well and, more basically perhaps, whether or not he has written a work worth reading. Of all Chaucer’s works, the reception history of The Legend is perhaps the most fraught.37 Lisa J. Kiser summarizes thus: ‘There are, I fear, legions of unsatisfied readers of these stories, most of whom think them narrative failures, understandably abandoned by the poet himself.’38 The narrative about Chaucer’s having tired of writing The Legend and abandoning it half-finished has now been roundly dismissed.39 That dismissal notwithstanding, the mixed critical reception of the poem is still one of the main topics within Legend criticism. As Nicola F. McDonald has argued, however, the manuscript evidence suggests that the poem was a popular one in and just after its own time.40 She concludes that then, just as now with the importance given to the poem in recent feminist scholarship, women were eager readers of a poem which so closely concerned them. Yet her case studies – of Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.19 and Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.1.6 – demonstrate a decided conservatism among the poem’s fifteenth-century readership, who did not necessarily celebrate the pluralities and humour of the poem, aspects that she suggests were appreciated by the ladies of the Ricardian court.41 Several essays in this volume open out the conversation about what impressions of Chaucer were current in the generations after his death; like McDonald they mark significant shifts of reception, shifts which are intricately linked to their political contexts. Thus Andrew Galloway, in line with McDonald’s Strohmian thesis about the ‘narrowing’ of fifteenth-century responses to Chaucer, identifies a transition from Ricardian to Lancastrian modes, finding a penitential theme within fifteenth-century depictions of Chaucer and his work which took as their prompt Chaucer’s own habit of oblique self-naming. Stephanie Downes and Joanna Bellis are concerned to link their findings – on the immediate French reception of Chaucer’s work and on evaluations of Chaucer’s contribution to English respectively – to the vicissitudes of Anglo-French relations from the Hundred Years War to the end of the sixteenth century. Mike Rodman Jones investigates the increasing specialization within the Protestant use of Chaucer’s name, while Thomas A. Prendergast finds a change from ‘the invented textual presence of Chaucer in the late Middle Ages to the invented personal presence of the poet in the early modern period’ (p. 186). There is also a recurrent pattern, among these considerations of later audiences, of writers who used Chaucer’s name rather as Chaucer had used the names of others – to find a home in the literary 37 38 39 40 41

For a full survey of those reactions see, for example, Minnis, Shorter Poems, pp. 323–5. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales, p. 25. Most particularly by Robert Frank Jr, Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Cambridge, MA, 1972), e.g. pp. 207–8. McDonald, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women’, pp. 33–4. Ibid., pp. 37–8.

16  Isabel Davis

canon; Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, for example, discover Pope selffashioning in this Chaucerian way, while Jamie C. Fumo finds Edmund Spenser and Francis Kynaston attempting a similar feat. Incidentally and amusingly, Jones and Fumo both find that the little phrase ‘up and down’ is particularly identified with Chaucer by his early modern readers. ‘Up and down’, which appears several times in Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, reoccurs regularly in later Chauceriana, an apparent shorthand for Chaucer’s famous predilection for double entendres. Yet for all this evidence of Chaucer’s posthumous fame, albeit in forms which he could never have imagined or anticipated – as, for example, his use by the anti-tobacco campaigner whom Prendergast discusses – it was a risk for Chaucer not to identify himself definitively within The Legend in a manuscript culture which did not, as Boffey and Edwards’ discussion of the ‘transmissional vicissitudes’ of The House of Fame shows, reliably attribute works to their right authors. There was, they write, ‘little sustained authorial attempt … to shape the patterns of … circulation’ (p. 88), thus discovering another aspect of Chaucer’s habit of self-vacancy even in a poem which was precisely about fame and naming. Chaucer and Fame begins with three essays, by William T. Rossiter, Nick Havely and Elizaveta Strakhov, which investigate some of Chaucer’s source material and in particular Dante, Petrarch and Statius, and which consider Chaucer’s investment in, resistance to and suppression of his Italian and Latin precursors and thus his contribution to the process of canon formation. William Rossiter argues that the language of illumination in Chaucer’s work, which Chaucer found and borrowed from Dante’s and Petrarch’s paeans to Virgil, was, in turn, applied to Chaucer by his immediate successors, Lydgate and Hoccleve. He argues that this language of light threads together, in a way that early readers of Chaucer acknowledged, The House of Fame with The Clerk’s Prologue and the close of Troilus and Criseyde, forming a ‘discursive continuum’ which encapsulates Chaucer’s engagement with concepts of claritas and fama. Nick Havely shines a forensic light on Book 3 of The House of Fame and its treatment of Dante’s discussion of fame and infamy, concluding that Chaucer appropriates Dantean modes even as he distances himself from the frameworks of justice that Dante builds around the administration of fame. Elizaveta Strakhov argues that Chaucer’s negotiation of literary genealogy (and, in particular, the suppression of contemporary names, in favour of ancient ones such as Statius’) in Troilus and Criseyde parallels the denatured and dysfunctional genealogical dynamics of Theban mythography; both, she maintains, articulate thwarted lineage. After them, with assistance from Lydgate’s Troy Book and Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Alcuin Blamires considers Criseyde’s dilemma in Troilus and Criseyde, arguing that, in his Trojan heroine, Chaucer develops a sceptical position on fama which demonstrates that it was ‘thinkable’ to propose self-



Introduction  17

sufficiency over the vagaries and calumnies of public reputation. Interestingly for the question of Chaucer’s self-definition, Blamires finds that Criseyde’s suggestions for thus repudiating infamy are also shared by the authorial avatar, Geffrey, in The House of Fame. Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards’ essay concerns the manuscripts and early print editions of Chaucer’s House of Fame, in a culture of unreliable textual attribution. They assess the evidence for readers’ responses both to Chaucer’s name and to the metaphors – the trumpets and architectural structures, for example – which Chaucer develops around fama in his poem, up to the self-interested appeal to Chaucer’s memory in the work of Alexander Pope in the early eighteenth century. Andrew Galloway also tracks down Chaucer’s reputation in the generations after his death, drawing a distinction between Ricardian and Lancastrian poetic personae in the work of Chaucer and his contemporary Gower, finding a particular investment in a pose of penitence. Galloway suggests that Chaucer’s habit of seeing himself as if from ‘outside’ promises the reader an apparent ‘immediacy or physicality’, a promise which is broken by the distances produced by the written word. This Derridean gap, his essay argues, parallels the problem of achieving penitential closure in Chaucer’s poetry itself, but also prefigures the development of an image of an ‘aged and penitent’ Chaucer, at some variance from the poet’s historical person, in the work of those fifteenth-century writers – Hoccleve, Lydgate and Scogan – who immediately received his work. But Chaucer’s very first critic, Stephanie Downes reminds us, was the Frenchman Eustace Deschamps in the 1390s, whose evaluation of Chaucer’s work is ambiguous enough to admit a number of different readings from modern critics. However, she goes on to argue that the history of the French reception of Chaucer, into the sixteenth century, may have had more to do with the poet’s name than anything he actually wrote. She details two curious and disparate applications of Chaucer’s name: one from Gentain Hervert d’Orléans, who counter-intuitively deployed Chaucer’s anticlericalism in the service of the Counter-Reformation on the eve of the French Wars of Religion; the other a sour nationalistic assessment, from André Thévet, of Chaucer’s alleged attempt to appropriate the reputation of Jean de Meun. Downes uses these examples to chart the ‘disputes over the cultural capital of each emerging nation’ (p. 141), concluding that Chaucer’s name and fame ‘started multilingual, cross-Channel conversations that continued into the early modern age’ (p. 142). Like Downes, Joanna Bellis is also concerned with Anglo-French relations, in her study of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century reception and characterizations of Chaucer’s English; she especially investigates the moniker ‘Father of English’, which Chaucer acquired in the early modern period. She charts a shift from praise of Chaucer’s ‘enlumynyng’ and ‘embellishing’ of English to praise of his vernacular plainness and purity. She argues that this

18  Isabel Davis

volte-face in early modern attitudes to older forms of English, and Chaucer’s English especially, was governed in part by political relations with France. In particular, she suggests, a late-medieval minority discourse, which developed in the context of the Hundred Years War and which was hostile to French aureation, was alive and useful as late as the late sixteenth century. Mike Rodman Jones, in his essay on ‘Chaucer the Puritan’, adds texture to our picture of early Protestant uses of Chaucer’s work, arguing that these appropriations are more diverse and often more appreciative of Chaucer’s comedy than we might expect. There is not, he argues, one Protestant Chaucer; rather, the poet’s name and work was mobilized for more specific sectarian ends. In particular Jones identifies the late-sixteenth-century and early-seventeenth-century development of a Presbyterian Chaucer, around whom there was a field of controversy. Thomas Prendergast’s essay tackles the grand narrative about the shift from a pre-modern culture of renown to the personal cult of celebrity in the eighteenth century. He demonstrates a change in Chaucer’s posthumous treatment, from textual in-filling by the early editors of Chaucer’s work to the strange revivification of the person of Chaucer in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury writing, which, he argues, demonstrates ‘an ur-culture of literary celebrity’ (p. 192). In particular, he investigates the curious case of Richard Brathwait’s Chaucer’s Incensed Ghost (1617), which co-opted Chaucer for the anti-tobacco cause. Jamie C. Fumo’s essay about temporalities concludes Chaucer and Fame. She raises the spectre of time which everywhere haunts our volume, which has variously moved with Chaucer from Augustan Rome up to (in her essay) Lord Byron in the nineteenth century. Fumo investigates the later reception of Chaucer’s literary reputation as ‘ancient’ but also the way in which Chaucer managed and projected that reputation through his engagement with ancient Ovid. Moving through Chaucer’s oeuvre, she considers his variant posthumous and self-representations: as a child, as an ancient father, as middleaged man and also as somehow ‘timeless’ and transhistorical. She ends with a discussion of two editions of Chaucer produced in the early days of new technologies – print and the internet – which preserve both the impression of antiquity and modernity which Chaucer himself lodged in his self-portraits. Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception, then, is concerned with the theme of fame in a double way, exploring not only Chaucer’s philosophical and poetical preoccupation with this theme, but also his own reputation among his near contemporaries and in the generations that came after him. In this way it is focused on questions of literary influence, and of the politics of authority from the late Middle Ages and into the early modern period. Together these essays cover the questions of Chaucer’s borrowings and translations, his relationship with his readers and fellow writers, and the political use to which later writers put his reputation. Chaucer and Fame thus first stresses the internationality of Chaucer’s citatory range and contemporary



Introduction  19

milieu, and, secondly, finds the Middle Ages in animated discussion with the periods either side of it about the nature of literary reputation and canon formation. A significant thread within this book discovers the paradoxical centrality of absence – of names and bodies – in the Chaucerian discourse of fame, an ambiguous core which could be variously in-filled by later writers, hoping to use Chaucer’s enduring fame in their own service. How strange that at the heart of this metamorphic poet’s literary fame – which, as Chaucer himself describes so sonorously in The House of Fame, is reputedly so noisy – are, after all, several missing names and a repeatedly retracted corpus: the illusion, paradoxically, of silence.

1 Chaucer Joins the Schiera: The House of Fame, Italy and the Determination of Posterity William T. Rossiter

T

he House of Fame dramatizes Chaucer’s interaction with trecento conceptions of the role and the function of the poet, as a number of commentators have shown.1 This chapter will explore the nature of Chaucer’s response to these conceptions, or re-conceptions (of classical ideas), but will also suggest the way in which The House of Fame forms a discursive continuum with The Clerk’s Prologue and the conclusion to Troilus and Criseyde – that is, how together they constitute an intertextual discourse on poetic claritas and fama.2 These works present us with Chaucer’s conversations, if you will,

1

2

See for example J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame: An Exposition of the House of Fame (Oxford, 1968); J. A. W. Bennett, ‘Chaucer, Dante and Boccaccio’, Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 89–113; and, in the same volume, Piero Boitani, ‘What Dante Meant to Chaucer’, pp. 115–39. See also Piero Boitani, ‘Chaucer’s Labyrinth: Fourteenth-Century Literature and Language’, Chaucer Review 17 (1983), 197–220; Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (Cambridge, 1984); Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, NY, 1984); A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 22–30; Steve Ellis, ‘Chaucer, Dante, and Damnation’, Chaucer Review 22 (1988), 282–94; Robin Kirkpatrick, English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue and Divergence (London, 1995), pp. 39–51; Helen Cooper, ‘The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour’, New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999), 39–66; and Glenn A. Steinberg, ‘Chaucer in the Field of Cultural Production: Humanism, Dante, and The House of Fame’, Chaucer Review 35 (2000), 182–203, to name but a select few. Fama differs from claritas both etymologically and qualitatively. Fama, for the medieval mind, stems from fari or loqui (to speak). It is the product of vox, and is synonymous with infamy and rumour. Claritas, as Boitani writes, ‘is a “figurative” term, for it includes the meaning of light, splendour, effulgence’ (Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, p. 39). According to Seneca, fame and glory (fama and gloria) are dependent upon the opinions of many, whereas claritas is dependent upon the informed opinion of the learned, moral few, and can be cultivated in silence, as it prospers by sententia as opposed to vox, by the signified rather than the signifier. I am entirely indebted to Piero Boitani’s erudite tracing of the terminology of fame and renown as it passed from antiquity to the Middle

22  William T. Rossiter

with two models of humanism – one of which is Dantean, the other Petrarchan.3 Crucially, this continuum confirms Chaucer’s recognition that there is a debate concerning humanism and fame in trecento Italy, which arose out of what Robin Kirkpatrick has termed ‘the wake of the Commedia’.4 Chaucer acknowledges two models of poetic fame, the one of ‘the grete poete of Ytaille / That highte Dant’, as he is described in the Monk’s Tale (lines 2460–1), the other of ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete … whos retorike sweete / Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie’ (Clerk’s Prologue, lines 31–3).5 One might be forgiven for thinking that Chaucer is being fickle in his poetic affections, seeming to shift allegiance from Dante to Petrarch, but if one looks at what the Monk and the Clerk actually say (not to mention what they actually do and represent as a monk and a clerk per se), then there is an obvious distinction between Chaucer’s conception of Petrarch’s fama/ claritas and his conception of Dante’s. These formulations of fame constitute two different poetical and political perspectives. Ultimately, Chaucer’s conception of poetic renown is informed by both of these figures – and the antique models of fama, gloria and claritas which stand behind them – synthesizing their views into a discourse upon fame which will determine his own posterity. As I see it, it is best to clarify this conceptual distinction first. Dante, for Chaucer, is ‘the grete poete of Ytaille’, and that genitive is important, as Dante is the poet of vernacular eloquence, the parlar materno as it was spoken by Italians (or Tuscans, at least).6 As such, the Monk’s accolade can be understood as signifying the great Italian poet who writes in Italian. Petrarch, on the other hand, is ‘a worthy clerk’, a scholar (but not a Scholastic), who illumined Italy with his poetry, and whose fame extended throughout Europe. This language of illumination, informed by the etymology of claritas (bright-

3

4 5 6

Ages in chapter 2 of Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame. In relation to the Senecan distinction between claritas, fama and gloria, see pp. 37–41. On the nature of Dante’s humanism, see Roberto Weiss, ‘Dante e l’umanesimo del suo tempo’, Letture Classensi 2 (1969), 11–27. See also Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, p. 13. See Robin Kirkpatrick, ‘The Wake of the Commedia: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron’, Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Boitani, pp. 201–30. All quotations of Chaucer’s works are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1988). As Chaucer would become in English, according to John Shirley: ‘Geffrey Chaucier / Whiche in oure wolgare / hade neuer his pere / Of eloquencyale retorryke’ [my italics]. Cited in Derek Brewer, ed., Chaucer: The Critical Heritage (London, 1978), vol. 1, p. 65. The reference to ‘wolgare … eloquencyale’ cannot but suggest Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia. Petrarch refers to Dante as ‘ille nostri eloquii dux uulgaris’ [the master of our vernacular literature] in Seniles, Book 5, letter 2. See Monica Berté’s edition of this letter (Florence, 1998); for the English translation, see Francesco Petrarca, Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII: Letters of Old Age, ed. and trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin and Reta S. Bernardo, 2 vols (Baltimore, MA, 1992), vol. 1, p. 160.



Chaucer Joins the Schiera  23

ness, splendour), is found in both Dante and Petrarch and is a crucial part of the discourse of early humanism. As Petrarch said of the pagan past in his Invective against a detractor of Italy, ‘even among their errors some intellects shone forth. Their eyesight, although enshrouded in dense fog, was still vigorous.’7 It is this light that Petrarch hopes will be relumed in the future, and that Chaucer’s Clerk ascribes to Petrarch himself.8 Furthermore, this language of light opens Petrarch’s verse epistle to the figure who in many ways is at the heart of The House of Fame, and of the trecento discourse of poetic fame, namely Virgil: ‘O luminary of eloquence … illustrious Maro’ (Familiares, Book 24, letter 11).9 Virgil provides the model to which both Dante and Petrarch aspire; indeed, the Pilgrim’s address to Virgil in the opening canto of the Inferno prefigures Petrarch’s ‘luminary of eloquence’:   O de li altri poeti onore e lume, vagliami ’l lungo studio e ’l grande amore che m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.   Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore, tu se’ solo colui da cu’io tolsi lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore.  (Canto 1, lines 82–7) [O honour and light of the other poets, let my long study and great love avail me, that has caused me to search through your volume. You are my master and my author, you alone are he from whom I have taken the pleasing style that has won me honour.]10

Virgil is the author of Dante’s ‘bello stilo’ and hence the means whereby honour is transferred from the Latin poet to the vernacular poet, as can be seen in the strategic repetition of onore in these lines. Virgil’s lume, his claritas, is the cause of Dante’s fame.

7

8

9 10

‘Elucebant tamen inter errores, neque ideo minus vivaces errant oculi, quamvis tenebris et densa caligine circumsepti’ (10.101 [my italics]). See Invectives, ed. and trans. David M. Marsh (Cambridge, MA, 2003), pp. 456–7. See also Theodor Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the Dark Ages’, Speculum 17 (1942), 226–42. What is immediately apparent is the similarity between this account and Sidney’s reference to Chaucer in the Defence of Poesy: ‘I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk so stumblingly after him.’ Sir Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford, 2002), p. 242. Chaucer had by Sidney’s time become equivalent to the poetae antiquae, as Petrarch and Dante had in Italy. Francesco Petrarca, Rerum familiarum libri: Letters on Familiar Matters XVII–XXIV, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Baltimore, MA, 1985), p. 340. All quotations from and translations of the Commedia are taken from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling and Ronald Martinez, 3 vols (Oxford, 1996–2011), unless otherwise indicated.

24  William T. Rossiter

In his introduction to the tale of Dido in the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer writes his own encomium to Virgil: Glorye and honour, Virgil Mantoan, Be to thy name! and I shal, as I can, Folwe thy lanterne, as thow gost byforn How Eneas to Dido was forsworn.  (F, lines 924–7)

Chaucer here appears to conflate Beatrice’s apostrophe to Virgil in the Inferno (‘O anima cortese mantoana / di dui la fama ancora nel mondo dura / e durerà quanto ’l mondo lontana’ [O courteous Mantuan soul, whose fame still lasts in the world, and will last as far as the world will go]; Canto 2, lines 58–60, my italics) with Cato’s lines from Purgatorio (‘Chi v’ha guidati? O chi vi fu lucerna, / uscendo fuor della profonda notte’ [Who has guided you, or what has been your lantern, coming forth from the deep night …?]; Canto 1, lines 43–4, my italics).11 However, Chaucer’s lines which immediately follow, ‘In thyn Eneyde and Naso [Ovid] wol I take / The tenor, and the grete effectes make’ (F, lines 928–9) reiterate his cross-referencing of the Aeneid with the tale of Dido as it appears in Ovid’s Heroides. This conflation first appears in The House of Fame, where the account of the Aeneid in Book 1 is cursorily concluded following the Dido episode, leading Helen Cooper to argue that, where in The House of Fame, ‘Chaucer exposes rival versions [of a given narrative], Dante eliminates them. … The Commedia is a poem that claims the authority of truth; The House of Fame challenges the possibility of ever attaining that’.12 Whether he approves or not, Chaucer evidently recognizes the self-serving ends to which Virgil is put by Dante’s praise and imitation of ‘lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore’. However, Dante’s imitatio is not the same as Petrarch’s – the Commedia transfers Virgilian poetics to the vernacular; when Petrarch imitates Virgil, he writes the Africa, a Latin epic, for which he was crowned poet laureate on 8 April 1341, despite the work remaining unfinished, like The House of Fame.13 For Petrarch, as Kenelm Foster has argued, the Italian vernacular was an inferior or debased form of Latin – hence he can later admit to Boccaccio (in Seniles, Book 5, letter 2) that Dante is the dux uulgaris, but this is rather

11

12

13

Bennett, ‘Chaucer, Dante and Boccaccio’, pp. 109–10, notes that ‘mantuanus was an epitheton perpetuum. But Dante uses it in the form “mantovano” no less than four times, and notably at Virgil’s first appearance. … Chaucer evidently read [lucerne] as addressed to Dante’s visible guide.’ Cooper, ‘Four Last Things’, p. 62. Cooper’s position here is akin to that of Sheila Delany in Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Gainesville, FL, 1994; first published 1972). Cooper’s discussion of Chaucer’s scepticism towards Virgil (and by extension towards Dante) is also consonant with the arguments of Ellis and Steinberg. On Dante’s and Chaucer’s choice of vernacular uncertainty over Latin monumentality, see Kirkpatrick, English and Italian Literature, p. 45.



Chaucer Joins the Schiera  25

a back-handed compliment (akin to saying that Dante is top of the second division).14 Nevertheless, Virgil is the mark against which poetic celebrity is to be measured in the trecento, and so it comes as no surprise that ‘Geffrey’ (House of Fame, line 729), upon entering the Temple of Venus – which Piero Boitani terms ‘the shrine of literature and the temple of Virgil’ – reads those famous opening words inscribed upon a brass plaque: Arma virumque cano.15 It is at this point that one must consider the debate as to whether Chaucer’s aspirations were the same as those of Dante and Petrarch, and whether he fully subscribes in The House of Fame to the trecento conception(s) of the poet’s role and function.16 Boitani argues that Chaucer’s translation of Virgil’s opening lines is ‘a solemn moment for English literature … pointing to an ideal and an ambition which will dominate the literary scene until the eighteenth century’.17 He proceeds to contend that ‘Chaucer makes a precise choice for the vernacular and a straightforward type of narrative … and the constancy with which Chaucer pursues exclusively the ends of his vernacular … is even more extreme than Dante’s passion for the “volgare”’.18 On the basis of this argument, Chaucer’s humanism is Dantean, and involves the transference of bello stilo from Latin to the vernacular. Yet Chaucer, I would argue, is less concerned with Dantean imitatio than he is with translatio: in The House of Fame at least, Chaucer does not imitate Virgilian style; instead, he translates Virgil into a style which is recognizably Chaucerian: ‘I wol now singe, yif I kan, / The armes and also the man’ (lines 143–4). That little caveat – ‘yif I kan’, which is repeated in the tentative ‘as I can’ in the passage from the Legend of Good Women discussed above – has given way to a wider debate over Chaucer’s acceptance of the poet as vates. A. C. Spearing, in an argument countered in part by Robin Kirkpatrick, claims that

14

15 16

17 18

See Kenelm Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh, 1984), p. 26. Albert Russell Ascoli has recently argued for Petrarch’s imitation of Dante’s classical works: see ‘Blinding the Cyclops: Petrarch after Dante’, Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition, ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Theodore J. Cachey, Jr (Notre Dame, IN, 2009), pp. 114–73. I have noted the critical work on Petrarch’s reading of Dante – of which there is a great deal – elsewhere, so will not repeat it here. See William T. Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 75–6, n. 18. Boitani, ‘Chaucer’s Labyrinth’, p. 200. Dante and Petrarch clearly do not share a unified conception of the poet’s role. However, Jonathan Usher, in a superlative essay, has suggested that the discussion of fame in Book 3 of Petrarch’s Secretum ‘would seem to be a highly concentrated paraphrase of the discussion of artistic glory and impermanence in Purgatorio 11’. See ‘Petrarch’s Second (and Third) Death’, Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators and Translators over 700 years, ed. Martin McLaughlin, Letizia Panizza and Peter Hainsworth, Proceedings of the British Academy 146 (2007), p. 77, n. 42. Boitani, ‘Chaucer’s Labyrinth’, p. 200. Ibid., pp. 200–1.

26  William T. Rossiter Chaucer is no bard, confident in his inspiration, and his ‘yif I kan’ tellingly betrays the medieval poet’s role as deferential entertainer, his audience’s humble servant … Dante might be what he needed, but first he had to come to terms with Dante’s unfamiliar grandeur. What happens in The House of Fame is that Chaucer repeats as uneasy and unfinished comedy Dante’s sublime experience of visionary rapture.19

According to Spearing, then, Chaucer’s poem is parodic, and there is plenty of evidence to support this reading, not least the scholastic Eagle, the debased Virgil to Geffrey’s comic cosmic Pilgrim.20 The Eagle itself, as it first appears, is taken directly from Canto 9 of the Purgatorio; Chaucer’s description of it at the end of Book 1 and the opening of Book 2 – Hyt was of gold, and shon so bryghte That never sawe men such a syghte, … But never was ther dynt of thonder … That so swithe gan descende As this foul … And with hys sours ayen up wente, Me caryinge in his clawes starke  (House of Fame, lines 503–4; 534; 538–9; 544–5)

– corresponds with Dante’s description of it in his dream: in sogno mi parea veder sospesa un’aguglia nel ciel con penne d’oro … Poi mi parea che, poi rotata un poco, terribil come folgor discendesse e me rapisse suso infino al foco.  (Purgatorio, Canto 9, lines 19–20, 28–30) [in dream I seemed to see an eagle hovering in the sky, with golden feathers … Then it seemed to me that, having wheeled a little, it descended terrible as lightning, and carried me off, up as far as the fire.]

However, here Dante’s Pilgrim awakes in terror, only to find Virgil by his side, who says ‘Non aver tema … fatti secur’ [Have no fear … be assured] (Purgatorio, Canto 9, lines 46–7). In Chaucer’s poem, these words are spoken by the Eagle, who thinks Geffrey is asleep: ‘Awak! And be not agast … Be ful assured’ (House of Fame, lines 556–7, 581). But if Virgil represents Reason 19 20

Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, p. 23. See Kirkpatrick, English and Italian Literature, p. 40, for contra. As mentioned earlier, Cooper, Ellis and Steinberg also refute the ‘homage’ reading of The House of Fame, preferring instead readings which highlight parody, satire and opposition to Dante’s conceptions of poetry, fame and judgement.



Chaucer Joins the Schiera  27

in the Commedia, then the Eagle, in The House of Fame, represents Logic (in the scholastic sense), although, comically, he thinks that he represents Reason: ‘“O yis! yis!” / Quod he to me, “that kan I preve / Be reson worthy to leve”’ (lines 706–8).21 Dante’s didactic guide through the underworld would appear to be the object of Chaucer’s gentle amusement here, suggesting that, in The House of Fame at least, the Dantean conception of poetic renown has not been assimilated. The reason why Chaucer replaces Dante’s Virgil with the Eagle possibly lies in Canto 4 of the Inferno, in which the Pilgrim is introduced to Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan:22   Così vid’i’ adunar la bella scola di quel segnor de l’altissimo canto che sovra li altri com’ aquila vola.   Da ch’ebber ragionato insieme alquanto, volsersi a me con salutevol cenno, e’l mio maestro sorrise di tanto;   e più d’onore ancora assai mi fenno, ch’e’ sì mi fecer de la loro schiera, sì ch’io fui sesto tra cotanto senno.  (Canto 4, lines 94–103) [So saw I come together the lovely school of that lord of highest song, who soars above the others like an eagle. When they had spoken together for a time they turned to me with sign of greeting, and my master smiled at that; And they did me an even greater honour, for they made me one of their band, so that I was sixth among such wisdom.]

This is a crucial moment: the great poets of antiquity honour Dante and make him sixth in line, and he walks and talks with them – ‘one of their band’ – until they reach ‘un nobile castello’, surrounded by seven walls (traditionally thought to symbolize the seven liberal arts), with the seven gates through which the six poets pass into a fresh green meadow (‘in prato 21

22

Kirkpatrick rightly argues that ‘To the exegete who first said that Virgil is Reason (it was not Dante), all subsequent readers must be grateful. But no one can suppose that Virgil is only that.’ See Robin Kirkpatrick, Dante: The Divine Comedy (Cambridge, 1987), p. 17. Chaucer’s Eagle delights in scholastic exposition and logical demonstrations in the didactic style: Now herkene wel, for-why I wille Tellen the a propre skille And a worthy demonstracion In myn ymagynacion. (House of Fame [hereafter HF], lines 725–8) Chaucer might also have taken an ironic cue from Inferno, Canto 24, lines 47–8: ‘seggendo in piuma / in fama non si vien, né sotto coltre’ [one does not find fame sitting on feathers, or under covers (my translation)]. More immediate sources are Virgil’s account of feathered Fama (‘sunt corpore plumae’) in Aeneid, Book 4, line 181. See Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, pp. 21–2.

28  William T. Rossiter

di fresca verdura’; Inferno, Canto 4, line 111), which Boccaccio glossed as symbolizing evergreen fame.23 This acceptance by the most famous poets of antiquity – a symbolic bequest of the poetic laurel – pre-empts the selfaggrandizing discussion of worldly fame in Purgatorio, Canto 11, and appears to be a stumbling block for Chaucer in The House of Fame. It does not appear that Geffrey is made sixth among such company in Fame’s House, which is Chaucer’s equivalent to the Palace of Limbo. Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan (but not Horace) are present, but they stand atop pillars, far removed from the lowly gaze of Geffrey, who must crane his neck to see them (‘hye / As I myghte see hyt with myn yë’; House of Fame, line 1492). The effect is that of entering a Gothic cathedral – one becomes small through looking up. However, we may be in danger of confusing ‘Geffrey’ with Chaucer: there are two Chaucers (and possibly three) in The House of Fame, just as there are two Dantes in the Commedia. Chaucer is perhaps not as modest as Geffrey, just as the narrator of the Commedia is not as sympathetic as the Pilgrim towards those damned whom he encounters.24 Dante’s concealed self-advertisement in Purgatorio, Canto 11, as the unnamed poet who might supersede the fame of Guido Cavalcanti and Guido Guinnizelli, just as Giotto supplanted Cimabue in painting (Canto 11, lines 94–9), develops into his open expression of desire for the poetic laurel in the opening canto of the Paradiso: O buono Appollo, a l’ultimo lavoro fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso come dimandi a dar l’amato alloro.   Infino a qui l’un giogo di Parnaso assai mi fu, ma or con amendue m’è uopo intrar ne l’aringo rimaso:   entra nel petto mio, e spira tue sì come quando Marsïa traesti 23

24

See Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, pp. 82–3. See also David Wallace, ‘Chaucer and Boccaccio’s Early Writings’, Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Boitani, p. 151. Boccaccio writes: ‘Entrò adunque l’autore, per gli effetti delle liberali arti, con questi cinque dottori, co’ quali si dee intendere ciascun altro entrare, il quale degno si fa per suo studio imitando i valenti uomini, nel prato della verzicante fama della filosofia, dove da questi medesimi, cioè da’ valenti uomini, e massimamente da’ poeti, gli son dimostrati coloro che per le filosofiche operazioni meritarono la fama, la quale ancora è verde’ [The author, accompanied by the five poets, then enters – through the effects of the liberal arts, being rendered worthy by his studious imitation of these worthy men – into the meadow of the verdant fame of philosophy. These same men here represent those who merit evergreen fame due to their philosophical works, especially poets (Esposizione allegorica, Inferno, Canto 4, lines 111–67)]. Boccaccio refers to the poets as ‘dottori’, following Dante’s frequent use of the term ‘dottore’ when referring to Virgil. See Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, ed. Giorgio Padoan, vol. 6 of Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. V. Branca et al. (Milan, 1965). See Kenelm Foster, The Two Dantes and Other Studies (London, 1977).



Chaucer Joins the Schiera  29 de la vagina de le membre sue.   O divina virtù, si mi ti presti tanto che l’ombra del beato regno segnata nel mio capo io manifesti,   vedra’mi al piè del tuo diletto legno venire e coronarmi de le foglie che la materia e tu mi farai degno.  (Canto 1, lines 13–27) [O good Apollo, for this last labour make me such a vessel of your power as you require to bestow the beloved laurel. Until now one peak of Parnassus has been enough for me, but now with both of them I must enter upon what of the field remains: come into my breast and breathe there, as when you drew Marsyas forth from the sheath of his members. O divine power, if you lend me so much of yourself to me that I may make manifest the shadow of the blessed kingdom that is stamped within my head, you will see me come to the foot of your beloved tree, and crown myself with the leaves of which the subject and you will make me worthy.]

Chaucer famously reworks these lines as the Invocation to Book 3 of The House of Fame: O God of science and of lyght, Appollo, thurgh thy grete myght, This lytel laste bok thou gye! Nat that I wilne, for maistrye, Here art poetical be shewed, But for the rym is lyght and lewed, Yit make hyt sumwhat agreable, Though som vers fayle in a sillable; And that I do no diligence To shewe craft, but o sentence. And yif, devyne vertu, thow Wilt helpe me to shewe now That in myn hed ymarked ys – Loo, that is for to menen this, The Hous of Fame for to descryve – Thou shalt se me go as blyve Unto the nexte laure y see, And kysse yt, for hyt is thy tree. Now entre in my brest anoon!  (lines 1091–109)

Commentators are understandably divided in their response to Chaucer’s translation of Dante’s paean, and it is worth briefly tracing their divergence. Bennett claims that ‘behind Chaucer’s appropriation of this prayer lies the fact that he is the first Englishman to share Dante’s sense of the worth of poetry and the act of poetic creation’, but also notes that Chaucer’s ‘humble prayer … seems deliberately to be distancing himself and his “little book”

30  William T. Rossiter

from his great exemplar, as if to emphasize that he would never presume to essay Dante’s task’.25 However, Chaucer stresses that ‘art poetical’ will ‘Nat … be shewed’, a statement which, together with his concern with ‘craft’ or makyng – the emphasis on ‘rym … verse … sillable’ which is absent from Dante’s invocatio – ostensibly constitutes Chaucer’s refusal to identify with Dante’s sense of poetic vocation.26 Boitani agrees with Bennett to an extent, when he argues that the Invocation to Book 3 illustrates how Chaucer ‘comes to understand the limits of his “vertu” and his “art”, measuring them against Dante’s achievements’ and so consequently he ‘shuts out the sacred and prophetic nature of Dante’s most exalted poetry’.27 Bennett’s suggestion that Chaucer does not feel adequate to ‘Dante’s task’ is not quite the same as Boitani’s position that Chaucer ‘shuts out’ the Dantean sublime. In this, Boitani is closer to Spearing, who claims that the Invocation ‘shows more signs of unease in the sublime mode than the previous one did’, and that Chaucer ‘omits much from Dante that must have seemed to him to be excessively difficult in its allusiveness or to make excessively arrogant claims for the poet’.28 Helen Cooper agrees with Spearing’s view of Chaucer’s withdrawal from such claims, noting that ‘Dante declares with a proud conviction of his own abilities that he will laureate himself’, whereas Chaucer ‘will, more humbly, pay homage to the laurel and kiss it’.29 Steinberg, going further, claims that Chaucer’s humility here ‘is frankly comic … [he] wholly undermines Dante’s classical pretensions, kissing a tree instead of grasping the laurel crown’.30 What this critical spectrum from homage to satire illustrates is the careful unevenness of tone and delicate ambiguity with which Chaucer imbues his prohemium. The opening three lines of the Invocation do attempt something like a Dantean classical apostrophe, but the requisite self-assurance is lacking, and the following lines retreat from the opening position in their self-effacement, encapsulated by the declaration that ‘I do no diligence’ (which does not read as a false modesty topos, but as a genuine concern). The humility noted by Spearing and Cooper is evident in the phrase ‘lytel last bok’, which corresponds to the envoy of Troilus and Criseyde: ‘Go, litel bok, go litel myn tragedye’ (Book 5, line 1786). Confidence does recover in the close translation of Dante’s ‘entra nel petto mio’ as ‘Now entre in my brest anoon!’, 25 26

27 28 29 30

Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame, pp. 101–2. Bennett claims that ‘art poetical’ ‘is in fact to be a prominent theme of the book’ and that ‘against the abasement of this Invocation must be set the reliance on this same poetic art that will be affirmed near the poem’s end’ (ibid., p. 102), thereby refiguring the statement as the trope of disclamatio, or praeteritio. Boitani, ‘What Dante Meant to Chaucer’, pp. 124–5. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, p. 28. Cooper, ‘Four Last Things’, p. 57. Steinberg, ‘Chaucer in the Field of Cultural Production’, p. 195.



Chaucer Joins the Schiera  31

but this statement has been undercut by the seemingly comic pledge which precedes it: that the narrator will kiss the next laurel tree he sees. However, Steinberg is right to say that ‘Chaucer is not as humble a poet as he sometimes claims to be.’31 It is worth recalling a statement of Boitani’s: ‘For Chaucer, Dante was never the “lauriat poete”; that honour was reserved for Petrarch.’32 Dante was the great poet of Italy, but Petrarch’s fame – that is, his fame as the laureate – was pan-European, as Boccaccio records in De genealogia deorum gentilium: His great eminence as a poet has been recognized by – I will not merely say all Italians, for their glory is singular and perennial – but by all France, and Germany, and even that most remote little corner of the world, England.33

Chaucer, despite living in that remote little corner, knew that Dante coveted the laurel, and knew that Petrarch received it. There is undoubtedly a bathetic element to Chaucer’s promise to kiss a laurel, but there is also a knowingness which renders the pledge’s humility slightly disingenuous. By kissing the ‘laure’, Chaucer would be doing what Apollo never could; the god’s pursuit of Daphne failed, we will recall, and indeed Chaucer would also have recalled this from Book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is Ovid’s tale that underpins the scattered rhymes (‘rime sparse’; Rvf 1.1) of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and that leads Augustinus to upbraid Franciscus in the Secretum for his conflation of poetic glory (fama) and erotic desire: For who can adequately condemn, who can express sufficient outrage at the insanity of your alienated mind, when, captivated by the splendour not only of her body but even of her name, you sought out, to no meaningful end, whatever sounded like it? This is why you cherished the laurel, whether imperial or poetic, because she is called by the name Laura. And since that time, you have produced scarcely a single poem that does not mention this laurel, as if you had become none other than an inhabitant of the river Peneus or a priest on Cirrha’s mountain. And finally, because it was wrong to hope for the imperial crown, you desired the poetic laurel, promised to you by the quality of your studies, no less modestly than you loved that woman herself. And although in order to reach your reward you were

31 32 33

Ibid., p. 197. Boitani, ‘What Dante Meant to Chaucer’, p. 124. See Giovanni Boccaccio, Boccaccio on Poetry, trans. Charles G. Osgood (New York, 1956), pp. 115–16. As Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ, 1993), p. 26, notes, ‘by the close of the fourteenth century, Petrarch had become the eponymous poet laureate: a literary figure inseparable from his epithet’. I will return to Lerer’s illuminating discussion of laureate reception subsequently.

32  William T. Rossiter carried on the wings of genius, nonetheless you tremble now remembering for yourself with what great effort you finally achieved it.34

Whether Chaucer read the Secretum remains to be seen, but, even if he had not, Petrarch’s eroticized laurel would have been immediately apparent from the most cursory reading of a handful of poems from the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. That Chaucer encountered Petrarch’s sonnets in some form is confirmed by his translation of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 132 as the Canticus Troili.35 Petrarch’s desire for laura/lauro is potentially present in Chaucer’s promise that ‘Thou shalt se me go as blyve / Unto the nexte laure as y see, / And kysse it, for hyt is thy tree’, as, when translating Dante’s laureate desire, Chaucer surely could not but recall Petrarch’s laureate achievement and his idol sculpted in living laurel (‘l’idolo mio scolpito in vivo lauro’; Rvf 30.27).36 Helen Cooper has also claimed a veiled act of immodesty in The House of Fame which equates, after a fashion, to Dante’s enrolment of himself as the ‘sesto’ member of ‘la bella scuola’ in Inferno, Canto 4. This potential 34

35

36

‘Quid autem insanius quam, non contentum presenti illius vultus effigie, unde hec cunta tibi provenerant, aliam fictam illustris artificis ingenio quesivisse, quam tecum ubique circumferens haberes materiam semper immortalium lacrimarum? Veritus ne fortassis arescerent, irritamenta earum omnia vigilantissime cogitasti, negligenter incuriosus in reliquis. Aut – aut omnium delirationum tuarum supremum culmen attingam et, quod paulo ante comminatus sum, peragam – quis digne satis execretur aut stupeat hanc alienate mentis insaniam cum, non minus nominis quam ipsius corporis splendore captus, quicquid illi consonum fuit incredibili vanitate coluisti? Quam ob causam tanto opere sive cesaream sive poeticam lauream, quod illa hoc nomine vocaretur, adamasti; ex eoque tempore sine lauri mentione vix ullum tibi carmen effluxit, non aliter quam si vel Penei gurgitis accola vel Cirrei verticis sacerdos existeres. Denique quia cesaream sperare fas non erat, lauream poeticam, quam studiorum tuorum tibi meritum promittebat, nichilo modestius quam dominam ipsam adamaveras concupisti; ad quam adipiscendam, quanquam alis ingenii subvectus, quanto tamen cum labore perveneris, tecum ipse recogitans perhorresces.’ For the original Latin, see Petrarch, Prose, ed. Guido Martellotti, P. G. Ricci, Enrico Carrara and Enrico Bianchi (Milan and Naples, 1955). For the English translation, see Petrarch, The Secret, trans. Carol E. Quillen (Boston, MA, 2003), p. 117. The references to Peneus and Cirrha are allusions to the Ovidian subtext. There are far too many studies of Petrarch’s Ovidian poetics to mention here; for a brief overview, see Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, p. 127, n. 49. On the Canticus, and Rvf 132 more generally, see E. H. Wilkins, ‘Cantus Troili’, English Literary History 16 (1949), 167–73; Patricia Thomson, ‘The “Canticus Troili”: Chaucer and Petrarch’, Comparative Literature 11 (1959), 313–28; Dominique Diani, ‘Pétrarque Canzoniere 132’, Revue des Etudes Italiennes, ns 18 (1972), 111–65; Piero Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 56–74; Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, pp. 109–31; and Warren Ginsberg, ‘Chaucer and Petrarch: “S’amor non è” and the Canticus Troili’, Humanist Studies and the Digital Age 1 (2011), 121–7. All quotations of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta are taken from Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA, 1976).



Chaucer Joins the Schiera  33

self-advertisement is dependent upon Chaucer’s account of the writers who upheld the matter of Troy: Ful wonder hy on a piler Of yren, he, the gret Omer; And with him Dares and Tytus Before, and eke he Lollius, And Guydo eke de Columpnis, And Englyssh Gaufride eke, ywis; And ech of these, as have I joye, Was besy for to bere up Troye. So hevy thereof was the fame That for to bere hyt was no game.  (House of Fame, lines 1465–74)

‘Englyssh Gaufride’ appears as the sixth auctour of Troy after Homer, Dares and Dictys, Lollius and Guido delle Colonne. Traditionally ‘Gaufride’ has been identified as Geoffrey of Monmouth, but, as Cooper notes, ‘[n]either by nationality nor by subject-matter could Geoffrey be described as “English” … There is only one Geoffrey who is English both by nationality and by choice of language and who has also written on the history of Troy, and that is Chaucer himself.’37 This claim necessitates that we revise our chronology of Chaucer’s works, as it is commonly assumed that The House of Fame was written in the late 1370s and Troilus and Criseyde in the early to mid 1380s. However, this dating depends significantly upon Chaucer’s use of ‘French’ octosyllables in The House of Fame, as opposed to the pentameter of Troilus and Criseyde. Cooper notes that the metrical dating is a tautology – ‘the poem must be early because it is in octosyllabics, and it is in octosyllabics because it is early’ – and David Wallace has noted that ‘[t]he old theoretical division of Chaucer’s career into French, Italian and English periods is now generally discredited’.38 As we shall see below, Chaucer is described as ‘Galfride’ in Lydgate’s encomium to him in the Troy Book (where Lydgate seeks to occupy seventh place), which corresponds with ‘Gaufride’.39 More important than this is the reference to Lollius, Chaucer’s alleged source for Troilus and Criseyde, who is made the putative author of Filostrato, in place of Boccaccio. Lollius is specific to Chaucer as an author who did ‘bere up Troye’, and is referred to in Book 1 of Troilus and Criseyde, immediately prior to the translation of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 132, ironically (‘As writ myn auctour called Lollius’; Troilus and Criseyde, Book 1, line 394), and again in Book 5 (‘as telleth Lollius’; line 1653). 37 38 39

Cooper, ‘Four Last Things’, pp. 58–9. See ibid., p. 59; Wallace, ‘Chaucer and Boccaccio’s Early Writings’, p. 141. On Lydgate’s own desire for fame, see Mary C. Flannery, John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame (Cambridge, 2012).

34  William T. Rossiter

There is neither the space nor the need to discuss the reasons why Chaucer replaced Boccaccio with Lollius, and whether or not it was an ironic substitution of his vernacular source for a classical-sounding substitute; what matters is simply the presence of the name itself.40 If Chaucer did believe that there was a real classical author called Lollius who wrote of Troy, then he must have read that auctour’s work, the acknowledged source of Troilus and Criseyde, prior to composing The House of Fame. However, Chaucer’s consistently faithful translation of Boccaccio’s vernacular poem, Il Filostrato, means that he must have had a copy of it in front of him when composing his ‘litel … tragedye’, thereby giving the lie to the Lollius claim. Lollius appears nowhere else in Chaucer’s corpus except in these two poems. His presence in Chaucer’s list of Trojan authorities reinforces the case for ‘Englyssh Gaufride’ as being a veiled reference to Chaucer himself, and in turn supports the claim – made not only by Cooper but also by A. J. Minnis and N. R. Havely – that The House of Fame was composed either immediately after or during the same period as Troilus and Criseyde.41 What we note in Chaucer’s reference to the ‘laure’ and to ‘Englyssh Gaufride’ in The House of Fame is the potential for a veneer of humility or comic misdirection to cover, and cover thinly, Chaucer’s aspirations to poetic fame, albeit these are not necessarily the same aspirations that he identified in Dante or in Petrarch. We cannot help but suspect that when Chaucer says ‘hyt was no game’, truth and falsehood might be compounded in this statement, as they are when they fly from the House of Rumour. It would seem then – and the difference between seeming and being is of critical importance in this poem – that, in The House of Fame, Chaucer does not fully assume the image of the trecento poet – vates – despite the lofty promise of the proems. He does not imitate Virgil in the style of Dante or Petrarch, but tempers his Aeneid with Ovid’s Heroides, just as he fuses Virgil’s goddess Fama from Book 4 of the Aeneid with Ovid’s setting of her in Book 12 of the Metamorphoses. To expedite this temperance Chaucer also adds the medieval authorities on Troy discussed above, and an overall tone of self-effacement. As such, the view that Chaucer is here coming to terms with Dante’s grandeur, but not entirely approving of or in agreement with it, would appear to hold true. Dante’s fame may also be implicitly compared to that of Petrarch in the poem, further evidence of the duality which characterizes Chaucer’s overall approach, as noted by Cooper.42 Chaucer’s suggestion 40 41

42

For a discussion of the critical debate over Lollius, see B. A. Windeatt, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford, 1992), pp. 37–40. See A. J. Minnis, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford, 1995), p. 171; Havely raises the issue in the introduction to his edition of The House of Fame (Durham, 1994; rev. Toronto, 2013). Chaucer’s image of Fame’s house being built upon a rock of ice in which names have been inscribed, but many of which have thawed away due to the sun’s rays (HF, lines 1136–47),



Chaucer Joins the Schiera  35

– unlike Dante’s declaration – that he became the sixth in glory is entirely consonant with his elaborately ambiguous insistence upon poetic humility in the face of the trecento revision of the poet’s role and function. However, Chaucer does not abandon the trecento conception of poetic claritas and fama; he returns to it at the close of Troilus and Criseyde, when he exhorts his little tragedy to ‘kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan and Stace’ (Book 5, lines 1791–2), thereby effecting his admission as the sixth member of the schiera he had not quite joined in The House of Fame.43 Dante’s band is back (although Statius admittedly turned up late for band practice in the Commedia, not arriving until the Purgatorio). Chaucer’s pose is still ostensibly subservient – ‘subgit be to alle poesye’ (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 5, line 1790) – but also decidedly more assured, as is evident in the closing stanza’s stately translation of Canto 14 of the Paradiso.44 Moreover, Petrarch makes a similar comment in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 287, which he addresses to his recently deceased friend Sennuccio del Bene: Ma ben ti prego che ’n la terza spera Guitton saluti, et messer Cino, et Dante, Franceschin nostro e tutto quella schiera.  (lines 9–11) [But I beg you to salute all in the third sphere: Guittone and messer Cino and Dante, our Franceschino, and all that band.]

Petrarch uses the same word as Dante here, ‘schiera’ [band], although the verb ‘saluti’, in terms of its deferential tone and modesty topos, has more in common with Chaucer’s ‘subgit be’.45

43

44

45

may owe something to Petrarch’s Triumphus temporis: ‘vidi ogni nostra gloria al sol di neve, / e vidi il Tempo rimenar tal prede / de’ nostri nomi ch’io gli ebbi per nulla’ [I saw our glory melt away like snow in the sun, and I saw Time take so much away from our names that they meant nothing; lines 129–31]. Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame, p. 110, drawing on Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (London, 1925), p. 161, n. 1, also suggests that Chaucer was familiar with this Trionfo. See Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, pp. 186–7. There is more to be said about the possible influence of the Trionfi upon The House of Fame, but there is not the space here. All of whom appear atop pillars in Fame’s palace, again in seeming imitation of Inferno, Canto 4, albeit the order is slightly different: Homer (line 1466), Statius (line 1460), Virgil (line 1483), Ovid (line 1487) and Lucan (line 1499). Dante’s ‘Quell’ uno e due e tre che sempre vive / e regna sempre in tre e ’n due e ’n uno, / non circunscritto, e tutto circunscrive’ (Paradiso, Canto 14, lines 28–30) is faithfully rendered by Chaucer as ‘Thou on, and two, and thre, eterne on lyve, / That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon, / Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive’ (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 5, lines 1863–5). Petrarch’s judgement is less harsh than that of Dante. Guittone d’Arezzo is condemned in Purgatorio, Canto 24, lines 55–7 and Canto 26, lines 124–6, and in De vulgaria eloquentia, Book 2, chapter 6, line 8: ‘Subsistant igitur ignorantie sectatores Guittonem Aretinum et quosdam alios extollentes, nunquam in vocabulis atque constructione plebescere desuetos!’

36  William T. Rossiter

Indeed, it is through this mixture of deference and praise that Chaucer establishes his own posthumous poetic fame in The Clerk’s Prologue, by providing those poets who will follow him with the terms in which they might consider his authority. In The Clerk’s Prologue we see him placing Petrarch on a pedestal and in doing so inconspicuously preparing one for himself, thereby returning to the theme of the Italianate poet-celebrity first broached in The House of Fame, but with greater confidence.46 In other words, the reluctant Geffrey of The House of Fame is replaced by the reluctant Clerk who determines the criteria by which Chaucer’s posterity will be measured:47

46

47



[So let the devotees of ignorance cease to cry up Guittone d’Arezzo and others like him, for never, in either vocabulary or construction, have they been anything but commonplace!] For the original Latin, see the edition by Pio Rajna (Florence, 1960); for the English translation, see Stephen Botterill (Cambridge, 1996). Cino da Pistoia’s death (25 December 1336) postdated that of Dante; indeed, Boccaccio, while studying canon law at Naples, attended his lectures on Justinian. See N. R. Havely, Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources of Troilus and The Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (Cambridge, 1980), p. 4. Likewise Franceschino di Taddeo degli Albizi’s death (d. 1348) post-dated Dante’s. Petrarch’s list of names here is repeated in the Triumphus cupidinis, Book 4, lines 31–8. He sees the Italian vernacular poets, who include Dante (whom he lists after the poets of antiquity), walking through a greensward talking of love (‘vidi gente ir per una verde piaggia / pur d’amor volgarmente ragionando’; lines 29–30), akin to the ‘prato di fresco verdura’ (Inferno, Canto 4, line 111) into which the Pilgrim passes after being inducted into la bella scuola. Seth Lerer has previously discussed the construction of Chaucer as an aureate/laureate poet in the fifteenth century, in particular by Lydgate, in the second chapter of Chaucer and His Readers, entitled ‘Writing Like the Clerk: Laureate Poets and the Aureate World’, pp. 20–56. I am entirely in agreement with Lerer, except insofar as I ascribe Chaucer greater agency in determining his own posterity: Chaucer uses Petrarch as he had earlier used Dante, and as Dante had used Virgil, as a means of fashioning the criteria whereby his own fame would be measured. Dante uses Virgil to establish his bello stilo as the criterion of poetic success, just as Chaucer does with Petrarch’s ‘rhetorike sweete’. I have addressed Lydgate’s relationship with Chaucer in greater detail elsewhere: see ‘“Disgraces the name and patronage of his master Chaucer”: Echoes and Reflections in Lydgate’s Courtly Poetry’, Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations, ed. Kathleen A. Bishop (Newcastle, 2010), pp. 2–27. See also Julia Boffey, ‘The Reputation and Circulation of Chaucer’s Lyrics in the Fifteenth Century’, Chaucer Review 28 (1993), 23–40, and Jackson Campbell Boswell and Sylvia Wallace Horton, ‘References to Chaucer’s Literary Reputation’, Chaucer Review 31 (1991), 291–316. Consonant with Geffrey’s metamorphosis into the Clerk is the Eagle’s transformation into Harry Bailey. The Eagle’s words to Geffrey – Have y not preved thus symply, Withoute any subtilite Of speche, or gret prolixite Of termes of philosophie, Of figures of poetrie, Or colours of retorike? Pardee, it oughte thee to lyke, For hard langage and hard matere Ys encombrous for to here (HF, lines 854–62) – are echoed in the Host’s admonition to the Clerk that



Chaucer Joins the Schiera  37 I wol yow telle a tale which that I Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk, As preved by his wordes and his werk. He is now deed and nayled in his cheste I prey to God so yeve his soule reste! ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete Highte this clerk, whos rhetorike sweete Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie …’  (Clerk’s Prologue, lines 26–33)

It is this language of illumination, of claritas, which, for Chaucer’s successors, becomes the standard discourse of poetic fame. For Lydgate and Hoccleve, Chaucer occupies the same position as Petrarch does in the Clerk’s esteem; in reiterating the Clerk’s encomiastic terms, these poets establish the Clerk’s praise as the origin of a discourse of fame which will continue throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For example, Lydgate, in his Floure of Courtesy, confirms that Chaucer is deed that had suche a name Of fayre makyng that [was] without wene Fayrest in our tonge, as the Laurer grene  (lines 33–5)

whereby Chaucer inherits the Petrarchan laurel.48 Likewise, in his Troy Book, he concedes to Noble Galfride, poete of Breteyne, Amonge oure englisch þat made first to reyne Þe gold dewe-dropis of rethorik so fyne, Oure rude langage only tenlwmyne.  (Book 2, lines 4697–700)49

48

49

Youre termes, youre colours, and youre figures, Keepe hem in stoor til so be ye endite Heigh style, as whan that men to kynges write. Speketh so pleyn at this tyme, we yow preye, That we may understonde what ye seye. (Clerk’s Prologue, lines 16–20) For a discussion of the Clerk’s disobedience towards Harry’s ‘yerde’, see Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, pp. 188–9. The Floure of Courtesy can be found in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 107, Original Series 192 (London, 1911, 1934; repr. 1961). It is not necessary to reproduce the many passages in Lydgate which praise Chaucer, as my focus is upon examples of those encomia which draw upon the Clerk’s terms of praise for Petrarch. However, in addition to those mentioned, see the Prologue to The Siege of Thebes, lines 1–76 (esp. 55–7); the Preface to The Serpent of Division (p. 65); and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (lines 19751–90). All line and page references are to the Early English Text Society editions of Lydgate’s works. See John Lydgate, Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 97, 103, 106 and 126 (London, 1906–35).

38  William T. Rossiter

In both instances the echo of the Clerk’s encomium to the dead laureate is apparent, but Lydgate makes the analogy even more explicit in Book 3 of the Troy Book: So þat þe laurer of oure englishe tonge Be to hym ȝoue for his excellence Riȝt a[s] whilom by ful hiȝe sentence Perpetuelly for a memorial Of Columpna by the cardynal To Petrak fraunceis was ȝouen in Ytaille Þat þe report neuere after faille Nor þe honour dirked of his name To be registred in þe house of fame Amonge oþer in þe hiȝeste sete My maister Galfride as for chefe poete Þat euere was ȝit in oure langage Þe name of whom shal passen in noon age But euer ylyche with-oute eclipsinge shyne.  (lines 4546–59)

Interestingly, Lydgate refers to Petrarch being ‘registred in The House of Fame’, thereby linking The House of Fame to The Clerk’s Prologue, and placing Chaucer upon one of his own pedestals, ‘Amonge oþer in þe hiȝeste sete’. Indeed, in Book 3 of the Fall of Princes, Chaucer is set firmly among those poets who have been the focus of this essay: Daunt in Itaille, Virgile in Rome toun, Petrak in Florence hadde al his plesaunce, And prudent Chaucer in Brutis Albioun Lik his desir fond vertuous suffisance …  (lines 3858–61)50

It is apt that Virgil has Dante on one side of him and Petrarch on the other, as both were vying for his crown (like a trecento Lion and Unicorn), a crown which now extends to ‘prudent Chaucer’, as glory is attendant upon ‘vertuous suffisance’.51 This link between Chaucer and Virgil – a link that both Dante and Petrarch claim for themselves – becomes a commonplace in the fifteenth century. Hoccleve, in The Regiment of Princes, following the customary echo of The Clerk’s Prologue (‘Mi maister Chaucer flour of eloquence … With bookes of his ornat endytyng / That is to al this land enlumynyng … God thi soule reste!’; lines 1962–3, 1974–5, 2107), apostrophizes that ‘The steppes of virgile in poesie / Thow filwedist’ (lines 2089–90) in an echo of the close of Troilus and Criseyde.52 This Virgilian comparison is main50 51 52

See John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 121–4 (London, 1924–27; repr. 1967). As both Cicero (in the Tusculan Disputations) and Petrarch (in the Secretum) had confirmed. London, British Library, MS Harley 4866, fols 34–37v.



Chaucer Joins the Schiera  39

tained until the sixteenth century, when the Greek scholar Roger Ascham terms Chaucer ‘our Englishe Homer’, a phrase echoed in Latin by John Argall in 1605: ‘Galfridium Chaucerum (Homerum nostrum)’.53 We recall that Homer is likened to an eagle by Dante in Inferno, Canto 4 (although Chaucer might have misread ‘quel segnor’ as referring to Virgil). However, Homer is a nominal auctoritas for Dante, as he was for Chaucer. Ascham, with a knowledge of Greek and access to the Homeric texts, could make the Homeric comparison with the benefit of a greater understanding of Chaucer’s analogous role as the figurehead of national culture and the font of critically accepted and politically sanctioned models of eloquence.54 Interestingly, in the Fall of Princes – a translation of Laurent de Premierfait’s French translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium – Lydgate’s depiction of Boccaccio’s visionary encounter with his maestro Petrarch in the prologue to Book 8 clearly equates ‘Bochas’ with Lydgate himself, and ‘Petrak’ with Chaucer:  Fraunceis Petrak, the laureate poete, Crownid with laurer, grace was his gide, Cam and set him doun by his beddis side. And as Bochas out of his slombre abraide And gan adawen sumwhat of his cheere, And sauh Petrak, lowli to hym he saide: ‘Wolkome maister, crownid with laureer, Which han Italie lik a sunne cleer With poetrie, pleynli to descryue, Most soueraynli enlumyned bi your lyue …

53

54

Roger Ascham, Toxophilus (London: E Whytchurch, 1545), STC 837, sig. E ii b; John Argall, Ad artem dialecticum (London: R. Bradochus for G. Bishop), STC 737, p. 28. This is not to say that the Chaucer–Virgil analogy is replaced by a Homeric one, but rather that the Homeric analogy is appended, in addition to comparisons with other classical authors (Horace and Ennius, for example), illustrating Chaucer’s status as auctour in his own right. Chaucer was instituted as the national poet during Henry VIII’s reign, however, representing for England what Homer did for Greece as part of the process of solidifying the nationstate. See John Watkins, ‘“Wrastling for this world”: Wyatt and the Tudor Canonization of Chaucer’, Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Theresa M. Krier (Gainesville, FL, 1998), pp. 21–39, and James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2: 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002). The Homeric analogy also reflects the Hellenism of the Renaissance proper, unlike Petrarch’s staunchly Roman agenda, which was in many ways an intellectual–political response to the Avignonese exile (1309–78) of the Papacy during Petrarch’s lifetime (1304–74). ‘Così vid’ i’ adunar la bella scola / di quel segnor de l’altissimo canto / che sovra li altri com aquila vola’ [So saw I come together the lovely school of that lord of highest song, who soars above the others like an eagle (Inferno, Canto 4, lines 94–6)]. The line which immediately precedes this tercet includes Virgil saying that ‘fanommi onore’ [they do me honour (Canto 4, line 93)], so the error could be easily made.

40  William T. Rossiter Ye haue been lanterne, liht and direccioun Ay to supporte myn occupacioun … To refourme the rudnesse of my stile With aureate colours of your fresh langage (Book 8, lines 61–70, 76–7, 80–1)

Again, the passage is strewn with echoes of the Clerk’s Petrarchan eulogy, often almost verbatim, but Lydgate enhances Chaucer’s language of claritas (‘lik a sunne cleer’) and infuses it with the latter’s praise of Virgil in the Legend of Good Women (‘I shal, as I can, / Folwe thy lanterne, as thow gost byforn’; F, lines 925–6) to the point that it echoes Dante’s words to Virgil in Inferno 1, Beatrice’s words in Inferno, Canto 2, and Cato’s words in Purgatorio, Canto 1 (discussed above). Of further interest is Petrak’s response to Bochas – An euident tokne of froward slogardie, Vpon thi bed thi lymes so to dresse, Ris up! for shame! … Forsak thy bed, rys up anon, for shame!  (Fall of Princes, Book 7, lines 92–4, 114)

– which echoes Pandarus’ words to Troilus, but inverts their intentio, as Petrarch is exhorting Boccaccio to continue with his book, unlike Pandarus: ‘Do wey youre book, rys up, and lat us daunce, / And lat us don to May som observaunce’ (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 2, lines 111–12).55 Lydgate’s response to this scene is mock-dejection: I folwyng aftir, fordullid with rudnesse, Mor than thre score yeeris set my date, Luste of youthe passid [with] his fresshnesse; Colours of rethorik to help me translate Wer fadid awey: I was born in Lidgate, Wher Bachus licour doth ful scarsli fleete, My drie soule for to dewe & weete. (Fall of Princes, Book 8, lines 190–6)

As Lerer argues, in Lydgate’s self-portrait (which is not unlike that of Chaucer in The House of Fame), his ‘soul is dry, for he has been denied, both by birth and by ability, the fecund streams of poetic inspiration’, and, whereas Chaucer’s Clerk eulogizes ‘a dead Petrarch, Lydgate offers up a living one. He shows us a poet not “nailed in his cheste” but walking 55

Pandarus’ exhortation to ‘Do wey youre book’ also recalls the words of the Eagle when he recounts how Chaucer, following his work at the Customs House, ‘goost hom to thy hous anoon, / And, also domb as any stoon, / Thou sittest at another book / Tyl fully daswed is thy look’ (HF, lines 655–8). Pandarus twice uses the Eagle’s vocative ‘Awak!’ in Book 1 of Troilus and Criseyde (lines 729 and 751).



