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Chaucer's Point of View as Narrator in the Love Poems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Dorothy Bethurum
Dorothy Bethurum*
Affiliation:
Connecticut College, New London
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Extract

Chaucer Writes about more varieties of amatory experience than any other English poet except Shakespeare. Whether in this abundance we have God's plenty or the devil's I will leave to Dryden and Father Denomy and try to comment only on this point of view as he relates the love visions and Troilus and Criseyde.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 74 , Issue 5 , December 1959 , pp. 511 - 520
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959

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References

1 See Les Chansons de Guillaume, ix, ed. Alfred Jeanroy (Paris, 1913) ix, 13–16.

2 The best edition of the Anticlaudianus is that of R. Bos-saut, Paris, 1955. De Planclu has not been recently edited but is in Migne, Patrologia Latina, Vol. ccx, and in Th. Wright's Satirical Poets of the Twelfth Century, Vol. ii. De Planctu was translated by Douglas Moffat, Yale Studies in English, Vol. XXXVI (1908), and Anticlaudianus by Wm. H. Cornog, Philadelphia, 1935. For recent studies of Alanus, see J. Huizinga, Uber die V erknupfung des Poetischen mit dent Theologischen bei Alanus de Insulis (Mededeelingen den Koninklijke Akademie van Westenschappen, Afdeeling Let-terkunde, Deel 72, Série B, No. 6, Amsterdam, 1932); Raynaud'de Lage, Alain de Lille, Montreal and Paris, 1951; and R. H. Green, Speculum, xxxi (1956), 649–674.

3 Huizinga makes this point in the article cited above.

4 The achievements of the early scholastics, especially the Chartrists, in estabhshing the autonomy and reality of the natural world are described in the work of de Lage cited above and in G. Paré, Le Roman de la Rose et la Scolastique Courtoise, Paris and Ottawa, 1941. See also, on the School of Chartres, B. Geyer, Uberwegs Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, Teil 2 (Die Patristische und Scholastische Philosophie), Berlin, 1928.

5 Alain's use of the dream to embody the form which is closer to God's idea than the waking experience appears in both his poems. On the garment of Prudence somniat hie rerum species pictura résultons, and the pictured house of Nature reveals the somnia veri. On Alain's use of painting, see the article of Huizinga referred to above.

6 B. H. Bronson, “The Book of the Duchess Reopened,” PMLA, lxvii (1952), 863–881.

7 Paull F. Baum, “Chaucer's The House of Fame,” ELH, viii (1941), 248–256.

8 I do not consider irrefutable Miss Shackford's evidence that he did not know the Somnium at first hand when he wrote the House of Fame. See “The Date of Chaucer's House of Fame,” MLN, xxxi (1916), 507–508.

9 Thomas Aquinas accepted the principle that a universe in which there were no evil would be less good than the one we have because less varied. Summa contra Gentiles, iii, 71, argues the perfection of the universe from its variety. “Its beauty results from the ordered unity of good and evil things,” tr. English Dominican Fathers (London, 1928), iii, i, 177.

10 On this point see J. A. W. Bennett's The Parlement of Foules, Oxford, 1957, chs. i and ii.

11 It looks a little as if the Prologue were a reaction from the pain of Troilus, something similar to Shakespeare's reaction from Romeo and Juliet in A Midsummernight's Dream,

12 Professor Donaldson, in his criticism of the poem in Chaucer's Poetry, New York, 1958, pp. 965–980, has written sensitively of Chaucer's role as narrator and the ambiguity it creates. See also Morton Bloomfield, “Distance and Predestination in TroUus and Criseyde,” PMLA, LXXII (1957), 14–26.

13 Bloomfield has listed the passages in Book i in which the author speaks. His interventions are most numerous in the third book and fewest in the fourth.

14 I agree with Professor Donaldson that the ending is not an afterthought nor inconsistent with the story, though it flows from Chaucer's strong reaction to the unhappy outcome.

15 See Thomas Aquinas' moderate discussion of the two in Summa Theologica, II, CLXxix CLXXxii, with his pronouncement that personal temperament should dictate one's choice in this matter.

16 For example, Father Denomy's The Heresy of Courtly Love, New York, 1947; and D. W. Robertson, “The Doctrine of Charity in Mediaeval Literary Gardens: A Topical Approach through Symbolism and Allegory,” Speculum, xxvi (1951), pp. 36 ff.

17 Roman de la Rose, ed. E. Langlois, Paris, 1924,11.19505–32. See the whole of Genius' speech of excommunication.

18 Cf. R. M. Lumiansky, RES, xxiv (1948), 81–89.

19 See Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, London, 1904, ch. XVI and Appendix vi, iii.

20 R. P. Warren, Selected Essays, New York, 1958, pp. 3 ff.