The Legend of Good Women is a collection of stories about women who were faithful in love. The stories are drawn from classical mythology, and all of them end tragically. The Legend consists of a prologue and nine stories, the last of which remains unfinished.
The prologue is the most famous portion of the Legend, and apparently a favorite of Chaucer’s, as he revised it later in his career. It is a dream vision, a conventional form for medieval English poetry. In it, the poet goes out walking in the springtime. Admiring the flowers, he falls asleep and has a dream about Cupid (the Roman love God), and his queen Alceste. Cupid reprimands Chaucer for denigrating love by recounting the stories of unfaithful women in his long poem Troilus and Cressida and his translation of the satirical French romance The Roman de la Rose. However, Alceste defends Chaucer, arguing that he has also been responsible for many great poetic works, and thus deserves a chance to rescue his reputation by writing a work dedicated to the nobility of love and the faithfulness of women. Chaucer agrees, and wakes up to begin writing the poem.
The stories themselves tend to follow a similar formula. With the exception of Medea, Ariadne, Philomela, and Hypermnestra, all the women end up dead at the end of their stories. Many kill themselves, whether to follow their beloveds to the grave (Cleopatra and Thisbe), out of grief at being betrayed by false men (Dido, Hypsipyle, and Phyllis), or out of shame at having been raped (Lucrece). A few of the men are faithful, most notably Pyramus in the Legend of Pyramus and Thisbe, who kills himself because he believes Thisbe has been killed, but most are not.
The Legend uses repetitive storytelling to argue that women are faithful, even to the point of death, while men are fickle lovers, often motivated more by selfish desires for honor and wealth. Frequently, men promise marriage when convenient, only to abandon their betrothed at the first opportunity. These men are often familiar figures from classical mythology, including Jason, who recovers the golden fleece, Theseus, who slays the minotaur, and Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid. The Legend centers their treatment of women rather than their heroic achievements, and thus casts them in a more negative light.