Chaucer Joins the Schiera  41

once again among the fields of the imagination.’56 Lydgate ‘folwyng aftir, fordullid’ and ‘fadid’ echoes Petrarch’s and Dante’s valorization of the illuminated past and provides a model for Sidney’s praise of Chaucer mentioned above. Moreover, Lydgate’s language of ‘licour’ and ‘dewe’ here conflates the Clerk’s praise of Petrarch with the opening of the General Prologue, itself redolent of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 310, and in doing so builds on Chaucer’s criteria for poetic fame, reaffirming his ‘maistir’ as the English laureate whose ‘Colours of rethorik’ equate to ‘swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour’ (General Prologue, lines 3–4); that flower, by extension, is Lydgate himself.57 Through this conflation, Lydgate not only recognizes but reiterates for his own ends Chaucer’s criteria for fama, which Chaucer himself had gleaned from the self-publication of Dante and Petrarch. It is no accident that Lydgate clarifies the purport of poetic claritas which he learned from Chaucer in this same prologue to Book 8: ‘for to make our names perdurable, / And our merites to putten in memorie … To cleyme a see in the heuenli consistorie’ (Fall of Princes, Book 8, lines 176–7, 180).58 I would like to conclude with the first encomium to Chaucer, which raises an interesting question concerning dating and Chaucer’s possible self-advertisement. Eustace Deschamps’ famous paean to the ‘Grant translateur, noble Geoffrey Chaucier’ compares Chaucer to an ‘Aigles treshaulz’ [lofty eagle (line 5)] whose knowledge ‘Enlumines le regne d’Eneas’ [illuminates the kingdom of Aeneas (line 6)].59 Given that the date for this poem is usually 56 57

58

59

Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, p. 36. Petrarch’s opening line ‘Zephiro torna, e ’l bel tempo rimena’ (Rvf 310.1) puts one in mind of Chaucer’s ‘Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth’ (General Prologue, line 5) but the two poets are drawing upon a common fund of poetic vernal conventions. While Lydgate was indebted to Chaucer’s discourse of fame and its terms, he was by no means the passive recipient of it. Rather he developed that discourse in accordance with his own Lancastrian laureate agenda, and used it to position Chaucer in the same way that Chaucer had positioned Dante and Petrarch – using epideixis to the ends of self-legitimation, as Robert J. Meyer-Lee has argued: ‘Lydgate enters his text [the Siege of Thebes] to bestow upon it the authority he possesses outside of it. The agon with Chaucer that he stages through his imitation of the Canterbury Tales – as well as through his accompanying eulogy of his master – aims not so much to depict himself as an authentic disciple and heir as to transform Chaucer into a flesh-and-blood laureate who retroactively defines the role that Lydgate implicitly claims to occupy.’ See ‘Lydgate’s Laureate Pose’, John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), pp. 39–40. In the same volume, see also the essay by Larry Scanlon, ‘Lydgate’s Poetics: Laureation and Domesticity in The Temple of Glass’, pp. 61–97. The term agon is integral to Bloom’s anxiety of influence, and implicitly references Spearing’s Bloomian Father Chaucer in Medieval to Renaissance. See also Daniel T. Kline, ‘Father Chaucer and the Siege of Thebes: Literary Paternity, Aggressive Deference, and the Prologue to Lydgate’s Oedipal Canterbury Tale’, Chaucer Review 34 (1999), 217–35. See Eustace Deschamps, Selected Poems, ed. Ian S. Laurie and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, trans. David Curzon and Jeffrey Fiskin (London, 2003), pp. 85–6. See also T. Atkinson

42  William T. Rossiter

given as being around 1385 (when Chaucer received it), and the date for The Clerk’s Prologue is somewhere between 1392 and 1395, might it be the case that Chaucer has transferred the praise given to him by Deschamps to Petrarch, and in doing so has prefigured the equivalence conferred by Lydgate and Hoccleve in the fifteenth century? The other option is that The Clerk’s Prologue was written slightly earlier, but that is entirely conjectural.60 In addition to pre-empting the Clerk’s praise of Petrarch, Deschamps’ comparison of Chaucer to an eagle recalls Dante’s simile from Canto 4 of the Inferno mentioned earlier, a simile which informs Chaucer’s choice of celestial guide in The House of Fame. On the basis of these references, it would appear that Chaucer’s successors perceived a discursive continuum comprising The House of Fame, the close of Troilus and Criseyde and The Clerk’s Prologue. The language of illumination which Chaucer adopts in his praise of Petrarch is used to emphasize his own posthumous celebritas, but the discourse of fame also links Chaucer inextricably with Dante, Petrarch and Virgil. To use Lydgate’s phrase, Chaucer is ‘registred in The House of Fame’, but he signed himself in under a transparent pseudonym (‘Englyssh Gaufride’) and was consequently placed atop one of his own pedestals. In The Clerk’s Prologue, Chaucer establishes the discourse of English poetic encomium, a discourse which will guarantee his own lasting fame by providing his followers with the terminology whereby poetic achievement is recognized and lauded. It is a language of illumination which Chaucer transposed from Dante’s praise of Virgil in the Commedia and which was used by Petrarch himself as a means of conceptualizing what would come to be termed the Renaissance. The House of Fame, partaking of this discourse, is the first step to Chaucer’s becoming ‘a man of grete auctorite’ (House of Fame, line 2158), or a fully fledged member of the schiera.

60

Jenkins, ‘Deschamps’ Ballade to Chaucer’, Modern Language Notes 33 (1918), 268–78, and James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto, 1991), pp. 248–54. For a discussion of dating Chaucer’s works and the problems that it poses, see Kathryn L. Lynch, ‘Dating Chaucer’, Chaucer Review 22 (2007), 1–22.

2 ‘I wolde … han hadde a fame’: Dante, Fame and Infamy in Chaucer’s House of Fame* Nick Havely

Non è il mondan romore altro ch’un fiato di vento  (Purgatorio, Canto 11, lines 100–1) [The world’s noise/applause is no more than a breath of wind]

I

n the otherworld of Dante’s Commedia there are – as in Book 3 of The House of Fame – a number of crowded spaces out of which celebrated or infamous figures emerge. At the entrance to hell in Inferno, Canto 3, out of the ‘long line’ of the uncommitted ‘neutrals’ ‘who are not allowed earthly fame’, Dante still recognizes (though of course does not name) the perpetrator of an infamous act.1 In the following canto, the multitude of anonymous unbaptized who ‘live in hopeless yearning’ are compared to a dense forest, out of whose darkness the light of Limbo’s castle, peopled by named and famous souls (and poets), seems to appear.2 Large and mobile groups of souls also feature at a number of points later in Dante’s otherworlds, when celebrated figures such as Francesca, Brunetto, Manfred and Guinizzelli stand out and are recognized. How Chaucer in Book 3 of The House of Fame responds to Dante’s imagining of fame and infamy will be the main subject of this essay. Chaucer’s stance in the whole poem, as he addresses (perhaps for the first time) the daunting precedent of the Commedia, has been variously interpreted, yet * I am grateful to the organizers of the 2011 conference on ‘Chaucer and Celebrity’ (especially Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall), for the initial opportunity to present and discuss some of the ideas that are developed here, and to Kara Gaston and Liza Strakhov for comments on a draft of this essay. 1 Inferno [hereafter Inf.], Canto 3, lines 48, 55 and 59–60. ‘He who made the great refusal’ (‘colui / che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto’) is usually identified as Celestine V, who resigned the Papacy, to be succeeded by Boniface VIII. Quotations from the Commedia follow Dante Alighieri, Commedia, ed. A. M. Chiavacci Leonardi, 3 vols (Milan, 1991–97); translations are my own. 2 Inf. Canto 4, lines 64–9.

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many modern critics read in it some degree of tentativeness or scepticism. Some have identified in The House of Fame – and especially in Book 3 – a recurrent ‘skepticism about Dante’s endeavor’, a ‘critique … that strikes at the very heart of Dante’s self-characterization as both historian and prophet of judgment’, and even a ‘satire on … Dante’s procedures of damnation and on his Virgilianism’; while the Riverside editor of the poem more cautiously concludes that ‘Chaucer does [here] sustain an ironic counterpoint to Dante’s poem’.3 Part of this complex intertextual relationship involves the Commedia’s wider discourse of fame. The desire for glory, distinction and the praise of the living is acute – often painfully so – among the ‘noble’ sinners of the Inferno (such as Farinata, Brunetto, Pier delle Vigne and Ulysses), but Dante’s damned souls are, as Piero Boitani shows, ‘not alone in longing for renown’.4 Fama and onore are associated with poets from the very beginning of the Inferno; and later in the poem Dante’s ancestor links the fama of souls in the afterlife to the onor that the poet himself may gain.5 As sought and dramatized in the Commedia, fame draws upon both classical and Christian traditions. In Leo Braudy’s view, Dante ‘foreshadow[s] a host of later efforts to fuse the Christian emphasis on the afterlife with the classical urge for earthly fame and honor’ and ‘transforms Augustine’s wary hostility to the Roman forms of public achievement into a fascination with reputation that links worldly action with the honors or punishment awaiting one in the afterlife’.6 The Commedia’s most extensive meditation on the quest for fame occurs in Canto 11 of the Purgatorio, very shortly after the dream of the eagle (Purgatorio, Canto 9, lines 19–33), which would prompt Chaucer’s first close imitation of the Italian poem (House of Fame, lines 496–508 and 529–46). During Cantos 10–12 of the Purgatorio, as Dante begins the ascent through the main circles of Purgatory itself, he encounters on the first terrace those who are atoning for pride, and he himself expects to spend some time expiating this sin (Purgatorio, Canto 13, lines 136–8). Pride, in this initial encounter with souls, is explicitly associated with artistry, writing and the acquisition of

3

4 5 6

See Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads The Divine Comedy (Stanford, CA, 1989), chapter 1, especially p. 39; Lisa J. Kiser, Truth and Textuality in Chaucer’s Poetry (Hanover, NH, and London, 1991), chapter 2, especially p. 40; Steve Ellis, ‘Chaucer, Dante, and Damnation’, Chaucer Review 22 (1988), 282–92, esp. 289; and J. M. Fyler in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. L. D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2008), p. 348. See Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 73–90. See Inf. Canto 1, lines 81, 89; Canto 2, line 59; Canto 4, lines 72–102; and Paradiso (hereafter Par.), Canto 17, lines 135–8. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York and Oxford, 1986), pp. 229, 232.



Dante, Fame and Infamy in The House of Fame  45

fame, as is evident from the pilgrim’s initial exchange with the (otherwise little-known) painter, Oderisi da Gubbio: ‘Oh’, diss’io lui, ‘non se’ tu Oderisi, l’onor d’Agobbio e l’onor di quell’arte ch’alluminar chiamata è in Parisi?’ ‘Frate’, diss’elli, ‘più ridon le carte che pennelleggia Franco Bolognese; l’onore è tutto or suo, e mio in parte …’  (Purgatorio, Canto 11, lines 79–84) [‘Oh’, I said to him, ‘Are you not Oderisi, the pride of Gubbio, the pride of that art which in Paris they call illumination?’ ‘Brother’, he replied, ‘the pages which Franco Bolognese penned are more lively; the pride of place is all his – mine only in part …’]

The penitent painter Oderisi then focuses particularly upon artists’ subordination of other considerations to their ‘great desire to excel’ (‘lo gran disio / de l’eccellenza’; lines 86–7). His subsequent view of ‘the empty glories of human powers’ (‘vana gloria de l’umane posse’; line 91) draws upon the traditional tropes of Fame as a withering plant and shifting breath of wind, and he goes on to name as examples those who, like himself, are artists: Credette Cimabue ne la pittura tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido, sì che la fama di colui è scura. Così ha tolto l’uno a l’altro Guido la gloria della lingua; e forse è nato chi l’uno e l’altro caccerà del nido. Non è il mondan romore altro ch’un fiato di vento, ch’or vien quinci e or vien quindi, e muta nome perchè muta lato.  (Purgatorio, Canto 11, lines 94–102) [Once Cimabue thought he commanded the field, and now Giotto takes all the praise, so that the former’s fame is overshadowed. So also has one Guido taken over from another his glory in poetry; and perhaps there is one now alive who shall chase both of them from the nest. The world’s noise/applause is no more than a breath of wind, blowing now one way, now another, changing its name as it changes its path.]

Oderisi thus names two painters, Cimabue and Giotto, one of whom has flourished and then been overshadowed by the other. But he then turns from the fragile luminosity of painting and its fame to ‘the glory of the vernacular’ and to a similar sequence of three contemporary poets of the ‘new style’. The first of these (Guido Guinizzelli) will name himself near the summit of

46  Nick Havely

Mount Purgatory (Canto 26) and be acknowledged by Dante as the father of the dolce stil. The second is Guido Cavalcanti, the course of whose uneasy friendship with Dante had been evident in the Vita nuova, in De vulgari eloquentia and most dramatically in Canto 10 of the Inferno. The third of the trinity – the one who ‘is now perhaps alive and will chase each of the others from the nest’ – has since the earliest commentators been assumed to refer to the author himself. The reference is, of course, indirect: as is well known, Dante names himself only once in the Commedia and then in another penitential context.7 The implied triumph here is also qualified by its context and by the immediate acknowledgement that, even for the famous fledgling Dante, the world’s applause ‘is no more than a breath of wind’ (‘Non è il mondan romore altro ch’un fiato / di vento’). The House of Fame seems to have engaged with this key passage in several different ways. Chaucer may have recalled the Purgatorial topography of the episode and its implications for vernacular writers when, very soon after the Dantean appeal to Apollo at the start of The House of Fame’s last book (lines 1091–9), he showed the dreamer-narrator, Geffrey, beginning his ascent of the mountain towards Fame’s ‘paleys’, which among its other wonders has performers and illusionists on its façade (lines 1193–284) and writers of ‘olde gestes’ in its great hall (lines 1419–519). At the end of the previous book, Geffrey has been freed from the Eagle’s talons after a lengthy flight and been set firmly down within earshot and a spear’s flight of Fame’s house. Then he begins to climb ‘with alle payne’ up towards this dwelling on the summit of the hill which has somehow become rather more than a spear’s flight away and is now described as higher than any ‘in Spayne’: But up I clombe with alle payne And, though to clymbe it greved me, Yit I ententyf was to see And for to powren wonder low Yf I koude eny weyes know What maner stoon this roche was, For hyt was lyke a thynge of glas/ alym de glas/ a lymed glas But that hyt shone ful more clere. But of what congeled matere Hyt was, nyste I never, redely. But at the laste aspied I And founde that hit was everydele A roche of yse and not of stele.  (House of Fame, lines 1118–30)8 7 8

Beatrice names ‘Dante’ and summons him to repentance in the same terzina (Purgatorio [hereafter Purg.], Canto 30, lines 55–7). Quotations from The House of Fame (hereafter HF) throughout are from the edition by N. R. Havely (Durham, 1994; revised Toronto, 2013). For the variants in line 1124, see below and p. 142 of the above edition.



Dante, Fame and Infamy in The House of Fame  47

If we accept the reading that, as Kathy Cawsey proposes, compares this hillside to ‘alymde glas’ (‘illuminated glass’; line 1124), the Chaucerian phrase might then echo the unusual, French-derived verb ‘alluminar’ which Dante has used to pay tribute to the painter’s craft at the beginning of the encounter with Oderisi in Purgatorio, Canto 11 (line 81).9 Skeat’s 1900 text of The House of Fame adopted the straightforward Fairfax and Bodley reading here (‘a thyng of glas’), while most later editions (following Henry Bradley’s suggestion in 1892) interpret the Pepys, Caxton and Thynne readings as referring to alum crystals (‘alym de glas’). However, Cawsey has argued that ‘y’ (as in the reading ‘alym’ for alum) rarely replaces ‘u’ in London or Kentish English; that despite the reference to ‘alum glas’ in The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale and elsewhere in Middle English, no other writer uses the phrase ‘alum de glas’; and that the reference to the substance in this context is ‘random’. Instead, Cawsey proposes a version of the Pepys/ Caxton/Thynne readings here: ‘alymed glas’, arguing that the verb ‘alymen’ means ‘give light to’ and that it could refer here to the mountain displaying the radiance of a stained glass window or an illuminated manuscript.10 In the context of the passage’s immediate concern with ‘famous folkes names’ (line 1137), this reading would, Cawsey suggests, reinforce the potent images of ‘lettres’ and ‘writynge’ in the ensuing account of the ‘of-thowed’ and ‘conserved’ inscriptions on the south- and north-facing sides of the mountain (lines 1136–64).11 There could well be a good case for accepting ‘alymed’ or perhaps ‘alymde’ (the actual form in Pepys) here and thus recognizing at this point in the text a further reference to writing, manuscript transmission and the precariousness of the fame of authors such as Chaucer.12 9 10 11

12

My suggestion; Cawsey does not suggest a parallel with alluminar in Purg. Canto 11, line 81. On the origin of Dante’s verb, see Chiavacci Leonardi, ed., Commedia, p. 335, line 81n. Kathy Cawsey, ‘“Alum de glas” or “Alymed glass”: Manuscript Reading in Book III of The House of Fame’, University of Toronto Quarterly 73 (2004), 976–7. Cawsey earlier claims that the ‘lettres’ and ‘writynge’ of these names constitutes ‘the only actual image of writing in The House of Fame’ (ibid., p. 972). It should be noted, however, that the verb ‘graven’ used of the inscriptions on the hillside here has also been applied to the lines from the start of the Aeneid which, engraved on brass, initiate the sequence of images in Book 1’s Temple of Venus; and that Geffrey’s own scribblings as writer of ‘bokes, songes or ditees’ and his making of ‘rekenynges’ have been duly noted by the Eagle in Book 2. See the quotation of Purg. Canto 11, lines 79–84, cited above. Cawsey’s proposed reading and accompanying argument have recently been adopted in Kathryn Lynch’s excellent edition of the Chaucer dream-poems (Geoffrey Chaucer, Dream Visions and Other Poems, ed. Kathryn Lynch [New York and London, 2007], p. 69). A different but related argument that might reinforce connections between ‘alymed glas’ and fame has been developed by David K. Coley, who suggests that the narrative constructed in Book 1’s ‘temple y-made of glas’ consciously parallels ‘medieval stained glass’s vernacular textuality’ and that ‘by casting his vernacular translation of Virgil in glass, Chaucer is expressing … optimism for the endurance of his vernacular project’. See David K. Coley, ‘“Withyn a temple ymad of

48  Nick Havely

Dante and Chaucer both focus on aspects of fame during early stages of their two pilgrims’ laborious ascents: shortly after Dante’s dream of the eagle and Chaucer’s dream journey with a ‘literal’ eagle. Both touch on the materiality of artistic media, and both emphasize the mutability of earthly glory: ‘what may ever last?’ (House of Fame, line 1147). Near the middle of Book 3 of Chaucer’s poem – at a point where Geffrey has reached the summit of the ‘roche of yse’, entered Fame’s curious and crafty castle and begun to encounter some of her petitioners – he engages quite explicitly with writers and fame. A passage which amounts to Chaucer’s most extensive catalogue of authors (lines 1419–519) portrays a dozen writers of ‘gret noblesse … gret sentence and … of digne reverence’ (lines 1454–6), in unchronological order from Josephus and Statius, through the ancient and modern bearers of the fame of Troy, to the classical Latin poets. Among all these writers perched on their columns on either side of Fame’s hall, Dante, of course, does not appear. However, awareness of the Italian author’s precedence and status is implicit here too, and I would argue that the silence about the poem that had dealt with souls ‘di fama note’ is a pregnant one. In the light of The House of Fame’s concern with authorship – and in the immediate context of this array of authors – Helen Cooper has argued that Chaucer is identifying one of the bearers of Troy’s fame – ‘Englyssh Gaunfride’ – with himself, writing in ‘the tradition of great named authors’.13 Yet Chaucer in The House of Fame and elsewhere seems uneasy about asserting such authority or even laying claim to the name of ‘poete’. The narrator in the invocation to this third book has approached Apollo’s laurel with considerable caution about his ‘art poetical’, and Geffrey will later resist the idea of posterity having his ‘name in honde’ (House of Fame, line 1877). On the other hand, at the end of Troilus and Criseyde the narrator does send his ‘litel book’ (Book V, line 1786) to follow in the footsteps of five classical poets, and, as Cooper suggests, Chaucer could be envisaging a role as an aspiring or established writer about Troy.14 If ‘Englyssh Gaunfride’ does indeed suggest

13 14

glas”: Glazing, Glossing, and Patronage in Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Chaucer Review 45 (2011), 70, 79. Coley’s argument leads ultimately to a very different conclusion about that ‘project’ and does not engage with either the passage in Book 3 or with Cawsey’s proposed reading, but it takes a comparable approach to HF’s textuality and intermediality. See H. Cooper, ‘The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour’, New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999), especially pp. 59–60. Chaucer has, of course, already written about Troy, ‘the Troianyssh blode’, ‘the Troian nacion’ and ‘Troian Eneas’ at some length in Book 1 of HF, although his version of the tragic tale of Dido tends to overshadow that narrative fact. Writing about Troy in this context could also extend to some stage of the ongoing composition of Troilus and Criseyde. However, there seems no need to suggest that HF ‘just might have been composed after Troilus and Criseyde’ (A. J. Minnis, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems [Oxford, 1995], p. 171), still less that this ‘seems likely, in fact’ (Helen Cooper, ‘Chaucerian



Dante, Fame and Infamy in The House of Fame  49

that the new English author is staking some kind of authorial claim, then the very obliqueness of Chaucer’s self-identification here might once again recall Dante’s indirect and quickly qualified claim to fame as the successor to a line of vernacular poets (Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti, in Purgatorio, Canto 11, lines 97–9). Chaucer’s awareness of Dante as authorial precedent is also implied at the end of this review of writers. At this point (House of Fame, lines 1507–12) attention turns from the matter of Rome and from poets such as Virgil, Ovid and Lucan to the ‘fame of hell’ and the work of Claudian: And next him on a piler stoode Of soulfre, lyke as he were woode, Daun Claudian, the sothe to telle, That bare up al the fame of helle; Of Pluto and of Proserpyne That queen ys of the derke pyne.  (lines 1507–13)

It is at this point that an extended occupatio immediately and abruptly brings the whole hundred-line literary survey to an end: What shulde y more telle of this? The halle was al ful, y-wys, Of hem that writen of the olde gestes As ben on trees rokes nestes – But hit a ful confus matere Were al the gestes for to here That they of write, or how they hight.  (lines 1513–19)

Such abruptness prompts several questions, not least about the seriousness with which these august talking heads are being viewed.15 But among the questions raised is also one about why the account of ‘the fame of helle’ should be so suddenly cut off. Who else then might tell of such a ‘derke’

15

Poetics’, New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard [Cambridge, 2003], p. 47). Rather than envisaging such a tidy poetic progression, it may be more productive to recognize what Kathryn Lynch has called the ‘braided complexity’ of the relationship between these texts; see K. L. Lynch, ‘Dating Chaucer’, Chaucer Review 42 (2007), 16. As HF’s long shot of the columns in Fame’s hall dissolves, they are compared unflatteringly to ‘rokes nestes’ (line 1516). On the tone of this image, see Stephen Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 1986), p. 21; it may, as Jacqueline Miller has suggested, reflect in general ‘the lack of any authoritative standard to negotiate among the different songs and stories’ (Jacqueline T. Miller, Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts [New York and Oxford, 1986], p. 63). But might the contentious nests of poetry here also recall that nido (nest) from which Dante was said to be chasing the other fledglings of the vernacular (Purg. Canto 11, line 99)?

50  Nick Havely

topic? In Book 1, Dante had immediately followed Claudian as an authority for readers on the subject of hell: And every torment eke, in helle Saugh he, whiche is longe to telle – Which, who-so willeth for to knowe, He moste rede many a rowe On Virgile or on Claudian Or Daunte, that hit tellen kan.  (House of Fame, lines 445–50)

Even the final group of ‘hem that writen of the olde gestes’ (Virgil, Ovid, Lucan and Claudian) replicates those who are alluded to at the end of Book 1.16 There seems thus to be a significant act of occlusion on Chaucer’s part at the end of this array of authors in Fame’s hall: a pedestal that he has perhaps deliberately left vacant, as he moves closer to his own representations of and judgements on souls who ‘wolde fayn han … a fame’. Chaucer’s awareness of Dante’s role as poet of ‘the fame of helle’ and of the Commedia’s moral framework has been recognized in the scenes which immediately follow the famous authors and which enact Fame’s wider verdicts. Over the course of three hundred lines or so – from the murmurous ‘noyse’ of the first ‘grete companye’ of petitioners (lines 1520–9) to the blasting of Aeolus’ foul ‘blake trumpe’ which proclaims the last group’s infamy to ‘the worldys ende’ (lines 1861–7) – Fame presides over a Dantean number of encounters and judgements (nine).17 Her arbitrary judgements, occasional brutality and the honesty with which she admits that there is ‘in me no justice’ (line 1820) all contribute at this point to Chaucer’s ‘damnation debate with Dante’, which Steve Ellis identifies at other points in The House of Fame, as well as in Troilus and Criseyde and the Legend of Good Women.18 Fame’s ‘questionable judgments’, as Lisa Kiser suggests, might make one ‘want to see her, in Dantean terms, as a master of the “anti-contrapasso”’.19 Within Chaucer’s and Fame’s pseudo- (or anti-)Dantean framework of judgement, it is significant that treachery occupies not the ninth category (as in the Inferno’s frozen Cocitus) but the eighth:   Tho come another companye That had ydoon the trayterye, 16

17

18 19

Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses, Virgil’s Aeneid, Claudian’s de Raptu Proserpinae and Lucan’s Pharsalia (source for the sinister reference to the ‘desert of Lybye’) are all alluded to within a hundred lines (397–491) at the end of HF, Book 1. On Dantean aspects of the sequence of judgements in HF, lines 1520–867, see Paul G. Ruggiers, ‘The Unity of Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Studies in Philology 50 (1953), 25; J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame: An Exposition of The House of Fame (Oxford, 1968), pp. 159–60, 162; and Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, pp. 77–8. Ellis, ‘Chaucer, Dante, and Damnation’, p. 292. Kiser, Truth and Textuality, pp. 36–7.



Dante, Fame and Infamy in The House of Fame  51 The harme, the grete wikkednesse That any hert kouthe gesse, And prayed her to han good fame And that she nolde doon hem no shame, But yeve hem loos and good renoun And do hyt blowe in a clarioun.  (House of Fame, lines 1811–18)

This extreme of ‘wikkednesse’, accompanied by a brazen bid for ‘good renoun’, meets not with a blast of what Pope called ‘Fame’s posterior trumpet’ (Dunciad [1741 version], Book 4, line 71), but with a roguish compromise – if not complicity – on the part of Chaucer’s goddess:   ‘Nay, wis,’ quod she, ‘hyt were a vice – Al be ther in me no justice – Me liste not doo hyt nowe, Ne this nyl I graunte yowe.’  (House of Fame, lines 1819–22)

Thus, despite Fame’s refusal to defy and corrupt justice entirely by granting ‘loos and good renoun’ to those guilty of the worst villainy imaginable (lines 1812–14), she nonetheless allows the veil of silence to be drawn over their ‘harme’ and ‘grete wikkednesse’. Perhaps, too, the ‘not … nowe’ proviso that accompanies her refusal even suggests that, were these petitioners to come back on another occasion, something ‘better’ might be arranged. This shiftiness in the seat of Chaucerian judgement contrasts sharply with the distributions of and negotiations over fame and infamy in the Commedia’s afterlife. Such negotiations can be complex, even somewhat devious: for example, in Inferno, Canto 32, as Boitani shows, the traitor Bocca degli Abati violently rejects the offer of fame through the note of the Commedia, yet ‘Dante proclaims that, in spite of his silence, he will bring true tidings of him to the world of the living’.20 Nonetheless, the premise of the Inferno remains that, however tortuous the dealings with figures such as Bocca may be, they are ultimately serving the purposes of justice. The ninth and final category of Chaucer’s fame-seekers comprises a group of souls who seem to inhabit a world of comedy that again seems very different from Dante’s:   Tho come ther lepynge in a route And gunne choppen al aboute Every man upon the crowne, That alle the halle gan to sowne, And seide: ‘Lady, leefe and dere, We ben suche folks as ye mowe here – To telle al the tale aright – We ben shrewes, every wyght, 20

Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, p. 78.

52  Nick Havely And han delyte in wikkednes As good folke han in godenes, And joy to be knowen shrewes And ful of vices and wikked thewes. Wherfor we pray yow arowe That our fame suche be knowe In alle thing ryght as hit is.’  (House of Fame, lines 1823–37)

The arrival of this ‘route’ at Fame’s hall is more vividly portrayed than that of any other group of petitioners and seems more like a raucous comic turn than a serious appeal to judgement. The outbreak of folly here could, as Sandra Billington suggests, derive from The House of Fame’s association with winter fool activity.21 The slapping of heads (lines 1824–5) would probably have been done with a fool’s stick, which might have a bladder on the end.22 The ‘shrewes’ announce themselves as ‘shrewes’ with all the cheerful confidence of vices in a moral interlude (lines 1827–30), and Fame seems to be playing their game when she dwells upon the fool’s costume worn by their spokesman: ‘But what art thow that seyst this tale, That werest on thy hose a pale And on thy tipet suche a belle?’  (lines 1839–41)

Fame’s final grotesque supplicant, with his hood and bells, is thus partly a court fool who, with his motley companions, heralds the ‘queynt’ chaos of ‘chirkynges, jangles’ and general ‘noyse’ that holds sway in the final scenes of the poem. He is also partly a more ancient and sinister anarch. As several commentators note, he is descended from the legendary Herostratus, the arsonist who for the sake of notoriety burned down the temple of Diana at Ephesus, and whose name the Ephesians then decreed should be unspoken.23 The Chaucerian rogue’s motives for burning down the temple of Isis in Athens (lines 1844–5) are set out in his reply to Fame’s next obvious question: ‘Wherfor didest thou so?’ To which he replies perkily:

21

22 23

Sandra Billington, ‘The Fool in Medieval England and the Play Mankind’, The Fool and the Trickster, ed. P. V. A. Williams (Cambridge, 1979), p. 41; Sandra Billington, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton, 1984), pp. 8–9. See Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London, 1935), pp. 121–2; William Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptre (London, 1969), pp. 11, 22 and 37 (pl. 10). An ironic touch on Chaucer’s part, as Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame, pp. 162–3, points out. On classical and medieval sources for the story of Herostratus, see Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, p. 137, and, more extensively, Albert Borowitz, Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratus Syndrome (Kent, OH, and London, 2005), pp. 6–8 and 20–2 (including Valerius Maximus and John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Book 8, chapter 5, p. 313).



Dante, Fame and Infamy in The House of Fame  53 ‘I wolde fayn han hadde a fame As other folke hadde in the toune, Allethough they were of grete renoune For her virtue and for her thewes. Thought y – as gret a fame han shrewes (Though hit be noght) for shrewednesse As good folke han for godenesse. And sith y may not have that oon That other nyl y noght forgoon. And for to gette of Fames hire The temple sette y alle afire. Now doon our loos be blowen swithe …’  (lines 1848–59)

This perverse yet cogent justification of his sacrilegious action promptly wins the ‘shrewe’ the ‘loos’ he seeks, and it draws together some of the issues in play at this late stage of the poem.24 For example, the sequence of rhyme words – ‘fame’/‘toune’/‘renoune’ (1848–50) – links this attention-seeking city-dweller with the carnivalesque urban gossip-mongers who will soon be encountered in the House of Rumour (lines 2121–30). His success in gaining ‘Fames hire’, as peremptorily demanded here, reflects once again Fame’s assertion that there is in her ‘no justice’; indeed, poetic (if not ethical) justice might well have reversed her last two judgements: sounding Aeolus’ ‘blake trumpe’ for those guilty of ‘trayterye’, while denying the oxygen of publicity to those who seek fame or infamy at any cost. The ‘shrewe’ is also a dominant and highly influential voice at this transitional stage in the journey. As a comic subversive, he shares a function with The House of Fame’s dreamer/ narrator: his paradoxical and reductive argument about infamy as ‘a fame’ is quickly followed by Geffrey’s rejection of the idea that future generations might have his own ‘name in honde’ (lines 1876–7), and both views combine to conclude the poem’s meditations about the bestowal of fame and infamy on a disturbingly nihilistic note.25 Chaucer’s imagining of ‘fame for shrewednesse’ at this late stage of The House of Fame seems to contrast sharply with some of the representations of infamy and the idea of cultivating and perpetuating ill-fame in the Commedia. ‘Infamia’ (as well as ‘fama’/‘lodo’) is referred to at several points 24 25

On this figure’s role as ‘spokesman for all of Fame’s petitioners’, see Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, p. 188. In a recent unpublished paper (‘Between Text and Gloss in The House of Fame and Inferno III’, presented at the 47th Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan, May 2012), Kara Gaston has suggestively compared Chaucer’s ‘shrewe’ with the unnamed individual among the ignavi of Inferno 3 (discussed above), concluding that ‘These two figures … help to define the nature of their respective poems’ content … in very different ways. Whereas Dante locates a meaningless figure on the edges of his poem, Chaucer places one at its very center.’ I am grateful to Dr Gaston for providing a copy of this paper and allowing me to quote from it.

54  Nick Havely

in the Inferno, and perhaps the most dramatic usage of the word itself is by the most prominent inhabitant of Dante’s ninth circle. Ugolino is initially reluctant to renew the ‘disperato dolor’ associated with his and his children’s death as a result of betrayal by Archbishop Ruggieri, whose head he now gnaws amid the ice of Antenora. But, when nerving himself vengefully to do so, he determines that: ‘… se le mie parole esser dien seme che frutti infamia al traditor ch’i’ rodo parlare e lagrimar vedrai insieme.’  (Inferno, Canto 33, lines 7–9) [‘… if my words are to be the seed that shall burgeon into infamy for this traitor I am gnawing, you shall see me speak and weep at once.’]

Ugolino is responding here to the Dante-persona’s earlier offer to spread such tidings on his behalf (Canto 32, lines 135–8); yet the very words he utters (especially the vicious rhyme word ‘rodo’) bespeak the bestial segno of his continuing hunger for revenge and mark him, too, with the infamia that the canto perpetuates. Nevertheless, despite the sardonic way in which he describes himself as ‘such a neighbour’ (‘tal vicino’) to his enemy – and despite the canine relish with which, at the end of his speech, his teeth fasten on the archbishop’s skull – Ugolino is far from finding much ‘joye’ in ‘shrewedenesse’.26 However, more exultant forms of infamy are evident earlier in Dante’s Inferno. One prominent example is the blasphemer Capanaeus, whose continuing obduracy in the face of Jupiter is apparent in his refusal to ‘soften’ even under the fiery rain of Hell’s seventh circle (Canto 14, lines 46–72). Although a prisoner of his own rage (‘rabbia’) as Virgil later explains, Capanaeus is still impressive (‘grande’) in his ‘contempt’ for Hell – like Farinata before him – and his opening words to Dante and Virgil convey a monumental (if perverse) self-confidence and resolution: ‘As I was in life, so am I in death’ (‘Qual io fui vivo, tal son morto’).27 Closer to the grotesque Chaucerian ‘shrewe’ in his courting of infamy is a Dantean figure who appears in between Capanaeus and Ugolino and, in the seventh ditch of Malebolge, voices a marked degree of ‘joye’ in ‘shrewednesse’: ‘Vita bestial mi piacque e non umana, sì come a mul ch’i’ fui; son Vanni Fucci bestia, e Pistoia mi fu degna tana.’  (Inferno, Canto 24, lines 124–6)

26 27

Inf. Canto 33, lines 15 and 77–8. Inf. Canto 14, lines 46, 51 and 64–6; compare Inf. Canto 10, lines 35–6 and 73–5.



Dante, Fame and Infamy in The House of Fame  55 [‘Bastard that I was, I preferred the life of the beast to that of humanity; I am Vanni Fucci, that beast, and for me Pistoia was a fitting lair.’]

Vanni Fucci seems, moreover, to have no regrets other than that of being discovered by Dante (lines 133–5), and even the crime for which he is now condemned to the serpent-infested bolgia of the thieves is very similar to the sacrilege committed by both Herostratus and the ‘shrewe’ at Fame’s court: ‘in giù son messo tanto perch’io fui ladro a la sagrestia d’i belli arredi, e falsamente già fu apposto altrui.’  (Canto 24, lines 137–9) [‘I’ve been sent down here because I robbed the sacristy (of S. Jacopo at Pistoia) of its fine ornaments, and the deed was wrongly pinned on others.’]

As a modern commentator notes: ‘Vanni Fucci brags about his own guilt here, as if it were an honour not to be yielded to anyone else.’28 His braggartry and defiance continue to inform the rest of the episode, as he gleefully goes on to prophesy the defeat of Dante’s allies (lines 139–51), and he finishes off more grotesquely than Capanaeus by aiming his defiance at God with an obscene gesture to open the next canto (25, lines 1–3). Fame is foregrounded at several points in this episode. The encounter with Vanni Fucci and the whole narrative of the thieves and their metamorphoses in Cantos 24–5 of the Inferno has been prefaced by Virgil’s insistence on the need to exert oneself in the pursuit of fama, and most modern critics recognize how Dante’s own sense of poetic reputation is implicated as he silences Lucan and even Ovid when describing the final bizarre transformations in the second of these two cantos.29 Chaucer might thus have had this Dantean interweaving of glory and infamy – and this climax of infernal grotesquerie – still in mind when moving from the last blast of Fame’s judgements to answering the question of whether Geffrey himself has ‘com hider to han fame’ (line 1872): ‘Nay, forsothe, frende,’ quod y, ‘I cam noght hyder, graunt mercy, For no suche cause, by my hede! Sufficeth me, as I were dede, That no wight have my name in honde. I wote my self best how y stonde – 28 29

Chiavacci Leonardi, ed., Commedia, p. 724, n. on line 139 (my translation). Inf. Canto 24, lines 46–51; Canto 25, lines 94–102. On ideas of artistry in these ‘Cantos of the Thieves’, see, for example, Joan M. Ferrante, ‘Good Thieves and Bad Thieves: A Reading of Inferno XXIV’, Dante Studies 104 (1986), 83–98; and Peter S. Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments (Stanford, CA, 1999), pp. 148–9.

56  Nick Havely For, what I drye or what I thynke, I wol my selfe alle hyt drynke, Certayne, for the more parte, As ferforthe as I kan myn arte.’  (House of Fame, lines 1873–82)

His complex response here – the shying away from the very word ‘fame’, the hedging about what his ‘arte’ might achieve – can all be seen as negotiating further with the Commedia’s discourse of how ‘in fama … si vien’.30 At the opening of this ‘lytel laste boke’, the narrator has disclaimed ‘art poetical’ and the concern ‘to shew craft’; yet the god who is craftily invoked for guidance is recognizably the laurel-bearing Apollo of Dante’s Paradiso.31 And, in the final stages of the poem – before the ‘world’s noise’ dissolves like ‘a breath of wind’ – Chaucer can still be seen acknowledging and measuring his indebtedness to and his distance from Dante.

30

31

Geffrey’s cryptic utterance has been variously interpreted: as ‘a stoic and Christian position’ (Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, p. 170); or as ‘a huffy and evasive little speech’ (David Wallace, ‘Chaucer’s Continental Inheritance: The Early Poems and Troilus and Criseyde’, The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. P. Boitani and J. Mann (Cambridge, 1986), p. 22. His argument develops a kind of circular ambiguity which Miller (Poetic License, p. 67) describes as ‘a careful balance between untenable alternatives’, although a more recent critic (reflecting something of Boitani’s view) finds here ‘a plea for the absolute necessity of the private life’ (Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London [Oxford, 2007], p. 20). For parallels with Par. Canto 1, lines 13–36, see especially HF, lines 1101, 1103 and 1109. On the convergences and differences between Chaucer and Dante here, see Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame, pp. 100–3; Howard H. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman, OK, 1984), pp. 68–70; Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1985), p. 179; Wallace, ‘Chaucer’s Continental Inheritance’, p. 23; and Glenn A. Steinberg, ‘Chaucer in the Field of Cultural Production: Humanism, Dante, and The House of Fame’, Chaucer Review 35 (2000), 194–6.

3 ‘And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace’: Reconstructing the Spectral Canon in Statius and Chaucer* Elizaveta Strakhov

A

t the close of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer instructs his ‘litel bok’ to go forth into the world as it continues to venerate the traces of the great poets, Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan and Statius, who have come before it (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 5, lines 1789-92).1 This moment constitutes a classic example of what David Wallace has called a ‘sixth of six topos’, a literary device that ‘bespeaks the highest poetic ambition: a desire to complete a sequence of poetic activity conjoining pagan antiquity and the Christian present’.2 Chaucer’s tribute to these five authorities establishes him as the recipient of their literary legacy, where he becomes the sixth member of an illustrious collective. Inserting himself into this handpicked canon, Chaucer becomes its implicit culmination, thus asserting Troilus and Criseyde’s claim to literary fame. Despite the self-professed reliance of his text on antiquity, however, in his actual use of the device Chaucer is drawing on far more proximate – and vernacular – literary models. His list of classical poets echoes Dante’s ‘bella scola’ in the Inferno, where Virgilio introduces Dante to the shades of Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan, who proceed to * My abiding gratitude to Rita Copeland, David Wallace, Nicholas Havely, Kara Gaston, A. B. Kraebel and Courtney Rydel for their generous feedback over the course of this piece’s development, as well as to Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall for first giving me the opportunity to present this work at the London Chaucer Conference in 2011. 1 All quotations of this text are taken from Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Barry Windeatt (London, 2003). 2 David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA, 1997), pp. 80–1; see also his Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 50–3. As Wallace observes, another model for Chaucer’s use of the ‘sixth of six topos’ is certainly also Jean de Meun’s section of the Roman de la rose, in which de Meun names himself sixth after Tibullus, Gallus, Catullus, Ovid and Guillaume de Lorris (lines 10477–578).

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welcome Dante as the sixth poet in their midst (Canto 4, lines 82–102). The form of ­Chaucer’s invocation is more reminiscent still of the Filocolo, where Boccaccio addresses himself to his ‘piccolo … libretto’ [little book] and commands it to follow Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid and Dante ‘siccome piccolo servitore molto … reverente’ [like a little servant most reverentially].3 However, where Boccaccio had Dante as the final figure in his constructed canon, Chaucer includes no vernacular poets at all in his line-up. Instead, despite borrowing the form of his envoi from Boccaccio, Chaucer asserts his text’s claim to fame by means of a purely classical literary heritage. Eliding not only Boccaccio’s but also the notion of any vernacular influence on his text, Chaucer thus replicates, in miniature, his process throughout Troilus and Criseyde of borrowing heavily from his unnamed Italian source, Boccaccio’s Filostrato, yet imputing the text’s origins to the Latin of a certain Lollius.4 The name, furthermore, that Chaucer situates in the emphatic final position of his literary line-up – in the same place where Boccaccio had himself located Dante – is Statius. Statius’ placement at the end of Chaucer’s self-authorizing moment resonates with the prominent role accorded to his magnum opus, the Thebaid, throughout Troilus and Criseyde. This disastrous final chapter in the myth of Oedipus details the events leading to the fall of the great city of Thebes and precedes the events of the siege of Troy, during which Troilus itself is set. Nevertheless, Troilus is steeped in references to Statius’ work.5 Chaucer repeatedly underscores that Troilus’ rival, Diomede, is the son of the Theban warrior Tydeus. Troilus compares himself to Oedipus (Book 4, line 300), 3 4

5

See Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, p. 53. Quotation taken from Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filocolo, ed. Ettore de Ferri (Turin, 1927), p. 328; the translation is my own. For the classic studies on Chaucer’s complex use of Boccaccio in Troilus and Criseyde, see, in particular, Barry Windeatt, ‘Chaucer and the Filostrato’, Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 163–83; Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, NY, 1984); David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio; Thomas Stillinger, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book (Philadelphia, PA, 1992), pp. 132–64; and Robin Kirkpatrick, English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue and Divergence (London, 1995), pp. 60–79. For the argument that Chaucer thought Lollius to be an authority on the Trojan War through personal misreading or scribal error in a manuscript of Horace, see G. L. Kittredge, ‘Chaucer’s Lollius’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 28 (1917), 47–133, and Robert A. Pratt, ‘A Note on Chaucer’s Lollius’, Modern Language Notes 65 (1950), 183–7. John V. Fleming proposes instead that Chaucer’s use of this name bespeaks his interest in the ethical values of poetry laid out by Horace: see Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s Troilus (Lincoln, NE, 1990), pp. 179–200. Although, as several scholars have noted, Thebes and Troy were often placed one after the other in medieval chronicles, a phenomenon that has been seen to account for Chaucer’s heavy use of the Theban story in Troilus and Criseyde: see Paul M. Clogan, ‘The Theban Scenes in Chaucer’s Troilus’, Medievalia et Humanistica 12 (1984), 182–3; David Anderson, ‘Theban History in Chaucer’s Troilus’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982), 109–19; and Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI, 1991), pp. 86–99.



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while Pandarus compares him to Niobe, also of Theban fame and misfortune (Book 1, lines 697–700). Criseyde’s mother is named ‘Argyve’ (Book 4, line 762), the same name used by Cassandre for Oedipus’ daughter-in-law Argia in her retelling of the Theban story (Book 5, line 1509).6 Elsewhere in the text (Book 2, lines 80–108), Criseyde is interrupted in her reading of a ‘romaunce’ of Thebes; details from her summary of what she is reading suggest that she may be engrossed in a vernacular rendering of the Thebaid. In the same scene, Pandarus superciliously tells Criseyde that he has read the whole twelve-book Latin version, a curious moment in which hierarchies of gender and genre collide.7 Direct allusions to Statius also emerge in the very connective tissue of Troilus and Criseyde: in the proems to Books 2 and 3, Chaucer’s narrator prays to Clio and Calliope, the same Muses invoked by the Thebaid’s own narrator, while the opening lines of Chaucer’s Book 1 call on Tisiphone, the same Fury whom Statius’ Oedipus asks to curse his sons.8 As Lee Patterson has noted, these Theban incursions into Chaucer’s ostensibly Trojan story are also the moments in which Chaucer tends to depart most radically from Boccaccio.9 The Theban tale is more than just a theme: it is a pervasive presence on all levels of Chaucer’s text, and it draws attention to his most significant reworkings of the Italian source that he is closely following, yet never openly acknowledging. That ‘Stace’ is also the final name in Chaucer’s ‘sixth of six topos’ suggests that these Thebaid references may be central to Chaucer’s vexed negotiations with Troilus and Criseyde’s source materials, materials that he seems so carefully to curate for the purposes of self-authorization.

6

7

8

9

On Troilus’ comparing himself to Oedipus, see Julia Ebel, ‘Troilus and Oedipus: The Genealogy of an Image’, English Studies 55 (1974), 15–21. On the significance of the Theban names Argia and Antigone for Criseyde’s mother and niece respectively, see Anderson, ‘Theban History’, pp. 126–8. Contra Anderson, Catherine Sanok sees Criseyde’s Theban genealogy as purely figurative, linking Criseyde with the suffering of these Theban women: see ‘Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid: Women and the Theban Subtext of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998), 69–71; Jessica S. Dietrich, ‘Thebaid’s Feminine Ending’, Ramus 28 (1999), 40–53; and Neil W. Bernstein, In the Image of the Ancestors: Narratives of Kinship in Flavian Epic (Toronto, 2008), pp. 85–104. See further Boyd Ashby Wise, The Influence of Statius Upon Chaucer (New York, 1911); Paul M. Clogan, ‘Chaucer’s Use of the Thebaid’, English Miscellany 18 (1967), 9–31; and Dominique Battles, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes: History and Narrative in the OF Roman de Thèbes, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate (New York, 2004), pp. 115–41. See Clogan, ‘Theban Scenes’, pp. 177–80, who takes the ‘romaunce’ to be unequivocally vernacular, and the counter-argument in Sanok, ‘Criseyde’, pp. 44–50, that the very dismissiveness of Pandarus’ reaction indicates that she is reading a Latin version. Chaucer: Clio (Book 2, line 8); Calliope (Book 3, line 45); Statius: Clio (Book 1, line 41); Calliope (Book 4, line 35). Chaucer’s narrator also calls upon the Erynies (Book 4, line 22) and Mars (Book 4, line 25), who play major roles in the Thebaid. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 133.

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Of all the moments in which Statius’ Thebaid surfaces in Chaucer’s text, however, none is more jarring than the scene of Cassandre’s exposition of Troilus’ dream, in which Troilus sees Criseyde lying in the embrace of a wild boar. Cassandre’s attempt to explicate this dream awkwardly sutures two seemingly unrelated texts: a brief summary of Statius’ entire epic and the tale of the Calydonian boar hunt that is taken not from Statius but from a wholly different classical source: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Cassandre herself offers little explanation as to why her analysis of Troilus’ dream rests on this combination of Statius and Ovid. Where previous critics have proposed that Chaucer is making a statement here about the failure of historiography as a didactic tool, I argue that Chaucer’s puzzling juxtaposition of the Thebaid with the Metamorphoses in this moment speaks to the key role that Ovid plays in Statius’ own careful construction of his relationship to his literary forebears for the purposes of his own claims to literary fame. Statius’ relationship with Ovid can therefore elucidate for us Chaucer’s suppression of his vernacular models in his rendition of the ‘sixth of six topos’ specifically, and in Troilus and Criseyde more generally. The Thebaid’s plot is consumed with forgotten origins and genealogical disruptions that forestall the successful forward march of historical time. I argue that Statius orients his narrative around dysfunctional dynastic genealogy in order to figure his own text’s situation within a dysfunctional literary genealogy. While Statius openly avows the Thebaid’s close relationship to Virgil’s Aeneid, he is, as we will see, actually deeply indebted to the Metamorphoses. By means of studied allusions specifically to Ovid’s tale of the Calydonian boar hunt, Statius highlights the Thebaid’s fraught relationship to its own literary models, a relationship that he seeks to massage in order to construct his claim to literary fame. Chaucer’s conjoining of the same Calydonian boar hunt with a summary of the Thebaid in Cassandre’s explication points to his understanding of Ovid’s key role in Statius’ own practice of authorial self-legitimization. I therefore argue that when Chaucer excludes his proximate vernacular models in favour of classical sources in Troilus and Criseyde, he is borrowing this move from Statius himself, and it is for this reason that allusions to Statius are so pervasive on all levels of his text. Chaucer thus learns from Statius that the claim to literary fame is, at its core, an act of retrospective self-comparison with one’s predecessors, repeated across literary generations. In order to seek future fame, in other words, one must be looking backwards.

Cassandre’s Explanation of Troilus’ Dream Cassandre’s explanation of Troilus’ dream juxtaposes Ovid’s Calydonian boar hunt with Statius’ Thebaid, even though the immediate motivations for putting these two texts together appear obscure. After Criseyde leaves Troy,



Reconstructing the Spectral Canon  61

Troilus dreams that she is lying next to a boar, apparently post coitus (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 5, lines 1233–41), and turns to his sister for a reading of the dream’s symbolism. Cassandre begins her exposition of the dream by reminding Troilus that, if he seeks truth, he ‘most a fewe of olde stories heere’ (Book 5, line 1459). The boar, she adds, is ‘as men in bokes fynde’ (Book 5, line 1463). Having thus drawn attention to the literariness of her own discourse, Cassandre goes on to recount, for the next twenty lines, the tale of the Calydonian boar hunt, as taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Intertextuality continues to figure prominently throughout the scene: explaining that Meleager was the man to have killed the boar ‘as olde bokes tellen us’ (Book 5, line 1478), Cassandre goes on to say that Meleager’s descendant was a man named Tydeus, ‘or ellis olde bookes lye’ (Book 5, line 1481). She then spends the next twenty-five lines on a detailed summary of Statius’ lengthy Thebaid, in which Tydeus is one of the main characters. Only after this extensive digression through two tales, one previously treated by Ovid and one by Statius, does Cassandre finally answer Troilus’ original question: the boar of which he has dreamt symbolizes Diomede, descendant of the man who killed the Calydonian boar, and Criseyde is in the boar’s embrace because she has taken Diomede as her new lover (Book 5, lines 1513–19). For all of its self-conscious emphasis on its own bookishness, Cassandre’s interpretation never fully discloses the relevance of that lengthy summary of the Thebaid to this moment. After all, the association of the boar with Diomede comes out of the Ovidian story about the Calydonian boar hunt. There is no apparent need to dwell on Tydeus, who is simply the agnatic link between Meleager and Diomede, let alone produce an exhaustive account of the entire fall of Thebes.10 In Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Troilo also dreams of Criseida and a boar, but Boccaccio notes that after Troilo wakes up ‘chiaro parve a lui considerare / che volea dir ció che gli era apparuto’ [it seemed clear to him what that which had appeared to him meant (Part 7, Stanza 25)].11 Explaining his dream to Pandaro, Troilo quickly works out on his own that the boar must represent Diomede because Diomede’s grandfather Meleager had slain the Calydonian boar, and the family has borne an image of a boar on its family crest ever since (Part 7, Stanza 27). In fact, Chaucer’s inclusion of Cassandre’s lengthy explanation, with its summaries of texts by two different classical authors, constitutes one of his longest additions to Boccaccio’s material. The egregious – and discordant – character of this digression is further emphasized codicologically in the manuscripts. All but two of the sixteen extant Troilus and Criseyde manuscripts contain a twelve-line insertion in

10 11

See Sanok, ‘Criseyde’, p. 54. Text from Giovanni Boccaccio, The Filostrato, ed. Nathaniel Griffin and Arthur Myrick (Philadelphia, PA, 1929); the translation is my own.

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Latin hexameter that re-summarizes the Thebaid and is copied, as part of the main text, exactly midway through Cassandre’s summary of Statius’ epic.12 Francis Magoun has argued that the insertion comes from Chaucer himself and shows that these twelve lines constitute a known Latin accessus to the Thebaid found in late medieval manuscripts of Statius’ text. Certain details in Cassandre’s English summary are further traceable to known Latin accessus to Books 2–12 also copied in medieval Thebaid manuscripts.13 Whether it is authorial or scribal, this curious Latin interlude, found in almost all extant Troilus manuscripts, strengthens the suggestion that the Thebaid’s intrusion into the already complicated textuality of Cassandre’s exposition is designed to be arresting to the reader. Critics have tended to view this scene’s conjoining of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with Statius’ Thebaid as Cassandre’s attempt to illustrate the relationship between individual human endeavour and fate and the interpretability of history more generally as lesson or guide to experience.14 For Winthrop Wetherbee, the very disjointedness of Cassandre’s exposition constitutes the point of the scene: the explanation blusters through an excess of characters and events from several sources yet teaches Troilus nothing.15 Catherine Sanok further draws attention to the self-conscious literariness of Cassandre’s explanation that points to Chaucer’s sophisticated practices of textual allusion. She focuses on a telling omission in Cassandre’s summary of the boar hunt, in which the prophetess footnotes Meleager’s death but quickly passes over it as being ‘to longe’ to tell (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 5, lines 1482–4). What Cassandre fails to mention is that Meleager killed his own uncles, forcing his mother to avenge their death by killing him, her own

12

13

14

15

The only two manuscripts to omit the Latin argument are London, British Library, MS Harley 2392 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poet. 163; for a full list of Troilus and Criseyde manuscripts, see Chaucer, Troilus, ed. Windeatt, pp. lvii–lix. Most modern editors, including those of The Riverside Chaucer, place this Latin section into the apparatus, but Windeatt’s edition reproduces the form of the original insertion by keeping the Latin in the main text, between the lines in Book 5 now traditionally numbered 1498 and 1499. See Francis Magoun, ‘Chaucer’s Summary of Statius’ Thebaid II–XII’, Traditio 11 (1955), 409–20. See further Paul M. Clogan, ‘Chaucer and the Thebaid Scholia’, Studies in Philology 61 (1964), 599–615, and his catalogue of glossed Thebaid manuscripts in ‘Medieval Glossed Manuscripts of the Thebaid’, Manuscripta 11 (1967), 102–12. David Anderson, ‘Cassandra’s Analogy: Troilus V. 1450–1521’, Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 13 (Spring, 1985), 1–17, holds that the Ovidian section, with its invocation of the ‘contek’ and ‘gret envye’ (Book 5, line 1479) that follow the boar’s death, is intended by Cassandre to be a historical prefiguration of the ‘contek’ at Thebes and, imminently, that of Troy, which Troilus fails to understand. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 131–2, reads Cassandre’s exposition as a fruitless labour that reveals the extent to which humans can learn neither from past experience nor from the successive waves of poetry written about it. Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, pp. 129–33.



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son.16 In this moment, Chaucer calls our attention, as he will do throughout the text, to his delicate play with literary sources. Cassandre’s circumvention of Meleager’s death in an exposition that appears otherwise deeply concerned with the relationship of present accounts to past sources thus further draws attention to the textuality of her discourse. As Sanok points out, Cassandre in this scene ‘suggests that Diomede’s genealogy is not merely recorded in a literary tradition but is constituted by it … Though not a participant in the disastrous siege of Thebes, Diomede is a descendent of the story of Thebes – indeed, in Chaucer’s poem, of the Thebaid itself.’17 Cassandre, who ‘descendeth down from gestes olde / To Diomede’ (Book 5, lines 1511–12; my emphasis), describes Diomede as ‘Tideus sone, that down descended is / Fro Meleagre’ (Book 5, lines 1514– 15; my emphasis). Through this clever verbal parallelism, Chaucer maps biological lineage onto literary lineage, conflating family genealogies with textual ones. As we are about to see, this same conflation had already taken place in Statius’ own Thebaid, and it is effected through Statius’ own carefully placed allusions to that same Calydonian boar hunt.

The Calydonian Boar Hunt and Statius’ Thebaid Dysfunctional family genealogies and their calamitous effects on larger social structures lie at the heart of Statius’ text. The whole narrative is propelled by different forms of unnatural – or denatured – familial relationships that inevitably produce social and dynastic breakdowns: infanticide, regicide, parricide, fratricide, incest and rape all take place at key moments in the narrative and drive the grim tale of Thebes to its ineluctable conclusion. The Theban curse, recalled repeatedly throughout the story by various characters, is, first and foremost, a curse visited upon kin: Cadmus sows the dragon’s teeth, and a band of brothers leaps from the ground to fight compulsively to the death until only five are left standing and become the city’s founders; one of their sons, Pentheus, is killed by his own mother; Cadmus’ daughter Ino and her husband, Athamas, go mad, killing their children and themselves; Niobe proclaims herself a better mother than Leda, leading Apollo and Diana to slay her husband and fourteen children in retribution for her boast; and Oedipus commits incest with his mother, Jocasta, and curses his progeny 16

17

Sanok, ‘Criseyde’, pp. 62–3: in this way, Cassandre hints at but ultimately retreats from the theme of unwilling female imbrication in the violence of male action that, Sanok argues, is an important Statian theme to which Chaucer is alluding repeatedly. See also Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, pp. 133–4, who points out that Cassandre’s suppression of Meleager’s story contributes to the baffling inefficacity of her exposition, for Meleager’s doomed love for Atalanta is surely relevant to Troilus’ situation. Sanok, ‘Criseyde’, p. 58.

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and his city.18 Throughout the narrative, both horizontal and vertical kinship structures are destroyed, again and again, by the accumulated series of disasters that together perpetuate the curse of Thebes. The ultimate disastrous fate of Thebes itself is closely tied to the genealogical disruptions that lie at the city’s origins. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas’ successful line, descended directly from Venus, creates a victorious society of succeeding generations that will culminate with Rome and the reign of Augustus. The descent of Eteocles and Polynices in the Thebaid, however, is not unproblematically linear in the same way: rather, it doubles back on itself when Oedipus incestuously engenders children with Jocasta. The knotted quality of this family’s genealogical tree forestalls any possibility of a successful historical outcome for Thebes. Thus, even though Adrastus attempts to reassure Polynices by telling him ‘nec culpa nepotibus obstat. / tu modo dissimilis rebus mereare secundis / excusare tuos’ [guilt does not hinder later generations; may you, alone being different, by favourable circumstances gain absolution for your people (Book 1, lines 690–2)], we know from the text’s opening pages that Polynices will encounter no favourable circumstances and absolve nobody.19 The deeper theme of Statius’ epic seems to be that a dysfunctional genealogy can only lead to traumatic repetitions of the past. Replete with characters haunted by the troubled pasts of their ancestors, the Thebaid is also extensively haunted by its own literary past, which takes the form, time and again, of allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, specifically to the tale of the Calydonian boar hunt. Statius describes Tydeus as wearing the hide of the Calydonian boar (Book 1, lines 488–90). That Tydeus is wearing this precious trophy is curious, since neither Ovid nor any other classical source names Tydeus as a participant in the Calydonian boar hunt (Metamorphoses, Book 8, lines 260–444), and Statius does not explain how he has acquired it.20 Tydeus is, however, from Calydon, so it makes sense for Statius to associate him with the famous hunt that has taken place, prior to the events of the Thebaid, in the same region. When Tydeus angrily leaves his 18

19 20

On the Thebans’ compulsive recollections of their violent history, see particularly P. J. Davis, ‘The Fabric of History in Statius’ Thebaid’, Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History VII, ed. Carl Deroux (Brussels, 1994), pp. 464–83; Alan Heinrich, ‘Longa Retro Series: Sacrifice and Repetition in Statius’ Menoeceus Episode’, Arethusa 32 (1999), 165–95; Bernstein, In the Image of the Ancestors, pp. 64–85; also, David Anderson, Before The Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida (Philadelphia, PA, 1988). Quotations taken from Publius Papinius Statius, Thebaid 1–7 and Thebaid 8–12; Achilleid, ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA, 2003); translations are my own. References to Tydeus are found in the following classical texts: Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes, lines 375–416; Virgil, Aeneid, 6.479; Apollodorus, Library, 1.8.5; 3.6.1, 3–8; Hyginus, Fabulae nos. 69, 70; Pausanias, Description of Greece, 3.18.12; 9.18.1–2; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 4.35.2; Quintus Smyrnaeus, Fall of Troy, 1.1050. None of these have Tydeus’ participating in the Calydonian boar hunt.



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unsuccessful embassy to Eteocles’ court, Statius describes his exit as being like the charging of the Calydonian boar when it attacked Telamon, Ixion and Meleager ‘ibi demum cuspide lata / haesit et obnixo ferrum laxavit in armo’ [until finally a broad spear tip made (the boar) stop, and it worked the iron loose from its unyielding shoulder (Book 2, lines 474–5)]. Statius’ detail about the spear in the Calydonian boar’s shoulder is dramatically echoed by the scene of Tydeus’ ambush less than a hundred lines later, when a spear hurled at Tydeus: per … Olenii tegimen suis atraque saetis terga super laevos umeros vicina cruori effugit et viduo iugulum ferit inrita ligno  (Book 2, lines 541–3; my emphases) [slipped through the skin and black hide with its Olenian (Caly­ donian) bristles, over the left shoulder, close to drawing blood, and, useless, struck (Tydeus’) neck with its bereft wooden shaft.]

In Ovid’s version of the hunt in the Metamorphoses, the first spear to hit the Calydonian boar fails to do it any harm because ‘ferrum Diana volanti / abstulerat iaculo; lignum sine acumine venit’ [Diana had stolen the iron from the javelin as it flew; the wooden shaft came without its sting (Book 8, lines 353–4; my emphasis)].21 Statius, meanwhile, describes the ‘lignum’ which fails to harm Tydeus by means of that curious term ‘viduus’ (‘bereft’ or ‘widowed’), even though the spear has succeeded in piercing the boar’s hide and has almost drawn blood. This paradoxical choice of words thus suggestively recalls the ‘lignum’ in Ovid, bereft of its iron tip through Diana’s theft.22 Furthermore, in the Metamorphoses, Meleager, eventual killer of the boar, dispatches the animal with a spear to the back and a final death-blow to the shoulder (Book 8, lines 418–19). In wearing the Calydonian boar’s hide, Tydeus, attacked in the same place on his body and unharmed by the spear’s wooden shaft, seems thus to become Ovid’s Calydonian boar. In addition to demonstrating Statius’ practice of buried allusion, this Ovidian subtext of the Calydonian boar hunt also showcases Statius’ use of suggestive omission with regard to his literary source. His careful construction of a textual relation between Tydeus and the Calydonian boar is all the more pointed considering that the killer of the Calydonian boar in the Metamorphoses is Meleager, who, according to classical sources, shares a father with Tydeus, rendering the two men half-brothers.23 Yet Statius does not, at 21 22 23

Quotations taken from Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA, 1994); translations are my own. See Alison Keith, ‘Ovidian Personae in Statius’ Thebaid’, Arethusa 35 (2002), 389–91. Meleager and Tydeus are both named ‘son of Oeneus’ in a variety of classical sources, but for passages that specifically describe Oeneus’ siring of Meleager by Althaea, the deaths of Meleager

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any point, inform us of this family connection: we recall that he offers no explanation for why Tydeus wears the Calydonian boar’s hide. This omission is all the more striking given the circumstances of Meleager’s death in the Metamorphoses that speak to the issues of dynastic genealogical failure found throughout the Thebaid. As we briefly saw above in our discussion of Cassandre’s exposition of the dream, at the end of the Calydonian boar hunt Meleager gets into a violent argument with his uncles over the spoils, murders them and is, in turn, killed by his own mother, Althaea, who feels forced to avenge her brothers. Unable to live with her choice, she then kills herself, leaving Meleager’s sisters to weep until Diana metamorphoses them into birds. Nothing of Meleager’s tragic end appears in Statius’ narrative, but his offhand mention in a completely different part of the Thebaid of ‘cognatis avibus Meleagria Pleuron’ [(the cliff of) Pleuron with Meleager’s bird sisters (Book 4, line 103)] points to his clear knowledge of the episode’s conclusion. Statius’ omission of Meleager’s and Tydeus’ siblinghood, despite its clear relevance to both the plot and the themes of his narrative, raises larger questions concerning the ways in which individual texts relate to each other within a shared literary tradition and how that relation may come to be expressed. In suppressing the biological relationship between the two characters, Statius articulates instead a different kind of relationship between them, for, in wearing the skin of the Calydonian boar, Tydeus is also wearing the skin of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. From the perspective of classical antiquity Meleager and Tydeus are half-brothers. From a textual standpoint, however, within Statius’ Thebaid Tydeus is a descendant of Meleager, in that his story draws heavily on the Calydonian boar hunt, rendering the Ovidian episode its literary parent. Statius’ allusions to the boar hunt thus demonstrate the ways in which agnatic relationships of characters within a narrative can be reconfigured into broader relationships between texts in literary traditions, a move that we will see reflected in Cassandre’s exposition of Troilus’ dream. In this way, Statius shows that kin can matter not just within a story but across literary texts as well. The Calydonian boar hunt is also not the only mention of Ovid to haunt Statius’ text. The lengthy catalogue of violent events in Theban history that Statius’ narrator goes through and discards as unsuitable beginnings for his narrative – the rape of Europa, Cadmus’ sowing of the dragon’s teeth, Amphion’s raising of the walls of Thebes through song, Bacchus’ birth, the madness of Athamas, Ino’s suicide and metamorphosis (Book 1, lines 1–14) – represents a list of episodes, all of which have already been treated by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. In rejecting all of these, Statius alights on the one cycle in Theban history not found in the Metamorphoses: the tale of

and Althaea, Oeneus’ subsequent remarriage to Tydeus’ mother and his siring of Tydeus, see Apollodorus’ Library, 1.8.1–5, and Diodorus Siculus’ Library of History, 4.34.2–35.2.



