2 - ‘I Wolde … han Hadde a Fame’: Dante, Fame and Infamy in Chaucer’s House of Fame

Summary

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]

In 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. 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. 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, yetmany 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’.

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’.