Summary
The first legend, as requested by Cupid, is the story of Cleopatra. She is made queen of Egypt after the death of her father, Tholome. While she reigns, a Roman senator, Antony, is sent to conquer Egypt. Although already married, he falls in love with Cleopatra and betrays his homeland in order to marry her. Rome responds by sending an army to destroy him, and Antony and Cleopatra sail out to meet them. There’s a great battle, but eventually Antony is defeated and retreats. He realizes that he has lost all his status and honor, and, despairing, kills himself. Cleopatra makes him a great shrine decorated with fine stones. Then she digs a pit next to the shrine and fills it with serpents. She announces that she has promised to feel all that her husband feels, and thus throws herself into the pit to die at her own hand as he has died.
Analysis
Chaucer begins the Legend of Cleopatra with a Latin description of what is to come, “Incipit Legenda Cleopatrie, martiris, Egipti regine.” In English, the title means, “Here begins the legend of Cleopatra, martyr and Queen of Egpyt.” By referring to Cleopatra as a “martyr,” Chaucer elides religious and secular themes, much as he did in the Prologue.
In Christian thought, a martyr is someone who dies for their faith. In the Middle Ages, there were many famous stories of “virgin martyrs,” or women who made oaths of chastity and chose to die rather than be forced into marriage. Indeed, the vast majority of female martyrs fit this description. Cleopatra, in contrast, marries a man who she fiercely desires, and dies for the love of him. In this sense, she is the exact opposite of the conventional female martyr in medieval literature.
Furthermore, in medieval Christianity, suicide was one of very few sins that could not be forgiven. After all, if you’re dead, you cannot subsequently repent of your sins. A saint was defined as someone who went to heaven automatically and immediately. Medieval readers would believe Cleopatra would suffer the opposite and be sent to hell forever. The sharp contrast between Cleopatra and a virgin martyr might lead us to see her as subtly vilified by the text. After all, the juxtaposition of a chaste woman who dies for her faith against a woman who sleeps with a married man, lures him away from his duty to his country, and then kills herself for him, is hardly a flattering one for Cleopatra.
However, as Alceste dictated in the Prologue, the point of The Legend is to praise good women. To this end, Chaucer describes Cleopatra as virtuous, and removes much of her agency in the story. We don’t see the moment where the two fall in love, but only hear that Antony deserted his country for the love of her. Her feelings for Antony are barely mentioned, except for in line 615, where Chaucer notes that she became his wife, and “had him as her leste,” or as she wanted. The line implies that Cleopatra desired Antony before he married her (indeed, when he was committed to another woman), but defers mentioning this feeling until after the two are lawfully united. Thus, rather than coming across as a seductress, in line with medieval misogyny, Cleopatra becomes a good wife, who bears no responsibility for Antony’s fall from grace.
Her suicide makes the text’s favoritism towards Cleopatra especially pronounced. Antony kills himself “for despair.” Chaucer depicts his suicide as an emotional decision propelled by a selfish love of honor. Conversely, Cleopatra does not kill herself because she cannot bear to be without Antony, but rather because she has made a “covenant” with herself to be a good wife by following her husband in all things. In this, her decision perversely mirrors that of the virgin martyrs, who similarly made a covenant and choose death to remain true to it. Thus at the conclusion of the story, Chaucer ties everything up neatly by stressing that there is no man as “true and stable” in love as Cleopatra was. Antony was hot-headed and weak; his queen, who undertook many of the same actions, was the epitome of a good woman, even akin to a saint.
What do we make of this inconsistency? We might start by assuming that Chaucer really felt this way, that he was sympathetic towards Cleopatra and critical of Antony. Yet the thesis of the story does not emerge organically from his narration, but rather comes as an assertion, voiced incongruously by Cleopatra as she takes her own life, and then as a pat and unsatisfying conclusion in the author’s own voice. Meanwhile, the events of the story as Chaucer narrates them, and the implied, unflattering comparison of Cleopatra to a virgin martyr, undercuts the message.
Given the playful, often satirical tone of the Prologue, it’s reasonable to assume that something more complex is going on. Here, one particularly persuasive reading is that Chaucer is emphasizing that history is always a matter of interpretation. As he states in the Prologue, books are often the only source for learning about events that happened in the past. Yet, ironically, to see books as valuable because they impart accurate knowledge is to disempower the author, who becomes merely a spokesperson for broader truth, rather than a creative voice in his own right. The author of “The Legend of Cleopatra,” in contrast, is obtrusively taking a stand. His language shapes the real historical events in accordance with the goals of his poem. He, and not history, has the power.