Reconstructing the Spectral Canon  67

Oedipus and the Seven against Thebes, as if he is looking for some creative road untaken by Ovid.24 Thus, when Statius’ Theban characters ruminate on the cyclical power of the Theban curse, the tales of their ancestors that they are recalling – that is, those of Europa, Cadmus, Bacchus, Ino, Athamas, Pentheus and Niobe – are the same tales already included by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. Patterson describes the story of Thebes as being ‘about disordered memory and fatal repetition, about the tyranny of a past that is both forgotten and obsessively remembered, and about the recursive patterns into which history falls’.25 It is also, we realize, about the tyranny of a literary past that can be suppressed, even omitted, and yet continues to bubble just under the surface of one’s text. Repeatedly conjured up at various points in the story, these recollections of the Theban curse upon the characters’ ancestors emerge as obsessive meditations on Statius’ literary ancestor, Ovid, who has already written up those sections of the Theban story. The dysfunctional family structures that haunt the Thebaid’s characters thus figure Statius’ own literary relation to Ovid, a relation which he never openly discloses and yet which subtends much of the text.

The Treatment of Tydeus and Meleager in Later Readers of Statius Before we progress to Troilus and Criseyde, it is worth ascertaining whether Statius’ sophisticated play with Ovid was, in fact, evident to any of his subsequent readers, whose commentaries Chaucer may have encountered in his reading of the Thebaid. As we discover, not only did commentators on the Thebaid remark on Statius’ allusions to Ovid’s Calydonian boar hunt, but they were specifically interested in problematizing the Meleager–Tydeus relationship, on which Chaucer himself focuses. One such figure was Lactantius Placidus, a significant late antique Thebaid commentator with whose work, as Paul Clogan has shown, Chaucer was undoubtedly familiar.26 In his scholia on the passage in the Thebaid, in which Statius compares Tydeus’ anger to that of the Calydonian boar, Lactantius offers a complete summary of Ovid’s account of the Calydonian boar hunt, including the full circumstances of Meleager’s death (Book 2, lines 1267–98).27 He emphasizes in two more places within his scholia that the hide worn by Tydeus is that of 24 25 26 27

See D. C. Feeney, The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1991), p. 344, n. 106. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 75. See Clogan, ‘Chaucer and the Thebaid Scholia’ and ‘Medieval Glossed Manuscripts’. All quotations are taken from Lactantius Placidus, In Statii Thebaida commentum, ed. R. D. Sweeney (Stuttgart, 1997). I follow Sweeney in reproducing the lemmata in upper-case letters, followed by Lactantius’ commentary in lower case. Lines in parentheses refer to lines of gloss text, rather than to text of the Thebaid.

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the famous Calydonian boar (Book 2, lines 1413–15; Book 8, lines 817–19). Interestingly, in a different gloss he identifies Meleager as being Tydeus’ grandfather, rather than half-brother (Book 1, line 1383). In yet another place, however, he offers a thoroughly contradictory statement about the relationship between Tydeus and Meleager, when he glosses the following lines: [Olenius Tydeus], fraterni sanguinis [illum] conscius horror [agit], quia occiderat auunculum suum Thoan, Althaeae matris fratrem … manifestius tamen est, quod Melanippum fratrem suum, dum uenatur, occidit. (Book 1, lines 1262–6) [Olenian Tydeus, guilt-ridden horror of fraternal blood drove him, because he had killed his uncle Thoas, the brother of his mother, Althaea … But the more apparent meaning is that he killed his brother Melanippus while hunting.]

Statius’ original text, as visible from the lemma, clearly states that Tydeus is fleeing Calydon because he is guilty of the murder of one of his brothers (‘fraterni sanguinis’: ‘fraternal blood’). Nevertheless, Lactantius claims that the man whom Tydeus has killed is his uncle, his mother Althaea’s brother. Althaea, however, is not Tydeus’ mother, according to classical sources: she is Meleager’s mother.28 Lactantius seems to be conflating the actions of Tydeus with the actions of his ill-starred half-brother, Meleager, thus further complicating the vexed relationship between Tydeus and Meleager already found in the Thebaid. It is, as we have just seen, Meleager who kills his uncles, brothers to his mother, Althaea. In no classical account, in fact, is Tydeus known to have anything to do with the death of Althaea’s brothers.29 Lactantius’ gloss could be chalked up to simple confusion over his sources, yet immediately preceding this gloss he notes paradoxically that Tydeus was exiled from Calydon for the murder of his brother Toxeus, and mentions no uncle (Book 1, lines 1250–5).30 In other words, not only is Lactantius explicitly emphasizing Tydeus’ associations with the Calydonian boar hunt in his 28 29

30

See notes 20 and 23 above. Apollodorus notes in Library, 1.8.5, that the accounts of whom, exactly, Tydeus kills differ: ‘as some say, Alcathous, brother of Oeneus; but according to the author of the Alcmaeonid his victims were the sons of Melas who had plotted against Oeneus, their names being Pheneus, Euryalus, Hyperlaus, Antiochus, Eumedes, Sternops, Xanthippus, Sthenelaus; but as Pherecydes will have it, he murdered his own brother Olenias’: The Library, trans. J. G. Frazer (Cambridge, MA, 1921), http://www.theoi.com/Text/Apollodorus1.html (accessed 26 October 2013). Hyginus states in Fabula no. 69 that Tydeus murdered a brother named Menalippus, which suggests that he may be the source for the second half of Lactantius’ gloss: Gaius Julius Hyginus, The Myths of Hyginus, ed. and trans. Mary Grant, University of Kansas Publications in Humanistic Studies 34 (Lawrence, KS, 1960), http://www.theoi.com/Text/HyginusFabulae1.html (accessed 26 October 2013). Either way, none of these are brothers of Althaea. Apollodorus, meanwhile, has Toxeus as a brother of Tydeus killed, not by Tydeus, but by their father Oeneus (Library, 1.8.1).



Reconstructing the Spectral Canon  69

commentary, but he is actually combining Tydeus and Meleager into a single figure, even though, elsewhere in his gloss, he claims that Meleager is Tydeus’ grandfather. Lactantius is, moreover, not the only author to contradict himself on the exact nature of the relationship between these two characters: in his summary of the Calydonian boar hunt, the First Vatican Mythographer gives the full Ovidian version of Meleager’s death at the hand of Althaea (Book 2, Chapter 44), only to note, in the same section of his compendium and in total contradiction to the preceding, that Meleager was killed by none other than Tydeus (Book 2, Chapter 96).31 Boccaccio states, furthermore, in his Genealogia deorum gentilium, that Meleager and Tydeus are half-brothers (Book 9, Chapters 19–21) but has Meleager as Diomede’s grandfather, namely Tydeus’ father, in the Filostrato (Book 7, Stanza 27).32

Gathering ‘a fewe of olde stories’ To understand, then, what ‘ilke boor betokneth’ (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 5, line 1513), one really ‘most a fewe of olde stories heere’ (Book 5, line 1459). The boar in Troilus’ dream is signifying Diomede, but, more importantly, it also signifies the ways in which the literary texts of one’s predecessors, the ‘olde stories’ on which an author relies, flit between the lines of his or her own text, anonymously yet insistently. The figure of the boar further represents the accumulation of mediating readings that stand between one’s present moment and one’s original literary source. Chaucer, we recall, glosses over the exact circumstances of Meleager’s murders and subsequent death as ‘to longe’ to tell in Cassandre’s exposition. Given the problematic role played by this particular episode in the literary tradition that has come before, explaining Meleager’s death would indeed take some time. Cassandre notes that Tydeus is a linear descendant of Meleager ‘or ellis olde bookes lye’ (Book 5, line 1481). Lying may be a strong word for it, but the exact nature of the family relationship between Meleager and Tydeus is evidently not something on which Chaucer’s sources seem able to agree: Statius himself suppresses the biological relationship between the two characters; Lactantius claims that Meleager is Tydeus’ grandfather yet imputes some of Meleager’s actions to Tydeus; the First Vatican Mythographer has Meleager die at the hands of both Althaea and Tydeus; while Boccaccio cannot seem to decide whether Meleager is Tydeus’ brother or father. This jumbling of agnatic lineages with literary lineages, performed by Statius and his later readers, resonates powerfully with what Chaucer seems to be expressing by his pointed 31 32

For an edition, see Le Premier Mythographe du Vatican, ed. Nevio Zorzetti, trans. Jacques Berlioz (Paris, 1995). For an edition, see Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon (Cambridge, MA, 2011).

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use of that verb ‘descendeth’ in the line ‘And so [Cassandre] descendeth down from gestes olde / To Diomede’ (Book 5, lines 1511–12). While each of these authors has a different reading of the exact biological relationship between Meleager and Tydeus, their continued association of the two characters links them within a literary genealogy that runs from Ovid, through Statius, through medieval commentators, down to Chaucer’s present moment. I propose, then, that Chaucer has Cassandre’s exposition take its strange form of an Ovidian story joined to a Statian text, with a twelve-line Latin gloss derived from accessus to the Thebaid at its core, in order to expose the unacknowledged, yet formative, Ovidian layer that subtends Statius’ Thebaid and the treatment of that layer by later commentators. The disjointed relationship of the ‘olde stories’ in Cassandre’s interpretation represents an intentional inversion of Statius’ poetic process, whereby Statius’ disavowed Ovid is recuperated back into Troilus and Criseyde. Cassandre thus offers Troilus a truly learned commentary on Diomede, giving at once a genealogy of Diomede to him, and to us a full account of the sources that Chaucer has used for his presentation of this scene, presented as a kind of genealogy. Chaucer’s repetition that Cassandre is relying on ‘olde stories’, ‘gestes’ and ‘bokes’ throughout this exposition, as she separates Statius’ palimpsestic text into blocks of narrative, transforms this scene into a literal unveiling of the ways in which authors suppress their sources – all in a text that is, of course, suppressing throughout its own reliance on Boccaccio’s Filostrato. The awkwardness of the structure of Cassandre’s exposition is, as Wetherbee has suggested, the point of this scene, but it is teaching us a lesson about literature, rather than just about historiography. Even though Cassandre’s exposition successfully recovers Statius’ Ovidian subtext, the end result is a profoundly formally – even linguistically – dissonant narrative, where relationships of literary influence are rendered so visible as to become crudely exaggerated. In this way, Chaucer exposes the awkward seams and hinges that authors employ to construct their relationships to their literary forebears in their quests for literary fame. It seems hardly surprising, then, that the character to disclose this damning revelation, on the ways in which authors construct dysfunctional literary genealogies in which certain elements get elided, should be Cassandre. The prophetess doomed never to be believed, Cassandre is vehemently rejected by Troilus in this scene as a witch and a ‘false goost of prophecye’ (Book 5, line 1521). As one of Chaucer’s lengthiest additions to his reworking of Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Cassandre’s exposition, in disclosing Statius’ negotiations with Ovid, is also drawing close attention to Chaucer’s own elision of Boccaccio. For this reason, within the logic of the narrative, it must be summarily dismissed, for it dismantles not only Troilus’ hopes for a happy future with Criseyde but the very architecture of Troilus and Criseyde itself.



Reconstructing the Spectral Canon  71

Genealogies and Fame Chaucer’s deep reading of what may be termed Statius’ ‘poetics of disavowal’ clarifies the numerous allusions to the Thebaid’s author that occur on all levels of Troilus and Criseyde, from minor characters’ names to direct citations to, notably, moments that particularly emphasize intertextuality and reading activity. By invoking the Thebaid repeatedly, Chaucer showcases his reliance on Statian processes of elision even as he thoroughly deconstructs them within the scene of Cassandre’s exposition. It comes as no surprise then that, in his rendition of the ‘sixth of six topos’, Chaucer rearranges Boccaccio’s sequence slightly, adding Homer, removing Dante and placing ‘Stace’ in the emphatic rhyme position. In so doing, he highlights Statius’ vital importance as a poetic model for his placement of himself within a purely classical literary genealogy that suppresses his more direct, vernacular literary parentage. In rewriting Boccaccio’s ‘sixth of six topos’, however, Chaucer makes one final textual allusion that reveals the ultimate aim behind such vexed negotiations with one’s literary influences. While Statius never acknowledges Ovid by name, despite the latter’s pervasive presence in his work, he does turn to another poet for guidance. This author’s identity does not emerge until the very final lines of the Thebaid, when Statius implores his own work: nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora.  (Book 12, lines 816–17) [and do not make an attempt on the divine Aeneid; rather, follow at a distance and always worship her traces.]

This moment reads like a gesture of extreme humility before Virgil, but it is immediately preceded by a far more confident proclamation: iam certe praesens tibi Fama benignum stravit iter coepitque novam monstrare futuris. iam te magnanimus dignatur noscere Caesar, Itala iam studio discit memoratque iuventus. vive, precor  (Book 12, lines 812–16) [certainly now Fame has paved for you a favourable road and begun to show you, newly made, to future generations. Generous Caesar deigns to examine you already, And already the youth of Italy learns and memorizes you eagerly. Live, I pray]

Statius presents his Thebaid as a text that has already achieved great renown at all levels of Roman society, from Caesar’s palace all the way to the simple schoolroom. Thus, rather than an expression of subservience before the

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Aeneid, Statius’ final lines suggest that he imagines his Thebaid following the Aeneid on the same path to equal heights of fame. These very lines, however, even as they profess Statius’ intimate literary relationship with Virgil, are themselves borrowed from a slightly different source. It is Ovid who already concludes the final lines of his Metamorphoses with the assertion: perque omnia saecula fama, siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.  (Book 15, lines 878–9) [and, if the prophesies of poet-seers have any truth to them, then through all the centuries I shall live in fame.]

Even as Statius’ envoi explicitly names Virgil as his dominant poetic model, Ovid’s influence continues to undergird its very form and structure.33 In this context, Statius’ substitution of a more hopeful ‘vive, precor’ for Ovid’s selfassured ‘vivam’ now sounds more like the diffident plea of an anxious father to his child, while the pledge to follow in the Aeneid’s footsteps suddenly reminds us uncomfortably of Creusa’s fate.34 In the very moment, then, that Statius presents his Thebaid alongside Virgil’s Aeneid, his very proclamation of his fame is observed to owe everything to the continually disavowed authority of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Statius’ final lines reveal that the ultimate endgame to eliding one’s literary sources is the establishment and maintenance of one’s own illustrious literary reputation. And yet, as the presence of Ovidian allusion even within these final lines demonstrates and as the whole Thebaid repeatedly teaches its readers, the suppression of the (literary) past ensures only traumatic repetition of that past. Chaucer’s own envoi to his ‘litel bok’ is, of course, an almost verbatim translation of Statius’ final lines. Statius’ ‘nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, | sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora’ [and do not make an attempt on the divine Aeneid; rather, follow at a distance and always worship her traces; (Book 12, lines 816–17)] becomes Chaucer’s no makyng thow n’envie, But subgit be to alle poesye; 33

34

See Philip Hardie, ‘Closure in Latin Epic’, Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature, ed. Deborah H. Roberts, Francis M. Dunn and Don Fowler (Princeton, NJ, 1997), p. 157, and William J. Dominik, ‘Following in Whose Footsteps? The Epilogue to Statius’ Thebaid’, Literature, Art, History: Studies on Classical Antiquity and Tradition in Honour of W. J. Henderson, ed. A. F. Basson and W. J. Dominik (Frankfurt, 2003), p. 94. For excellent and varied discussions of the ambivalence of these lines and their relation to Virgil’s Creusa, see Dietrich, ‘Thebaid’s Feminine Ending’, p. 50; Bernstein, In the Image of the Ancestors, p. 202; Dominik, ‘Following in Whose Footsteps?’, p. 109; and S. Georgia Nugent, ‘Statius’ Hypsipyle: Following in the Footsteps of the Aeneid’, Scholia 5 (1996), 70–1. See also Karla F. L. Pollman, ‘Statius’ Thebaid and the Legacy of Virgil’s Aeneid’, Mnemosyne 54 (2001), 10–30.



Reconstructing the Spectral Canon  73 And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 5, lines 1789–92)

By incorporating Statius’ final lines, themselves a rewriting of Ovid’s Metamorphoses even as they claim allegiance only to Virgil, Chaucer demonstrates his understanding of not only what Statius has been doing to Ovid in the Thebaid, but why he has been doing it: in the service of establishing literary fame. Chaucer’s choice to place this allusion to Statius’ final lines into his own ‘sixth of six topos’ elevates still further the poetics of disavowal inherent in Statius’ own work. Chaucer’s ‘sixth of six topos’, we may remember, resonates not only with Boccaccio’s use of this device but also directly with that of Dante, for both Dante and Chaucer invoke Virgil, Homer, Ovid and Lucan. There is, however, a crucial difference between the two enumerations: Chaucer reinserts Statius, whom Dante conspicuously leaves out because he has other plans for him. Dante’s Stazio, residing not in Limbo but in Purgatory, is later discovered by Dante the pilgrim to have been a secret Christian. When prompted to relate his conversion process, Dante’s Stazio explains that he came to Christianity through Virgil, because Virgil is like a man who walks by night and holds a lantern behind him, lighting the way for those who follow, though he himself cannot see (Purgatorio, Canto 22, lines 67–9). In his own ingenious reworking of Statius’ concluding lines in the Thebaid, where Statius claimed to follow the Aeneid into Fame’s spotlight, Dante’s Stazio follows Virgil into the light of Christianity. Chaucer’s simultaneous allusion to Boccaccio’s envoi and excision of the figure of Dante, whom Boccaccio places in the emphatic final position of his ‘sixth of six topos’, thus emerges in ironic counterpoint to Dante’s own excision of Statius from his ‘bella scola’. If Cassandre’s exposition showcases Chaucer’s understanding of Statius’ palimpsestic text by separating out the textual layers surrounding Diomede, then here Chaucer creates his own, even more layered palimpsest by collapsing the intertextual games of Statius, Dante and Boccaccio on top of one another. Statius seems to be saying that poets attempt to rewrite their literary genealogies only to be haunted by the spectres of what they have suppressed. Demanding from the poet a traumatic reinvention of the self as belonging to a literary heritage that is always artificial, the desire for literary fame dooms him to a Theban cycle of infinite literary repetitions. On the surface, Chaucer’s engagement with Statius’ poetics of disavowal offers a similarly dark view of the poet’s tortured posturing when vying for literary fame. Chaucer, like Statius, has a fraught relationship with his most direct and temporally proximate literary source, a source that he buries under a Latinate Lollius. His posturing, however, is ultimately performed by means of clever intertextual play with the classical figure of Statius, who offers him the template

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for these kinds of authorial reinventions. In this way, Chaucer’s elision of Boccaccio, modelled after Statius’ own elision of Ovid, renders him a true inheritor of a classical author’s strategies for self-legitimization. If Statius suggests that the poet’s quest for fame dooms him to reproduce his immediate literary past, ever in thrall to uncomfortably recent models, then Chaucer offers a far more positive vision because, in all of his vexed negotiations with Boccaccio, he is also directly engaging with Statius. Chaucer is not doomed to repeat Boccaccio’s Filostrato in the same way that Statius is doomed to repeat Ovid’s Metamorphoses; rather, he can bring classical poetics in to construct wildly playful relationships with his vernacular influences, as the masterful tissue of allusions within his ‘sixth of six topos’ epitomizes. In this way, Chaucer’s engagement with his proximate, vernacular sources becomes part of, rather than conflicting with, his classical inheritance. He thus rewrites Statius’ dysfunctional genealogies as no longer inimical to but indeed constitutive of success in future fame.

4 ‘I nolde sette at al that noys a grote’: Repudiating Infamy in Troilus and Criseyde and The House of Fame Alcuin Blamires

W

hen Boitani published his book on The House of Fame in 1984, he underlined the conflicted nature of that text – how Chaucer’s position concerning ‘the problem of glory and fame’ seemed to oscillate.1 My objective in this essay is to ponder one facet of that Chaucerian ambivalence concerning fame, as it emerges in Troilus and Criseyde. In a nutshell, what I shall be scrutinizing is a moment in the poem when the heroine is tempted towards the sceptical view that notoriety is not worth worrying about. The moment seems to pass, the explicit reason she gives for scepticism seems to evaporate; and we may wonder whether Chaucer has somehow, interestingly, fudged a key issue here, given that the poem makes both the heroine and the reader rather conscious of posterity heaping notoriety on Criseyde. Readers hardly need reminding that, in both Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s renditions, the heroine is a character acutely anxious to uphold her honour, her ‘name’. And then, as now, one’s name, of course, constituted one’s fame. For Boccaccio’s Criseida the concern for reputation is generally more of a front – or, as Hanning noted, a ‘shield’ – whereas for Chaucer’s Criseyde it expresses a more deeply held principle.2 But the language of the two heroines

1 2

Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (Cambridge, 1984), p. 155. Pandaro deduces that only a superficial concern for reputation (‘fear of shame’) inhibits Criseida at Il Filostrato, Book 2, Stanzas 25–7 (esp. 27), and this façade is seen in action when Pandaro brings her the love letter at Book 2, Stanzas 111–13. Subsequently it is Troilo’s judgement that her reply to the letter conceals love ‘under a shield’ (‘sotto lo scudo’; Book 2, Stanza 129). Robert W. Hanning’s excellent discussion is in his ‘Come in out of the Code: Interpreting the Discourse of Desire in Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, ‘Subgit to alle Poesye’: Essays in Criticism, ed. R. A. Shoaf and Catherine S. Cox (Binghamton, NY, 1992), pp. 120–37. I quote Boccaccio’s Italian text from Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’, ed. B. A. Windeatt (London and New York, 1984);

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is often similar. Thus, when the crucial decision has to be taken as to whether Troilo should comply with the edict for his mistress’s departure to the Greek camp, or defy it by running off with her into exile (as his instinct tells him is preferable), Criseida dismisses that alternative by imagining what people would say: how her abduction would cause the reputations of both of them to be degraded. He would become ‘biasimato’ (‘blamed’), to the destruction of his ‘fama’ (in Chaucer, his ‘honour’). And her ‘onestate’ (‘respectability’) would be blotted with ‘infamia’ (‘infamy’), never to be restored in a thousand years. In Chaucer, her respectability would be spotted ‘with filthe’, and ‘My name sholde I nevere ayeynward wynne’ (Filostrato, Book 4, 147–51; Troilus and Criseyde, Book 4, lines 1555, 1582). Here is one of the bitterest moments of irony in both texts. Her ‘name’ will be forever in question as a consequence of trying to preserve it, precisely because the supposedly lesser public risk of complying with the exchange order takes her into the arms of Diomede, and so her reputation is blotted in another way. Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s Criseydes subsequently experience notable pangs of doubt about the importance that they have customarily ascribed to fame and infamy. Before we come to these revisionary impulses, it may be helpful to review arguments that can be found in late medieval literature for discounting the importance of reputation – and equally, therefore, for discounting the importance of notoriety. At the risk of mild simplification, we may distinguish three grounds for scepticism about reputation: the theological, the philosophical and the pragmatic (though they merge into each other to some extent). The theological arose from the problematic relation between self-glorification and the glory due to God. In this perspective, substantial concern for the figure one cuts in the world is a potential distraction from the reverence owed to the glory of God. Technically, it was only too easy for a person’s legitimate desire to offer a noble example to others to slide into illegitimate ‘vainglory’.3 The philosophical reason for scepticism about reputation in the world arose from reflection on relativities. This was the argument influentially

3

translations of Il Filostrato are from Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde with FacingPage Il Filostrato, ed. Stephen A. Barney (New York, 2006). All quotations from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde are from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1988). There was a balance to be sought: C. S. Lewis summed up the view expressed in the twelfth century by Alain de Lille thus: ‘the good man should not make fame his object, but to reject it altogether is too austere’ (The Discarded Image [Cambridge, 1964], p. 81). For the late-thirteenth-century scholastics, ‘vainglory’ remained an ethically contentious topic. According to Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, pp. 64–6 and 145, the general verdict was against celebrating one’s gifts of fortune, nature and grace; and vainglory was considered sinful for its vanity, its transience and its implicit usurpation of God’s glory. Holcot’s Commentary On Wisdom nevertheless urged that to neglect one’s own fame was wrong, because one’s good fame spurs others to virtue.

Repudiating Infamy in Troilus and Criseyde and The House of Fame  77 rehearsed by Boethius (from whom Chaucer repeated it in recounting Geoffrey’s airborne journey in The House of Fame). Given that the circumference of the earth is nothing but a pin-prick compared with the vastness of the heavens, and that the habitable portion of the earth is a miniscule part of that pin-prick planet, how foolish of humans confined to ‘the leeste prikke of thilke prikke’ to presume to ‘manyfesten and publisschen your renoun and doon yowr name for to be born forth’ (Boece, Book 2, Prosa 7, lines 31–46). Relative to cosmic vastness, the surviving ‘name’ even of heroes such as Brutus is a ‘thynne fame … marked with a fewe lettres’. And to aspire to a posthumous legacy deriving from ‘wynd of yowr mortel name’ is only to face the prospect of a second ‘deth’ or obliteration, after one has died (Boece, Book 2, Metrum 7, lines 19–29). In contemplating the fragility of ‘thin’ fame, and especially fame’s airy insubstantiality (its ‘windiness’), Boethius takes us closer to what I am calling the third, pragmatic reason for being sceptical. There is a rich mingling of practical meanings in medieval literature’s penchant for imagining fame as wind.4 Reputation is windy because it particularly relies on the oral exercise of human breath, which enunciates judgement and shouts applause. It is also windy because it is characteristically proclaimed or enlarged by the literal ‘puff’ of trumpeters who are hired to publicize the good and the great to the world – just as notoriety can be windily broadcast by the whispered hissing denunciation spread through popular scorn. Above all, fame is windy because it shares the unpredictability of wind. Blowing up, shifting from one direction to another and dying down, windy fame cannot ever be here to stay.5 Possibly all of this pragmatic scepticism is gathered together in a few words in one of the most conspicuous conventional expressions of mistrust of fame found in Chaucer: that is, Palamon’s prayer to Venus in The Knight’s 4

5

Samples of the commonplace of ‘windy’ reputation can be seen in Bernardus Silvestris’ Commentary on the Aeneid (‘the vain love of praise swells up with a windy voice’; cited by Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, p. 55); and in Dante (‘earthly fame is nought but a breath of wind [un fiato / Di vento] which now comes hence and now comes thence’; Purgatorio, Canto 21, lines 100–2). Elsewhere, Petrarch wonders in his Secretum whether he has studied endlessly just for ‘the windy applause of the crowd’ (‘ad ventosum vulgi plausum’): see Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, p. 109. Henryson’s Cresseid warns all beautiful women of Troy and Greece, ‘Nocht is your famous laud and hie honour / Bot wind inflate in uther mennis eiris’: Testament of Cresseid (lines 461–3), in Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Barney. So Eolus, god of winds, is Fame’s agent and trumpeter in House of Fame, arbitrarily broadcasting reputations through the alternative trumpets of ‘Clere Laude’ and ‘Sklaundre’ (House of Fame [hereafter HF], lines 1570–82); and John Gower assigns trumpets to Renown and Defamation, the two assistants of Fortune who fly around spreading news good and bad – but erratically, because ‘Renown (who trumpeted prowess yesterday) changes her language today and blows the other trumpet (which is of misery and shame)’: Mirour de l’omme, trans. William Burton Wilson (East Lansing, MI, 1992), pp. 293–4, lines 22, 129–52.

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Tale. Palamon prays to attain solely ‘possessioun / Of Emelye’ by means of his tournament fight against his rival Arcite, not to attain military success in itself; for I kepe noght of armes for to yelpe, Ne I ne axe nat tomorwe to have victorie, Ne renoun in this cas, ne veyne glorie Of pris of armes blowen up and doun’ (The Knight’s Tale, lines 2238–43)

Here the verb ‘yelpe’ (‘call out loudly’, as well as ‘brag’) combines with the suggestion of an evanescence of ‘pris’ blown up and down, like a leaf in the wind perhaps, suggesting again the idea of the short breath which ‘blows’ someone’s fame abroad. At the same time, Palamon is thinking of the momentary flourish of tournament trumpets, raised but soon lowered. It might be countered that Theseus contradicts Palamon’s scepticism when he speaks favourably of Arcite’s fame after the latter’s untimely death. The duke does indeed seem to respect the claims of reputation as he reflects that dying like Arcite – at the peak of one’s fame in possession of a ‘goode name’ – has its advantages over dying late in life, when one’s name is ‘appalled … for age’ and one’s vassalage ‘al forgeten’ (lines 3047–56).6 However, on second thoughts this brave attempt at consolation equally draws attention to the brevity of reputation and its inevitable erosion in a person’s descent into age. It is the world’s usual forgetting of the declining hero’s heroism that is uppermost in Theseus’ mind.7 For a classic rumination on these issues in Middle English – in fact, for a summative articulation of ‘pragmatic’ reasons for repudiating both fame and infamy – we need to go forward a little to Lydgate’s Troy Book (a work influenced somewhat by Chaucer, of course, but mainly responsive to what Lydgate could find in Guido delle Colonne). Lydgate’s poem includes a difference of opinion among the Greeks – presented in effect as a debate – over whether to continue the siege of Troy after the death of Hector. To the distress of other Greek commanders, Achilles claims that they should now 6

7

Perhaps the emphasis here on ‘honourable death’ recalls Boece, Book 4, pr. 6, lines 275–7, which acknowledges that an ‘honourable renoun’ can accrue from ‘the prys of glorious deth’. But although Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, p. 55, suggests that in The Knight’s Tale Theseus reasserts ‘the heroic ethos’, Chaucer by no means emulates the glowing tribute to honour and fame ascribed to Teseo in Boccaccio’s Teseida, Book 12, lines 6–19: ‘the valorous man must not care how or where he will die, for wherever he is, the honour due to him will preserve his fame’, cited in Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, p. 93. That is a sentiment closer to Virgil’s observation that life is transient, but to widen fame with deeds is a work of virtue (Aeneid, Book 10, lines 467–9). A biblical authority on such forgetfulness was: ‘Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works; our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud’ (Wisdom 2:3–5).

Repudiating Infamy in Troilus and Criseyde and The House of Fame  79 propose peace. Some of his arguments are politically emotive. The war is destroying the nobility: do they want to see peasants becoming lords (Book 4, lines 1844–54)? But the nub of the disagreement is reputation. Achilles harps on honour (repeating it six times in forty lines, Book 4, lines 1076–116). This iteration is strategic in a speech which is claiming that there is ‘no shame’ (line 1119) in the ostensibly dishonourable path of giving up. It would be an honourable and prudent withdrawal, he insists, while the Greeks are on top. If they have not achieved what they came for – the return of Helen – they nevertheless possess Priam’s sister Hesione as a suitable alternative for Helen.8 To this argument of ‘prudence’ (as Achilles calls it; Book 4, line 1073) Ulysses responds with the objection, familiar from its use by Duke Theseus, that while Achilles’ own honour is currently on a high, shining across the world, it will fade and be clouded if it is not sustained against ‘forgetfulness’ by a continuing process of enhancement through fresh exploits (Book 4, lines 1760–85). Achilles’ counter to this is to embrace his opponent’s argument about reputation’s forgetability, in a surprising, outright repudiation of fame: For leuer I haue þat palled be my name Þan to be slayn, & han an Idel fame; For worþines, after deth I-blowe, Is but a wynde, & lasteth but a throwe; For þouȝ renoun & pris be blowe wyde, Forȝetilnes leith it ofte a-syde.  (Book 4, lines 1869–74)

Achilles adds that fame is liable to be defaced not only by the sheer oblivion of time but also by the workings of ‘fals report’ (lines 1877–83). We become aware of diametrically opposed views sticking out of the Troy Book (as they often do) like so many sore thumbs. Characteristically, Lydgate threads these discordant views across the poem in a mode of inchoate debate which tantalizes more than it ever resolves or clarifies. In this instance the collision concerning reputation conforms to what James Simpson has diagnosed as a conflict between ‘prudential’ (or clerical) and ‘chivalric’ (or aristocratic) cultural impulses, with Achilles at this point incongruously espousing the ‘clerical’.9 In so doing, Achilles 8

9

Lydgate’s poem was completed in 1420. It is an expansive translation of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae (1287), which was based in turn on Benoît’s Roman de Troie. I quote from the full edition, Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 97, 103, 106 and 126 (London, 1906–35), though I have also consulted Troy Book: Selections, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo, MI, 1998). In context, Achilles has an agenda, having made a commitment to Hecuba – and through her to Priam – to persuade the Greeks to cease warfare, as a condition of his gaining Polyxena as bride. In the present passage, where Achilles is responding to a deputation of commanders, his ulterior motivation remains implicit rather than explicit. James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2: 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002), pp. 255–7.

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reminds us of those key pragmatic grounds for scepticism: posthumous fame is mere ‘wind’; it is utterly transient; while it may be ‘blown’ far and wide, it is vulnerable to forgetfulness; and (an extra touch here, reminiscent of the House of Fame with its preoccupation with tidings which muddle false with true) the very ‘palme of chivalrie’ is seared by ‘fals report’ as a result of the operations of malice and envy.10 This brief review of sceptical views of the significance of fame can assist us as we return to the expression of such views in the Filostrato and in Troilus and Criseyde. Every reader of these poems soon recognizes how they highlight the heroine’s anxieties about her reputation, though Boccaccio’s poem consciously encourages the reader to believe that the lady doth protest too much. Replying to Troilo’s first letter, she flourishes the requirements of reputation at him like a red flag, asserting that she cannot see how she can both respond positively to him and at the same time have regard for ‘what is most received with favour in the world, that is, to live and die with a good reputation’ (‘ciò che nel mondo piú è da gradire, / che è onesta vivere e morire’; Filostrato, Book 2, Stanza 123). She immediately punctures this by remarking that one has to take the world as it is, not as one might wish it (evidently meaning as she would rather it were; Book 2, Stanza 125), and she is soon flashing collusive signals to Pandaro. Everything that is to transpire must remain secret. Subsequently, once Criseida’s compliance is in sight, Pandaro urges Troilo to consider how pure her current reputation is (‘la fama di costei / santa nel vulgo; Book 3, Stanza 8) and how its continuance is now in his hands. Most of this is retained by Chaucer, though with fewer hints of equivocation. True, the same game of equivocation does infiltrate Criseyde’s wariness when she agrees to go to her uncle’s for dinner. Clearly having guessed the likelihood of a tryst there with Troilus, she communicates her awareness in a thinly coded warning to Pandarus ‘to ben war of goosissh poeples speche, / That dremen thynges whiche as nevere were’ (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 3, lines 584–5). Her disparagement of gossip as goose-like squawking gives a comic turn to the warning; and her insinuation that nothing will happen anyway at her uncle’s house that might feed gossip except ‘thynges whiche nevere were’ is a wonderful way of suggesting that she knows that things 10

Lydgate greatly expands the slender basis which he finds in Guido’s Troy text. Guido’s Achilles argues only that the nobility are self-destructing in this war, that he would rather lose his fame than his being and that, while worthiness sometimes gains praise, it frequently disappears into oblivion (Guido de Columnis, Historia destructionis Troiae, ed. Nathaniel E. Griffin [Cambridge, MA, 1936], p. 195). Guido’s Achilles makes no mention of false report. Doubtless Lydgate borrows from HF, in which the House of Rumour is blatantly a place where truth/falsehood are inextricably ‘compouned’ (lines 2072, 2108); or from Troilus and Criseyde (hereafter TC), Book 4, lines 659–60, where Chaucer renders from Filostrato, Book 4, line 78, the idea that fame ‘false thynges / Egal reporteth lik the thynges trewe’.

Repudiating Infamy in Troilus and Criseyde and The House of Fame  81 might happen which ought not to be known to happen. The passage therefore manages to affirm the importance of reputation, its vulnerability to false report and the fact that the false report might be true, which underlines the necessity of preventing cackling people from knowing of it. It is after the news of parliament’s ratification of the exchange of the heroine that overtly sceptical views about infamy begin to appear in both poems. They do not come from Troilo, who is anxious not to damage ­Criseida’s ‘onore e la sua fama’ [honour and her fame] by attempting a forceful abduction (Filostrato, Book 4, Stanza 68), nor from Troilus, who would rather be dead than ‘hire diffame’ by direct action that would necessarily ‘disclaundre’ her name (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 4, lines 563–5). But Boccaccio’s Pandaro scoffs mightily. He lets rip with an explicitly reckless evaluation of fame. If he were Troilo, he would carry Criseida off regardless of who might complain of it: better opt to be ‘blamed somewhat’ (‘esser ripreso alquanto’, i.e. to suffer damage to one’s own reputation; Filostrato, Book 4, Stanza 72) than die in misery. As for her reputation (‘della sua fama’ is the emphasis here), its loss is less serious. This is quite a charged misogynist moment: ‘Let her do without it, as Helen does’ (Book 4, Stanza 74).11 Chaucer shows at this point the same agility in nuancing Pandaro’s outburst that characterizes many manoeuvres in the English poem. He has no truck with the outright contempt which finds a woman’s reputation less valuable than a man’s.12 Instead, he reformulates Pandaro’s scepticism into a sharper fling at the short-lived nature of scandal. If he were Troilus, says Pandarus, Criseyde would go with him willy-nilly, Though al this town cride on this thyng by note. I nolde sette at al that noys a grote! For whan men han wel cryd, than wol they rowne; Ek wonder last but nyne nyght nevere in towne. (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 4, lines 582–8)

Pandarus’ scorn for public perception as a transient phenomenon fit to be disregarded retains in its clout something of Pandaro’s power to shock, yet is now made consistent with one of the main pragmatic reasons for disregarding infamy: namely, that infamy is no more than a ‘cry’ or a ‘noise’ which blows up, then as quickly blows down. At the beginning of this essay I referred to the way in which the heroine comes back to the problem of infamy when she raises it as an impediment to her lover’s plea for them to run off together in order to pre-empt her depar11

12

The latter re-emerges, much muted, in Chaucer’s poem when Pandarus asks Troilus ‘Thenk ek how Paris hath, that is thi brother, / A love; and whi shaltow nat have another?’ (TC, Book 4, lines 608–9). Chaucer seems to divert this into an elaboration of the idea that Criseyde might welcome, or at least not in reality take offence at, direct action (TC, Book 4, lines 598–9, 603–6).

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ture to the Greek camp. Rather later in both poems – but more provocatively in Chaucer – comes a crucial moment when her hindsight opens up the possibility of recrimination and a distinctly revisionary estimate of fama. Boccaccio’s Criseida, lonely and at a loss after her transfer, begins to wish she had accepted Troilo’s plan to elope. Would anyone really have ‘spoken evilly’ of her for going off with such a man (‘e chi di me avria mai detto male’; Filostrato, Book 6, Stanza 5)? She resolves to attempt to escape back to him, come what may:      … e vada dove gire ne vuole il fumo, e ciò che può seguirmi di ciò ne siegua, ch’anzi che morire di dolor voglia, voglio che parlare possa chi vuole e di me abbaiare.  (Book 6, Stanza 7) [the smoke may go where it may wish to go and what can occur to me from this can occur, for rather than wishing to die of sorrow, I wish that he will speak and bark about me who may wish to.]

Chaucer replicates much of this, but he does two things differently. First, he leaves out the sarcastic ‘smoke’ figure describing the unhealthy, wandering exhalation of public opinion; but, secondly, he transforms Criseida’s decision to ignore people’s opinion of her into an enlightened-sounding rationalization of the inconsequentiality of all public opinion that habitually constructs reputation. The omission of the ‘smoke’ figure is perhaps a little surprising. Chaucer found it apt to his purposes in describing the operations of Fame in The House of Fame. It is stinking lurid-coloured smoke that pours forth from Eolus’ trumpet of scandal there and expands more and more the further it wafts (lines 1645ff). But in the Troilus and Criseyde episode, what seems instead to have fired Chaucer’s imagination is the opportunity to extend a reflective trait intermittently attributed to his Criseyde, affording her here an insight into what we would call the subjectivity inherent in public judgement. The Boccaccian Criseida’s ‘let people bark about me if they want’ translates, to begin with, into Criseyde’s more elaborate critique of how the notoriety of lovers is driven by envy: ‘No fors of wikked tonges janglerie, / For evere on love han wrecches had envye’ (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 5, lines 755–6). Then comes a whole stanza in which her resolve to get back to Troilus (and hence defy whatever the consequences will be), is justified by pointing out the incoherence of public judgement since it is based on contradictory subjective opinions: For whoso wol of every word take hede, Or reulen hym by every wightes wit, Ne shal he nevere thryven, out of drede;

Repudiating Infamy in Troilus and Criseyde and The House of Fame  83 For that that som men blamen evere yit, Lo, other manere folk comenden it. And as for me, for al swich variaunce, Felicite clepe I my suffisaunce.  (Book 5, lines 757–63)

There are two questions I want to ask about this stanza. One is: how are we meant to take it as a whole? The other (given that it powerfully alleges the uselessness of reputation) is: why does Criseyde – indeed why does the narrative more broadly – seem afterwards to abandon the position sketched here? In interpreting the stanza there is perhaps no difficulty with five of its seven lines. Criseyde has just decided that, regardless of what may be said of her, she will go with Troilus wherever he wants. Her reasoning for this change of attitude towards reputation is now presented. Whoever takes heed of every word people utter, whoever tries to govern their behaviour according to the ideas of others, will never prosper in life; for what some people find fault with, others approve. Implicitly, if you try to conform with such antithetical opinions, your actions will be pushed futilely this way and that. Then in the final couplet Criseyde seems to conclude that in the context of (or even ‘in defiance of’) this variaunce or inconsistency of external judgement, she herself will define her happiness in terms of what suffices her, what fulfils her. In a way, the stanza issues a fundamental challenge to a society which sets store by communal, public judgement (and let us not forget that this was embedded in medieval law through practices such as compurgation and the public performance of penance). Criseyde draws attention to erratic subjective processes of opinion-forming in such a way as to undermine respect for the public verdicts which they yield. We are in the realms of something somewhat familiar to readers of Chaucer, especially as encountered in The Canterbury Tales. Consider, for example, the oft-cited remark about multiple opinion following The Miller’s Tale: ‘Diverse folk diversely they seyde’ (Reeve’s Prologue, line 3857); and the clutter of opinions in The Squire’s Tale about the wonder-working presents offered to the king of Tartary: ‘Diverse folk diversely they demed; / As many heddes, as manye wittes ther been’, a passage concluding ‘Thus jangle they, and demen, and devyse’ (lines 202–3, 261). Criseyde is effectively deriding the jangling discordant wits of those whose words fabricate unstable and suspect reputation, much as these other passages remind critics that the whole structure of the Tales discloses the multiplicity and relativity of human viewpoints. In that case, her concluding remark can be taken as an important positive step. Given the narrowness and variability of view which informs public repute, she falls back on something like personal happiness as the key to fulfilment. Or, put another way, she will now view happiness as ‘enough’ for her. That last line, ‘Felicite clepe I my suffisaunce’ (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 5, line 763), is not easy to translate, or perhaps it is deceptively easy.

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Windeatt’s World’s Classics translation gives: ‘as far as I’m concerned – despite all such differences of opinion – I call happiness enough for me’.13 Barney’s edition glosses: ‘I call felicity sufficient for me’.14 Criseyde therefore appears to declare that happiness in Troilus’ company, regardless of any notoriety that this route to happiness may generate, will now suffice for her. She has once before called her lover her ‘suffisaunce’ (Book 3, line 1309), where Windeatt suggests she means that he is her ‘fulfilment’.15 Such a notion of personal sufficiency almost begs to be taken in a modern sense: the focused objective of an individual to maximize what they would like to gain or achieve, with or without the endorsement of conventional society. However, according to one school of thought, Criseyde merely becomes the butt of philosophical irony here. Is Chaucer playing Boethian games with her? As a member of a pre-Christian society, she may epitomize the errant individual who mistakes a limited sort of good for the more comprehensive ‘beatitudo’ or ‘blisfulnesse’ which is the sovereign good. As Boethius’ Lady Philosophy sees it, to settle like this for incomplete bliss is to find that bliss always lacking: it never offers sufficiency, ‘sufficientia’. It never leaves the individual sufficient unto the self, ‘sibi ipse sufficiens’. In this perspective, bliss with Troilus could never really constitute the heroine’s ‘suffisaunce’: at best it would show her participating slenderly in the human yearning for sovereign good. At worst it can only be a decoy from ultimate happiness, true ‘felicitee’.16 While the Consolation of Philosophy very clearly leaves its mark on Troilus and Criseyde, I am disinclined to think that it exerts the kind of vice-like grip that this interpretation requires. More guardedly, we might say with Myra Stokes that the relationship of Chaucer’s story to the Boethian concepts of ‘true’ and ‘false’ felicity is only ‘something the poem invites 13 14 15 16

Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: A New Translation, trans. Barry Windeatt (Oxford, 1998), p. 134. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Barney, p. 353. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, trans. Windeatt, p. 81. The key passages are Boece, Book 3, pr. 2–3 and pr. 9. Humans share an idea of reaching ‘oon ende of blisfulnesse’ which is ‘the sovereyn good’ comprehending all goods, but they seek this by diverse routes. The ideal plenitude of good would be in need of nothing: ‘suffisant of himself unto hymself’ (Book 3, pr. 2, line 94). But overriding the fragmented human quests is something nature-directed and beneficial: ‘how so that men han diverse sentences and discordynge, algates men accorden alle in lovynge the eende of good’ (Book 3, pr. 2, line 120). Confusedly, they seek ‘thilke verray fyn of blisfulnesse’ with a good intention even if ‘errours mystorneth yow therfro’ (Book 3, pr. 3. lines 1–10). Philosophy gets Boethius to agree that if anything is lacking to a person in attainment of a goal, even wealth, that person cannot be ‘suffisant to hymself’ (‘sibi ipse sufficiens’) and it reveals ‘lakke of suffisaunce’ (‘insufficientiam; Book 3, pr. 3. lines 45ff). Book 3, pr. 9, focuses on how ‘suffisaunce’ must be that which needs no addition, and on how the fragmented imagined routes to beatitude, both severally and combined, cannot provide the comprehensive unified bliss which humans seek.

Repudiating Infamy in Troilus and Criseyde and The House of Fame  85 us to consider’.17 We should equally consider whether Criseyde is making a move challengingly similar to that of the narrator Geffrey in The House of Fame. In a justly famous passage, Geffrey declares that he has not come to Fame’s palace on a quest for personal fame: Sufficeth me, as I were ded, That no wight have my name in honde; I wot myself best how y stonde.  (House of Fame, lines 1876–8)

Geffrey repudiates fame because subjecting yourself to it means that others hold your name or reputation in their hands. His ‘sufficiency’ lies in selfreliance, or reliance on his own art. Both passages seem to suggest that, given the unattractive jangling and envy of malicious tongues, and given the shallow discordant opinions of so many people, you have to cling to your own assessment of your objectives in life and of your success in reaching them. Yet, both in The House of Fame and in Troilus and Criseyde, these breakaway moments seem isolated, and (in Simpson’s terms) the ‘chivalric’ ethos substantiating conventional awe of fame cannot be suppressed by the logic of ‘clerical’ or ‘prudential’ positions. The insights intimated by Geffrey and Criseyde just lapse, as though they were but a glimpse into an as yet unreachable alternative or future culture. In both cases they give way to renewed apprehension about the awesome power of the myth-making forces that build celebrity. So in Troilus and Criseyde, after Criseyde begins to capitulate to Diomede, her mind once again runs on the notoriety that will now attach to her name: ‘for now is clene ago / My name of trouthe in love, for everemo!’ (Book 5, lines 1054–5).18 She has no recourse now to self-consoling reflections on the inconsistency or subjective partiality of external judgement – there is only a gloomy expectation of systematic defamation: ‘No good word’ will ever be said or written of her (Book 5, line 1060). And the gestures of concern for the heroine voiced by Chaucer’s narrator are barely informed by reflection on relativities of judgement either.19 They seem more informed by a refusal to join in the general condemnation of her name. He would prefer to excuse her, out of pity (Book 5, lines 1093–9). How much significance should be pinned on that one exceptional stanza of the poem? It is possible that Criseyde’s glimpse of a sufficiency which 17 18

19

Myra Stokes, ‘Wordes White: Disingenuity in Troilus and Criseyde’, English Studies 64 (1983), 29. This is paralleled in detail in Dido’s prophecy after Aeneas’ departure (HF, lines 345–60) that she will be defamed ‘on every tonge’ thanks to wicked Fame. She will be judged a serial prostitute in the chatter of ‘the peple prively’. The notable but brief exception is the interjected query about whether Criseyde really gave herself to Diomede: ‘Men seyn – I not – that she yaf hym hire herte’ (TC, Book 5, line 1050).

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could be independent of considerations of ‘name’ and hostile public assessment should be taken as a glib self-justificatory gambit (Chaucer does invest her with a considerable capacity for self-justification in the poem). It is also possible, as we have seen, that she stands revealed as a typical human rationalizing the wrong way to reach ‘felicity’. Moreover, the stanza, pointedly insisting on the dissonances of human judgement, may itself be susceptible to other responses not canvassed here. What this discussion has highlighted is that the very figure who in Chaucer’s writing is most anxious for the majority of the poem about not being celebrated in a hostile light, and the very figure for whom a legacy of negative celebrity is expressly foreseen, is at the same time the figure who in a moment of illumination ‘nails’ how to repudiate infamy. She does so both by diagnosing the shabby and subjective constituents of that unwelcome phenomenon, and by glimpsing something interesting about a personal sufficiency attainable irrespective of it. ‘Geffrey’ in The House of Fame seems of the same mind. Yet these insights are not taken far in either text. Perhaps they were too much at odds with their cultural milieu to allow for substantial development. They were, of course, thinkable ideas, for (as we have seen) suspicions about fame were articulated now and again in the Middle Ages. This usually occurred within carefully dramatized contexts: Achilles’ arguments in the Trojan cycle are driven by his questionable private motives, and the same might be said of Criseyde’s briefer meditation. While it therefore seems that in the passages we have looked at Chaucer pushes scepticism further than most contemporaries, these passages (even Geffrey’s in The House of Fame) remain, as it were, marooned. Ultimately we must conclude that the specific proposition that infamy does not matter was a proposition too avant-garde for a medieval poet to articulate unequivocally.

5 The Early Reception of Chaucer’s The House of Fame Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

R

ather paradoxically, for a poem concerned with the dynamics of creating fame, Chaucer’s House of Fame seems to have left only a fragmented impression on the consciousness of later writers and other readers. Allusions to it in the three centuries after Chaucer’s death seldom make reference to its concern with the poet’s own fame, and mostly address Fame as a personification, or the mechanics of fame’s transmission. Several factors – some arising from the possibility that Chaucer left it unfinished, others from the absence of scribal attributions – have some relevance to what seem the rather limited written responses to the poem. Perhaps the most important factor is that of circulation. Only three manuscripts of The House of Fame survive: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638, and Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2006. None of these surviving copies was produced before the middle of the fifteenth century, some fifty years – at the least – after the poem’s actual completion.1 Other copies may have circulated, but in what numbers and to what extent is unclear. Some of the transmissional vicissitudes to which The House of Fame was prey are demonstrated by the single reference to the poem made by the scribe John Shirley. Some time in the 1420s, in London, British Library, MS Additional 16165, after copying Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight, Shirley

1

The House of Fame is conventionally dated to about 1379–80, on the grounds that (i) it was probably written while Chaucer was comptroller of the wool custom (see lines 653–5), hence between 1374 and 1385; (ii) it reflects Chaucer’s reading of Dante, and thus probably postdates his 1378 visit to Italy; (iii) the anticipated love ‘tydynges’ (lines 644, 675, etc.) may have concerned the marriage of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, or the betrothal of John of Gaunt’s daughter Philippa. For discussion, see John Fyler in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford 1988), pp. 347–8, 978. More recent attempts to locate the writing of the poem to the mid 1380s are advanced by Helen Cooper, ‘The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour’, New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999), 39–66, esp. 65; and Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (Oxford, 2007), pp. 12–13n.

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announced in the colophon (fol. 200v) ‘þat shalle nexst folowe þe hous of fame’. But the poem does not appear there. Although Shirley evidently knew of its existence and had a firm expectation of obtaining a copy, and although he was living in London, the centre of the metropolitan vernacular book trade, he was not able to find one or chose not to copy it. It is difficult to interpret the significance of the chronological gap between the poem’s completion and the production of these earliest surviving copies. If we are willing to believe that the earliest copies were read to destruction, the gap might possibly be construed as an indication of the poem’s appeal. But, for whatever reasons, The House of Fame does not seem to have had a codicologically distinct identity. Perhaps the most likely reason for the absence of early manuscripts is that, as with others of Chaucer’s works, little sustained authorial attempt was made to shape the patterns of its circulation. It is possible that The House of Fame was conceived for some kind of coterie or for a specific occasion, and not initially released beyond this. While the absence of any evidence relating to the poem’s earliest reception is a significant impediment to any understanding of the early history of its circulation, the possibility that it was intended for some sort of live performance, as has sometimes been proposed, cannot be discounted.2 Another factor which bears on the poem’s own limited fame is its identity as a work attributable to Chaucer. None of the three surviving manuscripts names Chaucer as the poem’s author in the paratextual material supplied with it.3 The House of Fame is not alone among his early poems to circulate in this way: The Book of the Duchess, another early work, also provides an example. And it is worth noting that, among his subsequent works, most of the manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde do not name Chaucer as author. But as distance increasingly separated the original composition of Chaucer’s poems from their fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century copyists and audiences, and as the general identification of Chaucer’s significance became more firmly established during this period, the absence of any scribal attestation to Chaucer’s authorship of The House of Fame may have lessened engagement with it and opportunities for its wider circulation. The fact that The House of Fame is the only one of Chaucer’s works to mention his own Christian name makes this absence of early scribal attribu2

3

See Ebbe Klitgård, ‘“Dreme He Barefot, Dreme He Shod”: Chaucer as a Performer of Dream Visions’, English Studies 81 (2000), 506–12; William A. Quinn, ‘Chaucer’s Recital Presence in The House of Fame and the Embodiment of Authority’, Chaucer Review 43 (2008), 171–96. Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16 gives the title in the contemporary table of contents (fol. 2), as ‘The house of ffame’ and has the same title (fol. 154v) and running title throughout; there is no explicit. Bodleian Library, Bodley 638, has no title or explicit; the running title throughout is ‘The hows of ffame’. Magdalene College, Pepys 2006 has no contemporary title (a later hand has written ‘The booke of ffame’) and no running title; the text breaks off at the bottom of p. 114, ending imperfectly at line 1843.



Early Reception of The House of Fame  89

tions all the more striking (he is addressed at the start of the Eagle’s disquisition on sound, line 729: ‘Geffrey, thou wost ryght wel this …’). The poem also figures prominently in the lists of his works which Chaucer supplies in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (where it is grouped with such seemingly early poems as Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, ‘the love of Palamon and Arcite’ and love lyrics); and it is mentioned again in the Retraction to The Canterbury Tales.4 But general understanding that The House of Fame was one of Chaucer’s works seems to have been lost by the early fifteenth century. It is interesting that even John Shirley, the most ambitious and optimistic fifteenth-century attributor of works to Chaucer, does not indicate him as author in the note about The House of Fame which he wrote into British Library MS Additional 16165 (see above). It was not until William Caxton’s edition of 1483, the first and as far as we know the only form in which The House of Fame circulated as a separate work, that Chaucer’s name became attached to it. In Caxton’s edition it is titled ‘The book of Fame made by Gefferey Chaucer’. Caxton’s edition (STC 5087) was also crucial in shaping how Chaucer’s poem was understood.5 Confronted with the obvious difficulty of an incomplete work, Caxton solved the problem with pragmatic candour. On the final leaf, sig. d[v]r, after printing the final lines that were in his exemplar, he added twelve lines to create his own ending, and marked them in a side note as ‘Caxton’. Since Caxton’s exemplar seems to have ended at the impasse in Chaucer’s poem where ‘A lesyng and a sad soth sawe’ jostle uselessly with each other to squeeze out of the House of Rumour (lines 2093–4), he was able to put the moment to good use as a means of waking the dreamer from his sleep and bringing the poem to a neat end: They were a chekked bothe two And neyther of hem myght out goo And wyth the noyse of them two I sodaynly awoke anon tho And remembryd what I had seen And how hye and ferre I had been In my ghoost / and had grete wonder Of that the god of thonder Had lete me knowen / and began to wryte Lyke as ye haue herd me endyte Wherfor to studye and rede alway 4

5

Caxton

‘He made the book that hight the Hous of Fame’ (The Legend of Good Women, F, line 417, G, line 405), and ‘I revoke … the book also of Fame’ (Retraction, line 1085); see Riverside Chaucer, pp. 600, 328. See further Lauryn S. Mayer, ‘Caxton, Chaucerian Manuscripts, and the Creation of an Auctor’, Worlds Made Flesh: Reading Medieval Manuscript Culture (New York, 2004), pp. 108–38.

90  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards I purpose to do day by day Thus in dremyng and in game Endeth thys lytyl book of Fame Explicit

Caxton goes on to note after his ‘Explicit’ that ‘I fynde nomore of this werke to fore sayd.’ But the form he gave to Chaucer’s work was crucial to shaping its reception. When The House of Fame was next reprinted, in 1526, by Richard Pynson (STC 5088), the spurious ending was still present (fol. Ciiir), although Caxton’s name had disappeared from the margin.6 And the ending was reprinted following Pynson’s version in Thynne’s 1532 edition. It was in this form that Chaucer’s poem came to assume canonical status, with the result that all editions from Thynne’s down to the nineteenth century convey the impression that Chaucer actually completed his poem.7 Responses to The House of Fame from the early sixteenth century onwards were therefore shaped by a crucially invalid assumption: that Chaucer’s poem had survived in a completed authorial form. The extent to which such an assumption affected its reception is not easy to assess. It may have had little bearing on later responses to the poem, which as we shall see were often somewhat fragmented. The first indications of contemporary response to Chaucer’s poem are difficult to interpret. That it must have existed by the 1380s in a form that Chaucer saw as complete seems clear from Chaucer’s own references to it in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women and the Retraction. These invite the supposition that the poem had been authorized by its composer and was circulating in a form of which he approved. Evidence of contemporary awareness is nevertheless slight, limited to a few echoes from the poem in Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love in the 1380s. Usk clearly drew on various of Chaucer’s other works, particularly Troilus and Criseyde and Boece, as well as on Piers Plowman. But the extent of his knowledge of The House of Fame is hard to determine, since the signs of it are limited to what seem to be a few diffuse recollections of certain passages. Some parts of Usk’s description of the spread of fame approximate fairly closely to sections of the Eagle’s disquisition about the movement of sound: Greet weight on hye onlofte caried stinteth never til it come to his restingplace. Waters to the see-ward ever ben they drawing. Thing that is light blythly wil nat sinke, but ever ascendeth and upward draweth. Thus kynde in every thing his kyndly cours and his beinge-place sheweth.8 6 7 8

Pynson changed ‘I fynde nomore of this werke to fore sayd’ to ‘There is nomore of thys foresaid worke’ (sig. ciij). For further discussion, see John Burrow, ‘Poems Without Endings’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991), 22–3. See W. W. Skeat’s edition of Usk’s Testament of Love in Chaucerian and Other Pieces



Early Reception of The House of Fame  91

But Usk’s reference to the spread of ‘false fame, which that (clerkes sayn) flyeth as faste as doth the fame of trouthe’ seems a much more hazy recollection of Chaucer’s poem.9 There is nothing in these echoes of The House of Fame to suggest that he had ready access to a copy, and it is possible that he was recalling in The Testament memories of what he had heard read aloud.10 After Chaucer’s death, evident knowledge of The House of Fame itself was oddly mingled with uncertainty about author or title. John Lydgate certainly knew The House of Fame and it seems to have been particularly prominent in his imagination when he wrote The Temple of Glass, with its winter dreamsetting, its glass temple with wall-paintings representing the story of Dido, and its company of petitioners.11 Lydgate also seems to have been the first post-Chaucerian writer to make frequent allusion to the ‘trumpet of fame’, an image that recurs in various of his poems, particularly in The Fall of Princes, written in the 1430s;12 the work also contains more general references to ‘Fameis paleis’ and the ‘Hous of Fame’.13 There are echoes or probable allusions in others of Lydgate’s works, for example in Saint Alban and Saint Amphibalus, whose opening lines invoke ‘the golden trumpet of the hous of ffame’,14 and in the poem ‘On Gloucester’s Approaching Marriage’, an event ‘To beo regystred in þe House of Fame’.15 But it is not clear whether Lydgate knew The House of Fame to be by Chaucer, or understood how it was properly titled. It is not included by its usual title in the detailed list of

9 10

11

12

13 14 15

(Oxford, 1897), p. 126 (Book 3, Chapter 5, lines 73–6, which Skeat notes as similar to The House of Fame, lines 737–46). Usk, Testament, ed. Skeat, p. 30 (Book 1, Chapter 6, line 198, compared to The House of Fame [hereafter HF], line 350). Skeat notes further echoes in The Testament at Book 1, Chapter 5, line 45 (to HF, line 290); Book 2, Chapter 1, line 124 (to HF, line 1450); Book 2, Chapter 3, lines 45, 46, 63, 64, 70–81, 115 (to HF, lines 269–85); see Chaucerian and Other Pieces, p. xxv. For further discussion, see the annotation to Usk’s Testament in Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love, ed. R. Allan Shoaf (Kalamazoo, MI, 1998), where another Chaucerian echo is signalled in Testament, Book 2, Chapter 3, lines 248–9 (cf. HF, lines 307–10). The relationship between the two works is also discussed by Gary Shawver in his edition of The Testament of Love (Toronto, 2002), p. 27. See The Temple of Glass in Julia Boffey, ed., Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions: An Anthology (Oxford, 2003), pp. 15–89, especially line 6 (cf. HF, line 111), lines 16 and 55–6 (cf. HF, lines 120, 239–68) and lines 144ff (cf. HF, lines 1526–37). See The Fall of Princes, ed. H. Bergen, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 121–4 (1924–27; repr. 1967): ‘So frowardli Famys trumpe hath blowe’ (Book 1, line 5117); ‘The golden trumpet with blastis of good name’ (Book 6, line 110); ‘The goldene trumphe of the Hous of Fame’ (Book 6, line 3093). See also Book 7, line 418; Book 9, line 3467. Fall of Princes, Book 8, line 2735 (Book 3, line 2352; Book 4, line 122; Book 5, line 420; Book 6, lines 109, 514; Book 8, lines 26, 2735). John Lydgate, Saint Alban and Saint Amphibalus, ed. George Reinecke (New York, 1985), line 15. John Lydgate, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. H. N. MacCracken, vol. 2, Early English Text Society, Original Series 192 (1934, repr. 1961), p. 608, line 133.

