1 - Chaucer and the French Lyric Tradition

Summary

The Female Hermeneutic Dilemma: Anelida's Plight

In the fifteenth-century manuscripts that preserve Chaucer's short poems, Anelida and Arcite is among the texts most often copied. Early Chaucer audiences seem to have had a special fondness for the unfinished tale of Anelida, “quene of Ermonye,” who falls for the duplicitous Theban knight Arcite and loves him most faithfully and perfectly, only to be callously abandoned when he develops an interest in a “newe” lady. Anelida and Arcite showcases five interconnected tropes that constitute the female-voiced critique of fin’amor Chaucer weaves through much of his pre–Canterbury Tales work.

The first of these tropes, female ventriloquism (the allocation of direct speech to female characters and protagonists), links Anelida and Arcite to many of Chaucer's other poems. As in the Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, Hous of Fame, Parliament of Foules, and in several of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer here spotlights the female perspective: he allows her to express herself directly, and gives us additional insight into a female protagonist's mind and heart via his narrator's voice. Both the narrator and Anelida herself emphasize the second trope, namely, the plausibility of a male suitor's behavior as a lover. This shows up in the very first stanza describing Arcite:

This Theban knyght, Arcite eke, soth to seyn,

Was yong and therwithal a lusty knyght,

But he was double in love and nothyng pleyn,

And subtil in that craft over any wyght,

And with his kunnyng wan this lady bryght. (85–9)

Within three lines of introducing him, the narrator makes it perfectly plain that Arcite is “nothyng pleyn” – his gestures appear genuine, which makes his “kunnyng” all the more dangerous. The narrator's use of the word “craft” both here and in line 98, as in the Legend of Good Women, denotes clever deception; since it can also refer to a guild, it suggests that Arcite is part of a fraternity of deceitful men well practiced in maintaining the appearance of love.