Narrator (Chaucer)
Chaucer is both the author of the Legend and an important character within it. In the Prologue, he goes out of his way to establish that the writer of the Legend is also the author of Chaucer’s previous works. He portrays himself as an accomplished and witty poet, responsible for a varied body of work. Throughout the poem, the narrator displays his learnedness by referencing a range of classical sources for the Legend. In the Prologue, he especially emphasizes his love of reading, portraying himself as one who prefers books to games and the outdoors. He also presents himself as morally upstanding, vociferously condemning the selfish actions of the men while praising and sympathizing with their female victims.
Yet Chaucer only agrees to undertake the Legend in order to avoid Cupid’s arrow, or to protect himself from falling in love. This hostility to love manifests in the stories as an often subtly satirical attitude towards his own subject matter. This witty and ironical attitude is quintessentially Chaucerian.
Cupid
Cupid is the Roman god of erotic love. In the Legend, he appears in Chaucer’s dream as a defender of love who reprimands the poet for mocking romance in his previous works. He is extremely angry with the poet, and seems resolved to wound him until Alceste steps in.
Alceste
Alceste is a queen who accompanies Cupid in Chaucer’s dream in the Prologue. She is the human embodiment of the daisy Chaucer has been admiring, a beautiful woman garbed in green and white. Although miffed by Chaucer’s unflattering depictions of women, she defends his honor as a poet, attesting to his witty writing and the diversity of his previous work. She instructs him to write a series of stories about honorable women, and in return makes Cupid promise to contain his wrath at Chaucer.
Cleopatra
Cleopatra is the queen of Egypt who falls in love with the Roman soldier Antony. When he kills himself, she follows in his footsteps. In the Legend, she is motivated not by heartbreak, but rather by her own internal code of ethics—she has sworn to follow Antony, wherever he goes, and sticks to her promise even when it ends in death.
Antony
Antony is a Roman general sent to conquer Egypt. When he arrives, he falls in love with the queen Cleopatra and betrays his country. Learning that the Romans have sent an army to punish him for his treason, he sails out to meet them and is defeated. He kills himself to save his honor, leaving Cleopatra alone.
Thisbe
Thisbe is the daughter of a wealthy Babylonian family. She falls in love with Pyramus, the son of her neighbor, but is prohibited to marry him because of a feud between their families. She agrees to elope, and plans to meet him in the countryside, but is pursued by a lion. Terrified and a bit cowardly, she hides in a cave and misses her planned rendevous with Pyramus. When she leaves the cave and finds him dead, she passionately stabs herself in the heart, professing her desire to stay with her lover, as well as her desire to prove that women can be as true in love as men.
Pyramus
Chaucer describes Pyramus as the only man who was as true and kind in love as a woman. He agrees to elope with Thisbe, and kills himself when he mistakenly concludes that she has been slain by a lion.
Virgil
Virgil was the author of the Roman epic the Aenied, a well-loved work in the Middle Ages.
Ovid (Naso)
Naso is the Middle English name for the Roman poet we know as Ovid. He wrote the Metamorphoses, a famous collection of myths that include bodily transformations, as well as the Heroides, a collection of letters written from the perspectives of mythological women.
Dido
Dido is the queen of Carthage. She is a pious and powerful woman, rich, young, strong, and beautiful. When she hears of the destruction of Troy and Aeneas’s tragic defeat, she feels compassion for him, and when she sees his nobility and power, as well as his gentleness and good looks, she falls in love with him. Dido actively pursues Aeneas, finally having sex with him by luring him into a cave while on a hunt. When he leaves her, she sends a letter condemning him for his lack of faith, and then stabs herself with his sword and casts herself into a fire as a sacrifice to the gods who have betrayed her.
Aeneas
Aeneas is the hero of Virgil’s great work the Aeneid, as well as a character in Homer’s Iliad. A Trojan warrior, he flees when the city falls to the Athenians. He travels to Italy and eventually founds Rome. The Legend limits itself to his romance with Dido on the way to Rome. He seems to genuinely love her, but ultimately chooses his duty to his father and his honor over his love for her.
Jason
Jason is the hero of the myth of the golden fleece, known for his heroic crew, the Argonauts. Sent on what was supposed to be a suicide mission, he ends up succeeding in reclaiming the fleece. In the Legend, he appears as an especially unsympathetic character, who intentionally leads Hypsipyle to fall in love with him so he can beget children before abandoning her. He then replicates the betrayal with Medea. Chaucer thus portrays him as not only faithless, but manipulative and promiscuous.