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Chaucer’s works offered by Lydgate in The Fall of Princes, for instance, although it may be the work there called ‘Dante in Inglissh’.16 If this phrase is indeed meant to refer to The House of Fame, it stands as the first indication of what was to be a recurrent uncertainty about the title of Chaucer’s poem. Although in MSS Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638 it has the title ‘House of Fame’, the early printed editions follow Caxton in calling it ‘The book of Fame’. By the eighteenth century it had become, for Alexander Pope, ‘The Temple of Fame’, perhaps as the result of ongoing confusion over the titles of a group of dream poems by Chaucer or in a Chaucerian vein. Caxton’s 1477 edition of The Parliament of Fowls (STC 5091) probably contributed to the confusion by calling this work The Temple of Bras, as if to pair it with the edition of Lydgate’s Temple of Glas (STC 17032) issued in the same year.17 Most of the fifteenth-century allusions to The House of Fame come in the context of poems in the Chaucerian tradition, attributable to authors consciously following in Chaucer’s footsteps.18 Along with Lydgate’s references to the poem are possible allusions in the writings of the Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, who refers in his Legend of St Anne to the spreading of rumour through the agency of ‘the trumpet of fame’.19 The chronicler John Hardyng, who clearly knew a number of Chaucer’s poems, makes likely reference to The House of Fame in the second version of his chronicle, probably written in the later 1450s or early 1460s, in the context of a passage narrating the death of Aeneas: This worthy prince, kyng Eneas, mortally Ended his lyfe, that was of hye prowesse, Where, so God wyll, to reigne eternally Within the house of fame; where, as I gesse, Were knightes fele of noble worthynesse,

16 17 18

19

Fall of Princes, Book 1, lines 274–357 (line 303); see further E. P. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (New York, 1908), pp. 374–5. Venus’ temple in The Parliament of Fowls is ‘a temple of bras ifounded stronge’ (line 231). A number of the fifteenth-century and later allusions discussed in this essay are noted in Caroline Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357–1900, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1925; repr. New York, 1960), see esp. vol. 1, pp. 8, 25, 44, 65, 67, 83, 108; and in Jackson Campbell Boswell and Sylvia Wallace Holton, Chaucer’s Fame in England: STC Chauceriana, 1475–1640 (New York, 2004). The allusions noted by Boswell and Holton in Pierce the Plowman’s Crede (see STC 19904, sig. [A5]v) occur in the context of the narrator’s description of the Dominican convent, a building whose ‘tabernacles’ and architectural features are somewhat reminiscent of Fame’s palace; see Helen Barr, ed., The Piers Plowman Tradition (London, 1993), lines 172–207 (pp. 68–70). Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Serjeantson, Early English Text Society, original series 206 (London, 1938), p. 127 (lines 4638–41).



Early Reception of The House of Fame  93 That more desired in armes to have a fame, Then be the best in dede and beare no name.20

Chaucer’s poem may have come to Hardyng’s mind in a chain of associations also present in the impulses which prompted the printer Richard Pynson to assemble material relating to the story of Aeneas and Dido around The House of Fame in the anthology which he printed in 1526, entitled The Book of Fame (STC 5088). This anthology was probably designed as a Chaucerian companion volume to the editions of The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde which Pynson printed in the same year (STC 5086 and STC 5096); it included The Parliament of Fowls and ‘Truth’, as well as The House of Fame. While its other contents may simply reflect the assortment of works with which Chaucer’s minor poems were commonly associated in the kinds of manuscript anthology likely to have been available to Pynson, it is hard not to feel that some deliberate decision was made to include with The House of Fame an anonymous pseudo-Ovidian Letter of Dido, translated from the French of Octovien de Saint-Gelais, and another female lament in the form of an anonymous Complaint of Mary Magdalen.21 The collocation of these works with The House of Fame in Pynson’s anthology reflects interest in the Dido and Aeneas story in Book 1 of The House of Fame, and perhaps by extension a concern with the female complaint. Chaucer’s exploration of Virgilian fama was to be a significant point of reference for a number of later English discussions of the topic of literary reputation.22 His role in the English transmission of Book 4 of the Aeneid, and his apparently sympathetic portrayal of Dido, are treated extensively in the prologue to Gavin Douglas’ Eneydos, a translation of the Aeneid completed in July 1513. Douglas’ remarks begin with a reference to the account of Dido in The Legend of Good Women, where he interprets Chaucer’s declaration that he will ‘follow Virgil’s lantern’ as a statement of his intention to translate Virgil ‘word for word’, and uses this as a point of departure for an argument about whether translation should observe fidelity to the spirit or to the letter.23

20 21

22

23

John Hardyng, The Chronicle of Iohn Hardyng, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1812), p. 36. The other contents are La Belle dame sans merci, The Morall Proverbes of Christyne and Consulo quisquis eris. See further Julia Boffey, ‘Richard Pynson’s Book of Fame and The Letter of Dido’, Viator 19 (1988), 339–53, and A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘Taking Advice from a Frenchwoman: Caxton, Pynson, and Christine de Pizan’s Moral Proverbs’, Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, ed. William Kuskin (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), pp. 127–66. See Philip Hardie, Rumour and Renown: Representations of ‘Fama’ in Western Literature (Cambridge, 2012). The mediation of early-sixteenth-century English responses to Virgil’s fama through Chaucer is discussed on pp. 582–5. Gavin Douglas, Virgil’s Aeneid Translated into Scottish Verse by Gavin Douglas, ed. David F. C. Coldwell, Scottish Text Society, 3rd Series, 25, 27, 28, 30 (Edinburgh, 1957–64), vol. 1, pp. 339–45 (cf. The Legend of Good Women, lines 924–6).

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Douglas takes Chaucer to task for departing from Virgil in suggesting, in both The Legend and The House of Fame, that Aeneas was false to Dido, since ‘Virgille dyd diligens, / But spot of cryme, reproch or ony offens, / Eneas for to loif and magnyfy’.24 This line of attack is abandoned fairly quickly, however: Chaucer is, after all, ‘venerabill … principal poet but peir, / Hevynly trumpat’, and the reproof of Aeneas is to be excused by the fact that Chaucer ‘was evir (God wait) all womanis frend’.25 Before confronting the matter of Chaucer’s debt to Virgil in the context of his work for the Eneydos, Douglas had already engaged with the structure and content of The House of Fame in The Palis of Honoure, completed in 1500 or 1501. Framed as an ‘avisioun’, this work follows Chaucer’s dream in a number of respects. Its dreamer-narrator finds himself at one point in a barren desert; later he receives instruction on the movement of sound, invokes the Muses in a passage which echoes Chaucer’s invocation of Apollo, and visits a palace whose features echo many of those which Chaucer had singled out for notice in Fame’s dwelling.26 Chaucer himself also appears in this dream: ‘of Brutes Albion / Goffryd Chaucere, as A per se, sance pere’.27 Douglas’ concern to present a Chaucer who is both ‘all women’s friend’ and a pre-eminent English poet reflects with interesting precision the emphases of Pynson’s Book of Fame. In his collection of verse texts (STC 5088), Pynson reprinted a paragraph in praise of Chaucer’s achievement derived from Caxton’s 1483 edition of The House of Fame: There is no more of this foresaid worke / for as it may be wele vnderstande / this noble man Geffray Chaucer / fynisshed it at / the said conclusyon of the metyng of leysyng / and sothsawe : Where (as yet) they ben checked and may nat departe. Whiche worke as / me semeth / is craftely made / and dygne to be writen & knowen: for he toucheth in it right great wysedome and subtell vnderstandyng / and so in all hys workes he excelleth in myn opinyon / all other writers in Englysshe / for he writeth no voyde wordes / but alle his mater is full of hye & quicke sentence / to whom ought to be gyuen laude & praise / for his noble makyng and writyng: And I humbly beseche & pray you among your prayers / to remembre his soule / on whiche / & on alle christen soules / I beseche Iesu haue mercy. Amen. (C.iii.)

The same paragraph, with minor amendments, was to reappear in the collected edition of Chaucer’s works prepared by William Thynne and printed by

24 25 26

27

Douglas, Virgil’s Aeneid, ed. Coldwell, vol. 1, pp. 419–21. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 449, 339–40. The Palis of Honoure, in The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2nd edn, Scottish Text Society, 5th Series 2 (Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 1–133 (see especially lines 136–53, 364–81, 1288–96, 1429–58; Bawcutt discusses Douglas’ debt to HF on p. xxxiv). Douglas, The Palis of Honoure, ed. Bawcutt, lines 918–19.



Early Reception of The House of Fame  95

Thomas Godfray in 1532 (STC 5068). Chaucer’s own fame and celebrity had by this point become subjects in their own right. In ‘A commendation of Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate’ incorporated in his Pastime of Pleasure (1509; STC 12948), Stephen Hawes not only noted that Chaucer’s ‘goodly name / In prynted bookes, doth remayne in fame’ (lines 1335–6) but also singled out Chaucer’s ‘owne inuencyon’ of ‘The boke of fame, whiche is sentencyous’ (lines 1324–5).28 The ‘Quene of Fame’ makes an appearance in John Skelton’s Garland of Laurel (1523; STC 22610), reviewing Skelton’s case as he joins the crowds suing for favour at her palace, presented by no less than Chaucer himself, ‘that nobly enterprysyd / How that our Englysshe myght fresshely be ennewed’ (lines 388–9).29 In Skelton’s poem Fame becomes the antithesis of Chaucer’s conception: she is a stable, authoritative voice, one wholly judicious in her pronouncements. Such a conception is an aspect of the insistent self-referentiality of The Garland; Skelton’s triumphant election to Fame’s hierarchy stands in probably unwitting contrast to Chaucer’s own careful distancing of himself from it. Skelton draws on a number of details from The House of Fame.30 His adaptation of the two trumpets of Chaucer’s poem to become the ‘trumpettis and clariouns’ which proclaim his own triumph as The Garland comes to an end (lines 1505–7) draw attention to an aspect of the court of Chaucer’s Fame that was to make recurrent appearances, some distinctly curious, in later-sixteenth-century writings. In a speech delivered on 9 February 1571, for example, Chief Justice Robert Caitlin defined the fates of those guilty of treason in terms of Chaucer’s trumpets: As for them that seek fame by Treason, and by procuring the destruction of Princes, where shall sound that fame? Shall the gold trump of Fame and Good Report, that Chaucer speaketh of? No; but the black Trump of Shame shall blow out their infamy for ever.31

Not all allusions have this judicial precision, however. George Cavendish, in an allusion dating from the early 1550s, attributes the trumpeting directly to Fame herself: 28

29 30

31

Hawes, Pastime of Pleasure, ed. W. E. Mead, Early English Text Society, Original Series 173 (London, 1928); see also Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, vol. 1, p. 67. John Skelton, A ryght delectable tratyse upon a goodly Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell, in The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 312–58. For details, see A. S. Cook, ‘Skelton’s Garland of Laurel and Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Modern Language Review 11 (1916), 9–14; John Scattergood, ‘Skelton’s Garlande of Laurell and the Chaucerian Tradition’, Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 122–38. H. C. Whitford, ‘An Uncollected Sixteenth-Century Allusion to The House of Fame’, Modern Language Notes 52 (1937), 31–2.

96  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards Vntill dame fame I hard blowe hir trembling trompe Whiche woofull blaste brought me in a soden dompe Dame ffame I asked why blowe ye your trompe so shyrll (lines 1222–4)32

For Cavendish, Fame is one aspect of the contemporary historical misfortune which his poems chronicle. It is understandable that she should be seen, in his terms, as both discordant (‘shyrll’) and melancholy (‘woofull’). Writers on heraldry and related subjects were also drawn to Fame’s trumpets. Gerard Legh, in his Accedens of Armorie (1562; STC 15388), speaks of ‘pleasaunt Eolus, ye breth of fame’ (fol. 207) while Laurence Humphrey in The Nobles or of Nobilitye (1563; STC 13964) observes Himselfe I sawe so stond Dan Aeolus amyd the house of fame, Who blewe the blast with golden tromp in hand  (C.iii.)

Heraldic writers found other, more tenuous, links between their own interests and aspects of the poem.33 Legh, for example, makes a connection between the house of fame and the ‘horse of Fame’ (Pegasus): He beareth Azure, A Pegasus Argent, Called the horse of honour whose condicion Sorares ye xxiii. Emperour of Assiria, honored so muche for his swifte course, As he Iudged him not framed, of the grosse masse of comen horses. And therefore. S. Geffreye Chaucer built vnto him (after of his owne nature and condicion, a howse caled Fame, a place mete for the horse of honour) whose original the poets fayne, was when valiant Perseus the souldier of ye goddes Pallas, in daungerous fight, atcheued by helpe of her glittering shild, ye battaille against Medusa … (fol. 202v)

John Bossewell, in his Works of Armorie (1572; STC 3393), draws on the description of Fame’s seat: Beareth Azure, a Cathedre, or chaire Royal d’Or, adourned with Rubies propre. Suche a chaire is descryued by Chaucer in the thirde boke of Fame, where hee sayeth. Fame satte in a seate Imperiall That made was of Rubye royall, Whiche that a Carboncle is I called. And there she was perpetually istalled.  (fol. 91)

He is paraphrasing House of Fame, lines 1361–4.

32 33

George Cavendish, Metrical Visions, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (Charlotte, SC, 1980). See further Dorothy F. Atkinson, ‘Some Notes on Heraldry and Chaucer’, Modern Language Notes 51 (1936), 328–31.



Early Reception of The House of Fame  97

These often fragmented allusions suggest something of the ways in which Chaucer’s poem embedded itself into various kinds of literary consciousness in the sixteenth century: responses to the poem more often than not focus on Fame herself as a personification, or on her palace and her herald’s trumpets, ignoring the poem’s investigation of fame in relation to authorship. One of the most extensive manifestations comes at the very end of the century in Peter Pett’s Times Journey to Seek his Daughter Truth and Truths Letter to Fame of Englands Excellencie (1599; STC 19818). In a vision of ‘Englands excellence’ the narrator is carried by Time to ‘Fames great Castle’ (C1v):34 On highest top of this great hill there stood, A goodly Pallace framed large and wide: At foot of this same hill, a spatious wood, That hemd this mountaine in on euery side. Moreouer in this Pallace I espyde, A thousand windowes open euery way, And many doores nere shut by night or day. At euery one of which there thrungd a prease, Of rumours, and reports: Some of debates, Some told of warres, and others blabd of peace. Some talk tof Empyers, and of ruind states; And some of men whome Fortunes malice mates, Such a confusion neuer did I see, In one conclusion did not two agree. Vpon this castles toppe of christall glasse Stood a fayre turret: where Fame had her throwne There sate shee, and in hand a trompe of brasse Shee held, and therewith to the world made knowne, The sundry newes, and tales of euery one Of those Reportes, that to her castle came; And as they bought them, shee disperst the fame. Her trumpets sound was loud, and very shrill: Reporting euery matter very cleare; Which when it once was sounded forth, did fill The wood which to that hill adioyned neare; In which a thousand tatling Echoes were, That iterated euery vttered sound, And made the same throughout the world rebound.  (C2r–v)

Pett was clearly engaged by the central image of Chaucer’s poem, with the representation of Fame itself and her power, which he incorporates into his own vision of the state of England. 34

On this passage, see S. C. Chew, The Virtues Reconciled: An Iconographic Study (Toronto, 1947), pp. 72–6, especially p. 76.

98  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

The evidence of Spenser’s interest in The House of Fame is both more complex and more diffuse than Pett’s. Various points in The Faerie Queene hint at recollections of Chaucer’s poem: the House of Pride (Book 1, Canto 4) may recall the House of Rumour; the depiction of the Aeneid on the walls of the crystal tower of Panthea in Gloriane’s city of Cleopolis (Book 3, Canto 9) may recall Chaucer’s temple of Venus; and the recollection of the lost ‘acts’ of the heroes Cambel and Triamond, once supposedly ‘compyled’ by ‘that renowned poet … Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled’ notes that these feats are ‘On Fame’s eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled’ (Book 4, Canto 2).35 Whether this personification of Fame is a specific allusion to Chaucer’s poem is difficult to assess, and a number of late-sixteenth-century references to Fame, like some of Spenser’s, lack any precise Chaucerian resonance. Possible allusions to The House of Fame in the plays of Shakespeare are vague, and of a kind to suggest only a very general knowledge. In Titus Andronicus, the Moor, Aaron, likens the court of the Emperor of Rome to ‘the house of Fame, / The palace ful of tongues, of eyes and ears’, while the Induction to The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth is spoken by the personification of Rumour, ‘painted full of tongues’.36 Evidence of Ben Jonson’s knowledge of The House of Fame is rather more substantial, and the survival of his copy of Speght’s 1602 edition confirms his interest in Chaucer’s works.37 The ‘house of fame’ is mentioned in the comedy The Staple of News, first performed in 1625, and associated there explicitly with the spread of ‘rumours’.38 Jonson may have acquired fairly detailed knowledge of Chaucer’s poem in the course of devising The Masque of Queens in 1608–9. This extraordinarily lavish entertainment, commissioned by Queen Anne and performed at the Banqueting House in February 1609, represented the overturning of ignorance, embodied in an antimasque of twelve witches, by Fama Bona, Good Fame, whose house, throne and 35

36

37 38

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Qveene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London, 1977), p. 439 (Book 4, Canto 2, Stanza 32). See further Robert R. Cawley, ‘A Chaucerian Echo in Spenser’, Modern Language Notes 41 (1926), 313–14; Josephine W. Bennett, ‘Spenser’s Muse’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 31 (1932), 200–19; Hardie, Rumour and Renown, p. 405n; John Burrow, ‘Chaucer, Geoffrey’, The Spenser Encyclopaedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto, 1990), pp. 144–8; Kent A. Hieatt, ‘Room of One’s Own for Decisions: Chaucer and The Faerie Queene’, Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Theresa M. Krier (Gainesville, FL, 1998), pp. 147–64. Titus Andronicus, Act 2, scene 1, lines 126–7, and Henry IV, part II, Induction; William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1986), pp. 150, 575. See Ann Thompson, Shakespeare’s Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins (New York, 1978), pp. 74–5; Hardie, Rumour and Renown, pp. 485–523. See Robert C. Evans, ‘Ben Jonson’s Chaucer’, English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989), 324–45; Hardie, Rumour and Renown, pp. 523–37. First printed in 1631 (STC 14753.5); see Ben Jonson, Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925–52), vol. 6, p. 331 (Act 3, scene 2, lines 115–19).



Early Reception of The House of Fame  99

retinue were made to materialize by elaborate and expensive machinery. Fame carried in her right hand a trumpet, and in her left an olive branch. The annotated text of the masque prepared by Jonson, with a dedicatory address to Prince Henry, supplied some detail about Fame’s house, ‘the structure and ornament of which … was entirely Master Jones his invention and design’. The lower columns of the house bore statues of ‘Homer, Virgil, Lucan etc.’ and the upper ones some of the heroes celebrated by ancient poets, all apparently worked by Inigo Jones to follow ‘that noble description made by Chaucer of the place’.39 Elsewhere, Jonson cites The House of Fame with some frequency in his English Grammar.40 There are a few other quasi-proverbial allusions to the ‘House of Fame’ some of which may be connected directly to Chaucer’s poem. Dido Queen of Carthage by Marlowe and Nash41 refers to ‘Fame’s immortal house’ (1594; STC 17441), and since Marlowe shows other indications of having read Middle English he may have known The House of Fame.42 But other allusions, like those in Thomas Scot’s Philomythie (1616; STC 21869), the second section of which is headed ‘House of Fame’, or in Joshua Sylvester’s translation of du Bartas, Divine Weeks (c.1620; STC 21653), which mentions ‘House of Fame’ (p. 852), are more tenuous and harder to assess. Although these responses to the poem hardly suggest any extensive attempts at comprehension or analysis, it nonetheless continued to attract readers on into the seventeenth century, most of whom probably consulted it in the form of Speght’s 1602 edition of Chaucer’s works.43 One of the most developed responses to the poem in this period comes in Thomas Forde’s Fragmenta poetica: or Poetical Diversions. With a Panegyrick upon his 39

40 41

42 43

London, British Library, MS Royal 18 A XLV (see The Masque of Queenes … With the designs of Inigo Jones [and a facsimile of the manuscript, edited by G. C.], London, 1930; first printed in 1609; STC 14778). Ben Jonson, Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, CT, 1969), p. 138, lines 450–8; see also Monika Smialkowska, ‘“Out of the authority of ancient and late writers”: Ben Jonson’s Use of Textual Sources in The Masque of Queens’, English Literary Renaissance 32 (2002), 268–86. See Ben Jonson, The English Grammar, etc., ed. Strickland Gibson (London, 1928), chapters 1, 1983–4; 4, 1636–8; 5, 769–70, 1988–9; 8, 1713–15; 9, 265–6, 957–8, 1257–8. Christopher Marlowe, The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford, 1971), p. 35 (Act 4, scene 3, lines 7–11): Aeneas soliloquizes on his imminent departure from Carthage: ‘Aeneas must away; / Whose golden fortunes, clogg’d with courtly ease, / Cannot ascend to Fame’s immortal house, / Or banquet in bright Honour’s burnish’d hall, / Till he hath furrow’d Neptune’s glassy fields.’ Ethel Seaton, ‘Marlowe’s Light Reading’, Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson, ed. H. Davis and H. Gardner (London, 1959), pp. 29–33. Carol A. N. Martin, ‘Authority and the Defense of Fiction: Renaissance Poetics and Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Krier, pp. 40–65, argues that Speght’s editions betray a lack of interest in The House of Fame. There are no specific allusions to the poem recorded in the second half of the seventeenth century; see Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, vol. 1, pp. 227–72.

100  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

Majestie’s Most happy Return, on the 29. May 1660 (1660; Wing F1550), as part of a visionary narrative incorporated into a work titled ‘On Christmas Day’: the rising sun … … flies through all the world, to tell The newes of this great miracle. It was not long before he came Unto the lofty house of fame, Where every whisper, every sound Is taken at the first rebound, And like an aiery bubble blown By vainer breath, till it be grown Too big to be conceal’d, it flies About a while, gaz’d at, then dies  (p. 8)

Forde’s poem reflects essential aspects of Chaucer’s vision of the house of fame: while it attracts ‘every whisper, every sound’, the news that reaches it has an arbitrary ephemerality (‘it flies … then dies’). One of the more curious uses of Chaucer’s poem dates from shortly after Forde’s recollection of it. In 1662, Henry Foulis, in The Historie of the Wicked Plots, and Conspiracies of our Pretended Saints (Wing F1642), twice quotes directly from The House of Fame in contexts that are explicitly contemporary and political: But let us now think of his Majesties return from Scotland, in whose absence some of the Parliament had rais’d large reports of strange and terrible plots and designs against John an Oaks, and John a Stiles, by which means many people were endeavour’d to be whisper’d into dissatisfaction of the King; and such a jealousie was grown by the noise of this Chimaera, that many did, according as they were bid, think that things were not then well carryed: and this was cunningly aimed at the King and his Favourites, by those who had their Coy-ducks in such obedience, that their Commands was not unlike that of Madam Fame to Aeolus, in our ingenious Chaucer. Bring eke his other claviown [sic] That hight Sclaunder in every Towne, With which he wont is to diffame Hem that me lyst and do hem shame.  (p. 77)

House of Fame lib. 3, fol. 320. b.

The passage (lines 1579–82 in Chaucer’s poem) becomes a criticism of antiRoyalists, of the opponents of the newly restored King. A little later, ‘the Presbyterian faction’ is criticized in this appropriation of lines 1389–92: and all performed with care and celerity, that Dame Report in England outvapour’d Queen Fame in Chaucer, who Had also fele standing eares



Early Reception of The House of Fame  101 And tonges, as on beest ben heares And on her fete woren sawe I Patriche wynges redily  (pp. 83–4)

House of Fame Fol. B. 319

This brief emergence of a political reading of The House of Fame does not seem to have prompted emulation. We conclude with one of the most extensive attempts to produce a contemporary version of Chaucer’s poem. Alexander Pope was interested in Chaucer from his early years. He owned a copy of the 1598 Speght from his youth and wrote early poems about Chaucer, and his own versions of two of The Canterbury Tales.44 From the early period of his poetic career also comes The Temple of Fame.45 This is a version of the last book of Chaucer’s poem. The initial ‘Advertisement’ concludes by noting that: ‘The Reader who would compare this with Chaucer, may begin with his Third Book of Fame, there being nothing in the Two first Books that answers to their Title.’46 This is not wholly accurate: as Pope’s own notes indicate, his version is occasionally suggested by passages in Chaucer that do not come from Book 3.47 The general thrust of such Chaucerian ‘borrowing’ is to emphasize the operations of the House of Rumour. Overall the whole is much compressed: in the original, Book 3 is over a thousand lines (lines 1091-–2158); in Pope’s version this is reduced to little more than five hundred. Pope’s ‘Advertisement’ also discusses the dream structure of Chaucer’s poem, and its status as allegory, noting that ‘To infer … that … Allegory it-self is vicious, is a presumptuous Contradiction to the Judgement and Practice of the greatest Genius’s, both antient and modern.’48 Like the other works mentioned in this discussion, Pope’s account of Chaucer’s poem makes no reference to its lack of conclusion. His ending rather interestingly reflects Chaucer’s dreamer’s discussion of his own claims to fame:

44

45 46

47 48

For astute discussion of Pope’s interest in Chaucer, see Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, CT, 1985), pp. 125–9; see also Michael Hunter, ‘Alexander Pope and Geoffrey Chaucer’, The Warden’s Meeting: A Tribute to John Sparrow (Oxford, 1977), pp. 29–32. On Pope’s interest in The House of Fame, see John M. Fyler, ‘Chaucer, Pope, and The House of Fame’, The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays in Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of D. R. Howard, ed. J. M. Dean and C. K. Zacher (Newark, DE, London and Toronto, 1992), pp. 149–59; Hardie, Rumour and Renown, pp. 570–602 (and pp. 585–7 for discussion of some other eighteenth-century versions of Fama). Drafts of it survive from 1710 (Mack, Alexander Pope, pp. 163–7). Alexander Pope, The Temple of Fame, in The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, gen. ed. John Butt, vol. 2 (London, 1993; first published 1940), p. 250. See Pope’s notes on lines 11ff and 428ff. Overall, there are seventeen notes by Pope pointing to his indebtedness to Chaucer’s original. Pope, The Temple of Fame, ed. Tillotson, p. 252.

102  Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards One came, methought, and whisper’d in my Ear; What cou’d thus high thy rash Ambition raise? Art thou, fond Youth, a Candidate for Praise? … Then teach me, Heaven! To scorn the guilty Bays; Drive from my Breast that wretched Lust of Praise; Unblemish’d let me live, or die unknown, Oh grant an honest Fame, or grant me none!49 (lines 498–500, 521–4)

Here, for the first time since Skelton’s Garland of Laurel, the conjunction of poetic identity and Fame is re-established. Pope’s aspirational desire for ‘honest Fame’ differs from the Chaucerian narrator’s rather more secure ‘I wot myself best how y stonde’ (House of Fame, line 1878). But it is the first developed understanding since the sixteenth century of the literary dynamic that shaped Chaucer’s poem. Pope’s revisioning of the Chaucerian past adumbrates his own poetic future.

49

Ibid., pp. 287–9.

6 Fame’s Penitent: Deconstructive Chaucer Among the Lancastrians Andrew Galloway

Chaucer and Gascoigne Chaucer’s Retraction, which sums up an impressive span of his literary works while repudiating nearly all of them, fully excepting only ‘the translacion of Boece de Consolacione, and othere books of legends of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun’, has provided readers of all periods with an opportunity both to imagine the penitential outlook that it conveys as Chaucer’s final perspective on literature and life, and to take note of the substantial range, quantity and influence of his opus that thereby required such careful admonitions.1 Its ‘voicing’ is more of a problem even than usual in Chaucer. In all of its medieval copies it appears at the end of The Canterbury Tales, but since it begins by responding to ‘this litel tretys’, presumably The Parson’s Tale, the Retraction does not read as though designed to close the unfinished Canterbury Tales as a whole. Possibly, as Charles Owen suggests, The Parson’s Tale and Retraction were a completely separate work by Chaucer, a ‘treatise on penance’, imposed on The Canterbury Tales by other hands.2 All the surviving textual evidence, however, shows that the Retraction’s placement and that of Fragment X as a whole was very early, and it may be argued, as Stephen Partridge does, that the rubric introducing the Retraction, ‘heere taketh the makere of this book his leve’, was early or even authorial as well, since its textual variants are best explained as cautious efforts to resolve original ambiguities rather than as the wholesale import of new materials. Even that rubric, therefore, presents a problem of voicing, or rather scripting. Partridge suggests that Chaucer himself there mimed the role of a scribe, and,

1 2

Chaucer’s works are cited from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston, MA, 1987). Charles Owen, Jr, ‘What the Manuscripts Tell Us about the Parson’s Tale’, Medium Ævum 63 (1994), 239–49.

104  Andrew Galloway

by encroaching on the scribal territory of a colophon, crafted the ‘fiction of Chaucer’s direct supervision and control over the transmission of his text’.3 This ‘fiction’ of an author’s immediate hand in this – and, implicitly, all further scribal transmissions of his text – epitomizes some of the important problems of his literary presence and absence with which, as is shown below, readers of Chaucer in Lancastrian England grappled. But the simple image of ‘penitential Chaucer’ also remained uncannily alive, as if to posit a major author who nonetheless renounced the problems of literary fiction in toto. The latest and most melancholic instance of fifteenth-century images of this kind is the brief diorama of Chaucer’s death presented by Thomas Gascoigne in his mid-fifteenth-century Loci e libro veritatum: sic plures penitere se postea dicunt quando mala sua et mala per eos inducta destruere non possunt sicut chawsers ante mortem suam sepe clamauit ve michi ve michi quia reuocare nec destruere iam potero illa que male scripsi de malo et turpissimo amore hominum ad mulieres sed iam de homine in hominem continuabuntur Velim nolim et sic plangens mortuus fuit. [Thus many say they do penance only after the fact, when they cannot do away with the bad things they have done and the bad things inspired by them. Thus Chaucer before his death often cried out, ‘woe is me, woe is me, because I cannot now revoke or destroy those things that I wickedly wrote about the wicked and most foul love of men for women, but instead now they will be continually repeated from one man to another, willy nilly’. And thus lamenting he died.]4

In a period crucial for acknowledging and shaping vernacular English literature’s wide authority, the image of a penitential Chaucer seems to eclipse interpretive subtlety, undermining the claims of ‘literature’ as a realm where craft and social or psychological insight might trump moral condemnation or approval. But the construal of Chaucer as one of fame’s penitents merits fuller examination. For Gascoigne’s general focus is not unique, nor is it unsophisticated as a response to Chaucer’s poetry. The idea of penitential and reflective Chaucer is in fact itself a widespread element of Chaucer’s fame in the period; moreover, such a view shows new attention to and respect for

3

4

Stephen Partridge, ‘“The Makere of this Boke”: Chaucer’s Retraction and the Author as Scribe and Compiler’, Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (Toronto, 2012), p. 130. Quoted from Míċeál F. Vaughan, ‘Personal Politics and Thomas Gascoigne’s Account of Chaucer’s Death’, Medium Ævum 75 (2006), 115, which corrects the transcription in Douglas Wurtele, ‘The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer’, Viator 11 (1989), 358–9. I have slightly modified Vaughan’s translation. The passage is not included in the selections of Gascoigne’s dictionary available in Loci e libro veritatum: Passages Selected From Gascoigne’s Theological Dictionary Illustrating the Condition of Church and State 1403–1458, ed. James E. Thorold Rogers (Oxford, 1881).



Deconstructive Chaucer Among the Lancastrians  105

the power of vernacular literature, and the distinctive properties of Chaucer’s poetry in particular. The mere use of Chaucer’s deathbed scene to illustrate a general moral problem (where he is placed next to Judas Iscariot) is itself a mark of the wide notoriety of his works on which the scene itself dwells. Douglas Wurtele suggests that the story was orally transmitted from nearby Ewelme in Oxfordshire, the largest lands (inherited by marriage) of Chaucer’s prosperous son, Thomas Chaucer.5 Gascoigne, who was chancellor of Oxford, could easily have known Thomas, speaker of the House of Commons and a strong Lancastrian supporter, who, with the marriage of Thomas’s aunt Katherine Swynford to her long-time lover, John of Gaunt, became officially a member of the royal family. Apart from a single seal made by Thomas himself, Gascoigne is the only contemporary source stating directly that Geoffrey Chaucer was Thomas’ father, and Gascoigne goes on – again a unique testimonial – to mention that Thomas was buried at Ewelme.6 Thomas himself may have fostered the collection and reproduction of early copies of Chaucer’s works; records show that from 1411 to his death in 1434 Thomas took up the lease for the tenement in the garden of the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey for which Chaucer had signed his improbable fifty-three-year lease in the last year of his life. John Bowers argues that Thomas had held the lease continually from Chaucer’s death, keeping in his control Geoffrey’s final Westminster tenement, not in order to live there (for Thomas was in those years leasing a much grander house in London at Goldynglane), but as a ‘manuscript archive where Geoffrey Chaucer’s literary remains were safely stored inside the monastic precincts, sorted out by experienced copyists such as the poet’s long-time scribe [Adam] Pinkhurst, and read by approved parties such as John Lydgate’.7 If so, the tenement became a kind of literary mausoleum. Whether that was the case or not, the image of Chaucer himself as dying or dead preoccupied writers, readers and book-makers for decades, especially those closely connected to the Lancastrian regime. The general focus might be associated with the meditations on the ‘art of dying’ visible throughout London literary culture in this period.8 But the fascination extended beyond Chaucer’s London in the early fifteenth century, as shown by the fashion for ‘transi’ tombs for gentry and higher social groups, a tomb style that flourished in the same period as the steady expansion of copies and readers of English 5 6

7 8

Wurtele, ‘Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer’, p. 348. ‘idem chawsers pater thome chawsers armigeri qui thomas qui Thomas [sic] sepelitur in nuhelm iuxta Oxoniam’: Vaughan, ‘Personal Politics’, p. 115; Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, ed., Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford, 1966), pp. 543–4. John Bowers, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition (Notre Dame, IA, 2007), p. 187; Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, pp. 535–40. See Amy Appleford, Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 (Philadelphia, PA, 2014).

106  Andrew Galloway

poetry. Transi tombs display doubled effigies, one depicting the deceased in robust health and elegantly clothed, the other, often just beneath it, a rotting corpse; such tombs, through their demand for reflection about temporality and the gifts of nature and fortune, seem to Paul Binski to prompt in the viewer ‘a certain type of response, the pondering of self’.9 Thomas ­Chaucer is buried is a conventional tomb chest at Ewelme, but his wife, Maud, who brought Ewelme and other larger properties to the marriage and who died in 1437, is buried in a transi tomb, although its skeletal effigy of her body is inverted, nearly hidden on the underside of the massive marble tomb in the chapel (the effigy is now visible only with a mirror held close to the chapel floor, although the tomb shows signs of having been moved from its original site during renovations of the chapel). This sombre theme in art and literature, perhaps not coincidentally established in a period when new legislation against the Lollard heresy and any unapproved religious writing in English also emerged (a context pursued below), nonetheless allowed numerous intellectually, artistically and literarily creative responses. Among these were seminal assessments of English poetry from the immediately preceding decades, though framed in cagily renunciatory forms. Even the dismal scene transmitted by the Oxford–Ewelme connection implies subtle responses to Chaucer’s texts. To Gascoigne, that Chaucer’s works were ‘passed on from one man to another, willy nilly’, beyond any further control of the author, was the basis for filing this narrative in his dictionary under the category of those who undertake penance too late. With its claim that Chaucer wailed ‘ve michi ve michi quia revocare nec destruere iam potero illa quae male scripsi’ [woe is me, woe is me, because I cannot now revoke or destroy those things that I wickedly wrote], the anecdote may be thought not only a general or distorted parallel to the Retraction but also a shrewd response to that work, in which the narrator declares that he ‘revoke[s]’ his ‘translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees’.10 For, by editorial misplacement or ironic authorial design, the Retraction poses readers a paradox. It renounces the author’s further moral responsibility but manifestly did not lead to any commensurate action, such as destroying the preceding folio leaves full of ‘the tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into synne’ (1086) that the Retraction revokes. The Retraction might, therefore, be taken simply to present Chaucer the pilgrim-narrator’s latest reaction to a tale. Yet a substantial number of early copies, including the Ellesmere manuscript, introduce the Retraction as authorial voicing if not authorial action, in the rubric quoted above: ‘Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve’.11 If, as Partridge suggests, the rubric

9 10 11

Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, NY, 1996), p. 150. Vaughan surveys (but critiques) views that it emulates the Retraction: ‘Personal Politics’, 103–4. For the manuscript evidence, see Partridge, ‘The Makere of this Boke’.



Deconstructive Chaucer Among the Lancastrians  107

‘creates a fiction of Chaucer’s direct supervision and control over the transmission of the text’, that ‘fiction’ is peculiarly feckless, even self-consuming. ‘This book’ remains intact even after its maker, however involved with his scribes, takes his leave. It presents penitence and revocation not only too late but bookishly removed from the action he describes, like the narrator of The Parliament of Fowls retreating from the pending decision about the marriage in his song-filled dream to turn to ‘othere bokes … To reede upon’ (lines 695–6). In both cases we are reminded that he and we are ‘simply’ readers, and that the action and religious or political consequences of what we have read must be enacted elsewhere. To some readers of The Canterbury Tales, Gascoigne’s image of fecklessly penitent Chaucer would thus recapitulate the passive revocation of the Retraction, whose implied author is, like Gascoigne’s dying Chaucer, an impotent and belated penitent, unable to bring about the revocation and destruction for which he calls.12 To readers of a wider range of Chaucer’s works than just The Canterbury Tales – and there is no reason not to think that Gascoigne addressed those readers, and was one himself – Gascoigne’s anecdote would seem even more apt. In its proclamation of Chaucer’s failure of revocation of the publications and publicity that he renounces, it more closely parallels Criseyde’s lament of having her ‘name’ be ‘publysshed’ (Book 5, line 1095) henceforth into literary history: ‘Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende, Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende. O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge!’  (Book 5, lines 1058–61)

Gascoigne’s focus on Chaucer is, like Chaucer’s on Criseyde, not simply moral but also historical, its penance socially and historically attenuated as well as acutely self-reflective. Just as Gascoigne focuses on how Chaucer is at the mercy of the very literary tradition he fostered, so Criseyde, as her reading of the Roman de Thebes shows (Book 2, lines 78–112), cherishes a tradition of romance and epic tragedy until she recognizes that she will become the cynosure of such traditions, rolled on the many tongues of its tellers as objectively as she has been the property of the men who have successively possessed her. 12

Vaughan, however, sees Gascoigne’s account not in responce to Chaucer’s texts but instead as a ‘politically motivated act of character assassination’ of a poet fostered by the Lancastrians (‘Personal Politics’, 104). At another extreme, Thomas Prendergast treats the opposition in Gascoigne’s anecdote between the poet’s ‘ineffective’ oral repentance and the ‘durable writings’ that transmit stories of ‘filthy love’ as a launching point for his wide-ranging discussion of post-medieval obsessions with Chaucer’s dead body, which Prendergast relates to efforts to find ‘textual immortality’ in Chaucer’s poetry: Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (New York, 2004), pp. 22–3.

108  Andrew Galloway

By serendipity or design, Gascoigne’s variation on the theme of delayed repentance thus leads deeply into Chaucer’s poetry, not only in Chaucer’s most explicit, if paradoxical, repudiations of his own textual involvement such as the Retraction or the end of Troilus and Criseyde, but similarly so in the pervasive texture, character-construction and drama of his poetry, in love, satire and comedy. For Chaucer’s penitential and self-reflective earlyfifteenth-century afterimage, though suited to its own time, nonetheless also continues in other ways some of the strategies of textual and historical irony that he developed. These strategies include what Partridge, amid his discussion of Chaucer’s possible uses of quasi-scribal rubrics introducing the Retraction, aptly calls ‘the illusion of presence’ that Chaucer evokes,13 while the poet nonetheless simultaneously shows his own or characters’ entanglements in seemingly endless mediations in texts – a state of attenuated selfreflection, poised in more than one moment of the self in history, like the ‘pondering of self’ elicited by the transi tombs. This effect is consistent with such moments as Troilus’s ‘song’ in Troilus and Criseyde, where the narrator’s emphasis on showing directly this expression of Troilus’ passion and sorrow promises to bring us close to the event and words of Troilus’ song: And of his song naught only the sentence, As writ myn auctour called Lollius, But pleinly, save oure tonges difference, I dar wel seyn, in al, that Troilus Seyde in his song, loo, every word right thus As I shal seyn; and whoso list it here, Loo, next this verse he may it fynden here.  (Book 1, lines 393–9)

We are offered ‘every word right thus’ that Troilus sang, even told we can hear them (‘whoso list it here’), but in nearly the same instant reminded of how far away are the lost sounds and bodies in question. Promised a song, we are immediately reminded that the narrator is as much a reader as we are, and indeed he is a translating, selective and judgemental one. Each claim of our direct participation in the scene or even the author’s writing about the scene is undone by some reminder of its distance, even as we are teased with new promises for immediacy. Even when we are led to think that we can see (if not hear) as directly as the narrator does – ‘Loo, next this verse he may it fynden here’ – we find ourselves removed again by the unknown and inaccessible language of the original: ‘save oure tonges difference’. And save also the mediation by Lollius, not to mention all the mismetering scribes of Chaucer’s own writing, to whom the narrator elsewhere draws attention (Book 5, lines 1795–6). It is, after all, their lettering that we

13

Partridge, ‘The Makere of this Boke’, p. 131. see also Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body, pp. 4–7.



Deconstructive Chaucer Among the Lancastrians  109

are finally directed to regard: ‘Loo, next this verse’. Most manuscripts of the poem enhance this awareness of mediating textual distance with a marginal scribal – or authorial? – rubric: Canticus Troili. We are forced to ponder and desire an absent presence, just as Troilus himself is pondering and desiring the beloved whose absence he vividly feels. His bookish ‘song’ is fashioned to produce a ‘pondering of self’ in the reader, even if Troilus does not seem to attain that self-reflection as he launches himself into his fatally idolizing love. This sense of endless sifting through textual mediation while poignantly seeking some transcendent Real, including that of the author’s hand or dying words, is distinctively if not uniquely developed in Chaucer’s poetry, so acutely so that it has been compared to the theory of Jacques Derrida (at least in one of its central aspects): an inevitable escape of the signified, leaving us in an endless pursuit among signifiers. H. Marshall Leicester, Jr, has drawn the connection most directly, using Troilus’ ‘song’ as his chief example.14 A much longer philosophical lineage for this may, however, also be traced, in some ways reaching back to the foundations of medieval ­Christian textual interests. Some of the paradoxes with which modern theory has been concerned – of texts that serve both as seemingly transparent media to reality but turn out to offer no certainties in themselves about ‘truth’ – can be found, for instance, in Augustine’s fourth-century Soliloquies, written to provide a kind of Christian philosophical response to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. Whereas Cicero pursued questions of truth and the immortality of the soul through a series of arguments from Stoicism, Augustine brought such questions to bear on language, reading and the text that he was producing.15 Things can only appear to be ‘true’ through a larger truth that is itself unperceived, and Augustine focused this question on his own act of writing. He presents a debate with Reason (Ratio), whose voice arrives as soon as Augustine begins writing, and who argues for the importance of Augustine writing this down, in complete solitude (‘meram solitudinem’), thus with his own hand rather than by dictation. Yet whether Ratio is ‘within’ or ‘without’ his own mind and written text is initially posed as the central problem that he is trying to solve (‘sive alius quis extrinsecus, sive intrinsecus, nescio: nam hoc ipsum est quod magnopere scire molior’). Justly so, since this question of a Real beyond any textually or intellectually represented entity becomes the principle for defining the immortality of the soul, and the proof of how Truth itself logically transcends any existence or representation. Intriguingly, Augustine uses the fictions of poets and painters to make the same point: those show the reality of the True precisely because we know 14

15

H. Marshall Leicester, Jr, ‘“Oure Tonges Différance”: Textuality and Deconstruction in Chaucer’, Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (Ithaca, NY, 1987), pp. 15–26. On Augustine’s attention to textuality, see Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, SelfKnowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, 1996).

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that they are fictions. What is False is what deceives us and does not seek to reveal that it is merely fictional; falsity is known by the strength of verisimilitude. Yet nothing, therefore, that is perceptible or representational can disclose on its own terms why we think one thing true and another false. Our souls’ ability to know, nonetheless, that something is true proves the immortality of our souls and of Truth itself. In spite of that reassurance, the work closes by noting that only when one exits life altogether can one directly encounter the Truth, whose mere vestiges and implied presence must guide our judgements in this life.16 I note Augustine’s work not to settle or unsettle any of the substantial critical debate about Chaucer’s or his period’s ‘nominalism’ or ‘realism’, much less to prove or disprove the validity of using modern theory on earlier periods, a topic that has led to the richer question of how modern theorists themselves have given thought to or emerge from contexts still steeped in medieval philosophical traditions.17 But historical questions should be asked for any intellectual or literary effects or juxtapositions, as Leicester recognizes. Copies of the Soliloquia could be found in monastic libraries throughout late-medieval England, and the work was known to authors whose writings Chaucer knew well, such as Jean de Meun and Petrarch, whose Secretum (1343–58) adapted the form and conclusions of Augustine’s work to address Petrarch’s own love for Laura and for literary gloria as the ‘dual adamantine chains’ binding his soul to earthly goods.18 (It is the second chain that Petrarch can least detach, an outcome hardly helped by the ‘Augustinus’ who, playing the role of ‘Ratio’, asks ‘Francesco’, ‘what good is it to make beautiful poetry for others if you do not yourself listen to what you say?’ – a view that, while implying Petrarch’s alienation from his own works, would be unlikely to discourage his continued dedication to producing them for others’ benefit and admiration.) There is no direct evidence that Chaucer read Augustine’s work. However, the medieval tradition of Scepticism that Cicero and, indirectly, Augustine 16

17

18

Augustine, Soliloquia, Book 1, Chapter 1; Book 2, Chapter 7, Paragraph 14; I cite from Oeuvres de Saint Augustin: Opuscules: V: Dialogues philosophiques, ed. and trans. (in French) by Pierre de Labriolle (Paris, 1939), pp. 24–6. A developing arc of tracing modern theorists’ ‘medievalism’ can be seen in Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism (Minneapolis, MN, 2004); Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, IL, 2005); and Andrew Cole, The Birth of Theory (Chicago, IL, 2014). On Chaucer’s and his period’s ‘nominalism’ or ‘realism’, some of the abundant discussion is assessed in Francine McGregor, ‘Abstraction and Particularity in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale’, Chaucer Review 46 (2011), 60–73. Seven copies are listed in R. Sharpe, J. P. Carley, R. M. Thomson and A. G. Watson, English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues (London, 1996). See Petrarch, Secretum, ed. Enrico Carrara (Turin, 1977), Book 3, p. 192; Petrarch, Petrarch’s Secretum with Introduction, Notes, and Critical Anthology, trans. Davy A. Carozza and H. James Shey (New York, 1989), p. 143.



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purveyed can be seen throughout Chaucer’s poetry, epitomized by some of his casual philosophers such as Pandarus or the narrator-compiler of The Legend of Good Women, who doubts that any of the books on which he grazes can tell him the truth about heaven or hell but who declares, with uncertain tone, that he will take a leap of faith nonetheless to ‘these olde approved stories’ (Legend of Good Women, Prologue F, line 21). Chaucer presents a highly text- and reading-focused form of what has been called ‘sceptical fideism’, although that term too can be used in a variety of ways by modern intellectual historians.19 Leicester plausibly suggests that the parallels which he finds between Chaucer’s poetry and Derrida’s theory mainly result from Chaucer’s exploitation of ‘a drift from a traditional, face-to-face, logocentric culture of presence to a textual, disseminated modern culture of absence based in writing, where strangers read one another’.20 Chaucer’s version of this might be further compared to the mode of textuality found in some of the popular encyclopaedic histories of fourteenth-century England, featuring tensions between often heavy compilation yet emphatic authorial assertions.21 But Chaucer’s deft cultivation of all this attention to textual mediation and its ever-receding promise of presence should be seen within the particular professional and political elements of his literary agenda. In general, London vintner’s son and Westminster civil servant and courtier that he was, he can be said to draw from clerical exegetical and historical textual processing on the one hand, and a mercantile accounting outlook on the other, transferring the textual modes of both into the courtly erotic and epic materials by which he sought to establish his own authorial ‘profession’ in the widening centres of prestigious vernacular literature in London and Westminster.22 To capture the period-voicing of Chaucer’s emphases on the ‘illusion of presence’, however, requires noting not only the particular social and intel19

20 21

22

Chaucer’s connection to this wider intellectual tradition is posited and briefly outlined in Sheila Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism, 2nd edn (Gainesborough, FL, 1994); the best overview of Scepticism’s influence, though focused particularly on the recovery of ancient writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, rev. and expanded edn (Oxford, 2003). The considerable variety of modern historians’ uses of the notion ‘fideism’, however, is critically surveyed by Thomas Carroll, ‘The Traditions of Fideism’, Religious Studies 44 (2008), 1–22. Leicester, ‘Oure Tonges Différance’, pp. 19, 21. A key antecedent here would be Ranulph Higden’s popular mid-fourteenth-century Polychronicon, translated into Middle English in 1387 by John Trevisa. For some of its literary influence, see Emily Steiner, ‘Radical Historiography: Langland, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005), 171–211; Andrew Galloway, ‘Latin England’, Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathryn Lavezzo (Minneapolis, MN, 2004), pp. 41–95. For Chaucer’s negotiations of these spheres and some citations of further critical discussions, see Andrew Galloway, ‘The Account-Book and the Treasure: Gilbert Maghfeld’s Textual Economy and the Poetics of Mercantile Accounting in Ricardian Literature’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011), 65–124; and ‘London, Southwark, Westminster’, Europe: A Literary History, 1348– 1418, ed. D. Wallace (Oxford, forthcoming 2015).

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lectual spheres and traditions of the texts, stories and discourse that his characters and narrators invoke or respond to (from vows to saintly paradigms to erotic scripts), but also their degree of self-consciousness and control of the texts that shape and constitute their desires, identities and lives. More than the specific texts they use, his characters’ measure of self-reflection concerning the texts and scripts that they have made their own, or that have somehow made them, speaks to Chaucer’s context of colliding intellectual and discursive traditions that Ricardian London and Westminster witnessed or generated, less predictably or at least less marked by reflections on transience and mortality than in the decades after Chaucer’s and Richard II’s deaths. Thus, at one extreme, Alison in The Miller’s Tale can archly cite the high-courtly scripts of womanly resistance that she has no intention of adopting, ‘Lat be, Nicholas, / Or I wol crie “out, harrow” and “allas”!’ (lines 3285–6). At the other extreme, Troilus can yearningly only take ‘al for the beste’ in scrutinizing a letter Criseyde has written him, latching his hopes onto the merest hint of what he wants to construe her intention to be in the text before him, like a desperate religious exegete in search of sacred Truth, in whose transcendent role he has fatally cast her, as erroneously as he has himself adopted clerical exegetical strategies in order to read a letter from an object of erotic interest:    for somwhat he byheld On which hym thoughte he myghte his herte reste, Al covered she tho wordes under sheld. Thus to the more worthi part he held.  (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 2, lines 1325–8)

The voicing of Chaucer’s Retraction, the texts that it rereads and sometimes enigmatically leaves unspecified on the page (‘the tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into synne’, as Chaucer says with deadpan challenge to the reader [line 1085]), has neither of these kinds of clear markers of shrewdly satiric manipulation or of self-forgetfully full immersion and commitment. The Retraction thus presents a magnificent enigma among Chaucer’s many subtle versions of textual presence and absence, participation and detachment. And it was well-timed penance after all. A series of responses to Chaucer in the early fifteenth century show that this was a period particularly able to assess this kind of penance for fame.

Scogan, Hoccleve, Gower Placing Chaucer’s opus, much less Augustine’s, Petrarch’s or Derrida’s, next to Gascoigne’s dour anecdote does, of course, give far too much credit to this or any other fifteenth-century elaboration of Chaucer’s penance. For one thing, fifteenth-century responses of this kind are not focused on



Deconstructive Chaucer Among the Lancastrians  113

Chaucer alone. In the early Lancastrian period, a principle of literary penance became a focal point for how English poetry in general was legitimized. In this context it is logical to find a penitent dead Chaucer among politically authorized and royally connected living English poets such as Henry Scogan, Thomas Hoccleve and John Gower, as they cast themselves with him into a posture that might be called secular penance: a concern for good governance and social ethics, based on a form of sombre self-reflection tailored to the secular world as a realm whose further worldly achievements and acclaim are of high value. Their penance defined an idea of ‘English literary community’ by its being a shared posture. Yet Chaucer seems particularly to have served to bring the philosophical and literary complexities of this posture or trope into view. The first extant poetic lament on Chaucer’s death, Henry Scogan’s Morale Balade of c.1406–7, written (as John Shirley’s prominent colophon states) for the four sons of Henry IV at ‘a souper of feorthe merchande in the Vyntre in London’, and which Scogan himself describes as a ballad ‘writen of myne owen hande’, makes Chaucer himself aged and wisely penitent, an exemplar that is disclosed only after Scogan’s opening self-portrait paints himself in the same style: I compleye sore whane I remembre me The sodeyne age that is upon me falle; More I compleyne my mispent juventé, The whiche is inpossible ageine to calle; But comunely, the moste compleynte of alle Is foreto thenke that I have beon so nyce, And that I wolde no vertue to me calle In al my youthe, but vyces ay cheryce.23

Intertextually attentive examination reveals that this, like Gascoigne’s anecdote, is a sophisticated response to Chaucer’s poetry. Scogan’s opening passage, for instance, is close, but inverted as in a mirror, to the equally past-haunted but decidedly anti-penitential Wife of Bath. She, for instance, after drifting into painful memories of her fourth husband, who had his own extramarital affairs, turns with visible effort away from what critics have long noted are exceptionally complex and evasive reflections on that chapter of her past, to affirm a wholly impenitent carpe diem:24 23 24

Kathleen Forni, ed., The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection (Kalamazoo, MI, 2005), pp. 148–52, lines 9–16. Explanations of the Wife’s obscure comments on her fourth husband range from the theory that she murdered him to the view that she could not tolerate a husband’s claims to sexual freedom equal to hers. For references to these, and a sensible argument for the latter idea, see Robin Bott, ‘The Wife of Bath and the Revelour: Power Struggles and Failure in a Marriage of Peers’, Medieval Perspectives 6 (1991), 154–61. Most sympathetic are the observations of H. Marshall

114  Andrew Galloway But – Lord Crist! – whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age, allas, that al wole envenyme, Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. Lat go. Farewel! The devel go therwith! The flour is goon; ther is namoore to telle; The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle; But yet to be right myrie wol I fonde. (Wife of Bath’s Prologue, lines 469–79)

Indeed, Scogan explicitly incorporates phrases from the Wife’s narratives, but he attributes them only to ‘my maistre Chaucier’: By auncestrye thus may yee no thing clayme, As that my maistre Chaucier dothe expresse, But temporell thinge that man may hurte and mayme. (lines 97–9 [cf. Wife of Bath’s Tale, lines 1131–2])

Just as Scogan makes Chaucer into a moral penitent, so Scogan’s citations of the Wife elide her separate and disruptive feminine authority, whereby brief excerpts of the Old Wife’s ‘pillow-sermon’ become mere preparation for Scogan’s complete quotation of Chaucer’s Gentilesse. This work occupies the centre of Scogan’s Moral Balade, implying, as would Hoccleve’s invocation of Chaucer as the ‘first fyndere’ a few years later, a genealogy of moral, secular and male poetics. In Scogan’s extraction of that, the Wife’s femininity, albeit the basis for the emphasis on regret and penance that she contemplates but then rejects, is erased, along with her resistance to any male-orchestrated, clerical penance, whose human frailties she describes all too clearly. This is certainly a drastic sacrifice of what makes the ‘character’ of the Wife so significant an achievement and, in general terms, an emblem of poetic production in a very different world from that of Chaucer’s, as Robert Epstein observes.25 It is thus part of the ‘narrowing of the Chaucer tradition’ in the fifteenth century that Paul Strohm describes, which displays morally conservative and less ‘literary’ interests than those visible (to us, if not to earlier readers) in Chaucer’s own period and full range of works, favouring,

25

Leicester, Jr, that her evasiveness about this husband reveals a ‘tension between her desire to be quit [of the past] and her uncertainty about who wronged whom … a tinge of regret … for something that did not work out, that does not deserve, but might have deserved, a better memorial, or that the Wife momentarily wishes might have’: The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, CA, 1990), pp. 98–9. Robert Epstein, ‘Chaucer’s Scogan and Scogan’s Chaucer’, Studies in Philology 96 (1999), 1–21.



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for instance, works such as the Melibee.26 Such a posture of secular penance, in Scogan at least, seems inevitably more definitive, and simple, than anything that Chaucer’s characters display. It seems likely that this mood particularly emerged when Chaucer himself became a haunting absence after his death in 1400 amid the frenzied establishment of a new regime, creating unprecedented new demands and opportunities for poets’ political support.27 Yet against the more detailed intertextual reading that, I suggest, Scogan’s Moral Balade invites, Scogan’s effacement of the Wife’s ‘person’ can also be seen to foreground the multiple displacements, the vanishing prospect of ‘presence’ and experience, already in Chaucer’s narrative. There, for instance, the ‘old wyf’ is able to hold forth in a voice of calm authority to a deeply frustrated and humiliated knight, and with patiently referenced and organized detail.28 Just as we may savour the discrepancies of gender and status in Chaucer’s vehicle for such ‘authoritative’ discourse, issuing from the un-authoritative and all-too-bodily Wife (although her own Tale’s ability to metamorphose her ‘real’ body in so many ways suggests some of the typical oddity of Chaucer’s presentations of embodiment), so Scogan’s poem shows a recognizably Chaucerian displacement between persons, voices, genders and media. As the Wife tendentiously half-quotes scripture while emphasizing that she is repeating exactly what it said (‘Right thus the Apostel tolde it unto me’; Wife of Bath’s Prologue, line 160), so Scogan cites the Wife’s discourse half-accurately, declaring ‘As that my maistre Chaucier dothe expresse’. The Lancastrian court fostered other sophisticated versions of penitential and now dead Chaucer; indeed, these are the most fully developed images of an English author in the fifteenth century. The first instance of a distinction between an image of Chaucer and his ‘person’ appears in the poetry of Chaucer’s young associate (by his own claim) Thomas Hoccleve. Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes (1410–11), written for a young and volatile patron, Prince Hal, uses a literal image to frame and make publically accessible his mourning for Chaucer’s death: The firste fyndere of our fair langage Hath seid, in cas semblable, and othir mo, So hyly wel that it is my dotage For to expresse or touche any of tho. Allas, my fadir fro the world is go, 26 27

28

Paul Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the “Chaucer Tradition”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982), 3–32. For acute display of the aggressiveness of these demands for poetic and other narrative support, including Gower’s, see David R. Carlson, John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in FourteenthCentury England (Cambridge, 2012). For the incongruities, see Alastair Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), pp. 170–332.

116  Andrew Galloway My worthy maistir Chaucer – hym I meene; Be thow advocat for him, hevenes queene.… Althogh his lyf be qweynt, the resemblance Of him hath in me so fressh lyflynesse That to putte othir men in remembrance Of his persone, I have heere his liknesse Do make, to this ende, in soothfastnesse, That they that han of him lost thoght and mynde By this peynture may ageyn him fynde. The ymages that in the chirches been Maken folk thynke on God and on his seintes Whan the ymages they beholde and seen, Where ofte unsighte of hem causith restreyntes Of thoghtes goode. Whan a thyng depeynt is Or entaillid, if men take of it heede, Thoght of the liknesse it wole in hem breede.  (lines 4978–5005)29

Hoccleve’s memorial, both text and picture, emphasizes both simulacrum and (lost) original, aiming to nurture the reader’s own ‘breeding’ of further thoughts inspired by this image and its lost subject (see figure 1). In painting Chaucer not only as quasi-saint but as penitent, and in featuring this image in a long poem presented to a future king, Hoccleve makes even the person that his image is representing into a figure reflecting thoughtfully on the past (whether in personal or collectively political penance is not specified). Within the discussion of images of saints, as James McGregor notes, it is, like a saint’s image, explicitly meant to serve as a prompt for memory and inspiration not adoration in itself.30 Serving this end, the moment is a mise-en-abîme of past and future reflection on time past, a justification of literary, artistic and imagined representation as such, by pointing to how any sort of image – even the living face it represents – refers to or indeed depicts someone preoccupied with some other matter. Yet like Chaucer’s (or rather the rubricator’s) canticus Troili, with its ‘internal’ introductory rubric, ‘Loo, next this verse he may it fynden here’, Hoccleve’s passage confers onto the physical vellum and painted image before the reader an illusion of the presence of the commemorating poet, conjoined with the artist and scribe (as Hoccleve in fact was in making his autograph manuscripts, although none survives of the Regiment) in the immediacy of sharing a replica: ‘I have heere his liknesse.’ As the other Chaucer portraits show, the image is remarkably ‘realistic’ facially, though, as David Carlson notes, such realism is a vehicle for Hoccleve’s purposes of authorizing his writing among patrons who had 29 30

Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999). James McGregor, ‘The Iconography of Chaucer in Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principum and in the Troilus Frontispiece’, Chaucer Review 11 (1977), 338–50.



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Figure 1.  Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Regiment of Princes by Thomas Hoccleve; London, British Library, MS Harley 4866, fol. 88.

favoured Chaucer.31 Some of the work’s political implications elsewhere were specific to the circumstances of a young Prince Henry, although not all of those were perfectly timed.32 More generally, the state of pensive reflection that the Chaucer portrait and passage presents, unmoored from any ‘now’, can be seen, paradoxically, to advance the broad purposes of its moment. With both a new King Henry IV driving out the old (but perpetually and intemperately ‘youthful’) King Richard II and also an outbreak of the most 31 32

David Carlson, ‘Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait’, Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991), 283–300. See also Derek Pearsall, ‘Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal SelfRepresentation’, Speculum 69 (1994), 386–410.

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potent heresy that England had experienced, there are many indications in the period of a need for scouring, collective penance, or at least for withdrawing into a reflective distance from the period thereby defined as ‘ended’. This is visible in the sudden push by Henry IV and Archbishop Thomas Arundel to rectify the religious errors launched by John Wyclif before his death in 1384, then (as one might believe, reading the Lancastrian versions of Lollardy) allowed to run rampant until Henry took charge, bringing back his steady supporter Archbishop Arundel, whom Richard had condemned as a traitor and exiled in 1397. To Arundel, framing the ‘Oxford Constitutions’ of 1407 (published in 1409), Wyclif’s ideas were kept infectiously alive among the young by relics of late-fourteenth-century heresy, old lay preachers and grammar masters, whom Arundel targeted ‘since an old jar gives off the smell of what the new jar contains’.33 In this legislation – which left its mark on many an early-fifteenth-century English devotional work, at least in the form of manuscript colophons indicating that they had been thus examined and passed muster – the scope of the threat expands until any writing of Wyclif’s entire ‘period’ (‘per Johannem Wycliff, aut alium quemcunque tempore suo’) becomes suspect.34 So too in politics, there is evidence of a sense of not simply starting over with a new regime under Henry IV, but also that any such restarting of political community, after the traumatic late-fourteenth-century struggles between king, nobility and civic realms, must involve taking stock of, and doing penance for, the perversions and errors of the former reign. Political, religious and even linguistic trends (as when the ‘Constitutions’ focus on any scrap of biblical writing translated into English) were embodied in the image of the former king as a callow youth, misled by evil counsellors but also unteachable by wiser elders, leading to a need for collective purging and contrition. This is epitomized by the perennial image of youth imposed by a number of writers on Richard II, well after Richard reached his majority, and continued through Archbishop Arundel’s sermon at Richard’s deposition when he was thirty-two years old.35 All this evidence shows that poetic identity in Henry IV’s reign crystallized around the posture of aged penance in vague enough ways that both political and religious realms could be invoked, and this too was convenient for a king

33 34

35

‘Quia id quod capit nova testa inveterata sapit’: David Wilkins, ed., Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae ab anno MCCCL ad annum MDXLV (London, 1737), vol. 3, p. 317. See Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum 70 (1995), 822–64; Fiona Somerset, ‘Censorship’, The Production of Books in England, 1350–1500, ed. A. Gillespie and D. Wakelin (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 239–58. On the expansiveness of the legislation, see especially Anne Hudson, ‘Lollardy: The English Heresy?’, Religion and National Identity, ed. S. Mews, Studies in Church History 18 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 261–83. See Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford, 2008).



Deconstructive Chaucer Among the Lancastrians  119

who took on the mantle of spiritual chastiser of the heretical Wycliffites.36 In cultivating this posture, not Chaucer but his associate John Gower was the ‘firste fyndere’ – although Chaucer, though dead, soon followed his model. Gower’s self-images as a wise, old counsellor for orthodox religious governance is implied as early as the 1380s, when he was perhaps forty, with Book 6 of the Vox clamantis, where he counselled that Richard II as a ‘puer’ was ‘immunis culpe’ [a boy free from guilt], but led astray by those who guided the ‘puerile regimen’ [childish reign]: it is youth’s nature to be given to fun and play, and the glory of sporting contest, not fraud and intrigue, for evil’s origin does not lie there (‘Non dolus, immo iocus, non fraus set gloria ludi, / Sunt pueris, nec ibi restat origo mali’; Book 6, lines 556–72*) – as flattering a view of Richard’s youthful rule as any ever written.37 A sharp revision of this section, however, appears in a number of copies; it probably dates from after Richard’s deposition, though presented as if in prophetic warning. In the revised section, Gower describes Richard’s court as nothing less than a den of iniquity, where a group of ‘vain’ youths (‘vanos iuvenes’) readily comply with whatever folly the young king wishes, who is in turn manipulated by cupidinous elders: the moral ones flee, the vicious are those who arrive, and the king’s court holds whatever sort of vice exists (‘Cedunt morigeri, veniunt qui sunt viciosi, / quicquid et est vicii Curia Regis habet’; Book 6, lines 567–8). Implicitly, Richard badly needs wiser elders to guide him. Gower strongly suspects that Fate will soon make this error clear, even if there are only ‘hidden causes’ for this that no one but God yet can know (‘Sunt tamen occulte cause, quas nullus in orbe / Scire potest, set eas scit magis ipse deus’; lines 573–4). Fortunately for his later career as Lancastrian apologist, Gower’s penitential self-image was already vividly established in the Confessio amantis of the 1390s, whose composition thus preceded those apocalyptic prophecies for Richard’s court in the revised section of Vox clamantis, Book 6. At the end of the Confessio, the author as the young lover Amans is shown a mirror: Wherinne anon myn hertes yhe I caste, and sih my colour fade, Myn yhen dymme and al unglade, Mi chiekes thinne, and al my face With Elde I myhte se deface  (Book 8, lines 2824–8)

36

37

See Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badby (Woodbridge, 1987). The topic is central to Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, CT, 1998). Except where noted, Gower’s Latin texts are cited from The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols (London, 1899–1902), vol. 4. A translation is available in The Major Latin Works of John Gower, trans. Eric W. Stockton (Seattle, WA, 1962).

