Summary
The Legend of Thisbe tells the story of a doomed romance between Pyramus and Thisbe. The two live in houses that directly border each other. However, their families are mortal enemies, and forbid their marriage. In order to be together, they whisper through the wall that divides the two houses. Eventually, they devise a plan to steal away at night and elope. Thisbe reaches their meeting place first, but unfortunately she is pursued by a lioness. She flees to a cave, but lets drop her wimple (a kind of cloth headdress), and the lion mangles the wimple in her bloody jaws.
When Pyramus arrives, he sees the wimple and believes that the lioness has eaten Thisbe. He responds by stabbing himself through the heart. Too late, Thisbe begins to fear that Pyramus will fear her dead, and leaves the cave, only to find him dead on the ground. She mourns him passionately, and then, vowing to follow him to death, kills herself.
The Legend of Dido recounts the story of yet another woman who commits suicide for her lover. The story is set during the time of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the famous epic poems about the battle between Troy and Athens. Following the defeat of Troy, Aeneas sails aimlessly until he eventually lands in a wilderness, where he meets a “hunteresse” who speaks to him of Dido, the queen of the land. Aeneas seeks her out, but first finds in her temple paintings of the defeat of Troy. He begins weeping for his loss, and Dido, seeing his grief, seeks to comfort him.
Dido begins to recognize Aeneas’s noble qualities, and learns that he is the son of the goddess Venus and the knight Anchises. She swears to help him by providing ships and organizes a great feast in his honor. As Dido listens to him speak of Troy, she becomes desperate to become his lover, and tells her sister that she wishes to marry him.
The next day they go out hunting together and retreat to a cave where they have sex and swear faithfulness to each other. Yet Aeneas, despite having sworn his love, makes plans to escape, and eventually reveals to Dido that he feels he must go out to conquer Italy for the sake of his father. Though she pleads with him to stay, or to let her come with him, he leaves her behind and goes on to marry another woman. Dido, in despair, casts herself into the sacrificial fire, but not before writing a letter to Aeneas condemning his betrayal.
Analysis
As he does with Cleopatra, Chaucer describes both Dido and Thisbe as “martyrs.” If you’re reading through the legends in order, by this point you might realize that the stories follow a repetitive formula. A woman falls in love, things go terribly awry, she ends her own life, and the story ends by stressing the unique faithfulness and honesty of women in love.
Medieval stories were often much more repetitive than contemporary literature. This is partially due to different audience expectations, and partially to the fact that most literature was intended for reading aloud, probably in a series of installments. If the stories were read individually over the course of many nights, the repetition would be less frustrating. Furthermore, a distracted audience might miss things, so it made sense to repeat them.
In the Legend, repetition also enables Chaucer to subtly satirize love, despite professing his intention of praising it. One story of a woman who kills herself for love is tragic. By the third consecutive account, love just starts to seem inherently self-destructive. The conclusion of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe emphasizes this point. Rather than reflecting on the loss of life recounted in the story, Chaucer ends by stressing Pyramus’s status as the only “true man” whose story has been recorded in books. In parallel, Thisbe casts her suicide as proof that “a woman can / Be as true in loving as a man.” These statements imply that suicide is the epitome of honesty in love, or at least of the kind of honest love that The Legend of Good Women professes to praise. The implication is that if you want to stay alive, you might have to be a little dishonest.
When the reader turns to the story of Dido, this message only becomes more pronounced. Dido’s death is particularly dramatic, as she hurls herself upon the fire of sacrifice and then plunges Aeneas’s own sword into her heart. Yet even alive, her love is all-consuming. When she realizes her desire for Aeneas she “wakes, wails, makes many a sudden movement” in her desperation. From the beginning, love looks more like all-consuming grief than like joy. Dido also loses her sense of identity in her love for Aeneas. Once the proud queen of Carthage, she is willing to give up her territory to go with her beloved, even before his betrayal brings her to despair.
In contrast, Aeneas’s choice to leave Dido is motivated by his firm sense of self. Although the narrator repeatedly and emphatically describes him as a traitor, when we read between the lines we get a slightly more complicated picture, one that suggests the narrator may not be entirely reliable. For example, the narrator describes Aeneas as planning to “steal away by night,” in secret. Yet when Dido becomes suspicious and asks what’s wrong, Aeneas freely tells her that his father’s ghost has appeared to him and encouraged him to conquer Italy. Rather than the secretive rascal the narrator depicts him as, Aeneas’s statement suggests a man in a genuinely difficult position, with split allegiances. Ultimately, Aeneas’s decision to leave Dido enables him to honor his own identity as a warrior and his father’s legacy.
Chaucer begins the story by praising Virgil, the author of the Aeneid and the source for this story. The Aeneid remained popular and influential in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance; famously, it inspired Dante’s Inferno. Chaucer’s better-educated readers would have been familiar with at least the broad strokes of the story, and they would know that Aeneas is the hero, albeit a flawed one. This understanding might lead them to be more critical of Dido than the narrator wants them to be; after all, had Aeneas stayed with her, he would never have fulfilled his great destiny.
The reference to the Aeneid is also a manifestation of one of the most striking features of The Legend of Good Women: its self-conscious incompleteness. Throughout the Legend of Dido, Chaucer will begin to describe a bit of context, only to note that he doesn’t have time to go into detail. For example, in line 954-955, he begins to recount the story of Aeneas’s adventures before meeting Dido, only to stop himself and state, “It is not to purpose to speak of this here / For it does not accord to my subject.” Similarly, at the end of the story, he begins to describe Dido’s letter to Aeneas, only to cut himself off and tell the interested reader that they can find the full letter in the Roman poet Ovid’s version of the story.
The choice to emphasize what’s not being said might seem a strange one, but it was a popular literary device in medieval literature. Cutting oneself off midway through an idea was known as abbreviatio, while skipping over a subject entirely, with a reference like “I will not mention the time when…” was known as occupatio. Chaucer employs occupatio and abbreviatio throughout the Legend, as well as in his other work. Both tools emphasize the author’s control over his subject matter—he knows more than we do, and is choosing what we get to read, and what we don’t. It also enables him to discuss topics outside the bounds of the story while pretending to stay on topic. For example, the digression on Aeneas’s adventures conveys that he was more than a lover. Yet, by cutting off the account in the middle, Chaucer can still pretend to care only about Dido’s story.
Chaucer is thus pulling off a tricky balancing act, one that shows off his rhetorical prowess and skill as a poet. He presents the same story from two angles, at once sticking to the project of the Legend by emphasizing Dido’s status as a victim, and employing inconsistency and abbreviatio to hint at a different version of the story, one where Aeneas narrowly escapes ruin at the hands of a woman’s self-destructive love.
