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Page 70
the narrator'swhich we are left to sort out. Indeed, the story's "fame" subjects it to this condition. The Latin word itself,
fama
, is variable in its senses: it can denote rumor, news, and tidings as readily as desire for glory and earned good reputation. And Chaucer develops the theme of ambiguity in every kind of discourse by amalgamating different versions of Fame from Boethius, Virgil, and Ovid.
The work that most profoundly affected
The House of Fame
was Dante's
Commedia
. In the second and third books of Chaucer's comically unnerving vision of our doubt-filled world, there occuralmost run amoka series of richly parodic parallels with Dante's vision of the otherworld. The most memorable of these, based on the eagle in Dante's dream in
Purgatorio
IX, is the pedantic, garrulous eagle who scoops up the narrator in his claws and carries himthe whole time chatting and lecturing irrepressiblyto the faraway domain of Fame's Temple. The deserted
House of Fame
may have been a victim of its own overwhelming representations of uncertainty, but there can be no doubt that, in creating its talking eagle, Chaucer discovered a gift for characterization that would be more fully realized before long in Pandarus, Harry Bailly, and Chauntecleer.
The Parliament of Fowls
is also remarkable as a poetic vehicle for a multiplicity of voices in a variety of intellectual, literary, and colloquial registers, from the authoritative discourse of Africanus, both in the account of Cicero's
Somnium Scipionis
, which is the old book the narrator reads "a certyn thing to lerne" (line 20), and in the narrator's subsequent dream, in which Africanus appears as his guide; to the easy voice of Nature, who gently but firmly instructs her charges on this day of choosing their mates; to the humorous mimetic voicing of those charges themselves, reflecting in its full sweep of species in the kingdom of birds, from royal tercel down to lowliest seed fowl, a counterpart comprising all levels of human society.
Complementing this harmonious blend of various and sometime discordant voices, a narrative design to be fully orchestrated in the following decade's work on
The Canterbury Tales
, is a richly interwoven pattern of authors and texts, including Cicero's
Somnium Scipionis
(and Macrobius's commentary on it), Boethius, Claudian, Dante, Ovid's
Fasti
, Boccaccio's
Teseida
, the
Roman de la Rose
, and most important, Alan of Lille's
Deplanctu naturae
, on which Chaucer depended primarily for his portrait of Nature. Recent critical views of this pattern of wide-ranging dependencies suggest that it is indicative of authorial
 
Page 71
anxiety over its complexity, or of an extreme subjectivity, or of a subversive stance towards all forms of authority. The poem's narrator, it is true, closely ties his reading to an attempt to write something new concerning love, and he ends up, just before he falls asleep and dreams, with a lesson on the worth of common profit and morality in this world and the next he cannot help but value, even though it is not what he seeks: "For bothe I hadde thyng which that I nolde, / And ek I ne hadde that thyng that I wolde" (90-91).
Just as in
The House of Fame
the narrator was told by the eagle that he would be brought at Jove's behest to a source of tidings of Love's folk, so in
The Parliament of Fowls
he is told by Africanus that he will be shown matter to write about even though he is dull and not one of Love's servants: "I shal the shewe mater of to wryte" (168). The narrator's resolve to keep on reading at the end of his complex and ambiguous progress through this dream's garden of love suggests that he has still not found what he's looking for, yet may not be completely aware of the significance of what he has seen. Supporting the idea that the narrator does not fully appreciate what he has actually been granted in his vision is the accumulation of stronger, more frequent hints through the sequence of these dream visions that the narrative persona is less and less reliable. Also supporting this idea is the authority of the figure of Nature as opposed to Fortune and Fame, who are prominent in the two preceding visions. Like her prototype in Alan of Lille's
Deplanctu naturae
Chaucer's Nature is the divinely appointed overseer of marriages and procreation. Unlike Nature and her priest, Genius, in Jean de Meun's
Roman de la Rose
, who press the case for sexual action with great urgency, she patiently guides most of her charges through their sometimes tumultuous mating rites to a successful conclusion, and even reassures some that it is all right to wait a year.
Possibly the poet-dreamer has served as a medium, albeit a not totally self-aware one, for the only trustworthy message available in his vision, a text generated by creatures directly under Nature's purview, the stately roundel the birds sing as they depart in praise of her ineluctable law of renewal:
Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast thes wintres wedres overshake,
And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!
                                                     (680-682)
 
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Like the lesson from Cicero's
Somnium Scipionis
, this cannot be easily dismissed, although it may not be what the narrator thought he was seeking at the start.
Some recent studies strongly suggest that our observation of Saint Valentine's Day as the major amatory holiday of the year originates in this third of Chaucer's love visions. More practically notable is the metrical form of the poem. Like the earlier, aborted
Anelida
and
Arcite
(late 1370s), an elaborate and complex experiment with epic and lyric forms based primarily on Statius and Boccaccio,
The Parliament of Fowls
is written in the rime royal stanza of seven decasyllabic lines rhyming
a b a b b c c.
Modeled on the ottava rima of Boccaccio, rime royal became Chaucer's favorite verse form, at least until he devised the decasyllabic couplet in
The Legend of Good Women.
That both versions of the Prologue to
The Legend of Good Women
were written after the
Troilus
implies that Chaucer was still interested in the dream vision even after he had completed what was to be his only finished major poem. The shortest of the four dream visions in either the F (579 lines) or the G (545 lines) versions, the Prologue, as has already been noted, is a useful source of information about Chaucer's career. But it is also a poem of considerable accomplishments, and offers Chaucer's students a first-hand opportunity to consider his strategies of revision. The F version (ca. 1385), which survives in eleven manuscripts, has been accepted as earlier than G (ca. 1394), which survives in only one manuscript, although that manuscript is the earliest extant one of the work. Both follow the same general plan, with the narrator going out on a May morning to pay homage to his favorite flower, the daisy; with his falling asleep and dreaming that he is attacked by the God of Love for having translated the
Roman
and written the
Troilus
, but then defended by Alceste as one who has only translated what others have said and who has, in fact, written some acceptable works, even though he doesn't write particularly well. Ironically, some of the descriptions and dialogue are of especially high quality, showing just how well served his skills were by the new decasyllabic couplet. Particularly memorable is the inset "Balade" (actually three stanzas of rime royal), "Hyd, Absolon, thy gilte tresses clere," in honor of Alceste, who is about to appear as a transfigured daisy.
Queen Alceste, based on a woman in ancient myth who offers to die in place of her husband, Admetus, orders Chaucer to do penance for his trespass against the God of Love. She commands him to write, begin-
 