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As readers, we have already long had the benefit of the ‘wonder Mirour’ that Gower is given (Book 8, line 2821), by virtue of the Latin marginal gloss that introduces – or rather creates – Amans: ‘Hic quasi in persona aliorum, quos amor alligat, fingens se auctor esse Amantem, varias eorum passiones variis huius libri distinccionibus per singula scribere proponit’ [here, as if in the persona of those whom love binds, the author, fashioning himself to be a lover, proposed to write about their various passions one by one in the various sections of this book (Book 1, line 60 margin)].38 Like Gower’s other glosses, as Alastair Minnis has shown, this frames Gower’s English poetry in academic terms.39 Yet even this is a complex posture of absence and presence: a vernacular writer impersonating an academic impersonator of a vernacular lover, a character who in turn displays his own range of self-images and posturings, which his ‘confession’ readily solicits. Gower’s finally ‘genuinely’ aged self-portrait merely confirms the textual mirroring of penitential reflection that readers of the poem have been led to experience from the outset. With the rise of the Lancastrian regime, Gower emphasized that the poet’s life in bookish reflections on the past, not present experience, was the key to his value for statecraft. In a dedicatory poem to Archbishop Arundel attached to the Vox clamantis soon after Henry’s accession and Arundel’s return to power, Gower proclaims that he is indeed wholly blind, with an old, sickly and wretched body, though he urges Arundel to let his own ‘light … shine forth and guide the footsteps of my soul’ [‘Lux tua que lucet anime vestigia ducet’; Epistola, line 29]. He adds, Et sic viuentem custos simul et morientem Suscipe me cecum tua per suffragia tecum. Lux tua morosa de stirpe micans generosa Condita sub cinere non debet in orbe latere.  (Epistola, lines 33–6) [And so, as a guardian together in life and in death, take me, a blind man, unto yourself with your approval. Your worthy light, shining from a noble stock, ought not to lie hidden under ashes in the world.]

The presentation Epistola may proclaim and welcome (and thus be datable to shortly after) Arundel’s first return to public life in 1399, when Gower could look forward to the new spreading of the archbishop’s light ‘in orbe’, after its concealment during hisexile with Bolingbroke on the Continent. Gower’s other mentions of his own blindness can be dated to these years: first in the poem Quidquid homo scribat of 1400, then again in revised

38 39

Translations of Gower’s Latin apparatus and verses are in Gower’s Confessio amantis, ed. Russell Peck, with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway, 3 vols (Kalamazoo, MI, 2000–06). Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1984), pp. 177–90.



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versions of that poem in 1402 and at some later point.40 His blindness may have been a fact, but it may be no coincidence that it appears only in the Lancastrian period and in these emphatically pro-Lancastrian contexts. The issue hints at how Gower has sacrificed his decrepit body on behalf of guiding the state; it is also a productive motif for his reflective, bookish separation from the world, and thus his peculiar qualification for providing the kind of reflective ethical guidance and ethical justification in which the early Lancastrian regime wrapped itself.41 The verses to Arundel in the unique manuscript that contains the dedicatory Epistle to the Vox (Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98) are themselves written over an erasure, indicating an additional set of stages in this theme, while further putting into question the literal blindness they describe. This manuscript is not one of those that includes the much sharper revision to the description of Richard’s youthful court in Vox clamantis, Book 6, a revision that was probably therefore written or dictated still later. Having claimed blindness as soon as he began writing Lancastrian propaganda, Gower could not make many further claims about bodily impairment and thus enforced asceticism before his actual death in 1408. The ‘darkness’ of Gower’s blindness in the Epistola also receives special development through his metaphor that Arundel’s own ‘light’ ought not to be hidden under a bushel. This image, from Matthew 5:14–15, is applied by Gower in a quite non-evangelical way to how it shines forth from Arundel’s noble lineage (‘de stirpe micans generosa’). Thus applied, the figuration and the general motif of light and dark in the Epistola would surely evoke a further subtext: Chaucer’s Wife’s ‘pillow-sermon’, where she argues that the lineage of true nobility will shine forth even when hidden in a dark cottage:   ‘Taak fyr and ber it in the derkeste hous Bitwix this and the mount of Kaukasous, And lat men shette the dores and go thenne; Yet wole the fyr as faire lye and brenne As twenty thousand men myghte it biholde; His office natureel ay wol it holde, Up peril of my lyf, til that it dye.   ‘Heere may ye se wel how that genterye Is nat annexed to possessioun.’  (Wife of Bath’s Tale, lines 1139–47)

40 41

John Gower, Minor Latin Works, with In Praise of Peace, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager, with Michael Livingston (Kalamazoo, MI, 2005), pp. 46–9. See R. F. Yeager, ‘Gower in Winter: Last Poems’, The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, ed. R. F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya (New York, 2012), pp. 87–103; Andrew Galloway, ‘Gower’s Kiste’, John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception, ed. R. F. Yeager and Ana Sáez Hidalgo (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 193–214.

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The echo of the Wife’s metaphor of a fire in the dark here allows Gower’s seeming self-humbling before Arundel’s light (which shines forth from Arundel’s noble lineage to assist Gower in the ‘darkness’ of blindness) to suggest a different point from the great contrast of lineage between Arundel and Gower that ‘light’ and ‘dark’ might suggest. The cluster of images of a light in the dark shows that Arundel and Gower are implicitly united by a non-familial nobility of spirit, in which Gower’s blind body becomes an icon of both political and religious orthodoxy, austerity and authority. Indebted in part to Chaucer’s subtexts, this conglutination of Lancastrian piety was in turn reapplied to Chaucer’s image by Gower and other writers. Indeed, it seems possible that Chaucer’s early Lancastrian image of aged penance was in the first instance directly modelled on Gower’s carefully elaborated persona. Hoccleve’s visual depiction of Chaucer (see figure 1) – with beads and dark gown, as what might be called a secular saint – closely follows Gower’s textual self-portrait at the end of the Confessio, when Venus    wolde make an ende, As thereto which I was most able, A Peire of Bedes blak as Sable Sche tok and heng my necke about; Upon the gaudes al without Was write of gold, Por reposer.  (Book 8, lines 2902–7)

This moment emerges organically from the plot of the Confessio from the 1390s. But it also constitutes an increasingly useful claim for Gower, who, as the Lancastrian period proceeded, exploited further the posture of overcoming the fantasies of youth and libidinal distractions, in favour of national and public counsel. If Criseyde, the Retraction, the narratives of the Wife of Bath and other works such as the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women set the terms for the early-fifteenth-century penitential Chaucer (and, implicitly, other vernacular poets), no writer more fully adopted those terms than Gower. What we can see of Gower’s later political writings fully capitalized on this claim to secular penitential wisdom, whose features help explain the steady transformation of Chaucer in the same direction. Gower’s Cronica tripertita of c.1400, for instance, recounts how, in turn, 1388 – a moment of ‘opus humanum’, when the Lords Appellant endeavoured to oust or at least reform the wayward young Richard – gave way to the moment of 1397 – the ‘opus inferni’, when Richard diabolically executed the just lords of the kingdom. The kingdom was finally set right by the revolution and coronation of Henry IV in 1399, leaving the deposed Richard filled with regret for his losses, although in a form that lacks any contrition: contristatus doluit quasi morte grauatus: Ecce dolor talis suus est, quod spes aliqualis



Deconstructive Chaucer Among the Lancastrians  123 Amodo viuentem nequiit conuertere flentem … Semper enim plorat, semper de sorte laborat, Qua cadit, et tales memorat periisse sodales: Solam deposcit mortem, ne viuere possit Amplius, est et ita moriens sua pompa sopita (Cronica tripertita, Book 3, lines 437–49) [As though weighed down by death, he could but weep and wail. His grief was such that not a hope could still survive To turn him from his tears while he was still alive. … He always weeps, recalling comrades who have died. He only seeks to die, not live another day, And so his majesty declines and fades away.]42

By presenting Richard as a false penitent, Gower could emphasize his own constant outlook as a deeply and energetically true penitent. The trappings that he used to achieve this, however, came, uncannily enough, from the mausoleum of Chaucer’s bookish penance, to which, when they could, others returned some of the results of what Gower had made of that.

The Bedford Psalter-Hours The royal family’s recuperation of past and present poets in an almost monotonously similar vein of penance is perhaps clearest in the Bedford Psalter and Hours of 1420–2 made for John, Duke of Bedford, Henry V’s younger brother.43 This remarkable psalter is filled with the highly realistic and distinctive, but affectively closely unified, faces of contemporary and recent English ‘Lancastrian’ poets. There Gower repeatedly appears as penitential and aged, sometimes with his mouth open, captured in a moment of immediate, oral participation in the words of the biblical texts around him, Psalm 141 (142), whose beginning, ‘Voce mea ad dominum clamavi’ [I cried to the Lord with my voice], evokes the title of Gower’s Vox clamantis (figure 2a).44 The allusion proves the secular, courtly knowledge of the political Vox, and provides

42

43

44

This text and its translation – sometimes modified – are cited from John Gower, Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Anglie (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400), ed. David C. Carlson, with a verse translation by A. G. Rigg (Toronto, 2011). On the many Lancastrian official sources of this work, see Carlson, John Gower, pp. 153–96. London, British Library, MS Additional 42131; see Sylvia Wright, ‘The Author Portraits in the Bedford Psalter-Hours: Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve’, British Library Journal 18 (1992), 190–202; Sylvia Wright, ‘The Gesta Henrici Quinti and the Bedford Psalter-Hours’, The Court and Cultural Diversity, ed. Evelyn Mullally and John Thompson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 267–85; Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, 2 vols (London, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 166–71, no. 54. Wright, ‘Author Portraits’, p. 199.

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Figure 2a. Face of John Gower in The Bedford Psalter and Hours; London, BL MS Add. 42131, fol. 209v.

Figure 2b. Face of Geoffrey Chaucer in The Bedford Psalter and Hours; BL MS Add. 42131, fol. 51v.

Figure 2c. Face of King Richard II in The Bedford Psalter and Hours; BL MS Add. 42131, fol. 210.



Deconstructive Chaucer Among the Lancastrians  125

in a highly compressed way the paradox of Gower’s own literary prestige arising from his penitential posture. Hoccleve is visible, solemnly, although so too is Lydgate, who would soon replace Hoccleve as the royal family’s favoured poet.45 Chaucer is included too, in similarly penitential and aged habit. Unlike the other writers, he wears an elegant skullcap, and his mouth is closed, as if removed by death to a mutely textual existence (figure 2b). The Psalter moreover portrays Richard, crowned but beardless and with a wretchedly penitential expression, as if to suggest both his youth and final regret, as in Gower’s Cronica tripertita (figure 2c). Here is a full synthesis of Lancastrian political, religious and literary interests, a combination that has been considered beyond the bounds of ‘good taste’.46 Yet the Bedford Psalter-Hours was also a guide to the authors and books that should be read and reproduced: the first index to a Golden Treasury of English Literature, whose writers were in fact the ones most copied by the London Guildhall scribes who have been shown to have made most of the London manuscripts of Gower, Hoccleve and Chaucer.47 Just as Chaucer’s literary characters may have provided models for how other poets figured Chaucer, and just as ‘approved’ Westminster and London poets offer features that might be exchanged and circulated in order to define one another, so local artists and scribes mingled in the projects of those who sponsored or approved the copies of the English poets’ works. The ‘realism’ of literature and literary portraits (verbal and pictorial) in the period, so pivotal for a longer span of literary history, is also an index of a specific set of ideologies, strategies and forms of literary appreciation in the early fifteenth century that epitomized and confirmed how prestigious vernacular poetry ought to be allowed its fame. The community of literary makers and book makers was both figural and literal. Sylvia Wright judges that one of the artists of the Bedford PsalterHours (figures 2a–c) was the artist who made Chaucer’s portrait in the copy of Hoccleve’s poetry that is now British Library, MS Harley 4866 (see figure  1).48 An image of Gower’s Amans as an old man (rather than as the young lover, as he is pictorially represented in nearly all other manuscripts of the Confessio amantis) appears in a copy whose first two quires, including this image, were made by the London Chamber Clerk John Marchaunt (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902; figure 3).49 Marchaunt, formerly known only as ‘scribe D’ and one of the most prolific early-fifteenth-century copyists of Gower and Chaucer in the period, probably knew all these writers, 45 46 47 48 49

Wright, ‘Gesta Henrici Quinti’, pp. 268–9. Wright, ‘Author Portraits’, p. 190. Linne R. Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425 (Woodbridge, 2013). Wright, ‘Author Portraits’, p. 199. Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, pp. 61–2.

126  Andrew Galloway

Figure 3. An ‘old’ Amans beginning his confession in the Confessio amantis; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902, fol. 8v.

as well as their patrons and scribes; Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, who identify him, suggest that this unusual portrait of an old lover may be due to Marchaunt’s personal association with Gower as another legal clerk in the Guildhall, a proximity that allowed Marchaunt to update the image ‘near the end of [Gower’s] life, or after his death’.50 All these penitential poems and images of penitential poets would offer the viewer – especially the London or courtly viewer who might know (or know of) these poets in youth, old age and death – opportunities for a ‘pondering of self’ of a distinctly local kind, though a kind that only representations across many moments of life, detached from any immediate ‘now’, can sustain: food for satisfaction or, more often, penance, or simply further thought. Yet all these literary and visual portraits of absence also constitute the quintessential image of vernacular literary authority achieving full presence and disclosing philosophical maturity, social sophistication and moral complexity as those were recognized, cherished and made famous in the Lancastrian period.

50

Ibid., p. 62.

7 After Deschamps: Chaucer’s French Fame Stephanie Downes

Lenvoy Poete hault, loenge d’escuiye, En ton jardin ne seroie qu’ortie: Considere ce que j’ay dit premier, Ton noble plant, ta douce melodie, Mais pour scavoir, de rescripre te prie Grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier! [Envoi High poet, pride of the English squires, I would be just a nettle in your garden: remember what I mentioned at the beginning about your noble plant, and your sweet melody but write me back, so that I really know it: Great translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer!]1

E

ustache Deschamps’ balade, dedicated, in the early 1390s, to the ‘grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier’, has weighted status as the ‘first’ of all literary references to Chaucer.2 That it was written in French has contributed to the complexity of the poem’s modern reception. In 1925 Caroline Spurgeon wrote of Deschamps’ ‘charming greeting’ that: ‘It is curious that the earliest tribute of praise to Chaucer as a poet should have been written

1

2

Eustache Deschamps, Selected Poems, ed. Ian S. Laurie and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, trans. David Curzon and Jeffrey Fiskin (London, 2003), pp. 70–1, lines 34–5. All quotations from this balade and their English translations are from this edition, unless otherwise stated. The dating of the balade has been picked over in detail. Dates ranging from 1385 to the early 1390s have all been suggested over the past two centuries. Critical consensus currently rests on 1391. See James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto, 1991), p. 248; Murray L. Brown, ‘Poets, Peace, the Passion, and the Prince: Eustache Deschamps’ Ballade to Chaucer’, Chaucer’s French Contemporaries: The Poetry/Poetics of Self and Tradition, ed. R. Barton Palmer (New York, 1999), p. 194.

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by a Frenchman.’3 The provenance of the balade has added considerably to its twentieth- and twenty-first-century appeal. As Derek Brewer put it, some fifty years after Spurgeon: ‘what other English author has been so heartily praised by a French contemporary?’4 Yet critics have rarely taken the ‘Frenchness’ of Deschamps’ poem as a point of departure for assessment of Chaucer’s renown beyond England and the Middle Ages. How might audiences in France from the late fourteenth century onwards have come into contact with the English poet’s writing, or – often more crucially in the French context – his name? Names themselves, bearers of fame and infamy, have a lasting impact on developing narratives of literary history and disputes over cultural patrimony, from the Middle Ages to modernity. A crucial aspect that has been missed in the long critical history of reading Deschamps’ balade to Chaucer is its emphasis on names and naming, and on Chaucer’s name in particular. This begs the question: with what or with whom did other French readers, from the late fourteenth century onwards, associate Chaucer’s name, and in what different contexts was it spoken? In this essay, the balade and the modern critical commentary that surrounds it provide both a point of departure and an analytical frame for assessing Chaucer’s reputation in late medieval and early modern France. Since its publication among Deschamps’ collected works in the late nineteenth century the balade has offered hard evidence of at least one French contemporary’s familiarity with Chaucer’s activities as a poet.5 Its existence, however, has often tended to raise more questions than it answers.6 When was it written, and for what purpose?7 Was Chaucer aware of the poem, and did he reply? Did Deschamps know any of Chaucer’s works aside from his

3 4 5

6

7

Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357– 1900, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1925; repr. New York, 1960), Appendix B, p. 1. Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols (London, 1978), vol. 1, p. 2. Eustache Deschamps, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Auguste Henri Edouard Queux de SaintHilaire and Gaston Raynaud, Société des Anciens Textes Français, 11 vols (Paris, 1878– 1904). The balade survives in one witness: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Français 840, fol. lxii r–v. For general contextualization of the balade, see David Wallace, ‘Chaucer and Deschamps, Translation and the Hundred Years’ War’, The Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Age 8 (2003), 179–88; Glending Olson, ‘Geoffrey Chaucer’, The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. D. Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 566–88; Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, pp. 242–72. For perspectives from the French academy, see Jacques Kooijman, ‘Envoi de Fleurs: à propos des échanges littéraires entre la France et l’Angleterre sous la guerre de cent ans’, Études de langue et de littérature françaises, offertes à André Landry (Nancy, 1980), pp. 173–83; André Crépin, ‘Chaucer et Deschamps’, Autour d’Eustache Deschamps: Actes du colloque du Centre d’études médiévales de l’université de Picardie-Jules Verne, ed. Danielle Buschinger (Amiens, 1999), pp. 37–43. Brown, ‘Poets, Peace, the Passion, and the Prince’, pp. 188–9.



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translation of the Roman de la rose, and might he have read them, or been able to read them, in English?8 The earliest commentators on the balade were quick to establish the sincerity of its praise. In 1891 Paget Toynbee wrote that he found no compelling reason to discount Deschamps’ ‘genuine’ admiration of Chaucer’s writing. G. L. Kittredge called the poem ‘highly complimentary’.9 The Sorbonnebased Chaucerian Émile Legouis, however, found Deschamps’ comments to be generally tributary, but ‘non les plus touchants, ni les plus enthousiastes’ [neither the most touching/intimate, nor the most enthusiastic].10 Recent critics have increasingly tended to find the overall tone of the poem considerably thornier. Scholars who recognize the multilingualism of England in the Middle Ages are better prepared to deal with the wider implications – sincere or not – of Deschamps’ apparent praise of Chaucer’s writing.11 David Wallace, for example, reads the balade retrospectively through the lens of broader critical attitudes to Chaucer, arguing that Deschamps anticipates the various ‘hybridities of class, style, and gender’ that came to characterize The Canterbury Tales in twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship.12 Ardis Butterfield explores the poem ‘as an instance of invective’, part of a cross-Channel poetic tradition of ‘witty intellectual jousting’, which included figures such as Jean de Vitry, Oton de Granson and Jean de la Mote alongside Chaucer.13 So far as we know, Chaucer never responded to the balade, and there is good reason to believe that he never saw it. The prospect that his literary influence might have extended to France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has nonetheless proved irresistible: Jean Froissart, Oton de Granson, Charles d’Orléans and Christine de Pizan have all been proposed as possible

8

9

10 11

12 13

For a summary of critical perspectives on the balade, see William Calin, ‘Deschamps’s Ballade to Chaucer Again, or the Dangers of Intertextual Medieval Comparatism’, Eustache Deschamps: French Courtier Poet: His Work and His World, ed. Deborah M. SinnreichLevi (New York, 1998), pp. 73–83. Paget Toynbee, ‘The Ballade Addressed by Eustache Deschamps to Geoffrey Chaucer’, The Academy 40 (1891), 432–3; G. L. Kittredge, ‘Chaucer and Some of His Friends’, Modern Philology 1 (1903), 6. For another early response, see T. Atkinson Jenkins, ‘Deschamps’ Ballade to Chaucer’, Modern Language Notes 33 (1918), 268–78. Émile Legouis, Geoffroy Chaucer (Paris, 1910), p. 17. David Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Malden, MA, 2004), p. 58; Ardis Butterfield, ‘France’, Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin (University Park, PA, 2009), pp. 25–46. Wallace, ‘Chaucer and Deschamps’, p. 188. Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009), p. 112; for her analysis of the balade, see pp. 143–51. For other readings of the balade as invective, see Calin, ‘Deschamps’s Ballade to Chaucer Again’, p. 81, and Wallace, Premodern Places, p. 58.

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readers of Chaucer’s oeuvre.14 Christine’s Advision provides one of the most compelling cases for the transmission of Chaucer’s poetry to France.15 In the years before 1400, Christine corresponded and exchanged books of poems with at least one member of the Ricardian court, the earl of Salisbury. Christine’s son, Jean, was billeted in the earl’s household as a consequence of the friendship. After Richard’s deposition, Jean returned to France, but not before having spent some time in the new king’s court. Might we entertain the possibility that Jean brought back with him to France a book of Chaucer’s verse for his mother, who had only recently turned ‘professional’ poet herself? It is unlikely that Christine spoke or understood much English, but critics have nonetheless often noted similarities between Chaucer’s and Christine’s attitudes to gender, especially in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women and the Livre de la cité des dames (1405), and between The House of Fame and the Chemin de longue estude (1403).16 S. H. Rigby has compared the Wife of Bath’s ‘feminism’ with Christine’s, though he clearly makes the point that we cannot be certain that either author knew (or knew of) the other’s work.17 Of course, literary comparison of Chaucer’s writing with that of his famous French contemporaries can only lead so far: aside from Deschamps, no other French poet unambiguously names Chaucer in a literary context in fourteenth-century France. As Julia Boffey has argued in relation to Chaucer’s influence on the English lyrics of Charles d’Orléans, without Christine’s – or any French poet’s – specific acknowledgement of Chaucer’s writing as a source for their work, it is impossible to separate out the threads of homogeneous reading habits from instances of direct influence or emulation.18

14

15 16

17 18

On Froissart, see James Wimsatt, ‘Le Dit dou Bleu Chevalier: Froissart’s Imitation of Chaucer’, Medieval Studies 34 (1972), 388–400; Susan Crane, ‘Froissart’s Dit dou Bleu Chevalier as a Source for Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’, Medium Ævum 61 (1992), 59–74. On Charles d’Orléans, see Julia Boffey, ‘Charles of Orléans Reading Chaucer’s Dream Visions’, Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle Ages: The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, Ninth Series, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 43–62. André Crépin also observes similarities between certain lines in Charles’s and Chaucer’s verses, ‘Chaucer and the French’, Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Literature: The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, Perugia, 1982–1983, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge, 1984), p. 68. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de l’advision Christine, ed. Christine Reno and Liliane Dulac (Paris, 2001), p. 112. See Theresa Coletti, ‘“Paths of Long Study”: Reading Chaucer and Christine de Pizan in Tandem’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006), 1–40; and Judith Laird, ‘Good Women and Bonnes Dames: Virtuous Females in Chaucer and Christine de Pizan’, Chaucer Review 30 (1995), 58–70. S. H. Rigby, ‘The Wife of Bath, Christine de Pizan, and the Medieval Case for Women’, Chaucer Review 35 (2000), 139. Boffey, ‘Charles of Orléans Reading Chaucer’s Dream Visions’.



Chaucer’s French Fame  131

Repetition of Chaucer’s name, however, is precisely the crux on which Deschamps’ balade turns in its famous refrain: ‘grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier’. The late medieval and early modern French examples that I discuss here range across manuscript and print, and, like the balade, demonstrate a particular interest in naming Chaucer, as well as in his name: its potential Frenchness (‘chausseur’ or ‘chausser’; variously ‘shoemaker’ or to ‘lace-up’, ‘tie-up’ or ‘fit’); its Englishness and the poet’s reputation in England; and in associations of Chaucer with other famous literary names. If ‘name’ and ‘fame’ are a natural pair, as Chaucer well understood, the same is true of ‘nom’ and ‘renom’ for Deschamps, the one a literal extension of the other.19 In an earlier balade addressed to Guillaume de Machaut he declares: ‘Vo noms sera precieuse relique’ [your name will be a precious relic].20 The balade to Chaucer is similarly concerned with the memorializing qualities of a name, from antiquity on. It begins by enumerating the names of famous classical poets and philosophers, O Socrates plains de philosophie Seneque en meurs et Anglux en pratique, Ovides grans en ta poetrie  (lines 1–3, my emphasis) [You are a Socrates, full of philosophy, a Seneca of morals, worldly as Gellius, and in your poetry as great as Ovid]

continuing, in the second stanza, to explore etymologically the naming of England or ‘Angleterre’: … en la terre Angelique Qui d’angela saxonne et puis flourie Angleterre, d’elle ce nom s’applique Le derrenier en l’ethimologique  (lines 12–15) [… in the land of Angles, which comes from the Saxon Angela, which flowered into the name of Angleterre, which derivation is where the etymologies have ended]

The balade ends with Deschamps revealing his own name – ‘Eustaces sui’ [I am Eustache] – in the final stanza before the envoi.21

19

20 21

On ‘naming’ Chaucer in late medieval and early modern England, see Helen Cooper, ‘Poetic Fame’, Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford, 2010), pp. 361–78. Deschamps, ‘Balade 124’, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 245. On fame and memory in late medieval French literature, see Jacqueline Cerquiligni-Toulet, ‘Fama et les preux: nom et renom à la fin du moyen âge’, Médiévales 24 (1993), 35–44.

132  Stephanie Downes

A complex cultural politics is attached to the act of naming and being named as an author in late medieval France and England, let alone being named as a ‘translateur’ or a ‘poete’, as Deschamps variously describes Chaucer. In the balade Deschamps places Chaucer’s name in a genealogy of classical poets from Seneca to Ovid, but in addressing him at all he includes him in the company of his French contemporaries Guillaume de Machaut, Oton de Grandson and Christine de Pizan, poets whom he also ‘names’ in explicitly dedicated verses.22 Deschamps is not the only known author to articulate Chaucer’s name in the context of literary production in either English or French in the later fourteenth century: in Gower’s Confessio amantis, Venus instructs the speaker to ‘gret wel Chaucer whan ye mete, / As mi disciple and mi poete’ (lines 2941–2). Jean Froissart names Chaucer once in the Chroniques de France, but as a diplomat rather than a poet – this in spite of the fact that several of his poems indicate Froissart’s familiarity with at least The Book of the Duchess among Chaucer’s works; the opening of that poem is itself resonant with Froissart’s Paradys d’amour, as James Wimsatt has shown.23 For Chaucer’s own part, no text survives in which he refers directly to either Froissart or Deschamps. Instead, it is Granson whom Chaucer evokes by name at the end of The Complaint of Venus, when he writes of the ‘curiosite / Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce’ (lines 80–1).24 With the important exception of Chaucer’s naming of Gower at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, the various references of English and French contemporaries to each other reveal less overt reciprocity than one might expect, and I know of no trans-lingual examples in which the favour of ‘naming’ a fellow poet is returned by the poet named. Yet to study the examples that survive is to shuttle almost endlessly from one side of the Channel to the other and back. Together these show that the culture of naming and faming in late-medieval England and France was both communal and cross-lingual, spanning literature, language and location. In the closing lines of Deschamps’ balade, the presence of the English knight Lewis Clifford serves as a reminder of the role that diplomatic encounters played in cultural and linguistic exchange:25

22

23 24 25

For a general discussion of poets to whom Deschamps dedicated verses, see Laura Kendrick, ‘Rhetoric and the Rise of Public Poetry: The Career of Eustache Deschamps’, Studies in Philology 80 (1983), 1–13. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, pp. 174–209; see also Crane, ‘Froissart’s Dit dou Bleu Chevalier’, pp. 59–74. Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1988), p. 649, line 81. Subsequent quotations from Chaucer’s works refer to this edition. On Clifford’s role in the exchange, see Calin, ‘Deschamps’s Ballade to Chaucer Again’, pp. 73–83; and Brown, ‘Poets, Peace, the Passion, and the Prince’, p. 209.



Chaucer’s French Fame  133 Mais pran en gré les euvres d’escolier Que par Clifford de moy avoir pourras  (lines 28–9) [But take them graciously, these schoolish writings, which I will send you by Sir Lewis Clifford]

Unlike Froissart, Deschamps does not refer to Chaucer’s own activities as a civil servant and a diplomat. Certainly, political and literary spheres overlapped in late-medieval Anglo-French contexts.26 Chaucer’s own involvement in foreign embassies and other ‘secret business’ in France in the 1370s and 1380s would have offered ample opportunity for the presentation of his works to French recipients.27 Collections of verse in French, such as the earl of Salisbury’s for Christine de Pizan, would doubtless have made more strategic offerings than those written in English, serving as a reminder of shared cultural tastes. As diplomatic gifts, books of French poems might smooth the path of negotiation, especially where their subject was ‘love’. Chaucer probably did write poems in French at the start of his career; these would have fared predictably better on the Continent than his English. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Library, MS 15, the manuscript of French lyrics associated with Chaucer’s name, bears the initials ‘Ch’ alongside a number of its poems, which are mostly chansons and balades. James Wimsatt suggests that the volume may even have been prepared for Isabeau de Bavière, Charles VI’s queen.28 Deschamps, however, only refers to Chaucer as a ‘translator’ and nurturer of French literature on English soil, who might read and transmit French texts, but who writes in English: En bon anglès le livre translatas; Et un vergier ou du plant demandas De ceuls qui font pour eulx auctoriser, A ja longtemps que tu edifias  (lines 16–19) [and you translated the Rose into fine English; and long ago you began an orchard for which you asked for plants from those you understood to have authority.]

And yet Deschamps declares his receptivity to Chaucer’s English – his ‘bon anglès’ – when he implores him at the poem’s end to ‘write back’ (‘de rescripre te prie’; line 34). The Anglo-French poetic exchanges suggested in the balade are bilingual and two-way. They are not like the translatio studii model of the first stanza of the poem, which progresses in a chronological 26

27 28

Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, esp. Chapter 5, ‘Exchanging Terms’, pp. 152–200; Wallace, ‘Chaucer and Deschamps’, pp. 179–88; Calin, ‘Deschamps’s Ballade to Chaucer Again’, p. 81. On the formula ‘in secretis negociis domini regis’, see Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, p. 190. See James I. Wimsatt, ed., Chaucer and the Poems of ‘Ch’, rev. edn (Kalamazoo, MI, 2009; first published Cambridge, 1982), pp. 3–4.

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linear fashion, through history and geography, through Greece, Rome and Troy (via Socrates, Ovid and Aeneas) before reaching England, ‘[l]’Isle aux Geans, ceuls de Bruth’ [the island of the Giants, those of Brutus (lines 6–7; my translation)] The exchange that Deschamps anticipates with Chaucer is less direct: Chaucer translates the Rose into English; Deschamps asks for more of these English writings, proposing to drink from ‘la fontaine Helye’ [the fount of Helicon] as the source which Chaucer now controls (lines 21–7). Notwithstanding Deschamps’ request for presumably English verses to quench his thirst, and in spite of ample evidence of manuscripts carried from France to England during the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, manuscripts written in English circulating in French hands over the same timeframe have proved hard to find. Towards the middle of the fifteenth century, however, a single volume of Chaucer’s English was imported to France. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Anglais 39, like the balade, has been greatly emphasized in efforts to uncover the appeal of Chaucer’s writing for French readers. The volume is a copy of various Canterbury Tales made for Jean d’Angoulême during his English imprisonment, glossed and annotated in Latin, which probably returned to France with Jean in 1445 or shortly thereafter.29 The manuscript has presented modern critics with a number of puzzles. It is unclear, for example, whether the glosses were added by ‘Duxwurth’ (the manuscript’s English scribe), by Jean himself or by another unknown compiler. The particular significance of Chaucer’s writing for Jean has also been a subject of speculation.30 Chaucer is named several times in the manuscript’s various editorial interventions: at the start of The Man of Law’s Tale (‘sequntur verba Galfridi Chauncers compilatoris libri’31) and at the beginning of the collection:

29

30

31

See the various manuscript descriptions: J. M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of The Canterbury Tales, 8 vols (Chicago, IL, 1940), vol. 1, pp. 399–405; Gustav Dupont-Ferrier, ‘Jean d’Orléans, comte d’Angoulême, d’après sa bibliothèque’, Bibliothèque de la faculté des lettres de Paris 3 (1897), 64; Gaston Raynaud, ‘Catalogue des manuscrits Anglais de la Bibliothèque Nationale’, Cabinet Historique 29 (1883), 582–3; William McCormick, Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Oxford, 1933), pp. 379–86. Susan Crane, ‘Duxworth Redux: The Paris Manuscript of The Canterbury Tales’, Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Witney F. Bolton, ed. Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis (Lewisburg, PA, 2000), pp. 17–44; Paul Strohm, ‘Jean of Angoulême: A Fifteenth-Century Reader of Chaucer’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 72 (1971), 71; Martin Michael Crow, ‘John of Angoulême and His Chaucer Manuscript’, Speculum 17 (1942), 86–99; Meredith Clermont-Ferrand, ed., Jean d’Angoulême’s Copy of The Canterbury Tales: An Annotated Edition of Bibliothèque Nationale’s Fonds Anglais 39 (Paris), ed. Meredith Clermont-Ferrand (Lewiston, NY, 2008). Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Anglais 39, fol. 24; Strohm, ‘Jean of Angoulême’, p. 71.



Chaucer’s French Fame  135 POEMATA Gaufredi Chauceri Poetae Angli Incipiunt Prologi in fabulas Canterburienses32 [THE POEMS of Geoffrey Chaucer English poet begin with The Prologue of The Canterbury Tales]

This incipit describes Chaucer as an English poet (that is, an Englishman) rather than a poet who writes in English, though there is some slippage here between vernacularity and burgeoning nationalism, and it is difficult to be certain if either or possibly both notions of ‘English’ were understood. When the manuscript was catalogued in an inventory of Jean’s books made in the year of his death, 1467, the language and the style of the poem were more important than either the name or the identity of its author: ‘[u]ng Romant en anglois rimé’ [‘a romance in English, rhymed’ or ‘a romance in rhymed English’].33 The manuscript remained in the royal collection without attracting much notice before the twentieth century. At least one early modern French handler, however, left his mark on its folios in Latin. This reader inserted an extra leaf at the front of the manuscript on which is written a short paragraph in a seventeenth-century hand, ‘habentur in editione. anni 1602’ [(the poems) are contained in an edition of the year 1602].34 The note goes on to document some of the differences between the manuscript and Thomas Speght’s 1602 edition of Chaucer’s works. It includes a comment on lines appearing at the end of the manuscript copy of The Manciple’s Tale which are not present in the printed text, and a note at fol. 5v recording lines in the edition not witnessed in the manuscript copy of the Prologue. The notes suggest that the manuscript version is more accurate and complete than Speght’s edition. Their author was presumably a librarian or cataloguer of the royal collection at Blois, which the manuscript must have entered after it passed into the possession of François I. There is currently a single copy of the 1602 works in the Bibliothèque Nationale collection but no evidence of an earlier English edition of Chaucer’s works in the French royal library.35 32 33

34 35

BnF, MS Angl. 39, fol. 1. The French inventory-maker misreads the first line of the text, ‘a lykerous appetite’ (Maniciple’s Tale, line 189), for ‘aliberons appetit’: ‘Ung Romant en anglois rimé, en papier, commançant ou premier Feuillet Want taht Aprillz et finissant ou penultime aliberons apetite’ [a romance in rhymed English, on paper, beginning on the first page Want taht Aprillz and finishing on the penultimate aliberons apetite]. See Gilbert Ouy, La Librairie des frères captifs: les manuscrits de Charles d’Orléans et Jean d’Angoulême (Turnhout, 2007), p. 58 (cat. no. 37); see also Dupont-Ferrier, ‘Jean d’Orléans’, pp. 39, 92. With thanks to Catherine Nall for assistance with the translation. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Y 23. The Workes of Our Ancient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas Speght (London: A. Islip, 1602), STC 5080.

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Any trace of actual French readers of Chaucer’s writing in the later Middle Ages ends abruptly with the cataloguing of Angouleme’s manuscript. There are, however, at least two mentions of Chaucer’s name in sixteenth-century France that warrant further investigation as evidence of the poet’s reputation there in this period. The earliest known reference to Chaucer in French print dates from 1565 and appears in an anti-Protestant pamphlet written by Gentian Hervet d’Orléans, a canon of Reims.36 Initially educated in France, Hervet spent some of his early career in the 1520s and 1530s in England, where he developed a close association with the Pole family. Hervet explains how he learned of Chaucer from a member of the family: Le seigneur Artus Pole, homme de maison Royale en Angleterre, frère du Cardinal Pole (lequel Dieu absolve) me conta un conte d’un nommé Chausser qui a eu autresfois aussi grand bruit de poete en ce païs là, comme maistre Alain Chartier en France, et aussi à ce que je puis conjecturer, ilz estoient d’un mesme temps.37 [The lord Arthur Pole, a man of the royal house in England, brother of Cardinal Pole (may God absolve him) told me a tale by one named Chausser who was once as popular a poet in that country as master Alain Chartier in France, and, also, from what I can gather, the two were contemporaries. (my translation)]

Cardinal Pole’s younger brother, Arthur, might first have met Hervet in France: Arthur served on several diplomatic missions and had been selected to accompany Mary Tudor to France for her marriage to Louis XII in 1514. In England, Hervet was appointed tutor to a third brother, Geoffrey.38 The Pole family also extended literary patronage to the French theologian, and in 1526 he translated into English a copy of Erasmus’ Dei immensa misericordia at the request of their mother, the countess Margaret of Salisbury.39 In 1532 Hervet dedicated another English translation, this time of Xenophon’s Treatise of Householde, to his pupil Geoffrey.40 36

37

38

39 40

Georges Gougenheim, ‘Une mention de Chaucer en France au XVIe siècle’, Revue AngloAméricaine 11 (1934), 330–1. The reference does not appear in Spurgeon’s Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism. Reponse à ce que les ministres de la nouvelle Eglise d’Orléans ont escrit contre aucune epistres et livres de Gentian Hervet, par Gentian Hervet (Paris, 1565), fols 108v–109v. Quoted in Gougenheim, ‘Une mention de Chaucer’, p. 331. The entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography claims that Hervet was tutor to a younger Arthur Pole, Geoffrey’s son, rather than Geoffrey. See Hazel Pierce, ‘Pole, Arthur (1531/2–1570?)’. Based on the probable dates of Hervet’s time in London, the publication of his two English translations, and the fact that Arthur would only have been in his infancy at this time, Geoffrey seems the more likely student. Erasmus, Dei immensa misericordia, trans. Gentian Hervet (London: T. Berthelet, 1531), STC 10474.5. Xenophons Treatise of Householde (London: T. Berthelet, 1532), STC 26069. In a copy of



Chaucer’s French Fame  137

Hervet was a proficient linguist, and fluent in English. He would certainly have been able to read William Thynne’s edition of the works of Chaucer, published the same year as the Treatise, or Richard Pynson’s earlier 1526 edition of The Canterbury Tales, the Book of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde.41 There is nothing in the surviving account, however, to suggest that Hervet himself had actually read any of Chaucer’s works. Instead, Hervet ‘hears’ of Chaucer through his friend, Arthur: Il me compta, dy je, qu’il estoit un jour caché en quelque lieu, là où il pouvoit ouïr un jeune homme qui devisoit avec sa femme, j’entends dudict Chausser, et qu’en devisant ensemble, elle de son costé luy tenoit plusieurs propos amoureux, et entre autres choses luy disoit, qu’elle l’aymoit tant que merveilles. Ce qu’ayant ouy ledict Chausser, sortit du lieu ou il estoit caché, et sans faire autre deplaisir au jeune homme luy dist tout doucement: Mon amy, j’ay ouy les propos que t’a tenu ma femme, mais tu es bien simple si tu la crois, car je t’asseure bien qu’elle m’en a autant dict, plus de cinq cent fois, voire et trois fois d’avantage.42 [He (Arthur Pole) told me, I repeat, that he (Chaucer) was one day hiding in some place, there where he could hear a young man who was chatting with his wife, I mean of the said Chausser, and that in chatting together, she for her part made many amorous overtures, and among other things said to him that she loved him more than anything. Having heard this the said Chausser, coming out of his hiding place, and without causing any other displeasure to the young man, said to him softly: My friend, I have heard the propositions my wife has made you, but you are a great fool if you believe her, because I can assure you that she has said as much to me, more than five hundred times, verily, and three times again.]

The story that Arthur reportedly told Hervet has no obvious analogue in any of Chaucer’s known works. The reference to Chaucer’s ‘wife’, however, calls to mind the Wife of Bath. General themes of adultery and young and/or foolish lovers are all vaguely suggestive of that tale and its prologue as well, and shades of The Merchant’s Tale may be discerned in the hiding place, the overheard lovers’ tryst and the idea of foolish gullibility. In Hervet’s pamphlet, the fabliau-style narrative about Chaucer is used as an example of the hypocrisy of the clergy, criticizing priests who take marriage vows: ‘je ne puis croire que qui a une fois trompé dieux si impu-

41

42

the text held in the Bodleian Library, Geoffrey Pole’s name is excised by a later reader. The excision may date from the 1540s, after Geoffrey had been arrested and his mother, Margaret, executed for treason. The execution took place in 1541. The excision is visible in the text on Early English Books Online, sig. Ai b. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, ed. W. Thynne (London: T. Godfray, 1532). STC 5068; Geoffrey Chaucer, The Boke of Fame (London: R. Pynson, 1526), STC 5088. Quoted in Gougenheim, ‘Une mention de Chaucer’, p. 331.

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demment tienne jamais sa fois aux hommes’ [I cannot believe that a man who has one time deceived God so shamelessly could ever keep faith with men].43 Hervet’s inclusion of the anecdote about Chaucer shows that by the second half of the sixteenth century, on at least one occasion, the poet’s name had been associated in France with the case against clerical excess, particularly against married members of the clergy. Hervet had been present at the Council of Trent in 1545 and was an important spokesperson in the outbreak of the French wars of religion.44 It was around this time that the Poles fell out of favour with Henry VIII over their support for Catherine of Aragon and Mary’s succession: Cardinal Pole objected publically to the king’s supremacy and spent much of his life afterwards in exile.45 Hervet could have had no interest in promoting Chaucer’s proto-Protestant reputation, but the lecherous friar lurks at the margins of the exemplum: Chaucer’s adulterous ‘wife’ is like a priest who breaks his vow to God in taking marriage vows. Hervet advocated strongly against marriage among the clergy across a number of his writings, arguing that such men who had deceived God should not be trusted to convey the word of God to men. The Canterbury Tales are full of references to churchmen who fail to lead by example, as in the ‘shiten shephard’ (line 504), described in the General Prologue, who fails to set the standard of cleanliness that he expects of his sheep. In Hervet’s narrative, the adulterous wife, analogous to the ‘unfaithful’ priest, bears the burden of responsibility. The response of ‘Chausser’, however, is not to condemn her but to speak directly to the young lover – as the gullible fool who has been led astray – in an almost sympathetic tone. His composure makes sense if the lover is understood as representative of the parishioners, in need of guidance and liable to put their faith in the untrustworthy priest. That Chaucer and his ‘wife’ should be evoked at the start of the French wars of religion in a Catholic defence rubs against other appropriations of Chaucer’s works and apocrypha in support of English Reformation ideals and Protestantism. When Hervet compares Chaucer’s reputation to that of Alain Chartier, he places him in the secular, courtly sphere, harking back to a pre-Reformation state, over a century before the Church of England was established. Through Chaucer Hervet aligns himself with contemporary counter-reform. First, he gestures to an epoch in England before the Reformation when he associated politically and personally with the Pole family. Next, he calls up Chaucer by name as a representative of a pre-Reformation age, in which criticism of the clergy could take a number of different forms. 43 44 45

Quoted in Gougenheim, ‘Une Mention de Chaucer’, p. 331. Luc Racaut, ‘Nicolas Chesneau, Catholic Printer in Paris during the French Wars of Religion’, Historical Journal 52 (2009), 23–41. For Hervet’s support of Cardinal Pole, see Luc Racaut, ‘The Sacrifice of the Mass and the Redefinition of Catholic Orthodoxy during the French Wars of Religion’, French History 24 (2010), 29.



Chaucer’s French Fame  139

Hervet co-opts some of the same sentiments and motifs that led to associations of Chaucer with proto-Protestantism, Wyclifism and Lollardy into wider theological discourse on Catholicism during the religious conflicts of sixteenth-century France. A second reference to Chaucer in sixteenth-century France also came from the pen of a theologian but was specifically secular in its nature. André Thevet was a Franciscan friar who had been both chaplain to Catherine de Medici and cosmographer to Henri II. He travelled widely and published accounts of his voyages to North Africa, the Middle East and South America. His last work, the historiographical Pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (Portraits and Lives of Famous Men), was printed in Paris in 1584, an eight-volume collection that celebrated the lives of men who had excelled in war and in the arts and sciences from classical times to more recent history. It included a biography of Jean de Meun, or ‘Jean Clopinel’, which made mention of ‘Geofroy Chaucer Anglois’ as the English translator of the Roman de la rose.46 To convey the extent of de Meun’s international influence, Thevet called on the example of Chaucer: Plusieurs ont voulu imiter ce Romans [sic] de la Rose, & entre autres Geofroy Chaucer Anglois, qui en a composé un qu’il intitule The Romant of the Rose; lequel, au rapport de Balæus, a esté tiré du Livre de l’Art d’aimer de Jean Mone, qu’il il [sic] faict Anglois. Je conjecture qu’il entend nostre Jean de Meung, encores qu’il le face Anglois, d’autant que n’est aisé a croire qu’un Anglois osa se hazarder à une telle oeuvre, quoy que les termes ne semblent que trop rudes maintenant, si estoient-ils bien riches pour lors … Quoique ce soit encores, est-il contraint de confesser que son Chaucer a pillé (il appelle cela illustrer le Livre de Jean de Meung) les plus beaux boutons qu’il a pû du Roman de la Rose, pour en embellir & enrichir le sien.47 [Many have sought to imitate the Roman de la Rose, among others Geoffrey Chaucer, an Englishman, who composed a version that he called The Romant of the Rose; the which, according to Bale, was taken from the Book of the Art of Love by Jean Mone, which he renders in English. I suspect that he (Bale) means our Jean de Meung, even though he makes him English, as much as it is possible to believe that an Englishman dare to attempt such a work, for if the vocabulary seems simple now, it was rich in its day.… Nevertheless, one is obliged to admit that his (Bale’s) Chaucer has pillaged (Bale calls it ‘illuminating’ Jean de Meung’s book) the most beautiful gems

46

47

The reference was only included in its 1735 edition in Spurgeon’s original French history. In Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, she includes chronological reference to the 1584 version, Addenda to Appendix B, p. 123. Quoted in Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, Appendix B, p. 22; Caroline Spurgeon, Chaucer devant la critique en Angleterre et en France depuis son temps jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1911), p. 306.

140  Stephanie Downes that he could from the Roman de la Rose, to embellish and enrich his own. (my translation)]

Deschamps described Chaucer’s literary activities using a metaphor of the cultivation of nature: a tending of plants and flowers, from the roses planted by Brutus in English soil (lines 7–8) and Chaucer’s establishing a ‘vergier’ or orchard (line 17), to the seedlings that Deschamps’ wishes to contribute: ‘qui de mon plant aras’ [you will have some of my plantings (line 27)]. In stark contrast, Thevet seizes on an aggressively military metaphor to describe Chaucer’s relationship to the Rose: here is Chaucer the soldier, who pillages from Jean de Meun and steals ‘les plus beaux boutons’ of the text – its most beautiful gems or buds. Where Deschamps’ allusions to the planting of an orchard call up the garden of the Rose, Thevet’s intimations of the military aggression of the English repeat the poem’s metaphorical violence; instead of tending the garden, Chaucer ‘pillages’ from it, plucking the rose metaphorically himself. André Crépin has described the overall tone of Thevet’s commentary as ‘typical of the scornful French hostility for English literature’ throughout the early modern period.48 Certainly, Thevet takes a swipe at the French spoken in England when he expresses disdain at the thought that an Englishman could ‘dare’ attempt to write such a text. The richness of the French vernacular, he argues, is ample evidence that the Rose could only be the work of a speaker geographically native to France. Thevet’s reference to Chaucer contemplates the older medieval conflicts between England and France at the same time as it engages with literary activity in contemporary England. He conducted at least some of his research on Jean de Meun by reading John Bale’s Scriptorum illustrium majoris Britanniae catalogus. In the 1557 appendix of Bale’s catalogue of famous English literary figures we find the equivalent of a ‘French’ Chaucer: an English Jean de Meun. Bale believed that Jean de Meun was an Englishman, ‘Ionnaes Mone’, who studied in France. According to Bale, it was there that he wrote a Latin work on the art of love – ‘De arte amandi’ – which Chaucer translated into English and called the Romaunt de la Rose:49

48 49

Crépin, ‘Chaucer and the French’, p. 69. See Albert B. Friedman, ‘Jean de Meun an Englishman?’, Modern Language Notes 65 (1950), 319–25. Bale attributes the note in the appendix to ‘Chauorro’ (possibly an error for ‘Chaucero’). Friedman suggests (pp. 322–3) that Bale may have misread several lines in Hoccleve’s Letter of Cupid, itself an adaptation of Christine de Pizan’s Livre au dieu d’amours, included in the Thynne edition of Chaucer’s works. From Hoccleve’s text in that edition (1532 and subsequent reissues, STC 5068, 5069 and 5070, lines 281–3), the lines read: ‘To mayster Johan de Moone, as I suppose, / Than it was a lewde occupacioun / In making of the Romance of the Rose’ (lines 281–7). For an edition of Hoccleve’s poem, see Thomas Hoccleve, ‘L’Epistre de Cupide’, ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. Roger Ellis (Liverpool, 2001), pp. 93–107.



Chaucer’s French Fame  141 Ioannes Mone, Anglus natione, cupidissimus suam excolendi mentem bonis studiis, relicta sua patria, in Gallias, Lutetiamque Parisiorum recta se contulit. … De arte amandi, Lib. 1. Quem Galfridus Chaucerus, poeta insignis, & Anglicae linguae illustrator maximus, in Anglica metra transtulit, titulum addens operi, the Romaunt of thae Rose.50 [Ioannes Mone, of the English nation, loving his studies and wanting to further extend his mind, left his country, and took himself directly to Gaul, to Paris and Lutetia. … The Art of Love, Book 1 Which Geoffrey Chaucer, distinguished poet and great illuminator of the English language, translated into English metre, calling the substantial work, the Romaunt of thae Rose. (my translation)]

The claim that Jean de Meun was in fact an Englishman named ‘John Moon’ persisted in various forms throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although Thevet seems to be alone in France in responding to it.51 Thevet repeats Bale’s description of Chaucer as ‘illustrator’ (‘il appelle cela illustrer le Livre de Jean de Meun’), and he concludes that his biography of the French author should rectify English records: Ce que j’ay bien voulu adjouster, … pour montrer en quoi se trompent les anglois, qui veulent ravir a nostre France le Roman de la Rose. [I wanted to correct (Bale’s account), … to demonstrate how the English, who want to rob our France of the Roman de la rose, have been mistaken.]

Thevet almost certainly never read any of Chaucer’s works himself, but he was certainly familiar – through Bale – with the poet’s concurrent English fame. His evocation of Chaucer’s name in his biography of Jean de Meun shows that the literary pairings and triangulations of the medieval past – Chaucer and Deschamps; Chaucer, Deschamps and Jean de Meun; and so on – persisted into the early modern age on both sides of the Channel, at times resulting in disputes over the cultural capital of each emerging nation. It is precisely in their efforts to disentangle the threads of literary history that compilers such as Bale and Thevet show how intricately connected poets of either vernacular had been throughout the Middle Ages. Even an individual’s name – how it might be written down or pronounced – is a witness to Anglo50 51

John Bale, Scriptorum illustrum majoris Brittaniae catalogus, Part 2 (Ipswich: D. van der Straten, 1559), STC 1296, p. 58. Thevet’s Portraits was reprinted in the eighteenth century, during a time of renewed military aggression between England and France. Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath has suggested its particular ‘political resonance’ at this time: see ‘The Roman de la Rose and Middle English Poetry’, Literature Compass 6 (2009), 1118.

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French literary networks in the early modern age as extensions of those that existed in the later medieval period, during and after the Hundred Years War. The more ambiguous aspects of Deschamps’ balade have made room for a range of critical interpretations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but the poem is perhaps most often isolated by modern scholars to speak for late medieval cultural exchange between England and France. Whether or not Deschamps had occasion to read any of Chaucer’s works, the fact that he knew of Chaucer, and his invitation to the English poet to send more of his writing, suggest lines of literary transmission in both directions across the Channel. Precisely because tangible proof of manuscripts and texts exported from England to France is so frustratingly elusive, Deschamps’ balade proves, once again, exceptional. As evidence that cross-Channel cultural and intellectual exchange took place both synchronically and diachronically in the centuries after Deschamps’ poem to Chaucer, nonetheless, the examples discussed above offer an important insight, as does their sparseness: since Chaucer is so infrequently referenced in France, it should perhaps be considered even more remarkable when an identification of the poet takes place. But it should also be remembered that, while Deschamps’ balade may be exceptional, it is not entirely unique. Like the balade’s emphasis on names and naming as the means by which fame spreads over geographical and historical spaces, Continental knowledge of the poet depended less on distribution of his writing than on repetition of his name. In all but the English manuscript, BnF MS Anglais 39, the Francophone writers who evoke Chaucer’s identity do not engage directly with his language. Instead, they encountered the poet’s name through various intermediaries, from Clifford to Arthur Pole and the publications of John Bale. Chaucer’s contemporary fame started multilingual, cross-Channel conversations that continued into the early modern age, and that speak in turn to the extraordinary breadth of networks – literary, religious, political, intellectual and personal – that brought his name to the attention of French readers.

8 ‘Fresch anamalit termes’: The Contradictory Celebrity of Chaucer’s Aureation Joanna Bellis

B

oth the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries hailed Chaucer as ‘the Father of English poetry’, and the moniker stuck. Seth Lerer has detailed the terminology of paternalism in the works of the fifteenth-century Chaucerians, and Lee Patterson describes the poetic genealogy developed through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as it was claimed successively for (and by) Spenser, Milton and Dryden.1 This aspect of Chaucer’s fame achieved a tenacious longevity, as well as a contemporary currency: his Wikipedia entry’s opening sentence begins with the statement, ‘Geoffrey Chaucer … known as the Father of English literature’.2 What also persists doggedly in this popular representation is the sense that Chaucer’s achievement, for which he deserves to be credited with literary paternity, lay primarily in what he did for (or to?) the English language. A recent BBC documentary repeated the ubiquitously (and erroneously) rehearsed claim that Chaucer’s innovation and greatest contribution was to take the bold step of writing literature in English.3 However, if Chaucer was the father of English, the qualities for which the ‘English’ that he fathered was celebrated changed completely between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or between the first and second generations of his eulogists. This essay describes a fascinating U-turn in the history of Chaucer’s reception: the contradiction between his medieval and his early modern linguistic fame. It traces a remarkable volte-face in the celebration of Chau1

2 3

Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ, 1993); Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI, 1991), pp. 13–14. ‘Geoffrey Chaucer’, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer, accessed August 2012. The programme was entitled Seven Ages of Britain, presented by David Dimbleby and produced by Karen McGann, and aired in February 2010. The second episode, which discussed Chaucer’s language, was titled ‘Age of Worship’.

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cer’s language between the late medieval and early modern periods, from initial acclamations of his aureate loftiness to the later establishment of his status as an icon of plain speech, and explores the reasons for it. Both perceptions, diametrically opposed as they were, were projections upon Chaucer, the convenient frontman, of their own politically motivated linguistic agendas, and they bespeak a fascinating climate of language and poetry in the service of power and politics. The first section of this essay sketches the fifteenthcentury and then (in greater depth) the sixteenth-century depictions of Father Chaucer’s English, before the second contextualizes both depictions within the broader contention surrounding politicized language, showing how the linguistic debates of the Inkhorn Controversy (often thought of as so ‘humanist’) had their origins deep in the politics, as well as in the literary models, of their medieval past. Fifteenth-century poetry abounds with plaudits for Chaucer’s language, in well-known and often-cited tributes. The most famous is that of Hoccleve, who lamented in The Regiment of Princes that, with Chaucer’s death, ‘the honour of Englissh tonge is deed’ (line 1959). His elegiac apostrophe continued, O maistir deere and fadir reverent, My maistir Chaucer, flour of eloquence, Mirour of fructuous entendement, O universel fadir in science! … With bookes of his ornat endytyng That is to al this land enlumynyng. … Despoillid hath þis land of þe swetnesse Of rethorik, for unto Tullius Was nevere man so lyk amonges us.  (lines 1961–4, 1973–4, 2084–6)

Hoccleve was not only praising Chaucer’s language: his ‘ornat endytyng’ sits alongside his ‘fructuous entendement’ and his ‘excellent prudence’; he is ‘fadir’ not just of ‘eloquence’ but of ‘science’, compared not only to Tullius but to Aristotle. But the whole tenor of this eulogy is one that exalts aureation, and it concludes by giving Chaucer his most quoted accolade: ‘The firste fyndere of our fair langage’ (line 4978).4 In similar vein, in his 1426 translation of Deguilleville’s Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, John Lydgate (whose praise was more consistently and exclusively for his master’s linguistic achievements) applauded ‘The noble poete off Breteyne, / My mayster Chaucer’ (lines 19754–5), because, ‘Wyth 4

Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999), pp. 95–6, 100, 185. Accompanying lines 4990–5005 of The Regiment in London, British Library, MS Harley 4866 is the well-known pointing portrait of Chaucer (see Galloway, figure 1, p. 117).



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al hys rethorykes swete’, he was ‘the ffyrste in any age / That amendede our langage’ (lines 19774–6).5 Elsewhere he credited Chaucer with ‘pris, honure, and gloyre’ for being ‘first in oure language’, and praised The Canterbury Tales for ‘Voyding the chaf sothly for to seyn, / Enlumynyng the trewe piked greyn’.6 Similarly in the Troy Book, he applauded Noble Galfride, poete of Breteyne, Amonge oure Englisch that made first to reyne The gold dewedropis of rethorik so fyne, Oure rude langage only t’enlwmyne.     … as by similitude The ruby stant, so royal of renoun, Withinne a ryng of copur or latoun, So stant the makyng of hym, douteles.  (lines 4697–700, 4706–9)7

Other fifteenth-century poets, often taking their cues from Hoccleve and Lydgate, likewise singled out Chaucer’s ‘rethorik so fyne’. George Ashby’s Active Policy of a Prince, composed between 1463 and 1475 for his pupil Edward, Prince of Wales,8 quoted Hoccleve in its description of the triumvirate of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate: Primier poetes of this nacion, Embelysshing oure englisshe tendure algate, Firste finders to oure consolacion Off fresshe, douce englisshe and formacion Of newe balades, not vsed before, By whome we all may haue lernyng and lore.  (lines 2–7)9

James I of Scotland dedicated the Kingis Quhair to Gowere and Chaucere, that on the steppis satt Of rethorike quhill thai were lyvand here, Superlative as poetis laureate In moralitee and eloquence ornate.  (Envoi, 197, lines 1374–7)10

5 6 7 8 9 10

John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall (London, 1905), p. 527. John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo, MI, 2001), Prologue, lines 47–8, 55–6. John Lydgate, Troy Book: Selections, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo, MI, 1998). See Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 151–3, for arguments supporting the later dating of Ashby’s Active Policy. George Ashby, George Ashby’s Poems, ed. Mary Bateson, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 76 (London, 1899), p. 13. James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn (Kalamazoo, MI, 2005), p. 79.

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And in a comparable act of literary homage from across the border, William Dunbar addressed a stanza of The Golden Targe to O reverend Chaucere, rose of rethoris all (As in oure tong ane flour imperiall) That raise in Britane evir, quho redis rycht, Thou beris of makaris the tryumph riall, Thy fresch anamalit termes celicall This mater coud illumynit have full brycht. Was thou nocht of oure Inglisch all the lycht, Surmounting eviry tong terrestriall Alls fer as Mayes morow dois mydnycht?  (lines 253–61)11 The common thread in all these panegyrics is what they praise Chaucer for: his aureate language. For Hoccleve, Chaucer was the ‘flour of eloquence’, distinguished by his ‘ornat endytyng’. For Lydgate, his ‘rethorykes swete … amendede our langage’. For Ashby, Chaucer’s gift lay in ‘embelysshing oure englisshe tendure algate’ with ‘fresshe, douce englisshe’. James singled out Chaucer’s ‘eloquence ornate’; and for Dunbar, it was the ‘fresch anamalit termes celicall’ that made Chaucer ‘in oure tong ane flour imperiall’. A few more voices complete the chorus: at the further end of the century, Caxton praised Chaucer as the ‘worshipful fader and first foundeur and enbelissher of ornate eloquence’, to be lauded for ‘making the sayd langage ornate and fayr’;12 and London, British Library, MS Harley 78, a miscellany of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts brought together by John Stow, ascribed the Complaint Unto Pity to ‘Geffrey Chaucier þe aureat poete þat euer was fonde in oure vulgare’ (fol. 80r).13 These eulogies were written in the same aureate style they so admired, with their recursion to the terminology of ‘enlumynyng’, ‘embellishing’ and ‘endyting’. A number of common attributes characterizes this trademark discourse of literary tribute. Its signature features include not only polysyllabic prolixity but its recurring motifs and privileged metaphors (illumination, paternity, precious stones, polished surfaces); and its lexical lavishness approaching onomatopoeia, in words such as ‘anamalit’ (enamelled, polished, finely wrought, ornamented, which gives this essay its title) and ‘fructuous’ (fertile, rich, luxuriant), which indulge and explore their own physicality as lexemes signifying a precious, polished surface or a full, ripe sentence. The idea of being ‘fresshe’, as in Dunbar’s ‘fresch anamalit termes’ as well as 11 12 13

J. A. Tasioulas, ed., The Makars: the Poems of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas (Edinburgh, 1999), p. 529. William Caxton, ‘Epilogue to Boethius’ (c.1478), Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. N. F. Blake (London, 1973), p. 59. See Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, p. 46.



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Ashby’s ‘fresshe, douce englisshe’, is another repeated meme: a description that implies that, as well as being ‘anamalit’, Chaucer’s language is new, youthful, vigorous, vivid, bright and clean. This is praise in kind, couched in the same ‘anamalit termes’ that it applauded in its master. If this was Chaucer’s English, it was English at its most ornate and decorated. The point of encomiastic departure for this linguistic celebrity (as Lerer has demonstrated) was Chaucer’s own homage to Petrarch in The Clerk’s Prologue:14 Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete, Highte this clerk, whos rethorike sweete Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie.15  (lines 31–3)

This mode set the precedent and established the pattern for eulogies of Chaucer himself: this is the accolade that was quoted by Lydgate in his praise of Chaucer’s ‘rethorykes swete’. The tributes that followed in its wake were not simply derivative of The Clerk’s Prologue; more often they were exploring and examining the mode of poetic panegyric that it propounded, exploiting the model of literary lineage that it offered. Nonetheless, taken together they formed a repeating trope, ‘a mythology of poetry’ that yoked together language and literary stature, ‘aureation’ and ‘laureation’, such that ‘by the later fifteenth century laureate and aureate have become virtually interchangeable … the word laureate could at times be little more (or little less) than l’aureate’.16 Summing up the eulogistic tradition, Lerer continues: The Chaucer who inhabits their verse is … a laureate figure in an aureate world, a poet fit for a king whose glittering language befits his golden literary age.… Aureation is a golden language from a golden world … Together with its sonically resonating word-pair, laureation, it becomes one of the key terms in the critical terminology of the century.17

With laureate status came a special, elevated language, a style that characterized both the ‘Primier poetes’ and their disciples. It was a coterie idiolect that had its own particular codes: the metaphor of eloquence as illumination emerges saliently, present in The Clerk’s Prologue, in Hoccleve’s elegy, in Lydgate’s insistence on the power of Chaucer’s language ‘t’enlwmyne’, and supremely in Dunbar’s image of Chaucer’s language as ‘Surmounting eviry tong … as Mayes morow dois mydnycht’; and lapidary imagery recurs, in Lydgate’s ruby and Dunbar’s enamel. 14 15 16 17

Ibid., pp. 26–34, 152. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Clerk’s Prologue, in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1988), p. 137. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, pp. 37, 47. Ibid., pp. 23–4.