Hypsipsyle
Hypsipsyle is the daughter of Thoas, the king of Lemnon, an island Jason happens upon on his travels. She is young and naive. Initially, she desires Jason’s friend Hercules, but he convinces her to fall in love with Jason instead. Intriguingly, it is when Jason becomes “coy as a maid” that she finds him most attractive.
Medea
In Greek mythology, Medea is a powerful sorceress and priestess of the Goddess Hecate. She is the daughter of the king of Colcos, and helps Jason to retrieve the golden fleece. In return, he agrees to marry her, but later abandons her. In the mythology, she takes bloody revenge and goes on to marry again, but in the Legend she merely upbraids Jason for his falseness and mourns his loss.
Lucrece
Lucrece is the faithful wife of a Roman soldier. She is portrayed as remarkably attentive to her husband's needs. Even when he has been gone for months, she continues to think about him constantly and long for his return. Her beauty and honesty attract the attention of the tyrant Tarquin, who rapes her. Lucrece blames herself as well as the king, and kills herself. Chaucer portrays this as proof of her exceptional honesty.
Tarquin
Tarquin was well-known as a tyrannical king whose misdeeds inspired the creation of the Roman republic. In the Legend, he is selfish, violent, and deceptive. Once he begins to desire Lucrece, he resolves to have her regardless of her desires.
Ariadne
Ariadne is the daughter of Minos, the king of Crete. She has a strong moral compass, and when she determines that Theseus, who her father intends to kill, is innocent, she decides to rescue him. Theseus asks to marry her, and she agrees, but he ends up leaving her for her sister. At the end of the Legend, she is abandoned on a remote island, but in classical mythology she went on to become the wife of the god Dionysus.
Minos
Minos is Ariadne’s father. His son is killed while studying in Alcathoe, and in revenge he conquers the city and many others, vowing that their sons will be sent to die as his was. He has the sons taken to his labyrinth, a vast maze at the center of which dwells the minotaur, a ferocious beast.
Phedra
Phedra is Ariadne’s sister. She plays a more important role in the legend than in usual Greek mythology, by devising the strategy for Theseus to survive the labyrinth and the minotaur. She is also more beautiful than her sister, which leads Theseus to leave Ariadne for her.
Theseus
Theseus is the son of the king of Athens, who is selected by Minos to be killed by the minotaur. He survives because of Phedra and Ariadne’s compassion and cunning, but goes on to betray Ariadne in order to marry her sister.
Philomela
Philomela is a young maiden and the daughter of the king. Her sister’s husband Tereus is attracted by her innocence and rapes her, cutting out her tongue and imprisoning her in a castle to prevent her from telling what he has done. She does not give up, but instead weaves a tapestry to tell what has happened to her and gets it delivered to her sister Progne. In the Greek myth, the two take bloody revenge, but the Legend ends with Progne finding Philomela and lamenting her fate.
Progne
Progne is Philomela’s sister. She readily leaves her husband when she learns he has assaulted her sister.
Tereus
Tereus is the cruel and tyrannical husband of Progne. He does not hesitate to use violence to pursue his own desires, raping Philomela and cutting out her tongue to prevent her from reporting what has happened to her.
Phyllis
Phyllis is a queen who falls in love with the hero Demophon. She provides him with supplies and rest, and they get engaged, but he abandons her on the island. She kills herself, but not before writing a letter berating him for his dishonesty and inhuman cruelty.
Demophon
Demophon is the son of Theseus and follows in his father’s footsteps, using Phyllis when he needs a place to rest, but then abandoning her when he is ready to continue on his quest.
Egiste
Egiste is one of the two sons of the king Danao. He is a notoriously false lover, but his youngest daughter, Hypermnestra, is born of his legal wife. He has a dream that his younger brother Lyno seeks to kill him, and marries Hypermnestra to Lyno so she can kill him as he sleeps.
Hypermnestra
Hypermnestra is the daughter of Egiste. When he orders her to kill her husband, Lyno, she must choose between her duty to her father and her reluctance to do violence. Ultimately, she cannot do the bloody deed, and allows her husband Lyno to escape.
Lyno
Lyno is the younger brother of Hypermnestra’s father Egiste. Egiste dreams that Lyno will kill him, but in the Legend we don’t know if this reflects a true desire of Lyno, a twist of fate, or merely a deceptive delusion.
