The Legend of Good Women is a long poem about women who were faithful in love. It comprises a prologue and nine short stories, the last of which is unfinished. The prologue is the best-known portion of the poem, and apparently also Chaucer’s favorite, as he revised it later in his career. It recounts a dream in which Cupid chides Chaucer for writing poems that mock love and depict dishonest women, and orders the poet to balance out this part of his career by writing a long poem dedicated to good women from history. Chaucer agrees, and the rest of the poem fulfills this promise, recounting the stories of women from classical mythology, and emphasizing their honesty and commitment to love.
The poem was written in the 1380s, during a period of extraordinary English poetic production, akin to Shakespeare’s Elizabethan England. Although Chaucer is the most famous writer from this period, many of the most famous medieval writers, including William Langland and Julian of Norwich, were also writing in this period. At the time, the Legend was a well-known work, and it seems to have remained popular through the fifteenth century.
Contemporary readers, however, have been less impressed. The poem is highly repetitive, with many of the individual stories closely resembling one another. It is also difficult to pin down Chaucer’s tone. Despite the consistently serious subject matter, the stories range from tragic to comic. The poet frequently emphasizes that he is following a brief, and sometimes seems to be writing against his will. Earlier scholars suspected that this reflected the reality of the poem's composition, and hypothesized that the queen had ordered him to write the Legend. However, self-deprecation and displays of reluctance were conventional literary devices in the Middle Ages, and don’t necessarily indicate that Chaucer disliked the project.
Written before or during the composition of The Canterbury Tales, the Legend lays down the basic framework for Chaucer’s greatest work. Like the Tales, the Legend is a collection of short stories yoked together by a larger frame narrative. Although it lacks the Tales’ array of storytellers, it is notable for the complex presence of the narrator, who interjects and actively shapes each story. Finally, the Legend may be the first work of English poetry to employ iambic pentameter. Chaucer went on to employ the form for The Canterbury Tales, and it become the hallmark of English poetry, going on to inspire the greatest writers of the English Renaissance, including, of course, Shakespeare himself.