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This is not to suggest, however, that such eulogies were uniform in their motivation, uncomplicated in their devoteeism, or unaspirational in their selfabasement. The swift-stepping politics of (self-)laureation were as elaborate as its linguistic mode, and critics are increasingly alert to the subtle negotiations and repositionings of ‘Father Chaucer’ by his acolytes. Lydgate in particular, once derided as a derivative disciple, has received more probing analysis of his Chaucerian posturing. Scott-Morgan Straker finds ‘calculated self-authorization’ as well as subtle ‘distancing’ from ‘Chaucer’s vernacular poetic’ in The Siege of Thebes, in his rebuttal of arguments ‘that subsequent writers consider Chaucer to be the first English auctor, who bequeathed to his literary heirs both fitting subject-matter and the language in which to express it’.18 Likewise, Larry Scanlon and James Simpson look for other motives behind Lydgate’s poetic style than slavish imitation, suggesting that Lollard use of the vernacular, in plain style, for biblical translation and theological discussion was judged dangerous by the Lancastrian Church. Apparently in response to this conjuncture, Lydgate developed an ornate, highly mannered rhetorical mode for religious, especially Marian, verse. (His often-derided cultivation of such an ‘aureate’ style awaits historicization.)19

This essay does not suggest that Lydgate or the first generation of Chaucerians more generally were unsophisticated either in their motivation or execution. This is well-trodden territory already: the current revolution in Lydgate studies and its re-examination of his unfortunate reputation as Chaucer’s less talented lackey are familiar to medievalists and are not rehearsed again here.20 My argument is not about individual self-fashioning, whether as laureate or disciple, but rather about the language and stylistics of the snowballing literary institution of Chaucerianism: an exploration of why fifteenth-century poets seized on aureation as the most valuable and characteristic aspect of Chaucer’s legacy, and then why sixteenth-century polemicists asserted the reverse. But it does attempt the historicization (and politicization) of a poetic style, called for by Scanlon and Simpson: the contradictory narrative of the ‘Father of English’ across two centuries of Chaucerian fame. In the self-defined Chaucerian school, literary language and literary status went hand in hand, as mutually elevated (and elevating) identifiers. The best English was ‘fresshe, douce englisshe’, the best words ‘fresch anamalit termes’. The service that poets of ‘oure tong’ could do for ‘oure vulgare’ 18 19 20

Scott-Morgan Straker, ‘Deference and Difference: Lydgate, Chaucer and The Siege of Thebes’, Review of English Studies ns 52 (2001), 2, 5. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson, ed., John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture and Lancastrian England (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), p. 8. In addition to Straker, ‘Deference and Difference’, see Mary C. Flannery, John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame (Cambridge, 2012), and Catherine Nall, Reading and War in FifteenthCentury England: From Lydgate to Malory (Cambridge, 2012).



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was to beautify and embellish it, and the excellence with which they could perform that service was the measure of their own excellence. Of course, as Christopher Cannon has demonstrated, linguistic borrowing was ‘the general practice of the literary language’.21 Chaucer was no innovator in his ‘enlumynyng’ and ‘embellishing’ of English by exploiting the richer and stranger cognate lexicons that its cohabiting vernaculars made available to it, but he was its most celebrated proponent, and his celebrity was made synonymous with that enterprise. Initially, the tendency of writers in the first half of the sixteenth century to complain of the rude and narrow lexical capacity of English meant that praise of Chaucer framed him, in similar fashion to that of their immediate predecessors, as the dawn star who brought the language out of darkness. Pynson’s preface to his 1526 edition of The Canterbury Tales praised their ‘prolixyte’ and ‘crafty and sugred eloquence’, remarking that the author ‘for his ornat writynge in oure tonge may well haue the name of a laureate poete’, because ‘by his labour [he] enbelysshed, ornated & made fayre our englysshe’.22 The narrator of Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe (printed 1558, though written early in the century) complained, in terms echoing Chaucer’s lament in The Complaint of Venus that ‘rym in Englissh hath such skarsete’ (line 80),23 that Our naturall tong is rude, And hard to be enneude With pullyshed termes lusty; Our language is so rusty, So cankered and so full Of frowardes, and so dull, That if I wolde apply To wryte ornatly, I wot not where to fynd Termes to serve my mynde.  (Phyllyp Sparowe, lines 774–83)24

This perception of the inferiority of English meant that its chief poet needed apology, in both senses: Thomas Nashe, in 1589, opined that ‘Chaucer, Lydgate, Gower, with such like … liued vnder the tyranny of ignorance’, yet allowed that ‘these three haue vaunted their meeters with as much admiration 21 22

23 24

Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words (Cambridge, 1998), p. 65. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Boke of Canterbury Tales (London: R. Pynson, 1526), STC 5086, sig. A.1v. Pynson may well have been quoting Lydgate in his praise of Chaucer’s ‘crafty and sugred eloquence’, who extolled The Canterbury Tales for being replete ‘With many proverbe divers and unkouth, / Be rehersaile of his sugrid mouth’, as well as ‘crafty writinge of his sawes swete’ (Lydgate, Siege of Thebes, Prologue, lines 51–2, 57). Chaucer, The Complaint of Venus, in The Riverside Chaucer, p. 649. John Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven, CT, 1983), p. 91.

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in English as euer the proudest Ariosto did his verse in Italian’.25 In the same year, in more positive vein, Puttenham included Chaucer, Lydgate and Gower among ‘those of the first age’ in his literary hall of fame; by the same token, however, he admitted that their language was obsolete.26 In 1586, William Webbe, likewise, blended apology with apologia in praising Chaucer as ‘the God of English Poets … Though the manner of hys stile may seeme blunt & course to many fine English eares at these dayes.’27 Thomas Speght appended a list of ‘old and obscure words explaned’ to his 1598 edition.28 Very rapidly, however, sixteenth-century praise for Chaucer as the ‘Father of English’ came to rest on the opposite criterion from that of the fifteenth. It is a superb irony of Chaucer’s linguistic celebrity that the second generation of his eulogists celebrated him for reasons that were the exact opposite of those of the first: his legacy changed from ‘enlumynyng … oure faire langage’ with ‘ornat endytyng’ to being the ‘well of English vndefyled’, as Spenser (whose own ‘auncient … ragged and rusticall’ English E. K. singled out for special praise) called him, in his efforts to ‘reuiue’ Chaucer’s ‘labours lost’ in completing The Squire’s Tale.29 Chaucer’s language came to be praised for its simplicity, not its decorated aureation. He became the symbol of an ancient linguistic purity, despite the gaping irony that his English was stuffed with borrowed eloquence. For example, Peter Betham, in the epistle to The Preceptes of War (1544) commented, I doo well knowe that one tounge is interlaced with an other. But … I take them beste Englysshe men, which folowe Chaucer, and other olde wryters … whan they endevoure to brynge agayne to his own clennes our Englysshe tounge, & playnelye to speake wyth our owne termes, as our others dyd before us.30

25 26 27 28

29

30

Thomas Nashe, Preface to R. Greene’s Menaphon, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (Oxford, 1958), vol. 3, p. 322. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY, 2007), p. 148. William Webbe, ‘A Discourse of English Poetrie’, Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy, ed. Joseph Haslewood, 2 vols (London, 1815), vol. 2, p. 33. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of Our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, Newly Printed, ed. Thomas Speght (London: A. Islip, 1598), STC 5079, sig. Aaaa.ir– Bbbb.i[v]. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Ray Heffner, Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood and Frederick Morgan Padelford, 11 vols (Baltimore, MD, 1932–57), vol. 7, p. 8; see also vol. 4, p. 25, The Faerie Queene, Canto 4, Stanza 2, lines 32–3. Peter Betham, The Preceptes of Warre (London: E. Whytchurche, 1544), STC 20116, sig. A.7r.



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Six years later, Richard Sherry rebutted the allegation that ‘oure language for the barbarousnes and lacke of eloquence hathe bene complayned of’, rejecting ‘any defaut in the toungue it selfe’, but blaming its users, who have been slack in ‘searchyng out the elegance and proper speaches that be ful many … [in] the most excellent monumentes of our auncient forewriters, Gower, Chawcer, and Lydgate’.31 The poetic triumvirate of ‘auncient forewriters’ suggests that, for Sherry, ‘elegance and proper speaches’ were properties apparently native to the medieval canon, regardless of those writers’ actual stylistic habits. For him and others writing in the backlash against aureation in the intensifying heat of the Inkhorn Controversy (c.1546–c.1630), Chaucer (and his colleagues) had come to represent the purity of plain, old English. It seems it was perfectly possible to overlook the ‘anamalit termes’, the aureate style that had represented the pinnacle of Chaucer’s achievement for his fifteenthcentury admirers, in an ideological attempt to reclaim him as the emblem of plain and national English. His place in the literary narrative of English nationalism was too established and unquestionable for him to be excluded on the grounds of his proto-inkhorn terms; instead he was speciously hailed as speaking ‘playnely … wyth our owne termes’. This change in Chaucer’s linguistic fame was paradoxical on several counts. William De Lisle, grieved by what he called Chaucer’s ‘Normanizing’, tried to excuse his borrowing on the grounds that Tully himself scarce vnderstood the latine that Latins spoke: nor wee Chaucers English; nor hee, that was spoken before the conquest. If he did, hee would neuer haue borrowed so many words from abroad, hauing enough and better at home.32

This excuse represents Chaucer with his hands tied, having to make the best of the paucity of linguistic resources available to him, yet such a defence could not explain away the fact that it was for his ‘ornat’ language that his first eulogists had applauded him. E. K. simultaneously and ironically cited the accolades of ‘his scholler Lidgate’ for ‘the Loadestarre of our Language’, while praising the unadorned and plain language of ‘this our new Poete’ (Spenser) in terms lifted straight out of Chaucer: ‘Vncovth vnkist’.33

31 32 33

Richard Sherry, A Critical Edition of Richard Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, ed. H. W. Hildebrandt (London, 1958), sig. A.2v–A.3r. William De Lisle, A Saxon Treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament (London: J. Hauiland for H. Seile, 1623), STC 160, sig. D.1r, sig. C.3r. Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, p. 1, quoting ‘Unknowe, unkist, and lost that is unsought’, Troilus and Criseyde, Book 1, line 809 (Riverside Chaucer, pp. 484, 1029). ‘Unknowe unkist’ is proverbial, so probably not Chaucer’s coinage, although it is not attested before this usage. See Bartlett Jere Whiting and Helen Wescott Whiting, ed., Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500 (Cambridge, MA, 1968), U5.

152  Joanna Bellis

Two orthodoxies jostled alongside one another in the attempt to accommodate Chaucer into the doctrine of pure, plain English. He was alternately the last speaker of an uncorrupted vernacular and the first bard, the cosmopolitan ennobler of English, who inherited a barbarous tongue and raised it from lexical poverty by arraying it in borrowed splendour. Of course, neither of these depictions offered an accurate picture of the lexical timbre of Chaucer’s language, which was all things in all styles. Both were caricatures, exaggerations that made the ‘Father of English’ in the image of what each thought that ‘English’ should be. A key precept of the Inkhorn Controversy was that Old English had been robust, pure and equipped with all the lexical copiousness it needed, without recourse to importing words from Greek, Latin, Italian or French.34 William Camden had held that pre-Conquest English had possessed an intuitive significance before the Normans seeded it with alien lexemes. He rejected the ‘alteration and innovation in our tongue’ that ‘hath beene brought in by entrance of Strangers, as Danes, Normans, and others which have swarmed hither’, singling out the invidious practise of the Normans, who as a monument of their Conquest, would have yoaked the English under their tongue, as they did under their command … for the space of three hundred yeares, untill King Edward the third enlarged them from that bondage.35

Richard Mulcaster, likewise, blamed the Normans for the spoliation of English, demanding, what peple can be sure of his own tung anie long while … if the state where it is vsed, do chance to be ouerthrown, and a master tung comming in as conqueror, command both the people, and the peples speche to?

He lamented that ‘our tung semeth to haue two heds, the one homeborn, the other a stranger’: a depiction of English rendered monstrous by the violence done to it. And he imputed an intuitive significance to Old English, describing its habit of compounding words as bringing its ‘hole furniture in composition’, enabling the hearer to understand even a word he had never heard before because of the transparency with which it was built up from its constituent elements.36

34

35 36

Undoubtedly not all borrowings were equal, and French (as a native vernacular until the fifteenth century, as well as a close neighbour) was of course more cognate than Latin or Greek. However, it was an important manoeuvre of this anti-Inkhorn rhetoric to tar French with the same foreign/intellectual/unintelligible brush as it did the classical languages. William Camden, Remains Concerning Britain, ed. R. D. Dunn (Toronto, 1984), pp. 23, 27, 29, 31. Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie which Entreateth Chefelie of the Right



Contradictory Celebrity of Chaucer’s Aureation  153

Richard Carew, in his essay on The Excellencie of the English Tongue (printed in Camden’s Remains, 1605), elevated this conception of the innate purity of Saxon English to imply that it had boasted a referential and essential (as opposed to relational or arbitrary) semantic significance, inherent even in its non-verbal utterances and exclamations: for expressing our passions, our interjections are very apt and forcible. As finding ourselves somewhat agreeved, we crie Ah, if more deepely Oh, when we pittie Alas, when we bemoane, Alacke, neither of them so effeminate as the Italian Deh or the French Helas: in detestation wee say Phy, as if therewithall we should spit. In attention Haa, in calling Whowpe, in hallowing Wahabowe, all which (in my eare) seeme to be derived from the very natures of those severall affectations. Grow from hence to the composition of words, and therein our language hath a peculiar grace, a like significancie, … for example in Moldwarp wee expresse the nature of that beast. In handkercher the thing and his use.… In Wisedome and Doomes-day, so many sentences as words.37

Carew’s imputation of ‘peculiar grace’ and ‘significancie’ not merely to English words but to its expressions and (in)articulate sounds was only stretching to the (il)logical extreme an argument that others were formulating in perfect seriousness. Biblical translators had been making the claim for the innate significance of English words for some time: Tyndale claimed in 1528 that ‘the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin’;38 John Cheke translated Matthew’s gospel (c.1550) using solely English-derived lexemes, so that centurion became ‘hundreder’, resurrection ‘again-rising’, parables ‘biwordes’ and apostle ‘fro-sent’.39

37 38 39



Writing of our English Tung (London, 1582; repr. Menston, West Yorkshire, 1970), sig. K.2r/p. 75, sig. V.1v/p. 153, sig. S.2v/p. 139. Richard Carew, ‘The Excellencie of the English Tongue’, in Camden, Remains, ed. Dunn, p. 38. William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (London, 2000), p. 19. John Cheke, The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Part of the First Chapter of the Gospel According to St. Mark Translated into English from the Greek with Original Notes, ed. James Goodwin (London, 1843). This discourse, of enquiring which language could claim closest relation to the pre-Babel, pre-lapsarian language of Adam, had a long pedigree: Hebrew was often held to be the closest (or closer to breath, the original and antecedent of speech), with its guttural roughness, contrasted against the mellifluous seductiveness of Latin: see Jerome, Select Letters of St. Jerome, ed. and trans. F. A. Wright (London, 1933), letter 125, chapter 12, pp. 418–21, who compared the ‘bitter seed’ but ‘sweet fruits’ (‘amaro semine’, ‘dulces fructus’) of Hebrew with ‘the pointed style of Quintilian, the fluency of Cicero, the weightiness of Fronto, the gentleness of Pliny’ (‘Quintiliani acumina Ciceronisque fluvios gravitatemque Frontonis et lenitatem Plinii’). For further discussion of the European language wars, see Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford, 1994).

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In 1573, Ralph Lever applied this principle from translation to rhetoric, attempting to prove that ‘the art of reason’ (the title of his treatise) could be as well expressed in English as in Latin, and to codify an approach to writing and speaking English that would strip it of the influence of the ‘master tung’. To that end he reinvented rhetorical terminology in a pseudo-Saxon idiolect: ‘witcraft’ for reason, ‘forspeach’ for prologue, and a catalogue of other grammatical terms such as ‘inholder’, ‘inbeer’, ‘backsette’, ‘naysay’, ‘saywhat’, ‘ouershew’ and ‘storehouse’, for which, in painful irony, he had to append an explanatory table to his work. To English he ascribed an innate transparency, calling it ‘a language, whereby we do expresse by voyce or writing, all deuises that we conceyue in our mynde: and do by this means let men looke into our heartes’. He asked, whether it were better to borrowe termes of some other toung … and by a litle chaunge of pronouncing, to seeke to make them Englishe wordes, which are none in deede: or else of simple vsual wordes, to make compounded termes, whose seuerall partes considered alone, are familiar and knowne to all english men?

He maintained that ‘inckhorne termes doe chaunge and corrupt … making a mingle mangle of their natiue speache, and not obseruing the propertie thereof’. A man asked to consider the word ‘backset’, he alleged, would ‘eyther conceiue the meaning of oure wordes by himselfe, or else soon learne them’; but when presented with ‘predicate’, ‘he shall neither understand them by himselfe, nor keepe them in remembraunce when he is taught theyr signification of others, bicause the worde can make no helpe’.40 Lever’s approach, like that of Cheke and Carew, was to compound and to archaize rather than to borrow, based on the principle that the intuitive quality of ‘pure’ English words would make them readily intelligible. Aureation, for these language theorists, was a corruption rather than an adornment. The most insistent defender of Chaucer’s reputation as a speaker of pure English was Richard Stanihurst, who, in his continuation of Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, asserted that the Old English in Ireland (the descendants of the early Norman settlers) had preserved ‘the dregs of the olde auncient Chaucer English’ without allowing it to be polluted by Irish.41 Discussing the residents of the English part of Ireland, in the De rebus Hibernia gestis written during his exile in Europe, he commented: Quamuis uero a noua hac, & nimis peregrina magniloquentia, ex gentium exterarum linguis furacissime collecta, longius absunt: tamen incorruptam 40 41

Ralph Lever, The Art of Reason (London, 1573; repr. Menston, West Yorkshire, 1973), sig.*iiiir, sig. **vir–viir. Raphael Holinshed and Richard Stanihurst, Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, ed. Liam Miller and Eileen E. Power (Dublin, 1979), p. 14.



Contradictory Celebrity of Chaucer’s Aureation  155 Anglicæ linguæ vetustatem seruant, illam nimirum, quam Chauncerus uetus ac nobilis Poeta, & Anglorum sine dubio Homerus, in suis scriptis vsurpauit: qui ita Anglice magis crederes esse Anglicam. Nihil in illius libris lectori occurret, quod sputatilicam, (hoc enim verbum iam olim, nec sine caussa, ille Romanus risit) nouitatem redoleat: ex alienis linguis verba non mutuatur, quemadmodum solent ætate nostra, illi verborum opifices, qui Anglice vel tum maxime colloqui se putant, cum etiam minime Anglice dicant.42 [Although truly for a long time they were absent from this new and excessively foreign magniloquence, gathered most thievishly from the languages of foreign peoples, yet they preserve the unpolluted form of the English language, which indisputably the ancient and noble poet Chaucer, without doubt the Homer of the English, employed in his writings: he whom in this manner would be speaking more Englishly than you would believe it even to be English. Nothing catches the reader’s attention in his books that whiffs of a despicable novelty (for once, that famous Roman laughed, not without reason, at this word): he does not borrow words from foreign languages, in the manner that they are accustomed to do in our age, those artisans of words who then believe themselves to speak most, when in fact they speak least, Englishly.]43

Stanihurst held that the Old English preserved their mother tongue in a pure form free from the ‘magniloquentia’ of contemporary England’s English. But when he elaborated on what constituted this pure Chaucerian, his argument became more contorted. Not only was Chaucer the Homerus Anglorum (a classical exemplar), but also his English was so English that it was almost unrecognizable as English. This superlative praise placed the paragon of Englishness so beyond the grasp of most speakers of English that it mystified the national epitome that it exemplified. Stanihurst’s use of his classical precedent, ‘that famous Roman’ (Cicero) who laughed at the word ‘sputatilicam’ (the second of his Latin inkhorns after ‘magniloquentia’), developed the paradoxical joke still further. The word ‘sputatilicam’, meaning ‘despicable’ or ‘spittable’, was quoted by Cicero in the Brutus to mock Sisenna, a lawyer who ‘quasi emendator sermonis usitati cum esse vellet’ [professed/wished to be a reformer/corrector of current usage] with ‘inusitatis verbis’ [strange and unheard-of words]. The pun on trying to reform usage (‘usitati’) with the unusable (‘inusitatis’) prepares the introduction of ‘sputatilica’ as a particularly absurd coining that elicits

42 43

Richard Stanihurst, De rebus in Hibernia gestis (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1584), p. 28. I am grateful to Neil Wright and Venetia Bridges for their generous assistance with this translation. Colm Lennon has published a translation in Richard Stanihurst the Dubliner 1547–1618 (Blackrock, Co. Dublin, 1981), but it is based on a different version of the De rebus from that quoted here.

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a ‘maximi risus’ [a great laugh] because the hearer believed ‘recte loqui … esse inusitate loqui’ [correct speech to be unfamiliar speech (literally, ‘to speak correctly to be to speak strangely’)].44 Cicero, the famous Roman, the model of magniloquence, is invoked to declare inkhorn terms risible. It is a sophisticated sleight of hand by which Stanihurst depicted the master of Latin eloquence forestalling and deriding attempts to adopt that eloquence into English, and applied Cicero’s scorn for absurd neologizing to the borrowing of words ‘ex alienis linguis’ [out of foreign languages]. Greek, Latin and English; Homer, Cicero and Chaucer: each is brought into a poetic trinity. Chaucer stands amid the giants not because he imitated or borrowed from them but (apparently) because he did not. All of this made Chaucer’s established fifteenth-century reputation for ‘anamalit termes’ rather problematic. He was the founder of the vernacular poetic tradition in English, in both the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century retrospective construction of it. His centrality was non-negotiable, but it was also unstable and dichotomized. Therein lies the conundrum of the contradiction of Chaucer’s linguistic celebrity between the first and second generations of his eulogists. I will now contextualize that conundrum within a wider political narrative, a larger and more fundamental set of ironies surrounding national identity and language, of which Chaucer was the inevitable but contradictory symbol. Were ‘aureation’ not a medieval word, it would be a highly contentious one. It rests on the presupposition that concepts of borrowing and of loanwords are applicable to the multilingual context of medieval England, which has been repeatedly challenged by historians of language.45 English and French co-existed in a state of such intense mutual intersection for so long that some have argued that to think of them as discrete categories is reductive and redundant: Middle English might be better described as a merger or even a creole.46 Ardis Butterfield suggests that ‘“English” could be defined 44 45

46

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Brutus, Orator, ed. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell (London, 1952), 75.259–61, pp. 224–5. See William Rothwell, ‘The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo-French’, Medium Ævum 60 (1991), 174, where he argues that the multilingual context of medieval England ‘calls into question the whole notion of a “loanword”’. See also William Rothwell, ‘Lexical Borrowing in a Medieval Context’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 63 (1980), 143; D. A. Trotter, ‘The Anglo-French Lexis of Ancrene Wisse: A Re-evaluation’, A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 84–5. For the creolization hypothesis, see Charles-James Bailey and Karl Maroldt, ‘The French Lineage of English’, Langues en contact – pidgins – créoles, ed. Jürgen M. Meisel (Tübingen, 1977), pp. 27–34. For refutations, see William Rothwell, ‘Arrivals and Departures: The Adoption of French Terminology into Middle English’, English Studies 79 (1998), 158; Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization, and



Contradictory Celebrity of Chaucer’s Aureation  157

precisely as a form of French’. She argues that it is not ‘a single concept that works merely in polarity with French; it contains and is contained by French in a subtle, constantly changing, and occasionally antagonistic process of accommodation’.47 She insists on the need to collapse the imagined linguistic binary, and on the necessity of thinking of English and French not as separate entities in opposition, nor even as discrete categories, but as points on a linguistic spectrum whose blurry intersections in the middle are as important as their distinct identities at either end. Linguistic boundaries were far from clearly demarcated for medieval readers, indicated by glosses to Latin texts in which the terms ‘anglice’, ‘romanice’ and ‘normannice’ are wrongly applied.48 Moreover, the aureation described as so Chaucerian by Hoccleve, Ashby and the rest was by no means his innovation: as Cannon argues, Chaucer was no ground-breaking neologist; he was riding the wave of massive linguistic borrowing that had been fundamentally changing the lexicon throughout the fourteenth century, and long before.49 However, it was precisely in this muddy, multilingual context that the politics of linguistic intersection were being formulated and articulated, and all the more stridently because the reality was so polyphonic. The mistaken glosses indicate that, although it may have been impossible to disentangle the linguistic influences in English, readers nonetheless sought to do so: the concept of ‘frenchifying’ existed a long time before the Inkhorn Controversy, as indicated by Higden’s coining of the word ‘francigenare’.50 Writers were not blind to the extent to which language was a political collage – in Helen Cooper’s words, ‘a palimpsest of successive conquests’.51 Their praise of Chaucer’s ‘anamalit termes’ also indicates their awareness of such a singularly different register, fundamentally connected to the national identity of the vernacular: Chaucer’s language made him a ‘primier poet of this nacion’ for Ashby; for Dunbar it was ‘ane flour imperiall … in Britane’ (my emphasis).

47 48 49 50

51

Genetic Linguistics (Berkeley, CA, 1991), pp. 307, 313. For the more nuanced arguments for merger, see G. A. Lester, The Language of Old and Middle English Poetry (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 38; Rothwell, ‘Missing Link in English Etymology’, p. 174; and Trotter, ‘AngloFrench Lexis’, pp. 83–5. Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009), p. 99. Tony Hunt, ‘Vernacular Glosses in Medieval Manuscripts’, Cultura Neolatina 39 (1979), 9–37. Cannon, Making of Chaucer’s English, pp. 65–70. Ranulf Higden and John Trevisa, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, Monachi Cestrensis; Together with the English Translation of John of Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Churchill Babington, 9 vols (London, 1865–86, repr. 1964–75), vol. 2, pp. 158–60; see discussion in Rolf Berndt, ‘The Period of the Final Decline of French in Medieval England (Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries)’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 20 (1972), 348. Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London, 2010), p. 35.

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There was a consciousness that the different registers within English were tied to its status as a national language, intensely problematic though that formulation was. This is explicit in the way that Lydgate described his undertaking, at the behest of Henry V, to compose the Troy Book ‘in Englysche … / Lyche as the Latyn maketh mencioun’, so that the ‘noble story’ might be ‘openly … knowe / In oure tonge’, and ‘ywriten as wel in oure langage / As in Latyn and in Frensche it is’.52 As Scanlon and Simpson comment, the Troy Book was part of ‘a Lancastrian project of promoting an English vernacular tradition of high literary status that could stand beside a long French … tradition’.53 There were particular political reasons behind the identification of aureation as the Chaucerian inheritance at this specific political and cultural moment in the early fifteenth century, and the consequent reinvention of Chaucer’s poetic achievement in that moment’s own image. The absent presence lurking behind this discussion thus far, and the context whose relevance to Chaucer’s contradictory linguistic celebrity it seeks to propose, is the Hundred Years War: the conflict that made French, as well as being the language of the law, the king, the court, the social elite and their high-style poetry, once again the language of the enemy. The war that rumbled on throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was a daily reminder that French was only so entrenched in so many domestic functions because it had been the language of conquest. Hand in hand with the vogue of aureate English went an increasingly pugnacious nationalistic resistance to it. The Hundred Years War engendered a heightened political scrutiny of language, and the metaphor of French as the linguistic invader of English gathered momentum. It was around the mid-fourteenth century that statements started to be made rejecting the aureate, frenchified register of English: Robert Mannyng inveighed against ‘strange Inglis’,54 just as Thomas Usk did ‘straunge langage’, saying ‘lette Frenchmen in their Frenche also endyten their queynt termes, for it is kyndely to their mouthes; and let us shewe our fantasyes in suche wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge’.55 Reacting to the immeasurable saturation of their language with their enemy’s, writers observed that they could not narrate the conflict without, in some sense, linguistically performing it. Several poets of the Hundred Years War used aureation delib52 53 54 55

Lydgate, Troy Book, Prologue, lines 106–15. Scanlon and Simpson, John Lydgate, p. 8. Robert Mannyng, The Chronicle, ed. Idelle Sullens (New York, 1996), Part I, line 78, p. 92. Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love, ed. R. A. Shoaf (Kalamazoo, MI, 1998), pp. 48–9, Prologue, lines 25–7. The function of the vernaculars of England as sociolects, highlighting intra- as well as international tensions, is a much-discussed topic: for further discussion of ‘strange Inglis’, see Joyce Coleman, ‘Strange Rhyme: Prosody and Nationhood in Robert Mannyng’s Story of England’, Speculum 78 (2003), 1214–38; and Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, pp. 339–44.



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erately and pointedly to this effect, cultivating an acidic, poisonously xenophobic register of aureation in which they denounced and calumniated their French and Burgundian enemies.56 Moreover, this conjunction of language and war had official sponsorship. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were the time when the French of England was being publically and politically re-imagined: the Statute of Pleading banned it from the law courts in 1362 on the grounds that it was ‘trop desconue’ (and of course it banned it, with superb paradox, in French); it was rejected in favour of English as the language of Parliament in the same year.57 This hostile reaction to French was given a special prominence when Edward I, Edward III and (on behalf of the juvenile Richard II) the bishop of Hereford, in their various conflicts with France, repeated the claim that the French king had express intentions to annihilate the English tongue (again, with conspicuous irony, this claim was usually made in French).58 56

57

58

The best example is The Balade in Despyte of the Flemynges, preserved in London, Lambeth Palace, MS 84 (fol. 201v), printed in Friedrich W. D. Brie, ed., The Brut: Or the Chronicles of England, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, Original Series 131, 136 (London, 1906–08), vol. 2, p. 600. For discussion of this text, see Joanna Bellis, ‘“Rymes sette for a remembraunce”: Memorialization and Mimetic Language in the War Poetry of the Late Middle Ages’, Review of English Studies ns 64 (2013), 183–207. William Elliott et al., ed., The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols (London, 1963), vol. 1, pp. 375–6. The import of the Statute of Pleading has been the subject of much critical debate. I concur with W. M. Ormrod in seeing it as ‘a piece of gesture politics’ and a ‘symbolic rejection of the enemy language and emotional affirmation of the imagined linguistic unity of the realm’, made in the context of Edward III’s jubilee and the tide of victory in France that had led up to the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, rather than an enforced or enforceable piece of legislation: see W. M. Ormrod, ‘The Use of English: Language, Law, and Political Culture in Fourteenth-Century England’, Speculum 78 (2003), 753, 781. Gwilym Dodd’s recent work demonstrates similarly that what was previously conceptualized as a systematic Lancastrian promotion of English in bureaucratic documentation was much less comprehensive or programmatic than has been thought. The ‘most important feature of the spread of English in the records of government in the fifteenth century was that it was gradual’: the abrupt switch to English in the signet letters represents a canny manipulation of the political moment (Henry V’s second campaign in France, 1417–20) and not a generalized policy: Gwilym Dodd, ‘The Spread of English in the Records of Central Government, 1400–1430’, Vernacularity in England and Wales, c.1300–1550, ed. Elisabeth Salter and Helen Wicker (Turnhout, 2011), p. 233. See also Gwilym Dodd, ‘Trilingualism in the Medieval English Bureaucracy: The Use – and Disuse – of Languages in the Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal Office’, Journal of British Studies 51 (2012), 253–83; Gwilym Dodd, ‘The Rise of English, the Decline of French: Supplications to the English Crown, c.1420–1450’, Speculum 86 (2011), 117–50. See Edward I’s letter to the archbishop of Canterbury in 1295, in Thomas Rymer and Robert Sanderson, ed., Fœdera: Conventiones, Litteræ et cujuscunque Generia Acta Publica, 4 vols (London, 1816–69), vol. 1, Edward I, 1272–1307, p. 827; Edward III’s and the bishop of Hereford’s addresses to Parliament in 1346 and 1382 are given in Chris Given-Wilson et al., eds, The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England 1275–1504, 16 vols (Woodbridge, 2005), vol. 4, Edward III, 1327–1348 (ed. Seymour Phillips and Mark Ormrod), p. 390, and vol. 6, Richard II, 1377–1384 (ed. Geoffrey Martin), p. 282. See also a muster order of 1386

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However, these pugnacious expressions of linguistic nationalism were eddies against the tide. Throughout the Ricardian era, French retained its ‘unique courtly cachet’.59 Michael Bennett hypothesizes that before the losses of the 1360s that diminished the fashionability of French at court, it is possible that Chaucer wrote poetry in it.60 Not until the Lancastrians, and particularly Henry V’s insistence on ‘gallicana duplicitas’,61 did the reactionary emphasis really start to take hold; but even then, for official poets such as Lydgate and Hoccleve, writing for the court and in the court style, aureation remained the vogue; how could it not? When, against all probability, Henry V succeeded in 1420 in making the pipe dream of his predecessors – achieving the crown of France – a reality, the party-line emphasis switched again from the martial to the marital, from alterity to affinity. The ‘distinctively vernacular’ context of ‘the years between the victory at Agincourt and Henry V’s death’ was a deliberate and programmatic but unstable and short-lived window.62 Moreover, although political attempts were made to elide the xenophobic vilification of ‘strange Inglis’ with ‘fals French’, and thus to paint aureation as a specifically francophone diction, many writers were alert to the fact that Latin, and not French, was the source and the aureate style’s true cognate home. It was as ‘half chongyd Latyne’, for instance, that John Metham in 1449 criticized how Lydgate ‘Hys bokys endytyd wyth termys of retoryk’ and ‘conseytys of poetry’.63 The bellicose anti-French linguistic sentiment was always a simplification, and the fact that aureation became its object obscures more nuanced perspectives that reflected, instead of belligerence, an intellectual desire to raise English to the status of French and Latin. Ultimately the linguistic context of fifteenth-century England remained as tangled and as paradoxical as its politics. It was not until the sixteenth century, when the Hundred Years War had faded into history, and its intricate paradoxes flattened out into polemic, that the real statements about the invidiousness of ‘French English’ were made.

59 60

61

62 63

that rehearses the same claim, in W. H. B. Bird and G. J. Morris, eds, Calendar of the Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office [for Richard II], 6 vols (London, 1914–27), vol. 3, 1385–1389, pp. 261–2. Julia Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1985), p. 138. Michael Bennett, ‘France in England: Anglo-French Culture in the Reign of Edward III’, Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (York, 2009). See also Stephanie Downes’s essay, ‘After Deschamps: Chaucer’s French Fame’, in this volume. For a discussion of Henry V’s coining of this phrase, see Derek Pearsall, ‘Crowned King: War and Peace in 1415’, The Lancastrian Court: Proceedings of the 2001 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Jenny Stratford (Donington, Lincs, 2003). Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, p. 49. John Metham, Amoryus and Cleopes, ed. Stephen F. Page (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999), lines 2194–6.



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By the time of the Inkhorn Controversy, the Hundred Years War was long since lost, and the hope of conquering France that had flickered into a startling, short-lived reality had faded back into dream. Nonetheless, in a number of important ways, it served the Tudors to pretend that the Hundred Years War had never really ended. When Henry VIII invaded France in 1513, it was in near-exact imitation of his eponymous predecessor almost exactly a century earlier, even basing his confrontation with John Colet on Henry V’s famous interview with the incendiary pacifist preacher Vincent Ferrers.64 Every Tudor monarch continued Edward III’s practice of quartering his arms with the fleur-de-lys and styling himself king of France. The English did not lose Calais until 1558, and Elizabeth bitterly felt her sister’s loss, wishing that she might ‘have this our Calais returned to us’ and calling it ‘a matter of continual grief to this realm’.65 When in 1591 Normandy was once again the theatre of English military effort, echoes of a significant past were audible when England’s champion laid siege to the ideologically freighted town of Rouen: not only one of Henry V’s famous victories and the resting place of the heart of the Lionheart, but also of the bones of Talbot, whose own siege of Rouen was being played nearly simultaneously with Essex’s, dramatized in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part I, hot off the press in 1592. The conflict with France was the original context for combative assertions of Englishness, and remained their first frame of reference: Barnabe Riche held, in 1581, that ‘the French hath ever been our enemies by nature’.66 In 1586, George Whetstone forced the parallels between England’s historic French wars and its contemporary Spanish ones:   Set Speares in rest, renew your auncient fame: Rush on the Pikes, the Cannon do not shen,   Your Ancestors, with passage through the same, This Prouerbe raisde, among the French, their foes,   Vous es si fier, que vn Anglois. Thou art as fierce, as is an Englishman,   The French still say; and proofe the same did teach: Turn you the french into Castillian,   It hath a grace in such a loftie speach: Your cause is good, and Englishmen you are,   Your foes be men, euen as the french men weare.67 64

65 66 67

See Clifford Davies, ‘Henry VIII and Henry V: The Wars in France’, The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. John L. Watts (Stroud, 1998), pp. 235–62. See Richard Rex, The Tudors (Stroud, 2003), p. 196. Barnabe Riche, Barnabe Riche His Farewell to Military Profession, ed. Donald Beecher (Ottawa, 1992), p. 133. George Whetstone, The Honovrable Repvtation of a Sovldier (Leiden: Ian Paedts Iacobszoon and Ian Bouwenszoon, 1586), STC 25340, sig. C4r/p. 23.

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Whetstone’s plea was not only to imagine Spain as the ancient French enemy but specifically to turn ‘French into Castillian’: a request for translation, historical as well as linguistic. Similarly, when in 1579 John Stubbes wrote The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is Like to be Swallowed by an other French mariage, he systematically applied the medieval history of Anglo-French relations to the proposed, and massively unpopular, marriage between Elizabeth and the duke of Anjou. Much of the text is devoted to rehearsing ‘the auncient hurts that Englande haue receiued through royall intermariages with that nation’ which ‘haue alwayes endamaged England’.68 Stubbes’s examples are many, since almost every king from Henry III to Henry VI married a Frenchwoman. But his antipathy towards the French was couched specifically in linguistic terminology: he distrusted ‘euery lisping word and crouching curtesie’, the ‘braue words the false flattering frenchmen’ use upon ‘fond credulous Englishmen’.69 The French are ‘the old serpent in shape of a man, whos sting is in his mouth, and who doth his endeuor to seduce our Eue, that shee and we may lose this Englishe Paradise’.70 For Stubbes, the antipathy of ‘the true and naturall old English nation’ towards the Anjou match stems from the fact that England has ‘neuer esteemed nor loued the French’: indeed, ‘Out of thys inbred hatred it came, that Frenchemen aboue other aliens beare thys addition in some of our auncient chronicles, Charters, and, statuts to be the auncient ennemies of England.’71 Medieval history, culled from the Brut and other fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury chronicles via Caxton and Holinshed, was the source of Stubbes’s conjuration of English identity: it was the Hundred Years War, primarily, that continued to colour the imagination of Frenchness in the sixteenth century. Stubbes’s treatise illustrates that the same things that made the sixteenth century a new world simultaneously reinforced the ways in which the old world still functioned as its ledger, precisely because it was only just coming to be felt as an old world. The linguistic anxieties of the Inkhorn Controversy were born in the Hundred Years War, the conflict that forced the articulation of a nationalistic Englishness that defined itself against a French enemy, yet whose own hybridity made irony and anxiety contingent upon the very articulation of national identity. This anxiety plagued the language debates of the sixteenth century; indeed, it was a major cause of them. The particular blend of insecurity and pugnacity with which the Inkhorn theorists called all borrowings (including those from Latin and Greek) ‘French English’ indicates that it was scratching an old sore. 68

69 70 71

John Stubbes, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is Like to be Swallowed by an other French mariage (London: H. Singleton for W. Page, 1579), STC 23400, sig. C.4r. Ibid., sig. C.6r, sig. D.3r. Ibid., sig. A.2r. Ibid., sig. C.2r.



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The phrase ‘French English’ (not far from the ‘strange Inglis’ of Mannyng and Usk) is a common meme of these writings. In 1560, Thomas Wilson used it scathingly to describe the young courtiers, who, returning from the Continent, ‘seek so far for outlandish English that they forget altogether their mother’s language.… He that cometh lately out of France will talk French English and never blush at the matter.’72 Similarly, William Turner’s prefatory epistle to Robert Hutten’s 1548 translation of the Margarita theologica praised it because ‘It hath not so many newe french englyshe blossomes as many bookes haue.’73 Of course, just as much of the diction decried as ‘inkhorn’ as that lauded (or deplored) as aureate was Latinate in origin, not French, but it suited the polemicists in the sixteenth century as it had in the fifteenth quietly to elide the two. The metaphor of ‘French English’ was an old one. Where Caxton had praised Chaucer for ‘making the sayd langage ornate and fayr’, John Hart, a hundred years later, would praise ‘our Predecessours’ because they were contented for infinit other wordes … to kepe them in their mother tongue, as good reason was, except they would haue chaunged the whole Englishe Saxon language, to the French tongue, or nere unto it.74

Over the course of the two centuries following his death, Chaucer’s eulogists rewrote ‘aureate’ as ‘strange’, and then as ‘inkhorn’. Chaucer was the symbol of English poetry: of a language that was rich, robust and copious enough to support a poet of his stature. He ennobled the vernacular by writing in it, yet his reputation for aureation also complicated the very identity of that vernacular, in a period in which French represented both enemy and ancestor, both hostility and prestige.

72 73 74

Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric, ed. Peter E. Medine (Philadelphia, PA, 1994), p. 188. Robert Hutten, The Sum of Diuinite Drawen owt of the Holy Scripture (London: J. Day and W. Serres, 1548), STC 23004, sig. A.2v. John Hart, A Methode or Comfortable Beginning for all the Vnlearned (London: H. Denham, 1570), STC 12880, sig. A.3v.

9 Chaucer the Puritan Mike Rodman Jones

D

espite constructing a narrative of English ecclesiastical history which was saturated with authoritative citations of medieval writers – including Chaucer – John Milton wrote in 1641 that to look to the medieval past for spiritual examples had its risks: ‘Thus finally it appears that those purer Times were no such as they are cry’d up, and not to be follow’d without suspicion, doubt and danger.’1 Milton’s scepticism towards the putative spiritual and ecclesiastical purity of the medieval past can act as a kind of thumbnail sketch for the portrait of Chaucer’s celebrity in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drawn in this essay, for it combines scholarliness and scepticism with a strong, even compulsive, desire for national religious and literary parentage, even as it explicitly warns its reader of the precarious and contested ‘danger’ of pursuing Chaucer’s ghost. While Milton’s sceptical (or selectively sceptical) historiography makes another of his prose works, The History of Britain (1671), a useful touchstone for ideas about a developing ‘historical sense’ in the early modern period, it also serves both to entrench the reception of medieval literature within the discourse of religious controversy and to suggest the fraught and fractious nature of Chaucer’s status and celebrity in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 In many ways, literary celebrity might be an area in which we see a strong divide between the cultures of pre- and post-Reformation England. Despite Chaucer’s own, deeply equivocal, attitude towards fame – and, we might add, the self-consciously constrained or problematized view of ‘making’ held by a 1 2

John Milton, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven, CT, 1953–82), vol. 1, p. 560. On developments in early modern historiographical method and consciousness, see Daniel Woolf, ‘From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500– 1700’, The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, CA, 2006); and, more broadly, Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (Oxford, 1991). On Milton’s historiography, see especially Nicholas Von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1991).

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number of major late medieval poets – the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made Chaucer their own.3 Moreover, the way in which literary culture worked in these centuries – coming after the aureate and laureate shifts in the poetics of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – made literary fame a comparatively straightforward thing. The ‘Renaissance’ found literary celebrity, and self-appointed laureateship, a great deal simpler than Chaucer had done in The House of Fame.4 Indeed, in some ways to think about Chaucer’s fame and celebrity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is to recognize how widely and pervasively his name could be taken in vain. A quick tour through a number of versions of the ‘Renaissance Chaucer’ is an entertaining and sometimes eccentric experience.5 Along with the continued ownership and use of Chaucer’s works in manuscript, and printed editions of all or parts of the Chaucerian oeuvre – most importantly Thynne (1532, 1542), Stow (1561) and Speght (1598, 1602) – we find Chaucer’s name acting as cultural ballast for all kinds of things. He is, for example, an authority on astrology (though not in the way that a reader of The Treatise on the Astrolabe or Equatorie of the Planets might expect) in texts such as the Fearfull and lamentable effects of two dangerous comets, which shall appeare in … 1591 (1590) by the wonderfully named ‘Simon Smel-Knave’, in which ‘Chaucer’s books shall this yeere, prove more witty than ever they were’.6 The father of English poetry appears elsewhere as an authority on alchemy, grammar, armouries, bee-keeping and the dangers of smoking: Chaucer, wrote Richard Brathwait in 1617, ‘would think it ill / To plant tobacco on Parnassus hill’.7 So, despite the highly self-conscious images 3

4

5

6 7

Good examples of this self-limiting view of literary production – so different from the bald self-confidence of later writers such as Jonson or Milton – can be found across the canon of later Middle English writing, from Chaucer’s House of Fame and Canterbury Tales, through Langland’s quasi-autobiographical apologia in the C text of Piers Plowman, to Hoccleve’s Series. One might suggest connections, though, between the Renaissance ‘self-crowned laureate’ and the self-fashioning of Gower and Lydgate. For an important account of Renaissance literary fame, see Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA, 1983). On the development of aureate style and laureateship, see especially Robert Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, 2007). The essential tool for tracing Chaucer’s appearances in print is Jackson Campbell Boswell and Sylvia Wallace Holton, Chaucer’s Fame in England: STC Chauceriana, 1475–1640 (New York, 2004). Other important work can be found in Caroline Spurgeon’s formative Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357–1900 (Cambridge, 1925; repr. New York, 1960) and Derek Brewer, ed., Chaucer: The Critical Heritage (London, 1978; repr. 1995). Boswell and Holton, Chaucer’s Fame in England, p. 132. Some of these texts are: Edmund Southerne, A Treatise Concerning the Right Vse and Ordering of Bees (London: T. Orwin for T. Woodcocke, 1593), STC 22942; John Bossewell, Workes of Armorie (London: R. Tottill, 1572), STC 3393; Reginald Scott, The Discovery of Witchcraft (London: H. Denham for W. Brome, 1584), STC 21864. See Boswell and Holton,



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about cultural weight in Chaucer’s own House of Fame, it was precisely the weightiness of Chaucer’s name and fame which mattered to many receivers of his name (if not his verse) in the early modern period. But the dominant image of Chaucer in the period, and certainly the one with most longevity, barring the ‘Father of English Poetry’, is that which was governed by religious controversy. Frequently, from the 1530s onwards, Chaucer was read or cited because he represented a native vernacular authority who could speak to the anticlerical – and sometimes specifically anti-papal – agenda of early English Protestantism. This, after all, is what has been called ‘the Chaucer of Spenser and Milton’, the literary icon of Protestant England from the Henrician supremacy to Dryden’s translations in 1700.8 This particular ‘celebrity Chaucer’ was, of course, created with some editorial sleight of hand, with what Helen Cooper has termed ‘creative accounting’: the imposition of texts, particularly into The Canterbury Tales, which we might not now accept as authentically Chaucerian.9 Moreover, the second edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1570) worked to institutionalize the Reformers’ Chaucer as part of the narrative of one of the most important books in Elizabethan England.10 The last decade has seen a number of scholars working on this type of Chaucerian apocrypha, and a flourishing of work focused on the reception and presentation of Chaucer’s work in the first century of print.11 The ‘Protestant’ Chaucer is perhaps a better-known figure now than he was for much of the twentieth century. But what we know about this ‘Protestant Chaucer’ needs to be developed further, and nuanced, for two particular reasons.

8

9 10

11

Chaucer’s Fame in England, pp. 145, 85–8, 117–18. Brathwait’s text is The Smoaking Age or, The Man in the Mist, with the Life and Death of Tobacco (London: E. Griffin, 1617), STC 3585, also discussed by Thomas Prendergast in this volume. Mary R. McCarl, ed., The Plowman’s Tale: The c. 1532 and 1606 Editions of a Spurious Canterbury Tale (London, 1997), p. 14. On the importance of Chaucer and medieval literature more generally to the literary culture of early Protestantism, see John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1982), and David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London, 1984; rev. 2002), chapter 2. Helen Cooper, ‘Poetic Fame’, Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford, 2010), p. 369. On the importance of Foxe’s editions for print culture in a wider sense, see John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge, 2006). Also, for a full-length study relating Foxe’s historiography to wider literary and dramatic culture in the sixteenth century, see David Womersley, Divinity and State (Oxford, 2010). See, for example, John M. Bowers, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition (Notre Dame, IA, 2007); Siân Echard, Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA, 2008); Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford, 2006); Sarah Kelen, Langland’s Early Modern Identities (New York, 2007); Mike Rodman Jones, Radical Pastoral, 1381–1594: Appropriation and the Writing of Religious Controversy (Farnham, 2011).

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First, work on literary reception and appropriation which touches on religious history has always, at least potentially, been likely to misconceive its subject as much as traditional religious history. A narrative about how ‘Protestantism’ appropriated Chaucer rests upon ideas about religious identity which are assumed to be a priori historical categories. Much important work on historical religious identity – whether ‘Lollard’, ‘Protestant’ or ‘Puritan’ – suggests that the simplification of perspective brought about by such stable terminology might be a problem.12 Essentially, the words and categories with which we approach the question of religious identity – terms such as ‘Puritan’, the composite things that we assume make up such an identity (theological beliefs; devotional practices; ideas about Church government; familial or communal relationships; distinctive types of language, dress or sensibility) – might only rarely, or over long stretches of time, become as synonymous as we want or assume them to be. Describing precisely what we mean by any of these words – Wycliffite, Protestant, Puritan – is far from a clear or self-evident task.13 This shift in religious historiography informs one of the main arguments of this essay. I do not argue that there was a demonstrably ‘Puritan’ Chaucer at any time, but rather that our sense of what ‘Reformed’ or ‘Protestant’ Chaucer was has to be alive to the shifting ground, the fragmentation, diversity and complexity of ecclesiastical controversy in this most controversial of religious and historical periods.14 There may have been a ‘Protestant Chaucer’ to be found in the print shops of the 1530s (though no one in the 1530s would have called him that), and he may still have been around in the 1590s or even the 1640s, but there were also – along with some vocal anti-Protestant Chaucers – specifically Presbyterian Chaucers and Anglican, anti-Presbyterian, Chaucers too.15 The Reformed Chaucer was reformed more than once and was not a singular, monolithic thing, just as Protestantism was not a singular, monolithic thing. Secondly, when we see Chaucer being read, recalled and used in ecclesiastical controversy, it becomes clear that we need to contest the perceived limitations of reception and textual knowledge that often go hand in hand with work on the reception of medieval texts in the following centuries. The 12

13

14

15

For representative work on Lollardy, see Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge, 2008); on Puritanism, see Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT, 2002). On these difficulties, particularly in the early English Reformation, see Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, ‘Protestantisms and their Beginnings’, The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 1–13. For a useful hand-list of specific controversial exchanges in the Elizabethan reign, see Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (Lincoln, NE, 1977). On the problem of language, particularly the term ‘Protestant’, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999), p. 144.



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assumption often tends to be that, while dealing with ‘Protestant Chaucer’ and other similar things, we are actually dealing with a phenomenon of rather facile citation: something conventional, flimsy and lacking in sustained literary or intellectual engagement; cultural name-dropping by those who would not actually read medieval poetry, in which the name of an author is the dead weight of an iconic corpse; something detached from the ‘real’ interpretative history surrounding an author.16 In the case of Chaucer’s celebrity for early modern religious readers, the idea of the ‘Protestant Chaucer’ seems often to rest upon the rather flat, dull repetition of The Plowman’s Tale and selected bits of anticlericalism that could be detached and repeated like sententious Latin phrases in a floreligium collection. Much of the reception of Chaucer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may, indeed, work along precisely those lines, but, in some cases at least, citations of Father Chaucer in Tudor and Stuart ecclesiastical polemics were more interesting, and more literary, than that. The later English Reformation produced writers who were capable of being well and broadly read in Chaucer’s work, and sometimes strikingly creative in their reception and appropriation of his verse.

Protestant to Puritan Chaucer The impulse to add to, embellish or ‘complete’ The Canterbury Tales is one with a long history, reaching back to early scribal activities.17 But the 1530s saw the sudden appearance of apocryphal Chaucerian texts, in print, that were to shape Chaucer’s celebrity for centuries. The attractions of this suddenly ‘Reformed’ Chaucer were obvious. From the 1529 ‘Reformation’ Parliament onwards, anticlericalism had important political and economic ramifications.18 Authoritative anticlericalism could provide some of the necessary (or at least desirable) contexts for initiatives which we now call the Supremacy and Dissolution. The struggle between monarchy and church which had been a constant presence throughout the Middle Ages now required a sanctioned, popular and respectably ancient voice aiming its hostility at the clergy and 16

17 18

For two negative assessments of the scope of the reception of medieval writing in the sixteenth century, see Anne Hudson, ‘Epilogue: The Legacy of Piers Plowman’, A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 261–83, esp. p. 263, and James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2: 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002), pp. 328–9. See, for example, those collected in John M. Bowers, ed., The Canterbury Tales: FifteenthCentury Continuations and Additions (Kalamazoo, MI, 1992). For a useful, concise narrative of the 1530s, see Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2007), esp. pp. 5–26 and, on the place of medieval anticlerical literature, pp. 46–51. For a thorough recent account, see G. W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Re-Making of the English Church (New Haven, CT, 2005).

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the papacy. In the decade which saw single-text prints of The Plowman’s Tale (1532) and Jack Upland (1536), the entirety of the clerical estate was frequently the target of satire and polemic. Barring the papacy, specific orders or types of ecclesiastical life are rarely singled out: neither monasticism, mendicantism, parochial clergy nor the episcopacy are particular focuses for reform. Instead, the target is frequently the clergy at large. The Plowman’s Tale – a dialogue poem framed by a quasi-Chaucerian prologue which worked to graft it into the form of a Canterbury Tale – pitted a Christ-like Pelican, the defender of those ‘symple and small’, against a Griffon, ‘sharpe as fyre’, the mouthpiece for those ‘great growen … Popes cardinals and Prelates’.19 It is notable that The Plowman’s Tale and analogous, near-contemporary texts such as Rede Me and Be Not Wroth (1529) tend to use the non-dramatic dialogue or debate as a way of launching the broadest and most universal attacks on the clergy. A speaker, whether allegorical Griffon or a human character, tends not to contradict but to enable his interlocutor with questions designed to cover every aspect of the clerical life, from pope to mendicant to monk. The entire clergy are the subject of satirical assault, and the idea of root-and-branch corruption suggests the necessity of root-and-branch reform. This Reformist Chaucer, known primarily as a satirist of the clergy, clearly caught on, appearing in every edition of Chaucer’s works between 1542 and the later eighteenth century.20 As the sixteenth century went on, the apocryphal Pelican and Griffon dialogue of The Plowman’s Tale was ever more likely to be seen as Chaucer’s last word: the overpowering Reformist focus on anticlericalism, and particularly the papal antichrist – ubiquitous in the work of writers such as Cranmer, Bale and Foxe – came to annex Chaucer to a long tradition of Reformist writing. After 1570, every reader of Foxe was also a reader of Chaucer. But it is significant that in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, we see an important shift in the appearances of the Reformed Chaucer. Chaucer starts to be cited less as an authority on generalized anticlericalism, or on the perceived evils of the papacy, and more as a writer who could speak to different interests: most importantly the status of the episcopacy. Church government becomes the most important – and controversial – reason to read, remember or cite Chaucer’s name and writings. What develops is not so much a ‘Protestant’ Chaucer as a specifically Presbyterian one.21 We find, 19 20

21

McCarl, Plowman’s Tale, lines 57, 91, 58, 62. On the production and contexts of the text, see Jones, Radical Pastoral, pp. 94–102. The centrality of the Reformist Chaucer found in editions of his work across the period might be tempered, however, at particular moments. Greg Walker, for example, has argued that Thynne and Tuke’s 1532 edition of Chaucer might have been designed to act against the rising anticlerical hysteria; see Walker, Writing Under Tyranny, pp. 29–99. On the nature of English Puritanism, the classic studies remain those of Patrick Collinson, especially The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), and ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol:



Chaucer the Puritan  171

for example, William Prynne citing Chaucer as an authority against Laudian reform and Arminianism in 1630, against the episcopacy in the early 1640s, and as a supporter of ‘ancient’ parliamentary liberties in 1648, in a parliamentary speech delivered shortly before the execution of Charles I the following year.22 A tour through Milton’s reading of Chaucer is again indicative of this shift. His Commonplace Book regularly mentions his reading of Chaucer. He notes, for example, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, particularly what it has to say – based on Dante’s Convivio – about moral, rather than inherited, nobility and ‘gentilesse’. Moreover, given what Milton would go on to write about divorce, it is interesting to find both The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and The Merchant’s Tale annotated to emphasize ‘the discommodities of marriage’.23 But Milton’s more public citation of Chaucer is back on topic. In Of Reformation (1641), shortly after the comments quoted at the opening of this essay, Milton cites two stanzas of The Plowman’s Tale with the introduction ‘our Chaucer … gives from hence a caution to England to beware of her Bishops in time, for that their ends and aims are no more friendly to Monarchy than the Popes’.24 Chaucer is here not Protestant in a broad sense but specifically Presbyterian: an authority for those, Milton says, who have been ‘branded with the name of Puritans’.25 Another important example – and one that demonstrates in its attraction of a polemical reply the controversial nature of citing Chaucer – is a moment in a text written by Job Throkmorton in the early 1590s.26 Throkmorton is a name closely associated with a significant strand of Presbyterian writing in the late 1580s and early 1590s, because he is the most likely candidate for the notorious nom de plume Martin Marprelate.27 The Marprelate tracts were, of

22

23 24 25 26 27

Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism’, The Reign of Elizabeth: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. John Guy (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 150–70. William Prynne, Anti-Arminianisme, or the Church of England’s old Antithesis to new Arminianisme (London: E. Allde for M. Sparke, 1630), STC 20458, p. 237 (see Boswell and Holton, Chaucer’s Fame in England, p. 298); William Prynne, The Antipathy of the English Lordly Prelacy (London: M. Sparke, 1641), Wing P3891A, p. 336; William Prynne, The Substance of a Speech made in the House of Commons by William Prynne (London: M. Sparke, 1648), Wing P4093, p. 70. Boswell and Holton’s anthology does not include the last two. Prynne also approvingly cited Chaucer and Langland, along with Bale, Ochino and Skelton, as examples of writers whose texts were ‘penned only to be read, not acted’, in Histrio-Mastix. The Player’s Scourge (London: E. Allde, A. Matthewes, T. Cotes and W. Iones for M. Sparke, 1633), STC 20464, pp. 833–4 (see Boswell and Holton, Chaucer’s Fame in England, p. 316). Milton, Complete Prose Works, vol. 1, pp. 402, 416, 472. Ibid., pp. 579–80. Ibid., p. 540. For a discussion of the place of the text in a wider 1590s interest in the figure of Piers Plowman, see Jones, Radical Pastoral, pp. 146–52. Much of the work done on Throckmorton’s attachment to Marprelate was done by Leland H. Carson in Martin Marprelate, Gentleman: Master Job Throkmorton Laid Open in

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course, among the most famous writings of religious controversy in Elizabethan England. They also made a huge impact on both ecclesiastical discourse and literary writing, both in prose and for the stage. The tracts made the Presbyterian cause illicit, as well as enjoyable, and Throckmorton’s text, written a number of years after the controversial tide had ebbed, seeks to take a very different tone; he aims throughout for an ostensibly even-handed, scholarly and respectable face for those opposed to Episcopalian church government. This is where Chaucer, and indeed Langland’s Piers Plowman, fits in:   Piers Plowman likewise wrote against the state of Bishops, and prophecied their fall in these wordes: If Knighthood and Kindwite and Comone by conscience Together loue Lelly, leueth it well ye Bishopes The Lordship of Landes for euer shall ye lese, And liue as Leuitici as our Lord ye teacheth Deut. 8. Numb. 5. per primitias & decimas, &c.   Geffrey Chaucer also in Henry the fourths time wrote effectuallie against the state of the Bb. [bishops] in this maner: The Emperour yafe the Pope sometime So hie Lordship him about, That at the last the silly Kime The proude Pope put him out: So of this Realme is doubt. But Lords beware and them defende, But nowe these folke bene wondrous stoute The Kinge and Lords nowe this amend. Moses lawe forbade it tho That Priestes should no Lordships weld. Christes Gospell biddeth also That they should no Lordships held: Ne Christes Apostles were neuer so bold No such Lordships to hem imbrace But smeren hir sheep and keep her fold, God amend hem for his grace. Thus wrote this famous Poet against the English Bishops, and yet was neuer accounted diffamer of the Kinge, though the Bb. in his time did holde their Lordships of the Kinge as they doe nowe in England. Sir Geffrey Chaucers his workes were in K. Henry the eight his dayes authorized to bee printed by Act of Parliame[n]t, to which that glorious king would neuer His Colours (San Marino, CA, 1981). Most scholars now accept – to some extent – the attribution. See, for example, The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition, ed. Joseph L. Black (Cambridge, 2008), pp. xxxv–xxxviii; Lake and Questier, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 509, n. 55; Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol’, p. 157.



Chaucer the Puritan  173 haue condescended, if hee had thought that the diffamation of the Bishops had bin a diffamation of him selfe.28

Medieval literature becomes a significant part of a long tradition of writing for Throkmorton. What we see here has been called ‘The Piers Plowman Tradition’: a highly politicized, appropriative canon that annexed Wycliffite writing to vernacular poetry such as Piers Plowman, and then, via Jack Upland and The Plowman’s Tale, subsumed Chaucer as well.29 This tradition moves through historical time (much like Foxe’s Acts and Monuments), accruing names and anthologizing texts. Chaucer’s natural company in this tradition is not Machaut, Deschamps or Boccaccio, but Wyclif, Piers Plowman, Jan Huss, Robert Barnes and William Tyndale. Forcefully appropriative as this now seems, what is conspicuous about Throkmorton’s use of Chaucer and Langland is how scholarly it is made to look. The quotations come with marginal, paratextual support which is polemical but also accurate and studious. The Langland quotation is accompanied by the marginal comment ‘A prophecy of the fall of Bb.’, but it is also described in another as ‘Passus 15. Z. IIII. b’. Likewise, the Chaucerian citation comes with ‘Geffrey Chu. Against L. Bb.’ And ‘A caueat for Englande. The Nobilitie haue bin out-braued by the pride of lord B.’, but the ‘Act of Parliament’ described by Throkmorton in relation to the printing of Chaucer’s works also gets its own marginal reference: ‘34 & 35. H. 8. C. 1’. The meticulousness of the mise-en-page is important. The tracing of the Langland passage to its place in the whole (it is indeed from B Passus 15, lines 552–555a) was clearly worth the trouble. It is notable that the other part of the reference (‘Z. IIII. b’) refers specifically to the signature reference for the correct page in Owen Roger’s printed edition of the poem (1561); the signatures are different in Crowley’s 1550 prints. Throkmorton therefore ‘shows his working out’, allowing a reader quick access to the relevant passage in the most recent printed edition of the text. The reference to 34 & 35 Henry VIII c. 1, the statute known now as the Act for the Advancement of True Religion (1543), is also designed to make Throkmorton’s citations

28

29

Job Throkmorton, A Petition directed to her most excellent Maiestie (Middelburg: R. Schilders, 1592), STC 1521, pp. 34–5. The text was printed twice (STC 1521 and 1522). The quotation is from The Plowman’s Tale, lines 693–708. Interestingly, Throckmorton has modernized and slightly altered the lines: ‘y’ is frequently modernized to ‘i’; nouns such as ‘lordships’ are capitalized; and all the printed editions of the poem (1532, 1548, 1606, plus those in the Works editions of 1542, 1550 and 1561) all read ‘So of this Realme is in doubt’, rather than Throkmorton’s ‘is doubt’ at line 697, and have either ‘wonder’ or ‘wonders’ for Throckmorton’s ‘wondrous’ at line 699. This term, now used to describe the alliterative poems included in Helen Barr’s Dent edition, was coined by Helen C. White to describe this ‘Reformed’ tradition in her Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1944).