Page 73
ning with Cleopatra, only of good and true women who were betrayed by false men. That these prologues were intended to launch a large collection of stories implies that Chaucer was also thinking along the lines that finally led to the idea of the Canterbury pilgrimage as a frame of greater capacity and more dramatic possibilities than this unfinished series of nine tales of unvarying theme and action could offer. All nine of these "glorious" legends are drawn from classical legend and myth, and must have seemed very limited material for a poet who had already squarely met the challenge of exploring and testing against his own Christian and courtly world one of the greatest historical subjects antiquity had bequeathed it.
The story of the destruction of Troy, in which Chaucer and his immediate sources set their narration of the love of Troilus and Criseyde, was transmitted to medieval Europe by a number of works. Virgil's
Aeneid
and Ovid's
Metamorphoses
provided partial accounts of the first "great war" of the Western world, but the major sources were two Latin prose works of the fourth and sixth centuries A.D. There is no evidence Chaucer knew these two works directly, but he was familiar with the primary medieval intermediary based on them, the
Roman de Troie
(ca. 1160) of Benoît de Sainte-Maure and its late thirteenth-century translation into Latin prose by Guido delle Colonne. Benoit, the best candidate for inventor of the love affair, treated it in an incidental and minimal way in the course of his 30,000-line romance, but the true creator of the famous love story in the basic form in which it has been subsequently known was Giovanni Boccaccio. In 1338 he published
Il Filostrato
, a poem addressed to his own "nobilissima donna," Maria d'Aquino, in which he consolidated additional elements from Benoît with other sources to construct the tale of Troiolo and Criseida as a negative example of conduct in a love affair.
It is generally held that forty years later, in 1378, while on his second diplomatic mission to Italy, Chaucer acquired a copy of the
Filostrato.
If Boccaccio's version concentrates on shaping his source material into an account, with personal metaphorical implications and a transparently Italian fourteenth-century setting, of a love affair that ends in betrayal, Chaucer's adaptation attempts to restore the love affair to its historically significant setting in one of the foremost foundation myths of his world. This interest in a historical understanding of the events of the affair, along with several other artistic and intellectual concerns, provides an essential background for an explanation of the nature of
 
Page 74
Chaucer's "translation" of Boccaccio's poem. The well-known statistical analysis of the relationship between the two poems shows that what Chaucer did with the
Filostrato
cannot be considered a translation in the conventional sense of the word. There are 5,704 lines in the Italian poem and 8,239 in Chaucer's, but only about one-third of Chaucer's poem, about 2,700 lines, can be traced directly to Boccaccio's. Why Chaucer, who often named his sources, never acknowledged Boccaccio may or may not be related to this fact. His reason for offering the name of "myn auctor called Lollius" (I.394) as his source for the entire work has never been definitively explained, even though a persuasive argument has been made that a mistranslation of a line in Horace led in Chaucer's time to a belief in a Roman authority on the Trojan War named Lollius.
Chaucer's adaptation recapitulates the action of the
Filostrato
, but
Troilus and Criseyde
differs from Boccaccio's poem in many respects. Chaucer deepened the characterization of the three principals, Troilus, Criseyde, and her older uncle, Pandarus (in Boccaccio, Pandaro is her cousin and of an age with the lovers), by making their emotions and motives more complicated. He expanded and added episodes to intensify the sense that the fate of the lovers is tied to that of their city, and that the fate of their city resembles the fate of Thebes, another city doomed in the period of human history that stood outside of the providential scheme of salvation.
But the most substantial contributions to the implications of the poem's action come from Boethius and Dante. Chaucer's translation into prose Boethius's
De consolatione philosophiae
(early 1390s) was as significant to his artistic development as his earlier translation of the
Roman de la Rose.
Rendering into English the meaning of fortune, chance, destiny, providence, and free will as explained by the Lady Philosophy to the imprisoned Boethius, the author almost perfectly situated on the threshold of civilization's passage from the ancient into the medieval world, was probably the most demanding and rewarding intellectual exercise of Chaucer's life. The Boethian dimension pervades the
Troilus
, providing a pattern of understanding for the interaction of the operations of the internal world of the characters with those of the external, cosmic world. From Book I, in which the amatory expert Pandarus plays to the lovesick Troilus in a parody of Philosophy's instruction of Boethius, to Troilus's soliloquy in Book IV, in which Troilus attempts in vain to escape the conclusion with which he begins

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