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The Source of Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The question, as to the source of Chaucer's unfinished poem Anelida and Arcite is an unsolved problem. Professor Skeat points out in his introduction to this poem that the first three stanzas are from Boccaccio's Teseide, as are also stanzas 8, 9, and 10; and that stanzas 4 to 7 are partly from Statius. The origin of the rest of the poem, which is far the greater part, is unknown.
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References
page 461 note 1 Oxford Chaucer, Vol. i, p. 77.
page 462 note 1 Schick, in his edition of the Temple of Glas, E. E. T. S., p. cxx, says in a note upon the list of lovers given in the Intelligenza: “This list is interesting as giving, amongst others, the following pair of lovers (stanza 75, l. 2):
‘La bella Analida et lo bono Ivano.‘
This seems to point to one of the Romances treating of Iwain and the Round Table for the origin of the name Anelida, which would at once upset Bradshaw's and Professor Cowell's ingenious etymologies from '
and Anahita: for I do not believe that both the poet of the Intelligenza and Chaucer mistook a t for an l. We have also in Froissart's Dit du bleu Chevalier the line (ten Brink, Chaucer-Studien, p. 213):
‘Ywain le preu pour la belle Alydes.‘
One and the same personage is evidently indicated by the two names Analida and Alydes for Iwain's paramour: I am not, however, sufficiently acquainted with the Arthur-romances to know of the occurrence of such a name. Laudine in Chrestien's Chevalier au Lion is not very like it.“
On the name Anelida being a misreading of the name of the goddess Anáhita of the Zoroastrian religion in some Latin text see Professor Cowell's article on Chaucer's Queen Anelyda in Essays on Chaucer, Chaucer Society, 1892, p. 615.
page 463 note 1 See Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, Vol. ii, pp. 402-5; Skeat, Oxford Chaucer, Vol. i, p. 531; Globe Chaucer, p. 336.
Miss Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, p. 88, has, “I have queried if a ms. could have given Chaucer Corinnus instead of Corippus: see Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship, 436; but there appears no evidence of Corippus' influence.”
page 463 note 2 See Koscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der Criech. u. Röm. Mythologie, under Korinnos. Fabricius in his Bibliotheca Graeca, Vol. i, p. 16, gives something about Corinnus based also only upon Suidas.
page 464 note 1 Guilelmus Crönert, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, N. F. lxiii (1908), pp. 161-189.
page 466 note 1 See Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, p. 618; Manitius, Phil. ii, pp. 538-45; O. Müller, Rheinisches Museum, xviii, p. 189.
page 466 note 2 A. Graf, Roma nella memoria e nelle immaginationi del medio evo, Vol. ii, pp. 296-315; Sandys, p. 615.
page 467 note 1 Manitius says,—“Anführungen aus Lib. II fehlen: überhaupt ist im Mittelalter kein Buch so wenig berücksichtigt worden wie Am. II (und III), ausser den Medic. faciei, aus welchem ich überhaupt kein Citat gefunden habe” (Philologus, Supplement-Band vii, p. 736).
page 467 note 2 Bartsch, Bibliothek der deutschen National-Literatur, Vol. xxxviii, Einleitung, p. 111.
page 468 note 1 Becker gives the description of four such mss., Catalogi Bibliothecarum Antiqui, page 174, No. 74; page 196, No. 82; page 233, No. 115; page 239, No. 117. And the catalogues of French manuscripts give two: Catalogue des Manuscrits, Departments, Vol v, p. 121; Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Vol. ii, p. 156.
page 468 note 2 These are described in the following: Catalogue des Manuscrits, Departments, Vol. 371, p. 635; Catalogus Codicum MSS. Bibliothecae Bodleianae, pars tertia, p. 115, (this ms. is prefixed by this distich:
“Hoc opus est Naso titulo quo signat amorum
Cantata est libris una Corinna tribus“);
Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Regiae, VIIMCCCXI. This last ms. has animorum, which is plainly a mistake for amorum. See R. Merkel, Ovidius, 1855, p. iv, for a description of this ms.
page 468 note 3 J. A. Fabricius, Bibliotheca Latina, ed. J. A. Ernesti, Tom. i, p. 444.
page 469 note 1 Ovidius, 3 tom., Francofurti, 1601, f°., tom. i, p. 177.
page 470 note 1 See Ovidii Opera, ed. Burmann, 1727, Tom. i, p. 323.
page 470 note 2 Ovidii Opera Omnia, ed. Jahn, 1828, Vol. i, p. 227.
page 471 note 1 Sandys, Hist. Class. Schol., p. 619.
page 472 note 1 Rutebeuf, a trouvère of the 13th century, wrote complaints, but none of them deals with love. See Œuvres Complètes de Rutebeuf, ed. Jubinal, pp. 13 ff., 40 ff., 55 ff., 91 ff., 100 ff. For Machault's “complaintes,” see Guillaume de Machaut, Poésies Lyriques, ed. Chichmaref, tome 1, pp. 241-69. Froissart wrote amorous ballads of the conventional type; see Œuvres de Froissart, Poésies, ed. Scheler, Vol. ii, pp. 366 ff. Granson, from whom we know Chaucer translated his Compleynt of Venus, wrote a Complainte de Saint Valentin. For a discussion of this poem and others of Granson's, see A. Piaget, Romania, xix, pp. 405-7. Deschamps wrote many “balades amoureuses.” See Œuvres Complètes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. Saint-Hilaire, Vol. iii, pp. 209 ff. Christine de Pisan wrote “amorous complaints” of the established type. Her work was probably done too late to influence Chaucer. See Œuvres Poétiques de Christine de Pisan, ed. Roy, Vol. 1, pp. 281-95 and Vol. iii, pp. 203-8.