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of medieval literature as transparently legitimate and accurate as possible.30 The statute, perhaps most famous for its aggressive limiting of access to vernacular scripture after the printing of the sanctioned Great Bible (1539), makes a special point of proscribing types of text which we might associate with ‘literary’ writing: ‘printed bokes printed balades plays rymes songes and other fantasies’.31 It does, however, contain a number of provisos which release particular texts from the limitations and proscriptions of the rest of the statute, including ‘Canterbury tales Chaucers bokes Gowers bokes and stories of mennes lieves’.32 The specific mention of ‘Chaucers bokes’ in a proviso acts as useful historical evidence for Throkmorton, and the academic accuracy of the referencing in the margins again allows Throkmorton’s reader the opportunity to witness his transparency in constructing and defending Chaucer as a supporter of Presbyterianism. Both the detailed and rigorous appearance of the referencing, and the place of Chaucer in Throkmorton’s argument, work to forward a specific agenda. The point, of course, is that attacks upon the episcopacy are not inherently anti-establishment or politically dangerous. Throkmorton’s line of reasoning is necessitated and circumscribed by what one might call the ‘Reformer’s curse’, which appears consistently in sixteenth-century religious discourse. Religious change – whether theological or ecclesiastical – can always be made to look proximate to visions of profound social or political change, usually figured as nightmarish, violently chaotic and threatening to the commonwealth as a whole. From Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man (1529, written in the aftermath of the German Peasant Wars of the 1520s) onwards, Protestantism always had an argumentative burden of this kind, and Throkmorton’s citation of Chaucer is designed for this particular purpose: to act as a respectable academic counterfoil. Not only a ‘famous Poet’, Chaucer is also ennobled (‘Sir Geffrey Chaucer’) and his works, Throkmorton claims, specifically sanctioned – apparently almost in person – by Henry VIII. Anti-

30

31 32

Interestingly, in William Prynne’s A Breviate of the Prelates Intolerable Usurpations (Amsterdam: J. F. Stam, 1637), STC 20454, pp. 26–7, Prynne quotes precisely the same passage of The Plowman’s Tale, and follows it with ‘This Booke of Chaucer was authorized to be printed by Act of Parliament in the 34. And 35. H.8.c.I.’ See Boswell and Holton, Chaucer’s Fame in England, p. 342. Throkmorton’s Petition, and the arguments that it contained, were almost certainly read and used by fellow Presbyterians in the following generation. Alexander Luders et al., The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols (London, 1810–22), vol. 3, p. 894. Ibid., p. 895. The list also includes licensed religious books such as primers and psalters, statutes themselves, and chronicles. Importantly – and a point picked up by controversialists such as Matthew Sutcliffe (see below) – the mention of texts in the statute’s provisos does not actually sanction them per se, but excludes them from suspicion ‘oonelesse the kings saide Majestie shall hereafter make special proclamacion for the condempnacion and reproving of the same or any of them’.



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Episcopalian writing, then, if supported by well-referenced quotations from writers such as Chaucer, can potentially seem historically sanctioned, licit, reasonable and authoritative.

Presbyterian Chaucer and His Opponents This is not to suggest, however, that the appropriation of Chaucer by Presbyterian controversialists was singular and uncontested: quite the opposite is true. One of the noticeable things about Chaucer’s celebrity in this sort of material is just how controversial it is at points. Writers are frequently moved to contest these sorts of Chaucerian authority. Many, indeed, take umbrage at the idea of a ‘Puritan’ Chaucer, and from very different confessional standpoints. John Clare, for example, a recusant writing in 1630, attacked pamphleteers who were used to ‘setting downe certaine verses of Chaucer’. ‘But’, he asks, what prooueth this? For first, we are not in reason to giue credit to euery verse dropping from the satyricall penne of Chaucer. Secondly, admit all were true, that Chaucer writeth; yet seeing his reprehensions do only touch manners and conuersation, and not faith; it followeth not, that Chaucer was a protestant … or that the Protestant Religion was in his days professed.33

Clare’s sensible scepticism is significant, but the contested nature of Chaucer as a religious authority is tangibly present also in controversy between the increasingly fractured denominations and identities of English Protestantism itself. When Job Throkmorton claimed Chaucer as a Presbyterian in the 1590s, he received a forthright answer from Matthew Sutcliffe, an Anglican polemicist who was often involved in writing the kind of Foxean appropriative history which Throkmorton was attempting.34 In An Answere to a Certaine Libel, Sutcliffe took Throkmorton to task for his Chaucerian moment: If the libeller had had any modestie, he would not thus haue abused mens writings: nor if he had intended any other matter, then to make libels, would he haue drawne out certain rimes out of Pierce Plowman, & Chaucer, men farre excelling him in all modestie and humanitie. For albeit they rimed against wicked bishops, yet doe they speake more ciuilly of them, then he doth of godly and learned men, whome with rime dogrell, and dogger 33 34

John Clare, The Converted Jew, or Certain Dialogues (English Secret Press, 1630), STC 5351, pp. 139–40; Boswell and Holton, Chaucer’s Fame in England, p. 295. See, for example, Sutcliffe’s De Catholica (London: C. Barker, 1592), STC 23455, pp. 53, 62–3, 153, 158, 199, 338, 340, in which he co-opts Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto and Machiavelli as authorities against the pope, and similar passages in his De Turcopapismo (London: G. Bishop, 1599), STC 23460, pp. 448, 463, 464, 485–6. I am grateful to Professor Nick Havely for these references.

176  Mike Rodman Jones railing, and many slaunderous reports, and that in the presence of a prince, he goeth about malitiously to disgrace … That these books passe with this approbation, seene and allowed, it followeth not, that all things therein conteined are allowed; but that they are allowed to be printed, as hauing nothing in the opinion of him that allowed them contrarie to state. And rather, because we should reape some profite by that which is good; then loose the good for the bad: or allow that is euil because it is ioyned with that which is good.35

Sutcliffe’s attack on Throkmorton’s use of Chaucer and Piers Plowman attempts to deconstruct the connections that Throkmorton had made between the authority and respectability of Chaucer’s anticlerical satire and a specifically Presbyterian argumentative agenda. The key term for Sutcliffe is ‘modestie’, but there are a number of interesting distinctions in his counterPresbyterian argument. Chaucer’s authority and status go unquestioned, but Throkmorton’s use of them is reformulated as audacious, immodest and scandalous: all the things that Sutcliffe associates with the manner of Marprelate, whose voice Throkmorton had tried to avoid in the Petition. Chaucer might have written about ‘wicked’ bishops, says Sutcliffe (notably not simply all ‘Lord B.[ishops]’, as Throkmorton claims), but he did so with civility, respect, modesty and humanity. John Clare’s theological point returns – only ‘manners and conversation’, not ‘faith’, are Chaucer’s target; only ‘wicked’ bishops, and even then in ways circumscribed by some kind of deference and propriety. Throkmorton is suddenly distanced from the manner of Chaucer’s writing, according to Sutcliffe, and associated with the ‘malicious’, ‘rime dogrell’, ‘dogger rhyming’ and ‘slanderous reports’ of the Marprelate tracts, ‘and that in the presence of a prince’. This phrase – deliberately taking Throkmorton’s title (‘Petition’) as a literal act of ‘petitioning’ the monarch in person – again cements Sutcliffe’s point: Marprelate writing and Presbyterianism per se are designed to be synonymous, and both are serious transgressions against decorum. Sutcliffe manages to construct Chaucer’s ‘satirical pen’ as a polite foil for his polemical target: Presbyterians who are ignorant, indecorous and rude, and dangerously so. Sutcliffe’s distinctions between what is legally sanctioned and what is ‘seen and allowed’ are also significant. There were, as scholars have shown, a number of interpretative problems attached to these kinds of phrases associated with sanctioned or censored books in the early modern print marketplace.36 Sutcliffe is, in fact, correct to argue that the phrase ‘seen and allowed’ did not actually suggest that the monarch (or Stationers’ Company, or Master 35 36

Matthew Sutcliffe, An Answere to a Certaine Libel (London: C. Barker, 1592), STC 23450, p. 69. On this issue, see especially the revisionist account of print censorship in the period in Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1997). On the problem of the analogous Latin phrase ‘cum privilegio regali ad imprimendum solum’,



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of Revels or bishop of London) had read the work in its entirety and personally sanctioned all the contents.37 Instead, Sutcliffe’s point sounds a little like that made at the close of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: ‘Taketh the fruit, and let the chaff be still’ (line 3443). Sutcliffe carefully retains Chaucer’s authority while suggesting that not everything written by him is either sanctioned or sensible. Do not listen to ‘euery verse … dropping from the satyricall penne of Chaucer’, as Clare put it. There is scepticism as well as approbation for Chaucer in this statement, and Sutcliffe’s more complicated distinctions aim to prise apart the crude appropriative binds that Throkmorton had tried to tie around Chaucer and Presbyterianism. The appropriated, Presbyterian Chaucer, then, has his limits. There is no bee-keeping, anti-smoking, alchemical Chaucer for Sutcliffe, and certainly no ‘Chaucer the Puritan’. It is apparent that ecclesiastical polemic took recourse to Chaucer on a very regular basis, but it is also apparent that the ‘Protestant Chaucer’ is a little more contested than the non-debate of The Plowman’s Tale might suggest. Chaucer is cited and remembered, but using Chaucer is a very conscious and contested thing to do. This is not a flat, monolithic citation of a ‘man of great authority’, but something which is often more specific in ecclesiastical terms, and also much more controversial. Moreover, the way in which Chaucer is quoted in ecclesiastical controversy is often, I would argue, testament to just how well read the poet continues to be in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We might look at the increasing attachment of Chaucer’s name to Presbyterian polemic as a citatory tradition which is rather distanced from a readerly response to his actual poetry. But at least on occasion we find the recollection of Chaucer to be markedly accurate and appreciative: capable of linking passages together, of exploiting the satirical potential of his writing (beyond asserting how allegedly evil bishops are), and even of engaging in creative ways with what we might think would be the most unlikely of Chaucerian texts to make an appearance in ecclesiastical controversy. For example, again from an Anglican polemicist, we see that Elizabethans did not perhaps need, let alone depend upon, the amalgamation of The Plowman’s Tale into The Canterbury Tales to make Chaucer worth reading and remembering. Richard Bancroft, the future bishop of London (1597–

37

see pp. 3–29, 10–11. See also David Scott Kastan, ‘Naughty Printed Books’, Cultural Reformations, ed. Cummings and Simpson, pp. 287–304, esp. pp. 301–2. See Luders et al., Statutes of the Realm, vol. 3, p. 894. The importance of the phrase ‘seen and allowed’ is tangible in another royal proclamation, of 1538, which curtailed the importation or printing of vernacular bibles ‘except the same be first viewed, examined, and allowed by the King’s highness’. See P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin, ed., Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols (New Haven, CT, 1964–69), vol. 1, pp. 270–6. Not only is the phrase repeated twice in the proclamation, but this is also the site of Henry’s vexed attempt to delineate precisely what form of ‘cum privilegio regali cum impremendum solum’ should appear on books.

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1604) and archbishop of Canterbury (1604–10), used specific recollections of Chaucer’s work against a Presbyterian polemic in 1593: Fie vppon superioritie, may these Ministers say, fie vpon it. Indeede we (saith one of them in effect) do rest, not in names carrying shew, of worldly rule and lordly commaundement, &c. but of seruice, guiding, leading, ouerseeing, directing, & such like. Which maketh me to remember the Frier in Chaucer, that desired of the Capon, but the liuer; of a white loafe, but a shiuer; and after that, a rosted pigs head: but for him he would not any beast were dead. They wil seeke to be no higher, than be aboue princes. They wil take nothing vpon them (men of great humilitie) but euen, to be guiders, leaders, ouerseers, and directers. And as for names of any great shew or honor, they care not for them: so they may haue but onely the estimation, which is due to men, that haue such vaine titles. Euen Chaucers Frier, vp and downe.38

For a man synonymous with the ‘Bishop’s Ban’ six years later – the ecclesiastical censorship campaign which targeted, quite specifically, a particular genre – Bancroft shows a keen eye for the usefulness of Chaucer’s satire.39 First of all, he produces a parody of Puritan verbal style which could have been lifted directly from the stage at the Rose. Bancroft’s ‘fie … fie upon it’ mimics closely the exclamatory feel of aggressive ‘godly’ speech which contemporary plays such as A Knack to Know a Knave (1592, printed 1594) used to deride characters usually referred to as ‘Precise’.40 He then digests the argument of ‘pretended holy discipline’ and finds that it ‘maketh me to remember the Friar in Chaucer’. The memorial gesture of this phrase might belie quite how accurate the Chaucerian memory is, because it is a

38

39

40

Richard Bancroft, A Suruay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (London: I. Wolfe, T. Scarlet and R. Field, 1593), STC 1352, pp. 156–7; Boswell and Holton, Chaucer’s Fame in England, p. 142. Boswell and Holton do not note the origin of part of the quotation in The Wife of Bath’s Tale. For an excellent discussion of the Bishop’s Ban, see Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England, pp. 198–217. The writers proscribed by the ban included Thomas Nashe, John Marston, Thomas Middleton and John Davis: all writers of satire. On this specificity, see also Richard A. McCabe, ‘Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599’, Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981), 188–93. See, for example, the ‘precise’ priest in G. R. Proudfoot, ed., A Knack to Know a Knave 1594 (Oxford, 1963), lines 1652–6: ‘Fie upon usurie … fie upon it, fie … fie on it, ’tis ungodly’. On the anti-Puritanism of the play, see Jones, Radical Pastoral, pp. 166–8. While the word ‘fie’ is generally a feature of stage language, it is suggestive that Shakespeare’s two most likely stage Puritans – Angelo and Malvolio – use it or have it used against them. Angelo in Measure for Measure is partial to the exclamation (Act 2, scene 4, line 41; Act 2, scene 2, line 176), and Malvolio in Twelfth Night is twice addressed with it, by Feste and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, perhaps parodically (Act 2, scene 5, line 38; Act 4, scene 2, line 31).



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word-perfect recollection of lines 1839–42 of The Summoner’s Tale.41 The quotation perfectly aligns the hypocrisy of Chaucer’s mendicant with that of Presbyterian polemicists. The Friar, who wants the best of everything, refuses to acknowledge the processes by which those things are produced. The man who claims ‘I am a man of litel sustenaunce; / My spirit heth his fostryng in the Bible’ (lines 1844–5) of course would like the ‘litel sustenaunce’ to be of great quality. Likewise, the Presbyterians who want ‘litel’ in terms of ‘names carrying shew, of worldly rule’ actually, argues Bancroft, want a great deal indeed: to ‘be no higher, than be aboue princes’. Bancroft’s Chaucerian satire makes mendicant and Presbyterian one in hypocrisy, but something else is striking. The final comment here – ‘Euen Chaucers Frier, vp and downe’ – is a recollection again from fragment 3 of The Canterbury Tales, but from the beginning of The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Alison’s sharp retort to the friar who criticizes her prologue as ‘a long preamble of a tale’ (line 831) is, in Bancroft’s text, linked up with the friar from further on in The Canterbury Tales. Once, says Alison, there were elves and fairies everywhere in ‘th’olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour’, but now the only ubiquitous beings are the ‘lymytours and othere hooly freres’ (lines 857, 866). Then we get the savagely ironic Wommen may go saufly up and doun. In every bussh or under every tree Ther is noon oother incubus but he, And he ne wol doon hem but dishonour.  (lines 878–81, my emphasis)

Women, of course, may not go ‘saufly’ when they are persistently stalked by friars, imagined as sinister sexual predators hiding along the path: something between mock holy men, elves and demons. This passage is frequently quoted by later writers as an authoritative piece of Chaucer’s anticlericalism, but here – like Bancroft’s use of The Summoner’s Tale – the attack on pesky mendicants is transposed onto the ambitious Presbyterian, who is presumably wandering ‘up and down’ saying ‘fie’ rather than ‘in principio’, but whose hypocrisy and dangerousness are still palpable.42 Bancroft’s use of Chaucer, and his memory of the actual verse, is both specific and broad. He is able

41 42

All references to Chaucer’s works are to The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. L. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1988) and refer to the Riverside’s lineation. The passage appears, for example, in Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London: G. Purslowe and J. Beale for G. Lathum, 1603), STC 4327 (see the discussion below). For other uses of the passage in later texts see, for example, George Hakewill, The Uanitie of the Eie (Oxford: J. Barnes, 1608), STC 12621, which perhaps follows Harsnett, and Anthony Cade, A Iustification of the Church of England (London: G. Purslowe and J. Beale for G. Lathum, 1630), STC 4327. For the passages, see Boswell and Holton, Chaucer’s Fame in England, pp. 215, 294.

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to recollect and connect different passages from fragment 3 in a way which suggests both easy familiarity with Chaucer’s work and an eye for how the poet might be useful for his own satirical purposes. This is not Chaucer as a weighty authority, endlessly castigating the clergy through the figures of Griffons and Pelicans, but a real and lively presence in Anglican writing against the ‘pretended holy discipline’ of Puritanism.

Samuel Harsnett and the Fabliau Theatre of The Miller’s Tale Another Anglican writer – in fact Bancroft’s chaplain – also had particular interests in using Chaucer’s verse, and again we find that the nature of this reading and quoting of Chaucer is far more creatively engaged than we might have expected. Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) was commissioned by the privy council to discredit – rather after the event – particular Jesuit proselytizing activities in England. In this polemical mode – a kind of satirical farce in prose – Harsnett regularly looks to Chaucer, but of all the texts one might expect to appear in ecclesiastical polemic, it is The Miller’s Tale which he repeatedly uses. Harsnett’s text has been known for a very long time as the direct source for much of Shakespeare’s Edgar/Poor Tom in King Lear.43 The feigned madness, the demonic names and perhaps even some of the play’s character names (Harsnett frequently focuses on a Jesuit with the pseudonym ‘Edmunds’) originate in Harsnett’s text. Edgar speaks of ‘Obidicut, Hobbididence’, ‘Mahu’, ‘Modo’, ‘Flibbertigibbet’, ‘who since possesses chambermaids and waiting-women’ (Act 4, scene 1, lines 62–6), and this is precisely what Harsnett’s polemic addressed. In 1585–86 a group of priests trained at Douai, led by a Jesuit named Weston (alias Edmunds), travelled through England persuading just such ‘chambermaids’ that they were possessed by demons. The priests and Jesuit then ‘exorcised’ the women, thereby convincing both duped women and spectators of the necessity and power of the old faith. Harsnett was commissioned to write a polemic discrediting these activities,

43

See Kenneth Muir, ‘Samuel Harsnett and King Lear’, Review of English Studies 2 (1951), 11–21. The most famous, and problematic, work on the relationship between the texts is Stephen Greenblatt’s in Shakespearian Negotiations (Berkeley, CA, 1988), chapter 4: ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. For work on Harsnett, see F. W. Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (Newark, DE, 1993), which also contains an edition of Harsnett’s text; Marian Gibson, Possession, Puritanism, and Print: Darrell, Harsnett, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Exorcism Controversy (London, 2008); D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, PA, 1981). For Greenblatt’s ‘inflated’ relationship between the texts, see Brownlow, Shakespeare, p. 122, and William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (London, 1997), pp. 102–4.



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having already written against ‘exorcisms’ conducted among Puritans in the midlands. What is immediately apparent about Harsnett’s text is that its purpose is one of exposé: to discredit the very idea of possession and exorcism. But the means for doing this are to render the narrative of these exorcisms as a kind of bumbling comic theatre, to narrate from a position of comic scepticism. Theatricality is what Harsnett develops: he narrates events not as something that just happened but as belonging to the world of fiction and theatre. In the first few pages we are introduced to the Jesuit Edmunds and his ‘wicked associates’, as the title page describes them, in the following terms: ‘The names of the Actors in this Holy Comedie, were these’ (p. 1); ‘This play of sacred miracles was performed in sundry houses’ (p. 2); ‘this mysticall play … furnished the stage’ (p. 2); and so on.44 Harsnett’s use of Chaucer is intriguingly synthesized with this quasi-theatrical creation. He describes the group’s movements towards the house of Edmund Peckham, where an ‘exorcism’ is to take place: At Vxbridge they lay but two or three nights at the most, and yet the place was graced with a punie miracle, or two. Dibdale the Priest had his wench set so close vnto him in the way thether, (for auoyding turpitude & women) as she felt her selfe to burne, & could hardly endure the heate of the holy man. Trayford cryes out by the way water, water, as the Frier did that by Absolon in Chawcer was scalded in the toote. And thus were theyr Iournalls towards Denham, where the Court stayed: the hangings were tricked vp, the houses made ready and the greatest part of the wonders of this comedie was perfomed … Their harbinger, and host both … was one Edm: Peckham, an excellent purueior for such a campe … playing himselfe fiue or six parts in this comedie: the harbinger, the host, the steward, the vauntcourrier, the sacrist, and the Pandar. (p. 12)

Given the importance of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale to Harsnett’s text (and this is not the only Chaucerian moment), it is tempting to imagine the list of ‘parts’ played by Peckham as a bizarre re-working of The Canterbury Tales, as the group of ‘pilgrims’ travels between ‘exorcism’ sites instead of between Southwark and Canterbury. What is more important, however, is Harsnett’s use of the scorching eschatology of The Miller’s Tale in his recollection of lines 3810–15. The ‘hotness’ of the priest Dibdale – groping Trayford ‘(for avoiding turpitude and women)’, Harsnett adds in a characteristically funny clause – ends in comic spontaneous combustion. The episode, the ‘punie miracle’, is rendered as a ridiculous farce, even perhaps as a scene from a fabliau. 44

Harsnett, Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures. All quotations are from the original print, available through Early English Books Online (EEBO). The text was reprinted twice in the next two years: STC 12881 (1604) and STC 12882 (1605).

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Interestingly, Harsnett remembers Nicholas as a ‘Friar’, rather than the astrology-manipulating clerk he is in Chaucer’s text, but there might be a reason for that. While monasticism seems to disappear from the list of standard bêtes noires of anti-Catholic writing, friars – often annexed to Jesuits – remained a stock figure in the nightmares and writings of the postReformation Protestant imaginary.45 While we see friars blended with Presbyterians in Bancroft’s writing, we also see Harsnett’s blending of friars with Jesuits. We might see Harsnett’s recollection of Chaucer’s fabliau as imperfect (deliberately or not), but another word suggests a very detailed memory of the passage. Chaucer uses the verbs ‘smoot’ and ‘brende’ (lines 3810, 3812) rather than Harsnett’s ‘scalded’, but the word ‘toote’ surely recalls Chaucer’s ‘toute’ (line 3812). The noun itself is simply not current by 1603. In fact, the Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary both give the last usage as the Townley Plays, somewhere between 1480 and 1500.46 Harsnett both grasps the anarchic physical comedy of Chaucer’s text and also recalls the Middle English text itself very accurately. The puny miracle of clerical desire, then, is rooted in a well-remembered reference to the denouement of The Miller’s Tale, which suggests both that Harsnett expects his reader to recognize it and that he is thinking about medieval fabliaux as well as Elizabethan theatres when he constructs the ‘Holy Comedie’ of the events of 1585–56. Indeed, we might well see his use of The Miller’s Tale as a creatively acute moment of appropriation. Harsnett is writing a kind of theatrical farce for polemical purposes, and everything about The Miller’s Tale, from the tone of its vocabulary to the mechanics of its plotting, fits those purposes very well indeed. It is important that Trayford’s ‘Water! Water!’ is not the only moment in the text when Chaucer appears. Later, Harsnett – quoting the passage about friars and incubi from The Wife of Bath’s Tale, which Bancroft had used – explicitly sees Chaucer as a fellow traveller in scepticism: Geoffry Chaucer, who had his two eyes, wit, and learning in his head, spying that all these brainlesse imaginations, of witchings, possessings, house-haunting, and the rest, were the forgeries, cosenages, Imposturs, and legerdemaine of craftie priests, and leacherous Friers … (p. 137)

It is the blunt, sceptical common sense which makes Chaucer and Harsnett partners, and the description’s vocabulary, which includes some of Harsnett’s favourite words (‘Imposturs’, ‘legerdemaine’), makes Harsnett’s whole persona in the text self-consciously Chaucerian: Harsnett images himself and

45 46

On this point, see Vincent Gillespie, ‘Monasticism’, Cultural Reformations, ed. Cummings and Simpson, pp. 480–501, esp. pp. 481–2. ‘toute, n.’, in OED, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1989).

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Chaucer as hard-headed fellow travellers in a world of lame tricks and dupes which had not changed much between 1390 and 1585. More than this, though, the comic plotting which structures the Tale becomes a way for Harsnett to write his own kind of preposterous theatrical fabliau: Suppose now (gentle Reader) that Friswoods Mother had come sodainly in, and seene the Priest with his candell in his hand, and his Cope vpon his backe, busie in his enchaunting Latine charme, and with-all had espied her daughter Friswood musled in her chaire of estate, with a cloath, and a Crosse, and her other sacred geare, I wonder what she would sodainly haue thought …   But stay, what hast? For after these new transformed creatures had their ceremonies, and rites done vppon them, and were framed, fashioned, and attired for their parts, and were ready for the chaire, & the stage, no man abroad could be admitted to either sight, or speech with them … they were now mysticall creatures, and must attend their sacred close mysteries within. All must be mum: Clum, quoth the Carpenter, Clum quoth the Carpenters wife, and Clum quoth the Friar. (pp. 33–4)

Again, Harsnett’s memory of The Miller’s Tale (lines 3634–42) is detailed and accurate. Those saying ‘Clom’ (lines 3638–9) are indeed the Carpenter, the Carpenter’s wife and Nicholas (now a friar for Harsnett). Harsnett really grasps the comic potential of what is happening in Chaucer’s fabliau and uses it in a creatively appropriate way. The hushed ‘cloms’ of Chaucer’s characters come as John the Carpenter is left in the makeshift ark – ‘the tubbes hangynge in the balkes’ (line 3626), ‘Awaitynge on the reyn’ (line 3642) – which will come crashing down when he hears Nicholas’ screams of ‘Water!’ in the fabliau’s denouement. In Harsnett’s re-imagining, the narrative focuses on how the characters have ‘dressed alle thing as it sholde be’ (line 3635), carefully arranging candles, chairs, clothes and charms ready for a farce which is about to unfold. The transparent theatricality of the physical arrangement is perfect, organizing the characters for a carefully choreographed comic pay-off, a banana skin that needs the reader to recognize how deceived the guileless victim is. In Chaucer’s fabliau, John the Carpenter is carefully set up for a comic fall, and just so the victims of Harsnett’s Jesuit exorcist are meticulously arranged in ridiculous poses awaiting their own diluvian punch line. Harsnett’s recollection of The Miller’s Tale works here in a very literary way, and produces a raucous religious polemic via comic fabliau theatre, an odd and vibrant Chaucerian satire which is entirely Harsnett’s own.

Conclusion To return to Milton’s warnings about the ‘suspicion, doubt and danger’ of appropriating Chaucer’s memory, another thing could be added. We see

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­ haucer’s works frequently cited in a genre – religious polemic – which C might seem very stony ground for the growth of a history of Chaucerian reception. Yet this is precisely where his work often resided during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Moreover, the ways in which one could use him diversified within this discourse. The reformation of Chaucer, like the English Reformations themselves, developed in increasingly factional ways, something which complicates a narrative of the straightforward appropriation of medieval literature by a singular ‘Protestantism’. Certainly, as other Chaucerians would imagine, we might still view this tradition of reception as one that would ‘shake the bones of that good man / And make him cry from under ground’, but some of this history of Chaucer’s fame also acts as a testament to the detailed and continuous reading of his poetry through the Reformations and beyond, well after Speght’s 1602 Works.47 It is important, though, that the writing of religious controversy was often rather less sombre than we might think. Indeed, across the English Reformations controversial writing often existed in close proximity to – and was even sometimes the catalyst for – writing which is more explicitly, or at least tacitly, ‘literary’ in quality.48 The generic boundaries between polemic and satire are always porous, and we see in the writing of Bancroft or Harsnett the acute potential of Chaucer’s works for writers attacking either or both extremes of the confessional landscape in the reigns of Elizabeth I or James I. Indeed, some of these instances of Chaucer’s recurring fame might lead us back to those more familiar, and more literary, instances of reception recorded in volumes such as the Critical Heritage series, such as Wordsworth’s imagining of himself in something that sounds like the Parliament of Fowls: ‘I laugh’d with Chaucer; in the hawthorn shade / Heard him (while birds were warbling) tell his tales of amorous passion’, or the evocation of the General Prologue in the opening line of Eliot’s The Waste Land.49 Harsnett, in particular, but perhaps others too, reacted to Chaucer’s work not by taking recourse to the calcified icon of English literature, but, as Wordsworth has it, by laughing with Chaucer.

47

48

49

William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Lois Potter (London, 1997), Prologue, lines 17–18. On the importance of Speght’s editions to a number of early Jacobean plays, see Helen Cooper, ‘Jacobean Chaucer: The Two Noble Kinsmen and Other Chaucerian Plays’, Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Theresa M. Krier (Gainesville, FL, 1998), pp. 189–209. On the intersections between satire and controversial writing, see, in particular, Raymond A. Anselment, ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift, and the Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto, 1979). Brewer, Chaucer, vol. 1, p. 248.

10 Revenant Chaucer: Early Modern Celebrity Thomas A. Prendergast

I

n his Short History of Celebrity, Fred Inglis makes the claim that ­celebrity as a concept really only comes into being in the eighteenth century – a product of the invention of the fashion industry, gossip and the new consumerism of the early modern period. He distinguishes celebrity, a selfconsciously modern notion, from earlier forms of spectacle, which he identifies as renown. The difference, he argues, is that renown was accorded to men and women because of their high accomplishments. In his words, it ‘brought honour to the office not the individual, and public recognition was not so much of the man himself as of the significance of his actions for the society’.1 By contrast, celebrity is a function of the personal fame of the individual. The celebrity lives life in the public eye while maintaining the illusion that this life is private. Public figures, in this formulation, ‘at the centre of such vast attention [are] uniquely recognizable and still sacredly remote’.2 This notion of celebrity is interesting and helpful in thinking through the rise of glamour, modern theatrical culture and the twentieth-century political cult of personality, but it is also useful to think back to the origins of celebrity, to a moment when the illusion of presence laid claim to a kind of ‘truth’. In larger terms, the distinction between renown and celebrity is probably not so much historical as epistemic. Shakespeare’s plays, for instance (especially the history plays), often rely on the distinction between and the confusion of person and office, private and public. This double-bodiedness, famously adumbrated by Ernst Kantorowicz in his treatment of the corporeal aspects of kingship, suggests that the roots of celebrity lie much further back than Inglis observes. And, indeed, Joseph Roach suggests that it is precisely this idea of a persona that circulates in the absence of the person him- or herself that really defines the idea of celebrity.3 1 2 3

Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton, NJ, 2010), p. 5. Ibid., p. 11. Joseph Roach, ‘Celebrity Erotics: Pepys, Performance, and Painted Ladies’, Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2003), 213.

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If absence, then, defines and even makes possible the idea of celebrity, it is only because there is an invented presence that one can construct. At the same time, this falseness is transformed into something that seems to be true – it is, in other words, something akin to what Plato described as a phantastic presence.4 The reaction to this presence, to paraphrase Octave Mannoni, is that I know very well that this is not the ‘real’ person, but all the same there is something about the imagistic representation of the person that seems to capture the essence of the individual.5 However, I would suggest that it is even more than this. There is a belief, despite the fact that we know better, that some of the celebrity actually resides in the image of the celebrity; otherwise, I argue, the notion of celebrity could not function. At the same time it is the absence of the celebrity that enables the spectacle and, I would argue, the real presence of the celebrity. In this essay I would like to think about the transition of the invented textual presence of Chaucer in the late Middle Ages to the invented personal presence of the poet in the early modern period. Medieval scribes and compilers might invent text in order to convey something that is more ‘authentically Chaucerian’, but early modern writers seemed to feel at ease resurrecting the person of Chaucer himself in order to authorize their invented texts. The goals of these writers were similar – to locate in a text something of Chaucer, even if he was not its author. Unlike their medieval predecessors, however, early modern writers produced this presence through celebrity avant la lettre.

The Medieval Conjuration of Presence The invented presence of Chaucer began almost at the moment of his death. We need only turn to the manuscript tradition of his Canterbury Tales to see how the presence of the poet was often textually confected in his absence. Some manuscripts make the absence of the author manifest and are unwilling to ‘recreate’ what the author produced. After the unfinished Squire’s Tale, for instance, both the Ellesmere manuscript and Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198 leave a visual gap indicating the incompletion of the tale. But other compilers have different impulses. The editor of London, British Library, 4

5

As I have argued elsewhere, this phantasy of the past depends on the Platonic split between eikastic productions, in which likenesses are made, and phantastic productions, in which something is made that ‘seems to be a likeness, but is not really so’ (Thomas A. Prendergast, ‘Spenser’s Phantastic History, The Ruines of Time and the Invention of Medievalism’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38 [2008], 175–96). This kind of expression is often taken as the cornerstone of what has been called the ideology of cynicism – i.e. they know very well what they are doing, but still they are doing it. It is a kind of ironic response of an enlightened false consciousness. See, for instance, the work of Peter Sloterdijk as represented in Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York, 1989), pp. 28–9.



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MS Lansdowne 851, for instance, created a link between The Squire’s Tale and the text that follows it in the c group of manuscripts, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.6 In the absence of any connection between the Squire and the Wife, the Lansdowne editor suggests that the Squire will continue his tale later when the ‘lotte’ once again falls to him: And þere I left I þenke aȝeine begynne Bot I wil here nowe maake a knotte To the time it come next to my lotte For here be felawes behind an hepe treulye That wolden talke ful biselye And have her sporte as wel as I And the daie passeþ fast certainly Therefore oste takeþ nowe goode heede Who shall next tell and late him speede Explicit fabula Armigeri. Incipit prologus vxoris de Bathe Than schortly ansewarde þe wife of Bathe And swore a wonder grete haþe Be goddes bones I wil tel next I wil nouht glose bot saye þe text Experience þouhe none auctorite  (MS Lansdowne 851, fol. 87r)

This link suggests either that the Lansdowne editor is being disingenuous because he knows that The Squire’s Tale is incomplete, or that he thought that he would have access to more materials which would render the ‘complete’ Canterbury Tales promised in the General Prologue. In either case, this willingness to create text that gives the illusion of tying up loose ends (even if the ‘knotte’ reveals incompleteness) is perhaps one of the more radical examples of how notions of textual authenticity, and the idea of authorship itself, can be extremely fluid in the early manuscript tradition. The numerous editorial choices that the Lansdowne editor makes, as well as his outright invention of a ‘Chaucerian’ text, suggests that he was clearly fulfilling a late-medieval desideratum for an aesthetically pleasing, finished text. There will be those, of course, who argue that the Lansdowne editor was particularly egregious in his invention – that the set of four unique links indicates a sui generis impulse to create Chaucerian texts where there were none before. However, far from being unusual, this kind of invention or borrowing 6

Being part of the c group, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198 (which some argue was copied by the editor of London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 851) also contains this tale order, though eighteen blank lines follow the unfinished Squire’s Tale. Stephen Partridge argues that the early appearance of this gap in the manuscript tradition may indicate that it was present in ‘Chaucer’s own working manuscript of the Tales’ (‘Minding the Gaps: Interpreting the Manuscript Evidence of the Cook’s Tale and the Squire’s Tale’, The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie and Ralph Hanna [London, 2000], p. 73).

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was not only usual but, if we believe Charles Owen, ‘Lansdowne [was] perhaps a model in its “completeness” for the later editors to emulate’.7 The editors of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 14, for instance, borrow Lansdowne’s link between the Squire and the Wife of Bath and alter it to connect The Squire’s Tale with The Man of Law’s Tale. Having access to the two lines beginning what is known as section three (which do not appear in Lansdowne, though they do appear in Corpus), the editors of Arch. Selden. B. 14 sandwich the first eight lines of the spurious text (in which the Squire promises to finish his story later) between the end of part two and the beginning of part three, rejecting the four lines that introduce the Wife of Bath in order to justify their own peculiar ordering of the tales: But I here now wol maken a knotte To the tyme it come nexte to my lotte For her ben felawes behynde an hepe truly That wolden talke ful besily And haue here sporte as wel as I And the day passith certeynly Therefore oste taketh now good hede Who shal nexte telle and late him spedde Appollo whirleth up his chare so highe Til that the god Mercurious hous the slighe. Here endith the Squyr his tale and nexte bygynneth the Man of Lawe his prolog & c. Ovre Oste saw wel that the bright sonne8

Why the editors rejected Lansdowne’s ordering is unknown, but it is possible that they felt justified in doing so because of the break between the Squire’s endlink and the Wife of Bath’s headlink in Lansdowne.9 This particular link promises a part of the text that the editors of Arch. Selden. B. 14 presumably knew they could not deliver. If we are deeply suspicious of the compilers of Lansdowne (who probably knew that The Squire’s Tale was incomplete), we must believe that the editors of the Selden manuscript were being completely disingenuous – promising what they knew they could not deliver. Perhaps more interestingly, this particular adaptation of a false link indicates that editors knew that portions of various manuscripts had been invented and cynically filled in portions of the text with whatever texts they had to hand in order to satisfy those readers and patrons for whom they were created. Such cavalier treatment of texts might indicate a wholesale cynicism (at least from a modern point of view) on the part of these editors (the inclusion of Gamelyn in Corpus Christi and Lansdowne comes to mind 7 8 9

Charles Owen, The Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 1991), p. 74. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 14, fol. 141r. Ibid.



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here), except that even the Lansdowne editor baulks at filling in a whole part of a tale. The Merchant’s Tale, though incomplete in both Corpus Christi and Lansdowne, is left unfinished (though there is no gap in the Lansdowne MS), which might indicate that for some editors the links were thought to be more fluid because of their seemingly ‘oral’ status – a special quality which would enable them to be adapted or even invented to lend authority to the text (interestingly, F. J. Furnivall called them ‘chats’). The invention, borrowing and adaptation of Lansdowne’s link between The Squire’s Tale and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue suggest two potentially conflicting possibilities. First, it is probable that the early editors of these manuscripts had no more confidence in an absolute ordering of the tales than have later, modern editors and hence the links were cobbled together to justify an ordering of the tales about which the editors themselves were anxious. But it is also probable that the dissemination and adaptation of this particular link indicates that the drive for a complete (and one might say beautiful) manuscript was deemed at least as important as the representation of what modern editors would call an ‘authentically Chaucerian’ text. In other words, for some late-medieval editors, the more beautiful and complete the text, the more Chaucerian it was. This pre-modern notion of completion, then, with its promise of wholeness and presence rather than ‘authentic’ fracturedness, would suggest a strange conjuring of the poet’s voice in the absence of the poet himself.10

The Early Modern Reinvention of Presence This kind of invention, of course, would become the target for the humanists and Reformers of the sixteenth century. In order to understand a text, ‘one had to discover the actual words of the author; this usually meant extracting them from corrupt manuscripts’.11 The standard (and stubborn) narrative would have us believe that it is at this moment that philologically recuperated presence and invented presence (in the modern sense) split. The work of the editor Thomas Speght was thus seen as fundamentally different from the invention of the anonymous author of The Cobler of Caunterburie (1590), and both were marked out by the extent to which they identified themselves

10

11

This desire for completion finds expression in both Chaucerian manuscripts and Langlandian manuscripts. See Thomas A. Prendergast, ‘John But and the Problem of Langlandian Authority’, Yee? Baw for bokes: Essays in Honor of Hoyt N. Duggan, ed. Michael Calabrese and Stephen Shepherd (Los Angeles, CA, 2013), pp. 67–85. John F. D’Amico, Theory and Practice in Renaissance Textual Criticism (Berkeley, CA, 1988), pp. 7–8.

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as doing different kinds of things.12 One was an attempt to recover the ‘true’ words of the poet and the other was humble imitation. This idea of separating ‘truth’ from ‘fable’ was not only what we would consider an epistemological enterprise but an ethical one that rejected the inventions of the fabling Catholic past for the truth of the Protestant present. Yet, even if this was the prevailing belief about how texts ought to be recuperated, it did not stop editors from subordinating textual concerns to their ideological beliefs – even rewriting texts so they would be more doctrinally acceptable.13 In England, Reformist texts were often altered in order to add to their authority. A text that had connections with Piers Plowman, The Plowman’s Tale (originally perhaps an early-fifteenth-century Wycliffite text), was ‘improved’ in the sixteenth century with a prologue that led it to be included in The Canterbury Tales.14 Hence, the association with Chaucer enhanced the prestige of the doctrine put forth in the work.15 It was in the context of this increasing confluence of the various forms of recovery and the seeming confusion of truth and lying or ‘fable-making’ that a different kind of truth began to emerge. The figure who best embodied this kind of ‘truth’ was Edmund Spenser. Spenser not only asserted that his fictions somehow truthfully recovered a lost past (as I have argued elsewhere), but also asserted that his ability to connect with the spirit of Chaucer could be invoked to demonstrate the legitimacy of his Chaucerian productions. In Book 4 of The Faerie Queene Spenser directly addressed the spirit of the medieval poet: Then pardon, O most sacred happie spirit, That I thy labours lost may thus reuiue, And steale from thee the meede of thy due merit, That none durst euer whilest though wast aliue, And being dead in vaine yet many striue: Ne dare I like, but through infusion sweete Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me suruiue,

12

13 14 15

James Simpson characterizes these inventions as ‘remembered presence’ and provocatively argues that by the 1520s we are left only with ‘philological absence’: ‘Chaucer’s Presence and Absence, 1400–1550’, The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge, 2003), p. 267. See also his ‘Diachronic History and the Shortcomings of Medieval Studies’, Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. Gordon McMullen and David Matthews (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 17–30. Tim Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (Charlottesville, VA, 1994), p. 17. Thomas A. Prendergast, ‘The Work of Robert Langland’, Renaissance Retrospections: Tudor Views of the Middle Ages, ed. Sarah Kelen (Kalamazoo, MI, 2013), pp. 70–92. Andrew N. Wawn, ‘Chaucer, The Plowman’s Tale and Reformation Propaganda: The Testimonies of Thomas Godfray and I Playne Piers’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 56 (1973), 184.



Early Modern Celebrity  191 I follow here the footing of thy feete, That with thy meaning so I may the rather mete.  (Book 4, Canto 2, Stanza 34)16

Initially, Spenser claims that this rewriting of The Squire’s Tale is a ‘revivification’ of Chaucer’s labours and thus signals that his continuation is a kind of tribute.17 But he quickly acknowledges that his Chaucerian production is an attempted theft of Chaucer’s ‘meed of merit’ that is justified only because Chaucer’s spirit lives on in him. Punning on the idea of the metrical foot, Spenser follows in Chaucer’s footsteps – an action that leads him to the poet himself. Spenser’s suggestion had a direct impact on what we would consider the philological side of early modern recuperative efforts, for Thomas Speght invokes this special form of legitimacy by reasserting Spenser’s connection with Chaucer in his 1598 edition: In his Faerie Queene in his discourse of friendship, as thinking himselfe most worthy to be Chaucers friend, for his like naturall disposition that Chaucer had, hee sheweth that none that liued with him, nor none that came after him, durst presume to revive Chaucers lost labours in that unperfite tale of the Squire, but only himselfe: which he had not done, had he not felt (as he saith) the infusion of Chaucers owne sweet spirit, surviving within him.18

Speght reorients Spenser’s original claims so that Spenser becomes the first to dare to revive Chaucer’s lost labours rather than the first who was successful (something that, of course, was not true). He also plays up the affective connection with Chaucer. As Stephanie Trigg argues, Speght focuses on the ways in which this description, with its emphasis on ‘friendship’ and the ‘infusion of Chaucers owne sweet spirit’, enables a recovery of Chaucer’s works – a recovery that depends on the homosocial bonds of the brotherhood of poets, rather than a kind of occulted internalization of the poet wherein Spenser’s productions are enabled by Chaucer’s spiritual presence.19

16 17

18 19

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr with C. Patrick O’Donnell Jr (London, 1987, first published 1978). Spenser’s continuation of The Squire’s Tale has generally been seen as invention in order to supply loss. See, for instance, Craig A. Berrie, ‘“Sundrie Doubts”: Vulnerable Understanding and Dubious Origins in Spenser’s Continuation of The Squire’s Tale’, Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Theresa M. Krier (Gainesville, FL, 1998), pp. 106–27. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of Our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas Speght (London: A. Islip, 1598), STC 5079, sig. c. iii. Speght’s own ventriloquization of Chaucer in an imaginary dialogue at the beginning of the work would suggest that this is so. See Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis, MN, 2002), p. 133, and David Matthews, The Making of Middle English (Minneapolis, MN, 1999), p. 75.

192  Thomas A. Prendergast

This alteration may indicate the very different ways in which Speght viewed his editorial connection with ‘antique poetry’, but it also suggests the emergence of a counter discourse that focuses on similitude rather than an affect-driven sameness. This is not to say that the seventeenth century did not see its share of imitations that laid claim to Chaucerian authority. John Lane’s continuation of The Squire’s Tale in 1616 and the ‘brief moralizing conclusions to The Cook’s Tale and The Squire’s Tale in the 1687 reprint of Speght’s edition both suggest that Chaucerian invention (that is, writing as Chaucer) continued quite late.20 Yet even these two instances fit neatly into a paradigm of invented presence (as Lane makes it very clear that he wrote the continuation) and philological recuperation (as the endings of the two tales in the 1687 Speght were from ‘old’ manuscripts – Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 686 and Selden B. 14). Increasingly, however, poets justified the posthumous adaptation or continuation of works by resurrecting the original poet and externalizing him or her into the work itself as a legitimating threshold figure. It is here, I think, that an ur-culture of celebrity took hold as the poet himself began to make a quasi-appearance in literary works. One of the more famous examples of this phenomenon is Gower’s appearance in Shakespeare’s Pericles: To sing a song that old was sung, From ashes ancient Gower is come; Assuming man’s infirmities, To glad your ear, and please your eyes. It hath been sung at festivals, On ember-eves and holy-ales; And lords and ladies in their lives Have read it for restoratives: The purchase is to make men glorious; Et bonum quo antiquius, eo melius. If you, born in these latter times, When wit’s more ripe, accept my rhymes, And that to hear an old man sing May to your wishes pleasure bring, I life would wish, and that I might Waste it for you, like taper-light.  (Pericles, Act 1, scene 1, lines 1–16)21

This invocation of Gower is a literary resurrection but it is also a meditation on the bodily infirmities that Gower is willing to endure and the life that he is willing to use up ‘like taper-light’ in order to fulfil our wishes and bring us pleasure. We know, of course, that the actor who plays the role can in no way 20 21

Trigg, Congenial Souls, pp. 256n, 138. William Shakespeare, Pericles Prince of Tyre, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York, 2001).



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give authorial legitimacy to the tale, yet the invention makes a difference to its reception. Gower tells us ‘Et bonum quo antiquius, eo melius’ – the older a good thing is, the better it is. And then he immediately addresses us who live ‘in latter times’. He becomes that figure who can usher the old thing into the future because he purportedly existed in between us and Antiochus and sang the ‘song that old was sung’. Yet if this invocation of the medieval in order to justify the recovery of the ancient seems relatively unproblematic here, it led Fletcher and Shakespeare in the prologue to The Two Noble Kinsmen to resurrect Chaucer in order to chastise those who would borrow one of his plots:22 our play … has a noble breeder and a pure A learned, and a poet never went More famous yet ’twixt Po and silver Trent. Chaucer (of all admir’d) the story gives; There constant to eternity it lives. If we let fall the nobleness of this, And the first sound this child hear be a hiss, How will it shake the bones of that good man, And make him cry from under ground, ‘O, fan From me the witless chaff of such a writer That blasts my bays and my fam’d works makes lighter Than Robin Hood!’ This is the fear we bring; For to say truth, it were an endless thing, And too ambitious to aspire to him, Weak as we are, and almost breathless swim In this deep water.  (Prologue, lines 9–25)23

The story here, troped as a child, has been bred by ‘Father’ Chaucer. This displaced paternity is what leads to the ‘fear’ that somehow Fletcher and Shakespeare (who seem to be fostering the story) will awaken Chaucer from his grave by their bad rearing. It is, suggestively enough, Chaucer’s fear that his reputation as laureate will be injured that leads him to ‘cry from under ground’. Fletcher and Shakespeare at once employ and satirize a modesty topos in this prologue (much as Shakespeare gently mocks Gower in Pericles), but there also seems to be a certain level of discomfort with what might be called the early modern ‘misuse’ of Chaucer. This misuse produces an aesthetics of fantastic anxiety in which the ‘original’ poet (the source of all things Chaucerian) is represented as ‘speaking’ from the grave or descending

22

23

David Matthews makes the point that Chaucer’s poetic presence was a good deal more persistent than generally understood (‘Public Ambition, Private Desire and the Last Tudor Chaucer’, Reading the Medieval, ed. McMullen and Matthews, p. 75). The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston, MA, 1974), p. 1642.

194  Thomas A. Prendergast

from Mount Helicon to issue an authoritative correction to those who would threaten his ‘immortality’.

Chaucer v. ‘Chaucer’: Tobacco and the Early Modern Embodiment of Celebrity One might well claim that Chaucer’s appearance in early modern poetry and drama is to be expected. He is, after all ‘Father Chaucer’, the forebear whose acknowledged presence enables poetic production (even if ‘he’ takes issue with what is being produced). But his ventriloquized invocation in another text – an early modern anti-tobacco tract suggests that his resuscitation is something more than homage. Richard Brathwait’s Chaucer’s Incensed Ghost, published in 1617, narrates the descent of Chaucer from Parnassus Hill to take issue with those who have attributed false works to him. The poet is ‘incensed’ we are told, because someone has created a false Chaucer – a ‘Chaucer’ who has ‘fathered’ a tract (now lost) favouring tobacco – a ‘drug’ that leads to both physical and mental infirmity. In 1612, at the height of the tobacco pamphlet wars, William Vaughan came out firmly against King Tobacco and asked smokers to memorize this rhyme: Tobacco, that outlandish weed, It spends the brain and spoils the seed: It dulls the sprite, it dims the sight, It robs a woman of her right.24

At first glance this quatrain’s concerns with the purported effects of ‘drinking’ tobacco (emasculation, failing vision) would seem to be far removed from that poetic father who was styled as the fountainhead of English poetry. Yet what becomes clear in Brathwait’s poem is the extent to which these physical infirmities were tied to symbolic and literary barrenness. As Chaucer’s ghost puts it: Downe by a secret Vault as I descended, Pent in with darknesse save some little ray, Which by a private cranie made his way, By helpe whereof I saw what me offended, Yet found ne meanes to have the fault amended: Fixt to a Post (such was poore Chaucers lot) I found my name to that I never wrot.

24

Much of my discussion of the context of Chaucer’s Incensed Ghost is dependent on Jeffrey Knapp’s excellent ‘Elizabethan Tobacco’, Representations 21 (1988), 26–66; the quotation here is from p. 60.



Early Modern Celebrity  195 And what might be the Subject? no relation Sad, solid, serious, morall or divine, Which sorted with the humours of my time, But a late Negro’s introduced fashion, Who brought his Drugs here to corrupt our Nation. ’Gainst which, because it’s used in excesse, My Muse must mount, that she may it suppresse.25

The false ascription of this work to Chaucer led him to complain, in terms which recall Fletcher and Shakespeare’s language, that someone has made him a father ‘of a brat hee never got’. According to the poet, the illegitimacy of such works is primarily due to the threat of a pharmacological invasion. The result of which is that ‘yee English Moors’ had unclean congress with the ‘Indian weede’ rather than the muse who ‘was fed with purer substance’.26 This supposedly sad state of affairs presumably justifies the mounting of Chaucer’s muse to suppress this unclean habit. And the result is an imagistic presence of Chaucer that is at once confected and also more ‘real’ than the anti-presence of ‘Chaucer’. This somewhat chilling confluence of the issues of race and poetic authority is meant to evoke nostalgia for an earlier period before poetry had been ‘bastardized’. But the structure of the vision also gives voice to an anxiety that this Chaucer has no more authority than a vision of one of the ‘English Moors’. Brathwait’s conjuration of Chaucer to respond to the appropriation of his work has as its basis the very same nature of inspiration. One of the salient features of such anti-tobacco tracts as James I’s A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco and ‘Philaretes’ Work for Chimny-Sweepers is the insistence that tobacco is one of the devil’s ‘toys’.27 This link between tobacco and the demonic is not, perhaps, surprising given the New World (hence pagan) origins of the Indian herb. Even a defender of tobacco such as Nicolas Monardes affirmed that the Indian priests used tobacco as part of their devilish divinations. Yet there were perhaps other reasons why the ‘stinking weed’ (as James I styled it) was thought to be devilish. There was something decidedly unnatural about such a substanceless ‘food’ which one ‘drank’ and which (as contemporary sources reported) seemed to satisfy hunger. It was this inability to fit tobacco comfortably into some natural category (earth, water or fire) that led critics of the weed to assert that it was unnatural, hence not only literally dirty (both defenders and critics thought that it blackened the insides) but also figuratively unclean.

25 26 27

Richard Brathwait, Chaucer’s Incensed Ghost, in The Smoaking Age, or The Man in the Mist, with the Life and Death of Tobacco (London: E. Griffin, 1617), STC 3585, sig. O3r. Ibid., sig. O2v. Knapp, ‘Elizabethan Tobacco’, p. 41.

196  Thomas A. Prendergast

The defenders of tobacco, in particular Roger Marbecke (in his A Defence of Tabacco: With a Friendly Answer to Worke for Chimny-Sweepers) tried to allay such anxieties by focusing on how the fiery aspect of tobacco purged the ‘thick and foggy vapors of gross and earthly substances’; thus it enabled visions that were more divine than demonic.28 But defenders of tobacco were unwilling to afford the courtier with his pipe the same kind of religious ecstasy enjoyed by Monardes’ Indian priests. Hence the disagreement about the nature of the ‘vision’ had to be shifted away from potentially dangerous religious visions to the seemingly safer realm of the poetic vision. If this shift ensured the religious safety of the state, critics of tobacco argued that it threatened the authority of poetry by trivializing the notion of poetic vision. In terms that recollect Shakespeare and Fletcher’s anxieties about their ability to enact a ‘Chaucerian’ tale, William Vaughan claimed that tobacco led numerous ‘gentles’ to ‘recount tales of ROBIN-HOOD, of RHODOMONTING rovers’.29 Indeed, the very pamphlet to which the poem Chaucer’s Incensed Ghost is attached (entitled The Smoaking Age: or the Life and Death of Tobacco) has Pluto telling tobacco that the way to a poet’s nose is through his vanity, and that tobacco need only ‘Humour me these poets, extol their devices tho thou never heardst of any of them; for they love to be tickled’. The result will be that tobacco will ‘Smoak their Intellectuals’ and ‘contaminate their Principles’.30 This contamination comes from the idea that tobacco itself is literally and morally dirty; as John Deacon has a smoker’s wife remark in his 1616 production, Tobacco Tortured, ‘Why dost thou so vainly prefer a vanishing filthy fume before my permanent virtues?’ Tobacco was thought to be ‘that Indian whore’.31 John Taylor specifically brings together the ‘dirty’ habits when he says of the tobacco-taker ‘It is a thing his soul doth most adore / to Live and Love Tobacco and a whore.’32 This association of tobacco with filthy moral habits is almost to be expected – the association (as Thomas Jenner puts it in a popular poem of 1626) of ‘the foul pipe’ with the ‘soul defil’d’ is too allegorically satisfying to be avoided.33 28 29 30 31

32 33

Knapp, ‘Elizabethan Tobacco’, p. 43. William Vaughan, The Spirit of Detraction, Conivred and Convicted (London: W. Stansby and T. Snodham for G. Norton, 1611), STC 24622, sig. A1r. Brathwait, Smoaking Age, sig. M1r. John Deacon, Tobacco Tortured, or, The Filthie Fume of Tobacco Refined (London: R. Field, 1616), STC 6436; William Fennor, The Compters Common-wealth (London: E. Griffin for G. Gibbes, 1617), STC 10781, p. 15. ‘A swarty Indian [who] / Hath played the English Courtesan’ (Philaretes, Work for Chimny-Sweepers [London: T. Ester for T. Bushell, 1602], STC 12571.5, sig. A4) and ‘The Indian Devil, our bawd, witch, whore, man-queller’ (Thomas Scot [1615–16]: see Knapp, ‘Elizabethan Tobacco’, p. 60). Quoted in Knapp, ‘Elizabethan Tobacco’, pp. 68, 60n. Quoted in Jerome E. Brooks, ed., Tobacco: Its History Illustrated by the Books, Manuscripts, and Engravings in the Library of George Arents, Jr., 5 vols (New York, 1937–52), vol. 2, p. 128.



Early Modern Celebrity  197

In his treatise on tobacco, Nicholas Monardes writes that, when the Indian priests ‘drinke of this Tabacco fume, with the vigour and strength whereof, they fall suddenly to the ground, as dead men, remaining so, according to the quantitie of the smoake that they had taken’.34 Philartes echoes Monardes and translates it into an erotic allegory, wherein he says to tobacco, ‘Go charme the Priest and Indian Canniballs, / That Cerimoniously dead sleeping falls, / Flat on the ground, by vertue of thy sent’.35 It is, perhaps, too obvious to point out that ‘dying’, with all of its sexual connotations in the Renaissance, would suggest that the very act of taking tobacco was a kind of intercourse in which one took pleasure. In terms supplied by the critics of tobacco, this intercourse took place with the devil – or, as Philaretes says, ‘Our wit-worne gallants, with the sent of thee, / Sent for the Devill and his companie’. The issue, if any, were bastards, the illegitimate progeny of an illegitimate age.36 As Brathwait suggestively claimed about those poets who live on Parnassus, ‘How should they relish then ought that’s unclean, / or waste their oyle about a Smoaky dream?’37 Those who defended tobacco tended to avoid discussion of the visions which tobacco purportedly gave. Marbecke is an exception, claiming that But being used to clear the brains, and thereby making the mind more able, to come to herself, and the better to exercise her heavenly gifts, and virtues; me think, as I have said I see more cause why we should think it to be a rare gift imparted unto man, by the goodness of God, than to be any invention of the devil.38

Yet even if they avoided discussing the theological roots of the visions and focused on the merely physiological, these defenders could not get away from the idea that tobacco’s ‘heat and dryness’ opposed grossness and thus (as The Breviary of Health puts it) ‘worketh and destroyeth such [rheumatic] humors. and openeth the ways of the spirit / and so the body that is as it were dead hath living’.39 In Chaucer’s Incensed Ghost we might see a critique of this idea that tobacco can bring some genuine vision of the afterworld because, presum34 35 36

37 38 39

Philaretes, Work for Chimny-Sweepers, sig. F2r. Ibid., sig. B1r. Ibid., sig. B1r. Philaretes claims that the ‘Indian Caniball or Priest … Then waking straight, and tells a wonderment, / Of strange events and fearefull visions, / that he had seen in apparitions … giving answeres according to the visions and illusions which they saw whilst they were wrapt in that order. And they interpreted their demaunds as to them seemed best, or as the divell had counselled them, giving continual doubtful answers, in such sort that howsoever they fell out, they might turne it to their purpose, like unto the Oracle of Apollo’ (ibid., sig. F2r). Brathwait, Chaucer’s Incensed Ghost, sig. O3v. Quoted in Knapp, ‘Elizabethan Tobacco’, pp. 58–9. Quoted in ibid., p. 43.

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ably, Brathwait himself eschewed tobacco and conjured Chaucer from the otherworld with the help not of tobacco but of the same muse who helped Chaucer. His vision celebrates a Chaucer who is in one sense a poetic invention but in another is authentic. Indeed this is precisely what Brathwait has the poet claim when he says, ‘Chaucer would think it ill / To plant tobacco on Parnassus hill’.40 Yet if Brathwait conjures Chaucer to condemn that which supposedly aids poetic vision in the early modern period, he also has Chaucer claim that this vision is itself faulty: I impute This to no fate or destiny of mine, But to the barraine Braine-wormes of this time; Whose Muse lesse pregnant, present or acute, Affording nought that with the age can sute, Like to the truant Bee, or lazie drone, Robbe other Bee-hives of their hony-combe.41

His suggestion, then, is that the reason that Chaucer’s name was attached to the praise of tobacco is because the muse is less pregnant and thus is less able to bear a legitimate poetic vision. Thus the only answer is to father on Chaucer a ‘brat he never got’. The irony, if it is not too obvious, is that in order to critique this ‘robbing other Bee-hives of their hony-combe’, Brathwait has presumed to ventriloquize Chaucer and thus lay claim to his voice. The means by which he does so is oddly familiar, for he has a vision in which (if he does not fall as if dead) he visits with the dead and then, much like the Indian priests of Philaretes, reports of ‘strange events and fearful visions’. That this poetic vision so clearly mirrors the vision supposedly given by tobacco, and yet contains a critique of the kind of vision afforded by tobacco, suggests the difficulty of distinguishing between these inspirational phantasies. Brathwait, it is true, avoids the ‘drugs’ which problematize such visions, and he invokes the spectre of Chaucer rather than a fully reanimated poet, but this spectral poetics nonetheless conjures a past that can also be mystically present. It returns us, in other words, to that moment when we encounter the text and know very well that the speaker is not Chaucer, and yet there is a spectral truth in Brathwait’s poem that implicates us in the presence of the poet even as ‘Chaucer’ suggests that analogous visions are false. Ultimately, Brathwait attempts to justify the authenticity of his vision by distinguishing between proper and improper connections with the past. At least initially this argument is enabled by a series of oppositions. True inspiration for the poet derives from the place where poets have traditionally dwelt – Parnassus; false inspiration has its origins in the New World.

40 41

Brathwait, Chaucer’s Incensed Ghost, sig. O3r. Ibid., sig. O3v.



Early Modern Celebrity  199

True poets drink from the ‘crystall streames of Hippocrene’;42 false poets ‘drink’ tobacco. The implication is that the tract that Chaucer disavows has itself been enabled by an illegitimate vision that was the result of tobacco. But Brathwait’s ambitions in this short pamphlet extend beyond a simple dismissal of smoking. In fact, the attack on tobacco is only the occasion for what really concerns him: the true nature of poetic presence and the extent to which that poetic presence is dependent on the presence of the poet. Though his Chaucer may be invented, Brathwait makes the case for a furor poeticus that not only allowed poets access to celestial truths but also allowed writers access to the poets themselves – a move that in invoking an invented presence that is ‘true’ anticipates the celebrity turns of Chaucer in William Guthrie’s series of essays in the eighteenth century, W. R. Lander’s Imaginary Conversations in the nineteenth, and his starring role in the 2001 film A Knight’s Tale.43

42 43

Ibid., sig. O3v. The notion of the furor poeticus is ancient, but see George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), STC 20519, p. 110; William Guthrie, ‘The Apotheosis of Milton’, Gentleman’s Magazine 8 (1738), 232–5, 469, 521–2; 9 (1739), 20–1, 73–5; Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations (London, 1891). For a discussion of how the film-makers of A Knight’s Tale believed that they were ‘channelling’ Chaucer, see Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg, ‘The Negative Erotics of Medievalism’, PostHistorical Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Federico and Liz Scala (New York, 2009), pp. 117–37.

11 Ancient Chaucer: Temporalities of Fame Jamie C. Fumo

A

lle thyng hath tyme’ – pliant wisdom, derived from the Book of ­Ecclesiastes (3:1), that is wielded in Chaucer’s poetry by everyone from an opportunistic fiend to an irreverent merchant to an overzealous go-between.1 Like these characters, Chaucer as poet contemplates the power of time and appropriates it for his own ends. The present essay is concerned with the makings of Chaucerian time: namely, time as a shaping force of authorship and a conduit of reception. It explores Chaucer’s engagement with the poetic past – ‘olde tyme’ – and his own assimilation into a new poetic past after his lifetime, proposing that these pasts creatively intersect. More specifically, it considers one strand of Chaucer’s early modern reception that in turn illuminates the poet’s own attention to his incipient celebrity as an English author: the hermeneutic of antiquity. The reciprocal status of antiquity and celebrity, I argue, suggestively informs the early reception of Chaucer, his construction (and self-construction) as a vernacular author, and his own poetic figuration of authorial renown in relation to the passage of time. By the second half of the sixteenth century, Chaucer and his language were regarded as ‘ancient’, a word attached prominently to the poet in the title of Thomas Speght’s monumental Renaissance editions of The Workes of Our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer (1598, 1602; ‘Ancient, Learned, & Excellent’ in 1687).2 Scholars have emphasized the commercial and nationalist motivations behind the early modern alignment of Chaucer with the luminaries of classical tradition, the proclamation of Chaucer’s auctoritas as progenitor of English poetry, and the effects of these trends in learned mediation of Chaucer’s now-distant (and, through apocryphal accre-

‘

1

2

See The Friar’s Tale, line 1475, The Merchant’s Tale, line 1972, Troilus and Criseyde, Book 3, line 855. All citations of Chaucer’s poetry are from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1988). A detailed account of these three editions is provided by Eleanor Prescott Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographic Manual (New York, 1933), pp. 122–8, and Derek Pearsall, ‘Thomas Speght’, Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK, 1984), pp. 71–92.

