Summary
The Prologue begins with a defense of books. Chaucer argues that there are some things one can only learn by reading. For example, no one can directly prove that “there is joy in heaven and pain in hell.” Instead, they must rely on what the Bible says. However, books are also valuable because they are a source of joy. Chaucer states that for him, reading is more appealing than going out into the real world, with the exception of the first days of spring, where the flowers lure him away from his books. The action of the Prologue begins at this time of year.
Chaucer goes out in the early morning to see the daisies, and spends all day walking. He wants to write about the beauty of the meadow, but knows that there has already been so much poetry written about flowers that there is nothing else to say. Still, he goes on to praise the daisy, even to get on his knees and greet it from up close. Meanwhile the birds sing, and Chaucer imagines that some sing of their hatred of hunters, while others voice pretty love songs. Already crouched on the ground to look at the daisies, and soothed by the sounds of birdsong, Chaucer falls asleep in the meadow and dreams.
His dream begins with the arrival of Cupid, the God of love. He comes hand in hand with a queen robed in green with a golden net over her hair and a crown ringed with white petals, and Chaucer realizes that she is the human embodiment of the daisy he had been admiring. He identifies her as Alceste, and although she resembles the daisy, he remarks that she is actually far more beautiful than anything in nature, and sings a ballad in praise of her. The ballad lists many women from classical history who suffered for their love, and advises them all to hide themselves, because Alceste far surpasses them all.
Behind Alceste and Cupid are nineteen fair ladies, followed by a great crowd of women, all of whom were true in love. Everyone sits down, and the god of Love turns to Chaucer and begins to berate him for daring to sit near to Alceste. He argues that Chaucer has been the enemy of love in his work as a poet. He has translated the Romance of the Rose, a romance that satirizes courtly love, as well as the story of Troilus and Cressida, in which a woman is unfaithful to her lover.
Alceste intervenes on Chaucer’s behalf, and suggests that he might not have been deliberate in the poetry he chose to translate. She suggests that Cupid is acting like a tyrant for condemning Chaucer, and advises him to be merciful instead. She lists Chaucer’s many other poems, and argues that a king should recognize the value of the poet’s wit. She then suggests a deal. Cupid will not hurt Chaucer, and in return, Chaucer will write a work about women who were true in love, to make up for the Romance of the Rose and Troilus and Cressida. He is to devote the majority of his time to this work, and describe both married and unmarried “good women” who were betrayed by “false men.” In return, Chaucer will be spared having to fall in love himself, and can focus on his work.
Cupid identifies Alceste as a queen who was turned into a daisy in order to save her husband from death, and was then rescued from hell by Hercules. Chaucer recognizes that she is the origin of the beautiful daisies he admires in the fields. Cupid chides him for having written of false Cressida when he could have written about Alceste. Now, however, he can make up for his mistakes. The love god instructs Chaucer to begin with Cleopatra and go on from there. He also advises him to avoid going into too much detail, because someone telling so many stories would do best to tell them briefly. At that, Chaucer wakes up and begins to write The Legend.
Analysis
The Prologue of The Legend of Good Women is a “dream vision,” one of the most popular genres of writing in the late Middle Ages. Dream visions have a few conventional attributes. They are written in verse. They usually begin in the waking world, establishing a “frame narrative” around the dream itself. The narrator often encounters a guide in the dream world who helps him to navigate the unfamiliar universe. They also often feature personifications, or beings who embody some abstract concept like Love or Thought.
People in the Middle Ages put a lot of weight on dreams. The Bible established them as a valuable way of knowing God, and later philosophers emphasized that dreams could be anything from encounters with the divine, to premonitions of the future, to valuable sources of advice. Some dream vision poems were actually faithful accounts of real dreams, or at least, the authors wanted their readers to believe that they were reading a true account. However, many dream visions were far too elaborate, lengthy, and detailed to feel realistic. In these poems, the dream vision is a literary device that enables the author to write imaginative worlds and explore complex conceptual topics.
The dream vision that begins The Legend of Good Women belongs to this second category. Chaucer is a self-consciously literary writer—he’s constantly reminding his reader that they’re reading a poem that was written intentionally. He also loves to play games, and his verse is often not entirely earnest. The Prologue less encourages its reader to think, “wow, what an interesting dream Chaucer had!” than, “wow, what a clever poem Chaucer has written!”
Tellingly, the opening lines of the poem are not about the poem's themes, but rather about the value of literature itself. Chaucer points out that no one has actually experienced heaven or hell and come back to tell the tale. Instead, all of our knowledge about the afterlife is indirect, but everyone still agrees that “there is joy in heaven and pain in hell.” The claim is bold. Chaucer is discussing perhaps the central point of medieval Christianity: one’s actions in this life will be rewarded or punished by God in the afterlife. Yet rather than discussing the idea itself, he uses it as an example in order to persuade his readers that books are an irreplaceable source of knowledge that cannot be gleaned from personal experience.