page 473 note 1 Œuvres de Froissart, Poésies, ed. Scheler, Vol. ii, p. 387.
page 474 note 1 Œuvres Complètes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. Saint-Hilaire, Vol. iv, p. 185.
page 475 note 1 Guillaume de Maohaut, Poésies Lyriques, ed. Chichmaref, i, p. 254.
page 476 note 1 It may be well to indicate what is meant by complaint as it is used in this discussion. Skeat, in the Oxford Chaucer, Vol. i, p. 61, has defined complaint as follows: “The word compleynt answers to the O. F. complaint, sb. masc., as distinguished from O. F. complainte, sb. fem., and was the technical name, as it were, for a love-poem of a mournful tone, usually addressed to the unpitying loved one.” This is a somewhat technical limitation of the word, but this seems to be the kind of complaint that was fashionable among the French love-poets of the Middle Ages, and the kind that Chaucer imitated in his early complaints. Professor Neilson has shown in his discussion of the court of love genre that it was common enough for someone to present himself before Venus or her representative in the court of love with a complaint. (The Origins and Sources of the Court of Love, Harvard Studies and Notes, Boston, 1899, Vol. vi, pp. 231-2.) In these instances the complaint may be said to be an organic part of the story. But the word complaint is in such cases used in its broadest sense to mean any kind of grievance, and it really is a petition or “bill” presented to Venus for her judgment and is not a love-poem addressed to the unpitying loved one. In the same way we may call the débat a complaint. For instance, there is the complaint of the White Canonesses against the Gray Nuns in Jean de Conde's Le Messe des Oisiaus et li Plais des Channonesses et des Grises Nonains. (See Neilson, pp. 67-9.) Here the Canonesses come before Venus, who is to decide the question, to complain that the Gray Nuns have taken their lovers. It will readily be seen, however, that these petitions are not complaints in the sense in which Skeat defines the term and in which I am using it in discussing Chaucer's complaints. There are numerous instances later than Chaucer where the complaint or lament is made an organic part of a story. Professor Neilson has called my attention to three instances of such complaints in Scottish poetry which show likewise the nine-line stanzas of the Complaint of Anelida. These are Sir William Wallace, Bk. ii, ll. 170-359, Scottish Text Society, 1889; The Complaint of Cresseid in The Testament of Cresseid, ll. 407-69, Henryson, Poems and Fables, ed. David Laing, Edinburgh, 1865; and the complaint in the Quare of Jalusy, 11. 191 ff., The Kingis Quair and the Quare of Jalusy, Alexander Lawson, London, 1910. But Chaucer in the Compleynt of Mars and in the Anelida and Arcite appears to be the first poet to use the complaint in this way.
page 478 note 1 J. Schick, in discussing Lydgate's Complaint of the Black Knight, has suggested that the origin of the complaint may have been influenced by Ovid's Heroides. He says, “Further, the ‘Complaints’ of the Lady and the Knight as they present them to the goddess, recall to us a certain species of poetry which was at one time much in vogue in England and France. These ‘Complaints’ are usually put into the mouth of a rejected or forsaken lover, bewailing his wretched state and calling upon his lady for pity. It is not impossible that their origin may have been influenced by Ovid's Heroides, which enjoyed so remarkable a popularity in the Middle Ages. We have such ‘Complaints’ from French poets—for instance, from Rutebeuf, Christina de Pisan and Machault: Chaucer wrote the ‘Complaints’ of Mars, of Venus, and of Anelida (of somewhat different genre, the Complaint to Pity, and turned jokingly, the Compleint to his Purse)” Temple of Glass, E. E. T. S., p. cxxii.
If in its origin the genre owed something to the Heroides, it is interesting to observe that Chaucer in the Gompleynt of Anelida has broken away from his French masters who were by this time producing a type of complaint very different from Ovid's poems, and has gone back to the original source for his model.
page 479 note 1 It may be noted that Penelope, to whom Chaucer compares Anelida, line 82, is Ovid's heroine in the first epistle of the Heroides, and that Lucretia, referred to in the same line is celebrated by Ovid in Fasti, ii, 721-852. But the linking together of the names of Penelope and Lucretia as models of goodness and constancy was a favorite idea of Chaucer's caught from a passage in the Roman de la Rose. Professor Skeat notes this as follows in the Oxford Chaucer, Vol. i, p. 490, note to line 1081 of the Duchess:
“Penelope is accented on the first e and on o, as in French. Chaucer copies this from the Roman de la Rose, line 8694, as appears from his coupling it with Lucrece, whilst at the same time he borrows a pair of rimes. The French has:
'Si n'est-il mès nule Lucrece,
Ne Penelope nule en Grece.'
In the same passage, the story of Lucretia is told in full, on the authority of Livy, as here. The French has: ‘ce dit Titus Livius,‘ line 8654. In the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer alludes again to Penelope (line 252), Lucrece of Home (line 257), and Polixene (line 258); and he gives the Legend of Lucrece in full. He again alludes to Lucrece and Penelope in the lines preceding the Man of Lawes Prologue (B. 63, 75); and in the Frankelein's Tale (F. 1405, 1443).“ To these instances may be added this mention of the two names in Anelida, line 82.
page 485 note 1 House of Fame, Bk. ii, 712.