202  Jamie C. Fumo

tions, much-expanded) works.3 The complexity of the ‘ancient Chaucer’ tradition has not fully been confronted, however, and the following pages pursue several suggestive paradoxes informing early modern efforts to render Chaucer both classical and vernacular, ancient and childlike, old and new. Turning, thereafter, from reception history – biographical and editorial fashionings of Chaucer and remarks on Chaucer’s antiquity by his early admirers and critics – to Chaucer’s own self-reckoning as a poet contending with an ancient legacy and a myth of poetic fame, the last two sections build on newer methodologies associated with ‘career criticism’ and intertextuality to reveal how a reciprocity of antiquity and celebrity is inscribed in Chaucer’s poetry itself. Chaucer’s striking concern with his own poetic biography, manifest in his continual efforts to situate his artistic contributions in time, thus intersects with chronographic trends that emerge in the course of his early modern reception. The Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale figures centrally in the last stages of this argument, supplying a focal meditation by Chaucer on his own fame as it is epitomized by a poetic relationship to ‘olde tyme’ (line 50), a phrase used by the Man of Law to situate Chaucer’s juvenilia retrospectively. Simultaneously and provocatively, this phrase aligns the poet with ‘Ovide’, whose ‘Episteles’ here are themselves designated ‘ful olde’ (lines 54–5). Resonances between ‘olde tyme’ and authorial renown also surface in certain of Chaucer’s pre-Canterbury Tales literary endeavours, further exemplifying the significance held by Ovid for Chaucer’s own reflections on authorship and fame. By attending to these imaginative conjunctions, and particularly the relevance of Chaucer’s Ovidianism as it pertains to fame, we can better appreciate how his poetry shapes for itself a historical consciousness animated by a clash of antiquity and belatedness – discursive categories that re-emerge in Chaucer’s posture of influence in later periods as an English vernacular author of ‘classical’ consequence.

Chaucer’s Antique Celebrity Chaucer notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene, and contemptible, he owes his celebrity, merely to his antiquity, which he does not deserve so well as Pierce Plowman, or Thomas of Ercildoune. (Lord Byron, ‘List of the different Poets …’, 1807)4 3

4

See especially Tim William Machan, ‘Speght’s Works and the Invention of Chaucer’, Text 8 (1995), 145–70; Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 9–52; Kathleen Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville, FL, 2001), pp. 44–87; Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis, MN, 2002), pp. 109–43; and Andrew Higl, ‘Printing Power: Selling Lydgate, Gower, and Chaucer’, Essays in Medieval Studies 23 (2006), 57–77. Lord Byron, ‘List of the different Poets, dramatic or otherwise, who have distinguished



Ancient Chaucer  203

To study the development of Chaucer’s fame in the early history of his reception is to step into a time warp. Biographical narratives, such as those advanced seminally by John Leland, John Bale and Speght in the ‘Life’ prefacing his edition, tended to position Chaucer as a nationalistic point of origin for English by locating the poet not in his time but ahead of it, publicly invested in trends of Italian humanism and poetic succession rather than native minstrelsy, endowing the legitimizing interests of a political line – the Lancastrians – that achieved power only one year before his death. We postmodern critics too, as Helen Cooper reminds us, perpetuate longstanding patterns of reception by reading Chaucer, with varying degrees of consciousness, ‘for our own agendas, as a forebear of our interests’.5 Until fairly recently, a defining paradox of Chaucer’s reception has been that this pre-eminent medieval English poet has been valued for what is not ‘medieval’ about him – hence his appropriation in the sixteenth century, for example, as a proto-Protestant, in the nineteenth century as a proto-Romantic, and in the twentieth century as a proto-novelist, all personae that Chaucer’s poetry can at least superficially support, unlike that of his less historically tractable contemporaries. The appropriation of Chaucer’s chameleon-like authorial fame served a variety of subsequent cultural agendas; so, for that matter, did the counter-history of critique that at certain junctures impugned Chaucer’s language, metre and subject matter as benighted or undignified. Chaucer’s fame, however, remained a constant: whether lauded or denigrated, his name was borne promiscuously ‘in honde’ (House of Fame, line 1877) even when not handled with care.6 Fame, in Chaucer’s reception history, inhabits an ambiguous space between nascent discourses of celebrity on the one hand and a poetics of dusty age on the other. If the manuscript pages, even the very language of the ‘olde famous Poete Chaucer’ (as E. K. identified him in his preface to Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender) evinced the ravages of ‘cursed Eld the cankerworme

5

6

their respective languages by their productions’ (1807). This list appears in Byron’s memorandum book, dated 30 November 1807; quoted from Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford and New York, 1991), p. 3. See also Caroline Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357–1900, 3 vols (New York, 1960), vol. 2, p. 29. Helen Cooper, ‘Chaucerian Representation’, New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Cambridge, 2003), p. 10. Fuller reflection on this point is supplied in Trigg, Congenial Souls. This point is advanced vividly by Helen Cooper, ‘Poetic Fame’, Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford, 2010), pp. 361–78, who observes an early modern ‘cultural saturation with Chaucer’ whereby ‘[f]ar from the processes of canon formation setting the seal of approval on him and offering him entry, there was a scramble to enlist his fame’ for diverse causes (p. 365).

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of writs’ (Spenser, Faerie Queene, Book 4, Canto 2, Stanza 33),7 the dissemination of Chaucer’s name and works, bound to one another in ways that were foundational for modern structures of canonicity,8 exemplified the potential of new technologies of print production. Chaucer’s formidable cultural capital, founded in part on the sheer power of name recognition if not actual reading or credible ascription, was tapped by various new markets, even as his historical remoteness figured both as a liability (Chaucer’s poetry as outmoded) and a selling point (Chaucer as progenitor of English letters). The grand récit of Chaucer’s reception, with its familiar signposts marking the shadowy path from early praise and appropriation of Chaucer as rhetorician, through the early modern dilation of his canon, up to the development of professional criticism and the modern Chaucer industry, has largely evaded eccentric comments such as those of Byron, quoted at the beginning of this section. Caroline Spurgeon, writing nearly a century ago, declared Byron’s censure ‘well known’, but I have been hard pressed to find substantial engagements with this unflattering statement in Chaucer scholarship, apart from a rather literal application of it to a reading of Chaucerian obscenity.9 The acerbic tone of Byron’s dismissal of Chaucer as overrated is rather more extreme than the view, associated with a previous generation, that Chaucer’s poetry is of rude or outmoded quality, and it contrasts sharply with the later enthusiasms of Leigh Hunt and John Keats. While one should perhaps not place too much stock in the nineteen-year-old Byron’s juvenile, if trenchant, criticism of Chaucer, included in a list that assesses his poetic forebears’ merits and deficiencies, his remark does resonate with his general indifference towards Chaucer in his mature poetry (the occasional medievalism of which owes more to Spenser than to Chaucer); it also nods at the designation of Chaucer as both ‘olde’ and ‘famous’ already discussed.10 Indeed, Byron damns Chaucer with faint praise: immediately preceding the passage under consideration, he casts the poet as ‘sometimes spoken of, rarely read, and never with advantage’; his possibly mischievous fondness

7

8 9

10

The Shepheardes Calender is quoted from Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London and New York, 1999), p. 25. The edition of the Faerie Queene used is Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr with C. Patrick O’Donnell, Jr (London, 1987; first published 1978). See Machan, ‘Speght’s Works and the Invention of Chaucer’, pp. 149–51. In Laura Kendrick, Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in The Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, 1988), p. 21. Spurgeon’s remark appears in Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, vol. 1, p. lx. In a letter to John Murray dated 20 January 1819, Byron derides a reading public still enamoured of ‘the Bath Guide[,] Little’s poems – Prior – & Chaucer – to say nothing of Fielding & Smollett’ (Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols [Cambridge, MA, 1973–82], vol. 6, p. 94). A later letter, to Douglas Kinnaird on 26 April 1821, more positively associates Chaucer with advanced age (in ibid., vol. 8, pp. 101–2).



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for Langland and the thirteenth-century Scottish bard Thomas the Rhymer, which further muddies the waters, I leave to other scholars to parse. The irony of Byron, poet of scandal, charging Chaucer with obscenity is particularly rich, as is that of the very young, little-known Byron singling out the very old, well-known Chaucer for scorn. (Interestingly, Byron elsewhere defends Don Juan against moral censure by arguing that it contains nothing ‘so strong as in Ariosto – or Voltaire – or Chaucer’.)11 His apparent defensiveness, in the early days of his own poetic career, regarding Chaucer’s celebrity cuts yet closer to the quick if we bear in mind that ‘celebrity’, in the modern sense of the term, is a cultural phenomenon that Byron’s career has been held to exemplify and in many ways construct. Far from proceeding from a recognition of any ‘deep privatized subjectivity’ rendered publicly magnetic,12 Chaucer’s celebrity rested on multiple forms of ideological utility, boosted by an imputation of unbelonging in his own age that made him a potential compatriot to others. Thus Byron, whose own courting of celebrity would rest on a cult of personality, regards Chaucer as a wooden construction: famous simply because he is old, his renown no more than a reflex of his longevity. The sentiment is a kind of farewell to the classical notion of fame as the reward due, in a secular eschatology, to that which endures over time. Byron’s yoking of celebrity and antiquity is suggestive for at least two reasons. The first is the fact that in Chaucer’s own time these qualities in concert formed a prerequisite of literary importance: ‘new’, un-established writers had to masquerade as or channel ‘old’, well-known ones in order to be considered authoritative, as Chaucer’s use of Lollius illustrates. Second, Byron’s value-judgement interestingly reverses the usual relationship between antiquity and celebrity claimed by Chaucer’s admirers, who, beginning in the sixteenth century, maintained not that Chaucer’s antiquity engendered his fame, but that his fame made him ancient; that his widespread literary renown, in other words, earned him placement among the classical greats. Taking the next logical step from William Thynne’s modelling of Chaucer’s Workes on the precedent of the Latin ‘opera’, a titular distinction formerly reserved for classical authors,13 Speght’s edition enshrined Chaucer as a vernacular classic to be venerated, his fame borne up by praise from various luminaries in the prefatory matter, his learning highlighted by multiple levels of apparatus (textual, lexical and heraldic). Continuing this trend of classici11 12

13

Letter to Count Giuseppino Albrizzi, dated 5 January 1819, in ibid., vol. 6, p. 91. This, according to Tom Mole, ‘Lord Byron and the End of Fame’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (2008), 347, is a defining feature of modern notions of celebrity that took shape around Byron’s career; the point is developed more fully in Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke, 2007). Cooper, ‘Chaucerian Representation’, p. 13.

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zation, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender inserted itself in a respected authorial lineage by conflating Chaucer with Virgil in the person of Tityrus.14 Other attempts to assimilate Chaucer into a humanist vision of literary history, in which he could share the cultural prestige of the classical auctores, were legion. The business of fame was frequently inscribed into the classicization of Chaucer: the beginning of E. K.’s preface to the Shepheardes Calender, for instance, segues from Chaucer, the ‘olde famous Poete’, to Spenser as ‘this our new Poete’, predicting that ‘soone … his name shall come into the knowledg of men, and his worthines be sounded in the tromp of Fame’; in so doing, it furtively works against the grain of the Calender itself, as Rebeca Helfer has observed, ‘to substitute the “new Poete” for the “old Poete” as England’s Virgil’.15 Similarly, Sir Francis Kynaston’s 1635 translation of Books I and II of Troilus and Criseyde into Latin – perhaps the boldest humanist appropriation of Chaucer – is framed by a series of tributes in Latin and English which celebrate the resurrection of Chaucer from unintelligibility into a new fame to be shared by his translator, for whom one prefatory verse asks the medieval poet to ‘call thine Eagle downe to raise his [Kynaston’s] Name / From Troilus vp to the Howse of Fame’.16 Such audacious efforts to forge a discourse of English antiquity – a ‘classical vernacular tradition’ with Chaucer as an English Homer at its head – were inevitably riddled with paradox.17 Byron again offers a tart antidote to certain cultural complacencies when he points out, in his 1811 Hints from Horace (a stiffly Augustan poem that was published posthumously in 1831), that ‘our good Fathers never bent their brains / To heathen Greek, content with native strains’ such as the ‘quaint and careless’ ditties of Chaucer, who far from being the English Homer is more of an English anti-Homer, unable to read the bard himself.18 Early modern authors who did more convention14

15 16

17

18

For closer study of this conjunction, see Pask, Emergence of the English Author, and Patrick Cheney, ‘“Novells of his devise”: Chaucerian and Virgilian Career Paths in Spenser’s Februarie Eclogue’, European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto, 2002). Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 25. Rebeca Helfer, Spenser’s Ruins and the Art of Recollection (Toronto, 2012), p. 74. This verse, by William Barker, is in the unpaginated prefatory section of Geoffrey Chaucer, Amorum Troili et Creseidæ libri duo priores Anglico-Latini, trans. Sir Francis Kynaston (Oxford: Iohannes Lichfield, 1635), STC 5097, reproduced in Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, vol. 1, p. 208. The phrase is from Higl, ‘Printing Power’, p. 68. The notion of Chaucer as an English Homer was popularized by the accomplished humanist Roger Ascham (1515–68). Derek Brewer notes, ‘The comparison with Homer became a mid-sixteenth-century commonplace, though B. Googe in 1565 substituted the more primitive “olde Ennius”’ (Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols [London, 1978]), vol. 1, pp. 99–100. Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford, 1980–93), vol. 1, pp. 304–5 (lines 423–4, 428). See also Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, vol. 2, p. 52.



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ally credit Chaucer with the prestige of antiquity afforded him poetic peace only when, like the hag in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, he demonstrated the power to shapeshift between old and young. For instance, the Cambridge humanist Francis Beaumont, in a letter included in the prefatory matter of Speght’s Workes, commends his friend for summoning the ‘antient speeches’ of Chaucer magically to recover ‘Chaucer both aliue again and yong again’.19 The Preface to John Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) supplies what may be the fullest record of such paradox, depicting a Chaucer who, despite the apparent distinctions of the collection’s title, vacillates ambiguously between ancient and modern. Dryden, comparing Chaucer with Ovid, assumes the former’s status as a modern author; yet, in the same breath, he presents him as an ‘old English poet’ with an ‘old Language’ deserving of ‘Veneration for Antiquity’ and hence requiring modernization. Chaucer, Dryden famously declares, is the ‘Father of English Poetry’, just as Homer and Virgil sired Greek and Latin letters; yet, paradoxically, Father Chaucer is simultaneously a child, having ‘liv’d in the Infancy of our Poetry’.20 On the basis of such evidence, Barrett Kalter argues that ‘[m]ore than any other English poet, Chaucer raised questions about the proper place of the past in modernity’. Even though Chaucer, at the turn of the eighteenth century, was deemed a modern, he was remote in a way that ‘recapitulat[ed] the division of ancient and modern within the modern category of English itself’, hence his treatment as an ancient requiring antiquarian editorial reconstruction or, alternatively, creative modernization.21 Even when Chaucer’s language was regarded as antiquated, its relative proximity offered a corrective to neat temporalities, highlighting the provisional nature of modernity itself. Chaucer’s status as an ancient modern, so to speak, registers darkly in a remark on the endurance of ‘modern rhymes’ in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711). Building on the rhetoric of medieval mortality lyric, Pope observes that time no longer ensures a lasting name: ‘Now Length of Fame (our second Life) is lost, / … And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be’ – unintelligibility (or irrelevance) being a fate worse than death.22 These shifting constructions of time which mediate Chaucer’s reception history are productively disorienting, and the present essay aims to replicate this 19 20 21

22

Quoted in Brewer, Chaucer, vol. 1, p. 137. For further context, see Pask, Emergence of the English Author, pp. 36–8. John Dryden, A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford, 1987), pp. 552–70. See also Trigg, Congenial Souls, p. 150. Barrett Kalter, Modern Antiques: The Material Past in England, 1660–1780 (Lewisburg, PA, 2012), pp. 71, 106. For a productive discussion of Chaucerian valences of antiquity and modernity, see Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 1–16. Alexander Pope, Poems, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols (London and New Haven, CT, 1951– 69), vol. 1, p. 293, lines 480, 484. See also Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, vol. 1, pp. 310–11.

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effect by now moving backward chronologically, to consider Chaucer’s own imaginative shaping of time and fame. The malleability of time as a poetic construct in Chaucer’s works, we shall find, gives scope to his confection of a literary career.

The Poet as Timekeeper Prudence, allas, oon of thyne eyen thre Me lakked alwey, er that I come here! On tyme ypassed wel remembred me, And present tyme ek koud ich wel ise, But future tyme, er I was in the snare, Koude I nat sen; that causeth now my care. (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 5, lines 744–9)

Ancient as its mood may be, there hardly exists a more poignant formulation than Criseyde’s of the modern cliché that hindsight is 20/20. Ironically, Criseyde recognizes this as a principle of the future, but actually it is a function – an over-determined one, at that – of the literary past, since we all know the urgency of the doomed heroine’s error even before she commits it. This fraught complaint, spoken by the short-sighted daughter of a soothsayer, opens a window onto the complexity of Chaucer’s approach to time as a matter of historical consciousness, acutely developed in his attribution of specific temporalities to ancient and contemporary worlds, as well as the demarcation of time’s antithesis in eternity, the dispensation of salvation history. Moreover, time functioned for Chaucer as a powerful poetic modulator. He frequently rhymes ‘tyme’ with ‘ryme’, associating time-keeping with poem-making: he presents the array of pilgrims in the General Prologue while he has ‘tyme and space’ (line 35); he is accosted by the Host partway through Sir Thopas for wasting ‘tyme’ with his ‘ryme’ (lines 931–2); and at the end of The Book of the Duchess he documents the act of putting his dream ‘in ryme’ through a ‘processe of tyme’ (lines 1331–2). Fear of losing time by providing unnecessary detail rhetorically accelerates many a Chaucerian narrative even while the act of composition is framed, most prominently in the Prologue of The Second Nun’s Tale, as a constructive filling of time, an antidote to idleness. All this has led, fittingly and a bit ironically, to Chaucer’s reputation in later periods as a timeless poet, a writer who not only managed time but conquered it through his enrolment in a canon, insulated from all the Harry Baillys (or Lady Fames) who would say that the poet’s time is up. Even as, in our own historical moment, the English literary canon has been in many ways deconstructed – while the detachment from history assumed by canonical greatness has been rendered critically suspect – Chaucer’s uncanny timelessness has resurfaced in counter-critical movements such as Baba Brinkman’s



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rap Canterbury Tales and Brantley L. Bryant’s Chaucer Blog, both of which animate a nonlinear and contrapuntal relationship between past and present, showing Chaucer’s purchase on time as in flux, negotiable and trans-historical rather than fixed or completed.23 Chaucerian temporality invites consideration not only from the perspective of reception history but also of Chaucer’s poetry in its own time and place. The most salient treatment of this topic to date remains that of Lee Patterson in his powerful essay ‘“What Man Artow?”: Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee’. According to Patterson, Chaucer’s defining authorial position is that of the child; in a variety of ways, the poet ‘uses childhood to stage a problematic central to the act of writing’.24 Patterson’s construction of childhood functions largely outside the bounds of ordinary temporality and is epitomized by Harry Bailly’s characterization of Chaucer-the-pilgrim in the Prologue to Sir Thopas as ‘elvysshe’ – a word that evokes an otherworldly mixture of the very young and the very old, the childlike and the ancient. Indeed, one significant strand of Chaucer’s reception, particularly in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, is as a children’s author; Steve Ellis, building on Patterson’s insights, has remarked that the ‘“Children’s Chaucer” genre is interestingly related to the idea of Chaucer himself as essentially a child, or as proceeding from a period in literary history of childish immediacy and unsophistication’.25 At the same time, another temporal dimension of authorship vies with elvish childhood in Chaucer’s poetry: inglorious middle age. If Chaucer often affects a childish perspective, or one reflective of children’s genres, one can easily enumerate the instances in which his self-presentation evokes a man who is washed-up, belated, past his prime or cynically experienced. With a flick of the wrist, this Chaucer intuitively transforms Boccaccio’s youthful cousin Pandaro into the peripatetic uncle Pandarus – and, like Pandarus, Chaucer would have us believe that he too ‘hoppe[s] alwey byhynde’ (Troilus and Criseyde, Book 2, line 1107), gleaning here and there. As J. A. Burrow and Mark Lambert have argued, Chaucer’s artistic sympathies often lie with the Theseus-type figure: the character who has found a more-or-less happy medium between young and old, sympathetic but not beholden to the

23

24

25

Baba Brinkman, The Rap Canterbury Tales (Vancouver, 2006); Michael Uebel, ‘Opening Time: Psychoanalysis and Medieval Culture’, Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages, ed. Eileen A. Joy et al. (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 269–94; Brantley L. Bryant, Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media (Basingstoke, 2010). Patterson’s essay, first published in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989), 117–75, was reprinted in Lee Patterson, Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in The Canterbury Tales (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 97–128, from which it is quoted here, at p. 122. Steve Ellis, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis, MN, 2000), p. 48; see further Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (Jefferson, NC, and London, 2004).

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excesses of either extreme.26 This is the Chaucer who, in one of history’s greatest instances of periphrasis, stated his age at the Scrope-Grosvenor trial in 1386 as ‘del age de xl ans et plus’ [forty years and more of age] and, in the frustratingly difficult-to-date House of Fame, quipped that he was ‘now to old’ to learn about the stars (line 995).27 The Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale brings to the fore several of these dimensions of temporality. A crucial moment in the textual ontology of The Canterbury Tales, this Introduction registers the ceremony of timekeeping in the macrocosmic framework of the pilgrimage, the passing of time in the microcosm of each human life and the problems of artistic time raised by the traces of unsmoothed revision in the Man of Law’s promise to tell a tale in prose. The Man of Law’s Tale Introduction, textually fraught in its own right, is also acutely concerned with texts and their formation, as is the tale it prefaces, in which various texts – stories, letters, the book of the heavens – purport to represent the truth of Constance. It is interesting to observe that the attempt in this Introduction to fix Chaucer’s canon – which must be at least partly in earnest – is featured in a single-tale fragment which raises numerous pressing problems for the textual coherence of The Canterbury Tales itself. Amid these concerns, Chaucer reflexively evokes his own fame and contemplates the shape of his canon as a function of temporality, and he does so with the help of Ovid, that most precociously ‘modern’ of ancient poets. It is to this phenomenon that the final section of this essay turns.

Framing Fame: Chaucer and Ovid Ovides grans en ta poëterie…  [A great Ovid in your poetry…] (Eustache Deschamps, Autre balade, c.1385)28

Dryden’s observation of a deep poetic affinity between Chaucer and Ovid, anticipated by Deschamps’ compliment above, has been corroborated many times over by modern students of Chaucer’s Ovidianism such as Edgar Finley Shannon, John Fyler and Michael Calabrese. Ovid’s value to Chaucer

26

27

28

J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain Poet (London, 1971), pp. 126, 129; Mark Lambert, ‘Troilus, Books I–III: A Criseydan Reading’, Essays on Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Mary Salu (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 122–5. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, eds, Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford, 1966), p. 370. See Kathryn L. Lynch, ‘Dating Chaucer’, Chaucer Review 42 (2007), 16, for an instructive meditation on problems of dating The House of Fame and the other dream-visions in light of the ‘braided complexity’ of Chaucer’s compositional chronology. Deschamps’ poem of praise of Chaucer is quoted from Brewer, Chaucer, vol. 1, pp. 40–1, from which translations are also taken.



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did not end, however, with strategies of narration or a serviceable body of material: the Roman poet also provided a forum for authorial self-reflection, through which Chaucer could articulate the nature and trajectory of his career as a poet, both its past and its future. In the Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale, Ovid figures as an ancient counterpart of Chaucer as a poetic chronicler of ‘loveris up and doun’ (line 53), who, despite his belatedness, outpaces his classical predecessor in sheer productivity: against Ovid’s sole book acknowledged here (the ‘Episteles’, line 55), Chaucer has produced too many to keep track of (‘if he have noght seyd hem … / In o book, he hath seyd hem in another’, lines 51–2). The catalogue of Chaucer’s works presented in this Introduction, like the lists contained in the Prologue of The Legend of Good Women and the Retraction, is inscribed in a legal context; advanced somewhat tendentiously by a fast-talking lawyer, it recalls the one contested by defence and prosecution in The Legend and anticipates ­Chaucer’s self-reckoning for Judgement Day at the end of The Canterbury Tales. The Man of Law’s catalogue is noteworthy not only as a retrospective that consolidates (and perhaps even projects, if we accept Kathryn L. Lynch’s speculation that it may include works still in planning) Chaucer’s corpus, but also as a strategic positioning of this corpus against late-medieval literary competition, namely John Gower’s Confessio amantis.29 My interest here is less with the Introduction’s evocation of the contemporary poetic relationship between Gower and Chaucer, which has been much studied, than with its fashioning of an association between Chaucer and Ovid that is also necessarily competitive – and, as such, less transparent than readers of this passage tend to assume.30 The Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale can be approached by way of the scholarly model of ‘career criticism’, a relatively new branch of literary study that is distinct from older forms of biographical criticism. Philip Hardie and Helen Moore define career criticism as a methodology that

29

30

Lynch, ‘Dating Chaucer’, p. 6. For an overview of possible cross-references to Gower’s English story collection in this part of The Canterbury Tales, see Patricia J. Eberle’s explanatory notes to The Man of Law’s Tale in the Riverside Chaucer, pp. 854–6. The place of Gower in Chaucer’s construction of his literary career is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is worth noting that the analogy with Ovid in the Man of Law’s remarks on Chaucer’s corpus suggests that Chaucer not only positions his love poetry against Gower’s (through his allusion to incestuous narratives in the Introduction, lines 77–89) but also asserts a distinction between his and Gower’s identities as Ovidian poets specifically. On the topic of the two poets’ contrasting forms of Ovidianism, see Kathryn L. McKinley’s insightful recent essay, ‘Gower and Chaucer: Readings of Ovid in Late Medieval England’, Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson and Kathryn L. McKinley (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 198–230, and see also A. J. Minnis, ‘De vulgari auctoritate: Chaucer, Gower and the Men of Great Authority’, Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. R. F. Yeager, English Literary Studies Monograph Series 51 (Victoria, BC, 1991), pp. 36–74.

212  Jamie C. Fumo takes as its starting point the totality of an author’s textual output and asks how that oeuvre as a whole shapes itself, both in its intratextual relationships (what kinds of beginnings, middles, and ends are traced in the pattern of an oeuvre), and in the claims it makes to reflect or mould extratextual conditions of production (whether located in the personal history of the author, or in the relationship of the author to political and cultural structures of power and authority).31

In conjunction with intratextual and extratextual dynamics, career criticism assumes that intertextual forces also significantly affect an author’s representation of his or her literary development, insofar as prior career models – the Virgilian rota from pastoral to georgic to epic being one prominent example – supply precedents and contrasts for the self-conscious shaping of literary careers. The bulk of criticism in this field has gravitated, for natural reasons, towards classical literature and the Italian and English Renaissances, which offer an abundant variety of intersecting and proliferating career models. Medieval English poetry does not fit neatly into any of these models: the largely anonymous texture of literary production in England up to the fifteenth century; the absence, in the slippery world of manuscript transmission, of the declarative power of print culture; the nascent state of the English vernacular as a medium amenable to auctoritas and hence authorship; and the dominance of hagiography, rather than individualized experience, as an authoritative structure for life-writing have all resulted in an understanding of medieval English poetic careers, articulated as such, as marginal, undeveloped or erratic. Kevin Pask, who has written astutely of the construction of Chaucer as a poet with a documentable and variously malleable ‘life’ in the early modern folio editions and antiquarian records, stresses the Renaissance fabrication of this ‘life’ as apart from Chaucer’s own recurrent disavowals of authority and his flippant stance on the integrity of his works, topoi that emerge in his appeals to a compiler pose and in his (perhaps coy) inability to remember the names of all his works even as he retracts them at the end of The Canterbury Tales.32 Chaucer’s ostensible deficiencies here result, for Hardie and Moore, in a ‘notable lack of an English poetic career model to rival those of Virgil, Horace and Ovid’.33 A rather different view, advanced by Robert R. Edwards, holds that teleological and hierarchical models of career development assumed by other periods must be set aside in order to recognize the more eclectic, dynamic forms of literary association that constitute medieval authorship. In Edwards’ reading, programmes of genealogy and

31 32 33

Philip Hardie and Helen Moore, eds, Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception (Cambridge, 2010), p. 1. Pask, Emergence of the English Author, pp. 9–52. Hardie and Moore, Classical Literary Careers, p. 10.



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succession structure the ‘politics of influence’ through which authors such as Chaucer and Lydgate self-consciously shape their poetic careers by building from classical and Italian precedents.34 In spite of these constraints, it is nonetheless possible to grant Chaucer a significant role in the formation of notions of an English literary career. Even given the fluidity of manuscript culture and the inchoate sense of vernacular canonicity within which he worked, Chaucer names himself on two occasions in his poetry (House of Fame, line 729; Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale, line 47), attaches his writings to his authorial reputation in several other instances, and includes various self-catalogues, such as the one in the Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale, that explicitly address the sequence of his works and their relation to one another. In other words, Chaucer provides several key ingredients of ‘career autography’.35 We should not underestimate the significance of these moments, particularly taken together, simply because many of them appear in ironic or otherwise poetically fraught contexts. Indeed, Chaucer’s authorial self-abasement, instead of functioning straightforwardly as a de-authorizing gesture, so clearly emerges as a literary pose that it is hard to ignore its potential to shape his poetic career advantageously. For example, when in the Retraction Chaucer draws a blank on ‘many another book, if they were in my remembrance’ (line 1087), he identifies himself with the very prolificacy quipped about, in a different context, by the Man of Law as an image of his capacious authorship. This surfeit, then, obstructs the imaginative expurgation of Chaucer’s canon by virtue of its very evasiveness, prompting early modern readers and editors not only to preserve that canon but to add to it works that could moonlight as those which Chaucer conveniently forgot. Chaucer’s own model of accomplishment defies expectations of linearity and audacity shaped by our inherited cultural assumptions regarding the ‘life of the poet’; instead, it is haunted by displacement, self-criticism and recursion.36 Far from being impediments to literary career construction, these vexations strikingly anchor Chaucer’s poetic autography in a career model identified with Ovid, who challenged the stylized discipline of the Virgilian rota with a poetic life-narrative that rested

34

35

36

Robert R. Edwards, ‘Medieval Literary Careers: The Theban Track’, European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto, 2002), p. 107. This phrase is taken from Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie, ‘The Ovidian Career Model: Ovid, Gallus, Apuleius, Boccaccio’, Classical Literary Careers, ed. Hardie and Moore, p. 65. In the study whose title is echoed in this phrase, Lawrence Lipking gathers such expectations under the rubric of ‘a faith in greatness’; the (mostly post-Enlightenment) poets he considers set out ‘to become great poets by achieving great poetic careers’ (The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers [Chicago, IL, and London, 1981], p. xi).

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on a principle of ‘career re-scription and re-vision’ formed by the ‘uncertainties, recapitulations and reversals’ of a corpus reconfigured by exile.37 It is my contention that Ovid, one of the very founding fathers of Fame – as The House of Fame reminds us when it underscores the Metamorphoses as source for the location of Fame’s palace (line 712) – is pivotal to Chaucer’s own thinking about fame, and about himself as famous. Similarly, Ovid figures evocatively, as we have already noticed and will further consider, in articulations of Chaucer’s fame as an honorary ‘ancient’ in the centuries after his death. I will now approach these points through a closer reading of the Introduction of the Man of Law’s Tale, which might be characterized as an exercise in self-reception: offering a ‘reception’ of Chaucer, paradoxically, by a character of his own creation, this Introduction helps establish a cult of renown for the poet precisely by treating his fame as a given. Chaucer, in the Man of Law’s telling, is a poet whom we have all heard of, and have heard rather too much from – hence the wonderfully anticlimactic irony of the Host’s later query to a reclusive Chaucer, ‘“What man artow?”’ (Prologue to Sir Thopas, line 695), and his subsequent impeachment of Chaucer’s poetic efforts, of which Byron’s remark is a distant (and ironic) echo. In this Introduction, Chaucer fashions a posture of influence as an English vernacular author, as I have argued elsewhere, in the very motion of articulating an analogy between himself and Ovid as poets.38 To do this, he reflects (with the Man of Law as grudging guide) on the topography of his literary career. Shortly before comparing Chaucer’s love poetry with Ovid’s Heroides, the Man of Law states that Chaucer wrote stories about lovers ‘of olde tyme, as knoweth many a man’ (Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale, line 50, my emphasis). This observation both attaches a lexicon of fame (namely, that which is widely known) to Chaucer’s output as a love poet and implicitly aligns Chaucer with Ovid, whose ‘Episteles … been ful olde’ (line 55, my emphasis). Although, on one level, the Man of Law must by ‘olde tyme’ simply mean ‘long ago’, as would be consistent with his attribution of particular material to Chaucer ‘in youthe’ (line 57), this is a loaded phrase in context. Not only does it implicitly associate Chaucer’s juvenilia with 37

38

On these aspects of the Ovidian career model, see Hardie and Moore, Classical Literary Careers, pp. 12, 16. Barchiesi and Hardie, ‘The Ovidian Career Model’, pp. 59–88, argue that Boccaccio programmatically appropriates the Ovidian career as a model for his own, which both repeats and corrects it. Chaucer’s appropriation of the Ovidian career model, in my view, is less programmatic but just as significant as Boccaccio’s; indeed, this may be yet another way that Boccaccio mediated Chaucer’s encounter with earlier poetic models. The following four paragraphs adapt points contained in my chapter on ‘Ovid: Artistic Identity and Intertextuality’, Oxford Handbook to Chaucer, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Oxford, forthcoming). My approach here also builds on Stephanie Trigg’s insightful analysis of this Chaucerian signature as marking ‘the absence on which modern authorship depends’; for Trigg, Chaucer’s conjunction with Ovid facilitates a ‘first move toward the historical alterity of the poet in English’ (Congenial Souls, p. 63).



Ancient Chaucer  215

Ovid’s antique authority, but it also evokes two similar phrases in Chaucer’s earlier works that touch significantly on the reciprocal status of antiquity and celebrity. The first of these is the account of the shaded side of the rock of ice in The House of Fame, which displays the names of ‘folkes that hadden grete fames / Of olde tyme’ (lines 1154–5, my emphasis). These are the names, sheltered from the sun’s heat, that remain perpetually ‘fressh’ and new-looking despite their antiquity. The other instance of ‘olde tyme’ occurs in the description of the book read by the insomniac narrator of The Book of the Duchess: ‘And in this bok were written fables / That clerkes had in olde tyme / And other poetes, put in rime’ (lines 52–4, my emphasis). The ‘olde tyme’ valorized in both of these dream-visions is clearly the time of classical antiquity, resonating variously with the bygone ‘former age’ and with the milieu of ‘olde bookes’ and ‘olde stories’ evoked in works such as The Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. Allowing such moments in Chaucer’s earlier poetry the force of intertexts, the impression that emerges from the Man of Law’s belated perspective as a storyteller working in the shadow of Chaucer is that ‘Chaucer’ is cognate to an ancient poet, his poetic productions similarly associated with the lingering power of ‘olde tyme’. Chaucer is more than just a successor to Ovid here: he actually shares with Ovid a temporal dimension based on ‘olde tyme’: for Chaucer, youth; for Ovid, antiquity. ‘In youthe’, according to the Man of Law, Chaucer ‘made of Ceys and Alcione’ (Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale, line 57). Critics have puzzled over whether this reference is meant to represent The Book of the Duchess as a whole, or just part of it, or perhaps something else entirely.39 For whatever reason, the content of The Book of the Duchess as we know it is reduced by the Man of Law to the Ovidian story of Ceyx and Alcyone that Chaucer’s dreamer began the poem by reading. A closer look at the beginning of The Book of the Duchess, particularly in its points of contact with The House of Fame, reveals what is at stake in the Man of Law’s telescoping of Ovid’s story with Chaucer’s. In The Book of the Duchess, the narrator’s selective re-telling of the Ovidian legend of Ceyx and Alcyone, ostensibly to share with us the ‘wonder thing’ he read to try to get to sleep (line 61), spans fully 155 lines and ends with an omission of the metamorphosis that supplies consolation in Ovid’s version. The Ovidian narrative is momentarily interrupted, however, just over thirty lines into his rehearsal of Ceyx and Alcyone’s story. Just as Alcyone wishes desperately to hear some news about her husband, the narrator interjects in his own voice:

39

For the various possibilities, see Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess, ed. Helen Phillips (Durham, 1982), pp. 32–3.

216  Jamie C. Fumo Such sorowe this lady to her tok That trewly I, that made this book, Had such pittee and such rowthe To rede hir sorwe that, by my trowthe, I ferde the worse al the morwe Aftir to thenken on hir sorwe.  (lines 95–100; my emphasis)

This interruption demands to be understood as more than an innocent digression by a self-absorbed narrator, and it would be facile to assume that the emphasis laid on the unifying theme of sorrow and empathy is its only function. Instead, these lines create an impasse in the narration of Alcyone’s story that gives Chaucer – ‘I, that made this book’ – creative precedence over Ovid, to whom the phrase ‘this bok’ was recently attached: namely, in ‘this bok’ containing fables of ‘olde tyme’, which the narrator is reading in bed. The distinction between Chaucer’s creation of his own (new) book and his reading of Ovid’s (old) book is suggestively blurred. The Man of Law’s conflation of Chaucer’s and Ovid’s ‘olde tyme’ as love poets thus parallels an imaginative conjunction anticipated, rather sensationally, in the very poem with which he began his list: just as the Man of Law recalibrates a Chaucerian work (The Book of the Duchess) as an Ovidian story (‘Ceys and Alcione’), so does Chaucer in The Book of the Duchess claim his reading matter, the story of Ceys and Alcione, in the service of that which he ‘made’ in the present ‘book’. Chaucer’s earliest flirtation with authorship thus rests momentously on strategies of Ovidian appropriation, to the extent that the Eagle’s designation, in The House of Fame, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Chaucer’s ‘oune bok’ (line 712) – precisely at the climax of the poem’s homage to Ovid’s portrayal of Fame – invites interpretation as a knowing conceit: Ovid’s book is Chaucer’s, and neither shrinks from fame.40 Both Chaucer and Ovid, as poets who traffic in ‘olde tyme’ – whether through their poetic autographies or their historical dispensation – are among those whose names are preserved in the rock of ice, as the Man of Law’s casual invocation of the complementary fame of both poets assumes. In this light, Eustache Deschamps’ famous reference to Chaucer, in his Autre balade (c.1385), as an ‘Ovides grans’ outshines the hackneyed rhetoric on which it rests. Referring to Chaucer’s translation of the Roman de la rose, Deschamps states that Chaucer has ‘semé les fleurs et planté le rosier’ [sown the flowers and planted the rose-tree] in English soil, and that he is ‘d’Amours mondains Dieux en Albie’ [god of earthly love in Albion].41 It 40

41

Such a play on associations is consistent with what Helen Cooper sees as Chaucer’s backdoor entry into Fame’s House by means of a coded designation of himself as ‘Englyssh Gaufride’ (‘The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour’, New Medieval Literatures 3 [1999], 58–60). Whether or not one accepts this reading, Chaucer also, as I argue below, stands allusively with Ovid in Fame’s palace. Brewer, Chaucer, vol. 1, pp. 40–1.



Ancient Chaucer  217

is tempting to speculate that Chaucer reconfigures the terms of Deschamps’ encomium in his portrayal not of himself but of Ovid on the pillar in The House of Fame (the terminus ad quem of which is 1386): Venus clerk Ovide, That hath ysowen wonder wide The grete god of Loves name.  (House of Fame, lines 1487–9)

These lines represent Ovid in terms strikingly similar to those used to portray Chaucer as an Ovidian poet in Deschamps’ poem, even as the two passages’ intersecting vocabulary of sowing flowers and the God of Love anticipates the Man of Law’s association of both Ovid and Chaucer with a fame founded on love poetry. Furthermore, Deschamps’ early contribution to the discourse of Chaucerian fame finds a complementary motion in this passage from The House of Fame, which concerns not only Ovid’s personal renown but his promotion of the God of Love’s fame, by sowing his name far and wide – an effort in which Chaucer, too, has participated, thus (like Ovid) gaining a name for himself by extension, as the Man of Law attests. It is fitting that Chaucer’s only two instances of self-naming occur in The House of Fame and the Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale: both poems ‘think’ fame by ‘thinking’ Ovid. Appropriately enough, when Chaucer was given his own pillar on the title page of Speght’s 1598 edition as issued by Bonham Norton (figure 1), where his name appears as ‘our Antient and Learned English Poet’ at the centre of a classical portico, an epigraph from Chaucer’s Parliament of Foules on the top of the page is balanced symmetrically against one from Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the bottom of the page.42 The mise-en-page immortalizes Chaucer as an ancient poet who is borne up (literally) by an Ovidian brand of antiquity. The two epigraphs harmonize around the notion of antiquity itself. The first illustrates Chaucer’s longevity: Out of olde feldes, as men seyth, Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere, And out of olde bokes, in good feyth, Cometh al this newe science that men lere.  (Parliament of Fowls, lines 22–5)

The second, an Ovidian defence, proclaims: ‘Seris venit usus ab annis’ [experience comes from ripe age (or late years)]. The latter dictum, in the Metamorphoses (Book 6, line 29), is spoken by Minerva, disguised as an old woman, to rein in her artistic rival, the upstart Arachne. In Speght’s edition, 42

This title page (and its variations in other editions) has also been discussed in Pask, The Emergence of the English Author, pp. 38–9; Cooper, ‘Chaucerian Representation’, pp. 13–14; Trigg, Congenial Souls, pp. 129–30.

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Figure 1. Frontispiece to Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, Newly Printed, ed. Thomas Speght (London: Printed by Adam Islip, at the charges of Bonham Norton, 1598), STC 5078 (B); Harvard University, Houghton Library.



Ancient Chaucer  219

Figure 2. Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame (Nabu Public Domain Reprints, 2011).

conversely, Ovid ‘speaks’ it to vindicate Chaucer as his poetic equal, a kindred and similarly ancient auctor. As The House of Fame demonstrates so well, however, Fame’s gifts are erratic and inscrutable. Not only has the currency of Chaucer’s name changed in value over time, but so has the material format through which he contributed to an idiom, and later an industry, of authorship centred upon ‘the book’. As the tectonics of authorship continue to shift, and the making of texts circles

220  Jamie C. Fumo

back in the age of the Internet to a more collaborative, anonymous mode reminiscent of the fluid and provisional exchanges of medieval manuscript culture, Chaucer’s fame continues to evolve. A mind-bending, yet somehow terribly fitting, example of these shifts is a title page which we might, in a dark moment, compare with Speght’s: a slim 2011 edition of The House of Fame published by Nabu Press (figure 2), a somewhat under-the-radar press that specializes in inexpensive public domain reprints of older scholarly books marketed for Amazon.com. Underneath a large picture of an industriallooking wheel and axle (a latter-day Fortune’s wheel, one wonders?) appear the following words run as a continuous title: ‘G. Chaucer. The Hous [sic] of Fame…’. Beneath this is the name of the author: ‘Anonymous’. No hint is given, until one turns to the third page, that this is actually a reprint of Hans Willert’s German edition of the House of Fame from 1888, originally published by R. Gaertners Verlagsbuchhandlung. A headnote to the edition states that this book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

This canned apology forms an appropriate coda to a study of the disruptions of renown in The House of Fame, as well as the vagaries of manuscript culture and early printed editions of Chaucer more generally. The copyright of the original nineteenth-century edition having lapsed, the work in question is casually re-presented as though ‘G. Chaucer’ is part of the title, and ‘Anonymous’ its author. ‘Sufficeth me, as I were ded’, The House of Fame’s author pleads, ‘That no wight have my name in honde’ (House of Fame, lines 1876–7). As early modern and modern conceptions of authorship fade from the horizon, Chaucer gets his wish. This is not, however, Byron’s revenge, since, at least in one sense, his assessment was right: Chaucer’s celebrity derives from his antiquity, but not because time’s favour bestows worth even on the undeserving; rather, because in looking to the past, in confronting his own belatedness, Chaucer was empowered to shape an authorial position, and hence a posterity. Chaucer, finally, is not timeless but timely – a poet of the future.

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242  Bibliography Watkins, John, ‘“Wrastling for this world”: Wyatt and the Tudor Canonization of Chaucer’, Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Theresa M. Krier (Gainesville, FL, 1998), pp. 21–39. Watson, Nicholas, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum 70 (1995), 822–64. Wawn, Andrew N., ‘Chaucer, The Plowman’s Tale and Reformation Propaganda: The Testimonies of Thomas Godfray and I Playne Piers’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 56 (1973), 174–92. Webbe, William, ‘A Discourse of English Poetrie’, Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy, ed. Joseph Haslewood, 2 vols (London, 1815), vol. 2, pp. 13–95. Weiss, Roberto, ‘Dante e l’umanesimo del suo tempo’, Letture Classensi 2 (1969), 11–27. Welsford, Enid, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London, 1935). Wetherbee, Winthrop, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, NY, 1984). White, Helen C., Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1944). Whitford, H. C., ‘An Uncollected Sixteenth-Century Allusion to The House of Fame’, Modern Language Notes 52 (1937), 31–2. Whiting, Bartlett Jere and Helen Wescott Whiting, eds, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500 (Cambridge, MA, 1968). Wilkins, E. H., ‘Cantus Troili’, English Literary History 16 (1949), 167–73. Willeford, William, The Fool and His Sceptre (London, 1969). Wimsatt, James I., Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto, 1991). ———, ed., Chaucer and the Poems of ‘Ch’ (Kalamazoo, MI, 2009; first published Cambridge, 1982). ———, ‘Le Dit dou Bleu Chevalier: Froissart’s Imitation of Chaucer’, Medieval Studies 34 (1972), 388–400. Windeatt, B. A., ‘Chaucer and the Filostrato’, Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 163–83. ———, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford, 1992). Wise, Boyd Ashby, The Influence of Statius Upon Chaucer (New York, 1911). Woolf, Daniel, ‘From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500–1700’, The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, CA, 2006), pp. 33–70. Womersley, David, Divinity and State (Oxford, 2010). Wright, Sylvia, ‘The Author Portraits in the Bedford Psalter-Hours: Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve’, British Library Journal 18 (1992), 190–202. ———, ‘The Gesta Henrici Quinti and the Bedford Psalter-Hours’, The Court and Cultural Diversity, ed. Evelyn Mullally and John Thompson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 267–85. Wurtele, Douglas, ‘The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer’, Viator 11 (1989), 335–60. Yeager, R. F., ‘Gower in Winter: Last Poems’, The Medieval Python: The Purposive



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Index A Knack to Know a Knave  178 Accedens of Armorie  96 Achilles  78–80, 86 Aeneas  1, 4–6, 41, 64, 92–4, 99 n. 41 Alain de Lille  76 n. 3 Alceste  8, 10, 14 Amans  119–20, 125–6 Apollo  29, 31, 46, 48, 56, 63, 94 Arcite 78 Argia 59 Argall, John  39 Arundel, Thomas  118, 120–2 Ashby, George  145–7, 157 Ascham, Roger  39, 206 n. 17 Augustine  44, 109–11 Bacchus  66, 67 Bale, John  139–41, 170, 203 Bancroft, Richard  177–80, 182, 184 Beatrice  24, 40, 46 Beaumont, Francis  207 Betham, Peter  150 Bible 174 Psalm 141  123 Book of Ecclesiastes  201 Book of Wisdom  78 n. 7 Gospels 172 Matthew  121, 153 1 Corinthians  6 Bocca degli Abati  12, 51 Boccaccio  24, 28, 34, 36 n. 45, 39, 40, 173, 175 n. 34, 214 n. 37 De mulieribus claris 5–7 Genealogia deorum gentilium  5, 31, 69 Il Filocolo  58 Il Filostrato  1, 2, 10, 14, 16, 33–4, 58, 61, 69, 70, 74, 75–6, 80–82 Boethius  77, 84 Boitani, Piero  7, 21 n. 2, 25, 28 n. 23, 30, 31, 44, 51, 56 n. 30, 75–8 Bokenham, Osbern  92 Bossewell, John  96, 166

Brathwait Richard  18, 166–7, 194–9 Byron, Lord  202–6, 214 Cadmus  63, 66–7 Calliope 59 Camden, William  152–3 Capanaeus 54–5 Carew, Richard  153–4 Cassandra  59–63, 69–71 Cavalcanti, Guido  28, 46, 49 Cavendish, George  95–6 Cawsey, Kathy  47 Caxton, William  47, 89–90, 92, 94, 146, 162, 163 Charles d’Orléans  129, 130 Chaucer, Geoffrey Boece  77–8, 84, 90, 103 Book of the Duchess  88–9, 132, 208, 209, 215–16 Canterbury Tales  6, 13, 16, 83, 93, 101, 103, 107, 129, 134, 137, 138, 145, 149, 167, 169, 174, 177, 179, 181, 186–7, 190, 209–12; Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale 47; Clerk’s Prologue and Tale 8, 13, 16, 21–3, 36–42, 147; Cook’s Tale 192; General Prologue 41, 138, 184, 187, 208; Knight’s Tale 77–8, 215; Man of Law’s Tale 134, 188, 202, 210–17; Manciple’s Tale 135; Melibee 115; Merchant’s Tale 137, 171, 189, 201; Miller’s Tale 83, 112, 180–3; Monk’s Tale 22; Nun’s Priest’s Tale 177; Parson’s Tale 103; Reeve’s Prologue 83; Retraction to The Canterbury Tales 89, 90, 103, 106–8, 112, 122, 211, 213; Second Nun’s Tale 208; Squire’s Tale 83, 150, 186–9, 191–2; Summoner’s Tale 179; Sir Thopas 208–9, 214; Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale 6, 113–15, 121–2, 130, 137, 171, 179, 182, 187, 188–9, 207

246  Index Complaint of Venus  132, 149 Gentilesse  114 House of Fame  2, 11, 12, 21–42, 43–56, 75–86, 87–102, 130, 166, 167, 203, 210, 213–20 Legend of Good Women  2–16, 25–6, 40, 50, 89, 90, 93–4, 111, 122, 130, 211 Parliament of Fowls  89, 92, 93, 107, 184, 217 Romaunt of the Rose  14, 129, 133–4, 139–41, 216 Troilus and Criseyde  1, 2, 10, 12, 14, 16, 21, 30, 33–5, 38, 40, 42, 48, 50, 57–74, 75–86, 88, 90, 93, 108–9, 112, 132, 137, 206, 208, 209, 215 Cheke, John  153–4 Christine de Pizan  7–8, 129–130, 132, 133, 140 n. 49 Cicero  38 n. 51, 109–10, 144, 151, 155–6 Cimabue  28, 45 Clare, John  175–7 Claritas  8, 21–3, 35–4 Clio 59 Claudian 49–50 Complaint of Mary Magdalen  93 Cooper, Helen  3 n. 8, 24, 26 n. 20, 30, 32–3, 34, 48, 87 n. 1, 157, 167, 203, 216 n. 40 Criseyde  7, 16–17, 59–61, 75–6, 80–6, 107, 112, 122, 208 Dante  2, 11, 22–42, 43–56, 57–8, 71, 73, 77 n. 5, 171 Convivio  171 De vulgari eloquentia  22 n. 6, 35 n. 45, 46 Inferno  12, 23–4, 27–8, 32, 35 n. 43, 36 n. 45, 39–40, 42, 43–4, 46, 50–55, 57 Paradiso  28, 35, 56 Purgatorio  11, 24–6, 28, 35, 40, 43–7, 49, 73, 77 n.4. Deacon, John  196 Derrida, Jacques  109, 111 Diana  52, 63, 65–6 Dido  1, 2–7, 11, 14, 24, 48 n. 14, 85 n. 18, 91, 93–4 Dido Queen of Carthage  99 Deschamps, Eustace  41–2, 127–134, 141–2, 210, 216–17

De Lisle, William  151 Diomede  58, 61, 63, 69–70, 73, 76, 85 Douglas, Gavin  93–4 Dryden, John  143, 167, 207, 210 Dunbar, William  146–7, 157 Eliot, T. S.  184 Erasmus 136 Eteocles 64–5 Fama  1–2, 7, 16–17, 21–2, 31, 35, 41, 44, 55, 76, 82, 93 Farinata  44, 54 First Vatican Mythographer  69 Francesca 43 Forde, Thomas  99–100 Foulis, Henry  100 Foxe, John  167, 170, 173, 175 Froissart, Jean  129–30, 132–3 Gascoigne, Thomas  104–8, 112–13 Giotto  28, 45 Gower, John  17, 77 n. 5, 95, 113, 119–26, 132, 145, 149–51, 174, 192–3, 211 Confessio amantis  119–20, 122, 125–6, 132, 211 Cronica tripertita  122–3 Quidquid homo scribat  120–1 Vox clamantis  119–21, 123 Guido delle Colonne  33, 78–80 Guillaume de Machaut  2, 131, 132, 173 Guinizzelli, Guido  43, 45–6, 49 Harsnett, Samuel  179 n. 42, 180–3 Hardyng, John  92–3 Hart, John  163 Hawes, Stephen  95 Henry IV  117, 118–19, 122 Henry V  117, 158, 160, 161 Henry VIII  138, 161, 174, Henryson, Robert  77 n. 4 Herostratus  52, 55 Hervet, Gentian  17, 136–9 Hoccleve, Thomas  16, 17, 37, 38, 42, 113, 114, 115–7, 122, 125, 144–7, 157, 160 Letter of Cupid  140 n. 49 Regiment of Princes  38, 115–17, 144 Homer  2, 27, 28, 33, 39, 57, 71, 73, 99, 155–6, 206, 207 Horace  27, 28, 39 n. 53, 57, 58 n. 4, 212

Hundred Years War  18, 158–62 Inkhorn Controversy  144, 151–6, 161–3 Jack Upland  170, 173 James I of England  195 Jason  8–9, 11–14 Jean d’Angoulême  134 Jean de Meun  2, 14, 17, 57 n. 2, 110, 139–41 Jenner, Thomas  196 Jerome  14, 153 n. 39 Jocasta 63–4 Jonson, Ben  98–9 Josephus 48 Kingis Quhair  145–6 Kiser, Lisa  4 n. 16, 15, 50 Kynaston, Sir Francis  206 Latini, Brunetto  43, 44 Leland, John  203 Lerer, Seth  31 n. 33, 36 n. 46, 40, 143, 147 Letter of Dido  93 Lever, Ralph  154 Lollardy  106, 118, 139, 148, 168 Lollius  10, 14, 33–4, 58, 73, 108, 205 Lucan  2, 27, 28, 38, 49, 50, 55, 57–8, 73, 99. Lydgate, John  36 n. 46, 37, 91, 92, 95, 125, 144–50, 160, 166, n. 3, 213 Complaint of the Black Knight  87 Fall of Princes  38, 39–42, 91, 92 Floure of Courtesy  37 ‘On Gloucester’s Approaching Marriage’ 91 Saint Alban and Saint Amphibalus 91 Siege of Thebes  37 n. 48, 41 n. 58, 144–5, 148, 149 n. 22 Temple of Glass  91, 92 The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man 37 n. 48, 144–5 Troy Book  33, 37–8, 78–80, 145–8, 158 Manfred 43 Mannyng, Robert  158, 162 manuscript Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2006  87, 88 n.3

Index  247 London, British Library, MS Additional 16165  87–8, 89 London, British Library, MS Additional 42131  123–4 London, British Library, MS Harley 78 146  London, British Library, MS Harley 2392  62 n. 12 London, British Library, MS Harley 4866  117, 125, 144 n.4 London, British Library, MS Royal 18 A XLV  99 London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 851  186–9 London, Lambeth Palace, MS 84  159 n. 56 Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98 121 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 14  188 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 638  87, 88 n. 3, 92 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 686 192 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 902 125–6 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16  87, 88 n. 3, 92 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poet. 163  62 n. 12 Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198 186–9 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Français 840  128 n. 5 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Anglais 39  134, 142 Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Library, MS 15  133 Marbecke, Roger  196–7 Marchaunt, John  125–6 Marprelate Controversy  171–7 Medea  7, 8–9, 11, 13 Meleager  61, 62–3, 65–70 Metham, John  160 Milton, John  143, 165, 167, 171, 183 Minnis, Alastair  2, 4, 34, 120 Monardes, Nicholas  195, 196, 197–8 Mulcaster, Richard  152 Nashe, Thomas  99, 149, 178 n. 39 Niobe  59, 63, 67

248  Index Oderisi da Gubbio  45, 47 Oedipus  58–9, 63–4, 67 Oton de Granson  129, 132 Ovid  2, 27, 28, 35, 49, 50, 55, 57–8, 70, 71, 131–2, 202, 207, 210–19 Heroides  3, 24, 34, 50 n. 16, 214 Metamorphoses  11, 31, 34, 50 n. 16, 60–7, 72–4, 214, 216 Palamon 77–8 Pandarus  40, 59, 61, 75 n. 2, 80–1, 111, 209 Parnassus  29, 166, 194, 197, 198 Patterson, Lee  59, 62 n. 14, 67, 143, 209 Petrarch  2, 22–5, 31–42, 77 n.4, 110, 147, 175 n. 34 Africa  24 Familiares 23 Rerum vulgarium fragmenta  31–5, 41 Secretum  25 n. 16, 31–2, 38 n. 51, 77 n. 4, 110 Seniles  22 n. 6, 24 Pett, Peter  97–8 Pier delle Vigne  44 Piers Plowman  90, 166 n. 3, 172–3, 176, 190, 202 Placidus, Lactantius  67–9 Polynices 64 Pope, Alexander  16, 17, 51, 92, 101–2, 207 Presbyterianism  100–1, 168–182 Protestantism  138–9, 167–71, 174–5, 184 Prynne, William  171, 174 n. 30 Puritanism  168, 170, 178, 180 Puttenham, George  150, 199 n. 43 Pynson, Richard  90, 93, 94, 137, 149 Rede Me and Be Not Wroth  170 Riche, Barnabe  161 Richard II  87 n. 1, 112, 117–9, 122–5, 130, 159 Roman de la rose  14, 57 n. 2; see also Chaucer, Geoffrey, Romaunt of the Rose Rumour, House of  34, 53, 80 n. 10, 89, 98, 101 Scogan, Henry  17, 113–5 Scot, Thomas  99 Shakespeare, William  98, 161, 178 n. 40, 180, 185, 192, 193, 195–6

Sherry, Richard  151 Shirley, John  22, n.6; 87–8, 89, 113 Sidney, Sir Philip  23 n. 8, 41 Skelton, John  95, 102, 149, 171 n. 22 Speght, Thomas  98, 99, 101, 135, 150, 166, 184, 189, 191–2, 201–2, 203, 205, 207, 217–18, 220 Spenser, Edmund Shepheardes Calender 150–1, 203–4, 206 The Faerie Queene  98, 150, 190–1, 204 Stanihurst, Richard  154–6 Statius, Thebaid  2, 35, 48, 57–74 Statute of Pleading  159 Stow, John  146, 166 Stubbes, John  162 Sutcliffe, Matthew  175–7 Taylor, John  196 The Balade in Despyte of the Flemynges  159 The Breviary of Health  197 The Cobler of Caunterburie  189–90 The Nobles or of Nobilitye  96 The Plowman’s Tale  169, 170–1, 173, 177, 190 The Tale of Gamelyn  188 Thebes 58–67 Theseus  78–9, 209 Thevet, André  17, 139–41 Tisiphone 59 Troilus  58–62, 66, 69–70, 75–6, 80–4, 108–9, 112 Throkmorton, Job  171–7 Thynne, William  47, 90, 94, 137, 166, 170 n. 20, 205 Troy  33–4, 48, 58, 60, 78, 134 Tydeus  58, 61, 64–70 Tyndale, William  153, 173, 174 Ugolino 54 Ulysses  44, 79 Usk, Thomas  90–1, 158, 161 Vaughan, William  194, 196 Venus  64, 77, 98, 112, 132, 217 Virgil  2, 16, 23–8, 34–42, 49, 50, 54, 55, 57–8, 71, 72–3, 99, 206, 207, 212 Aeneid  1, 3–6, 60, 64, 72, 78 n. 6, 93–4

Index  249

Wallace, David  33, 56 n. 30, 57, 129 Webbe, William  150 Whetstone, George  161–2 Wilson, Thomas  163

Wordsworth, William  184 Wyclif, John  118, 173 Xenophon 136

CHAUCER STUDIES I MUSIC IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER, Nigel Wilkins II CHAUCER’S LANGUAGE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS’ TRADITION, J. D. Burnley III ESSAYS ON TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Mary Salu IV CHAUCER SONGS, Nigel Wilkins V CHAUCER’S BOCCACCIO: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales, edited and translated by N. R. Havely VI SYNTAX AND STYLE IN CHAUCER’S POETRY, G. H. Roscow VII CHAUCER’S DREAM POETRY: Sources and Analogues, B. A. Windeatt VIII CHAUCER AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY, Alastair Minnis IX CHAUCER AND THE POEMS OF ‘CH’ in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, James I. Wimsatt X CHAUCER AND THE IMAGINARY WORLD OF FAME, Piero Boitani XI INTRODUCTION TO CHAUCERIAN ENGLISH, Arthur O. Sandved XII CHAUCER AND THE EARLY WRITINGS OF BOCCACCIO, David Wallace XIII CHAUCER’S NARRATORS, David Lawton XIV CHAUCER: COMPLAINT AND NARRATIVE, W. A. Davenport XV CHAUCER’S RELIGIOUS TALES, edited by C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson XVI EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MODERNIZATIONS FROM THE CANTERBURY TALES, edited by Betsy Bowden XVII THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE CANTERBURY TALES, Charles A. Owen Jr XVIII CHAUCER’S BOECE AND THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF BOETHIUS, edited by A. J. Minnis XIX THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE EQUATORIE OF THE PLANETIS, Kari Anne Rand Schmidt XX CHAUCERIAN REALISM, Robert Myles XXI CHAUCER ON LOVE, KNOWLEDGE AND SIGHT, Norman Klassen XXII CONQUERING THE REIGN OF FEMENY: GENDER AND GENRE IN CHAUCER’S ROMANCE, Angela Jane Weisl XXIII CHAUCER’S APPROACH TO GENDER IN THE CANTERBURY TALES, Anne Laskaya XXIV CHAUCERIAN TRAGEDY, Henry Ansgar Kelly XXV MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, edited by Peter G. Beidler XXVI CHAUCER AND COSTUME: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue, Laura F. Hodges XXVII CHAUCER’S PHILOSOPHICAL VISIONS, Kathryn L. Lynch XXVIII SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [I], edited by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel

XXX FEMINIZING CHAUCER, Jill Mann XXXI NEW READINGS OF CHAUCER’S POETRY, edited by Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard XXXII THE LANGUAGE OF THE CHAUCER TRADITION, Simon Horobin XXXIII ETHICS AND EXEMPLARY NARRATIVE IN CHAUCER AND GOWER, J. Allan Mitchell XXXIV CHAUCER AND CLOTHING: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Laura F. Hodges XXXV SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [II], edited by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel XXXVI THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN: Context and Reception, edited by Carolyn P. Collette XXXVII CHAUCER AND THE CITY, edited by Ardis Butterfield XXXVIII MEN AND MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER’S TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec XXXIX IMAGES OF KINGSHIP IN CHAUCER AND HIS RICARDIAN CONTEMPORARIES, Samantha J. Rayner XL COMEDY IN CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO, Carol Falvo Heffernan XLI CHAUCER AND PETRARCH, William T. Rossiter XLII CHAUCER AND ARRAY: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and Other Works, Laura F. Hodges

Isabel Davis is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Birkbeck, University of London; Catherine Nall is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributors: Joanna Bellis, Alcuin Blamires, Julia Boffey, Isabel Davis, Stephanie Downes, A. S. G. Edwards, Jamie C. Fumo, Andrew Galloway, Nick Havely, Thomas A. Prendergast, Mike Rodman Jones, William T. Rossiter, Elizaveta Strakhov.

Chaucer AND Fame

REPUTATIO N AND RECEPTION

ISABEL DAVIS AND CATHERINE NALL (EDS)

Cover image: A historiated initial from a Canterbury Tales manuscript, depicting Geoffrey Chaucer. © The British Library Board. London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 851, f. 2.

Chaucer and Fame

F

ama, or fame, is a central concern of late medieval literature: where fame came from, who deserved it, whether it was desirable and how it was acquired and kept. An interest in fame was not new but was renewed and rethought within the vernacular revolutions of the later Middle Ages. The work of Geoffrey Chaucer collates received ideas on the subject of fama, both from the classical world and from the work of his contemporaries. Chaucer’s place in these intertextual negotiations was readily recognized in his aftermath, as later writers adopted and reworked postures which Chaucer had struck, in their own bids for literary authority. This volume tracks debates on fama which were past, present and future to Chaucer, using his work as a centre point to investigate canon formation in European literature from the late Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period.

Chaucer Studies Boydell & Brewer Ltd

PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620–2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

CHAUCER AND FAME 9781843844075 v4.indd 1

EDITED BY ISABEL DAVIS AND CATHERINE NALL

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