Thus, although he stresses that he “accords well that it is so,” Chaucer implies that the Bible is not an inherently more reliable source than any other written document—all the other “old books” that tell “of holiness, of reigns, of victories/ Of love, of hate, of other sundry things.” Sure, some of the books Chaucer mentions are religious, but others are histories, recounting the actions of kings and warriors, and still more are romances, secular texts that concern the ordinary events of love. He uses the fact that everyone in medieval England was meant to see the Bible and other religious texts as inherently reliable to argue that they should also “honor and believe” all these other kinds of books.
However, Chaucer describes books as a source of pleasure as well as knowledge. Although he describes his reading as an act of “devotion,” he also notes that he “delights” to read in books, and prefers them to other forms of recreation like games or holidays. Now we live in a world where reading is a normal hobby, even an especially respectable one. But in the late Middle Ages, books were expensive, literacy was rare, and doing something purely for pleasure could be seen as a form of “sloth,” or the sin of laziness. Most people were probably exposed to literature by listening to it read aloud, in a group of other listeners. In the Prologue of The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer is constructing silent reading as a normal and desirable activity, and “the reader” as an identity, in the way people now might think of themselves as a sports fan because it’s an accepted and well-defined kind of person. By working to cast reading as a desirable activity, Chaucer is, in a sense, creating his own audience.
Similarly, Chaucer spends a lot of the Prologue constructing his own persona as an author. People often emphasize that the Middle Ages were less individualistic than our present era. Many medieval poems and artworks are anonymous, and artists and writers didn’t have the kind of cult status that people today assign to figures like Christopher Nolan or Shakespeare. They might love a work, but not particularly care who wrote it. Chaucer, however, was a serious exception. He didn’t just want people to read his work, but also to know that it was all written by one person with a unified vision.
In the Prologue, Chaucer cheekily manipulates the dialogue to shoehorn in references to everything else he ever wrote. Cupid chides him for his translations of the French love poem Roman de la Rose, and the classical love story Troilus and Cressida. Alceste responds by specifically noting his other poems, including his original works (readers today might be familiar with The House of Fame, The Book of the Duchess, and The Parliament of Fowls) and his translations of religious writings. Indeed, when Chaucer revised the Prologue, he added in a reference to a verse translation of “Of the Wretched Engendering of Mankind” by Pope Innocent, as though he completed this project in between writing the original prologue and revising it, and wanted to keep the record complete.
The list emphasizes Chaucer’s wit, originality, and learnedness. It also gives readers a sense of a “Chaucer canon,” encouraging them to see The Legend in the context of Chaucer’s other work. Chaucer is often referred to as the father of English poetry. This is partly because he was an exceptionally skillful poet who introduced many of the hallmark characteristics of later English poetry—wordplay, satire, even iambic pentameter. Yet in the Prologue, we see that Chaucer was also the father of the English poet: for Chaucer, writing poetry wasn’t just something you did, but something that defined who you were. The poet was more than the invisible figure behind the writing; he was an author, a celebrity, someone whose identity mattered.
Indeed, Chaucer can’t seem to stop himself from seeing the world through the lens of literature, even when he leaves his books behind to go outside. When he sees the field of flowers, he declares his wish to have “English, rhyme or prose” that would suffice to praise the flower. At first, we think he is responding to the beauty of the flowers themselves, but he soon specifies that the real problem is that so much poetry has already been written about flowers that there are no new words left. The meadow isn’t just a meadow to him, but rather a subject of poetry.
Furthermore, his profession that he lacks the language to describe the flowers himself does not prevent him from attempting to do so. His description of the daisy doesn’t have much to do with the humble flowers themselves. Instead, he speaks of the daisy like a beloved woman in a romance: “She is the clearness and the very light/ That directs me through this dark world.” His hyperbole is ridiculous when directed at a flower. The passage is no longer about the flower, but rather about romance poetry itself. By adapting its language to a new context, Chaucer satirizes the extremes of romance poetry, and suggests that love poets make themselves ridiculous by employing such over-the-top language to describe ordinary people.
The love poem for the daisy makes us a little skeptical about The Legend’s subject matter. The Legend is meant to be a praise of love inspired by Cupid and dedicated especially to women’s faithfulness. Yet in the waking world, Chaucer seems keen to employ the language of love poetry to make a mockery of romance. Of course, poetry is complicated, and The Legend views love from multiple angles. Still, despite the serious subject matter of many of the legends, we should read all of them as self-aware, and potentially satirical.
