Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Romance and the Orient
- 2 Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean: Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, Boccaccio's Decameron 5, 2, and Gower's Tale of Constance
- 3 Two Oriental Queens from Chaucer's Legend of Good Women: Cleopatra and Dido
- 4 Chaucer's Squire's Tale: Content and Structure
- 5 A Question of Incest, the Double, and the Theme of East and West: The Middle English Romance of Floris and Blauncheflur
- 6 Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East
- Conclusion
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Two Oriental Queens from Chaucer's Legend of Good Women: Cleopatra and Dido
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Romance and the Orient
- 2 Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean: Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, Boccaccio's Decameron 5, 2, and Gower's Tale of Constance
- 3 Two Oriental Queens from Chaucer's Legend of Good Women: Cleopatra and Dido
- 4 Chaucer's Squire's Tale: Content and Structure
- 5 A Question of Incest, the Double, and the Theme of East and West: The Middle English Romance of Floris and Blauncheflur
- 6 Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East
- Conclusion
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
CHAUCER'S portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Legend of Good Women reflect another side of the Orient: here we find not the rich trading landscape of the Man of Law's Tale, but the locale of secret pleasures and sexual excess. This chapter discusses the legends of these two oriental queens whose claim to sainthood, even in terms of the religion of Cupid, is ambiguous.
Unlike The Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, those long versified romances that he had already written, Chaucer makes the Legend a collection of short narratives on the order of the Canterbury Tales (which he wrote after the Legend). According to the Prologue, the reason for brevity is the many stories the narrator has to tell: “For whoso shal so many a storye telle,/Sey shortly, or he shal to longe dwelle” (F 576–77). The ten stories of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra (eleven, if Alceste is counted) ostensibly offer a defense of the merits of women presented by the poet-narrator, Chaucer, in the fiction of this work, to make amends for his portrait of the unfaithful Criseyde. A playful disclaimer in Book 5 of the Troilus seems to anticipate a collection of lives about “goode wymmen, maydenes and wyves,/ That weren trewe in lovyng al hire lyves” (F 484–85):
Bysechyng every lady bright of hewe,
And every gentil womman, what she be,
That, al be that Criseyde was untrewe,
That for that gilt ye be nat wroth with me.
Ye may hire gilt in other bokes se;
And gladlier I wol write, if yow lest,
Penelopees trouthe and good Alceste. (5. 1772–78)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance , pp. 45 - 62Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003