may me hele;
(ll.36–40)
The idea that one might suffer the sickness of unrequited love for such a long time is a familiar trope in medieval poetry, and in modern criticism this passage is often “explained away” as a simple imitation of a European convention of courtly poetry: the poet establishes his credentials for writing about love by invoking the depth of his own feeling.
Yet in older biographical and critical traditions, this passage generated some heated debate about whether Chaucer was paying a compliment, either heartfelt or performative, to a lady of the court. This tradition goes back at least to William Godwin’s biography of 1804, which suggested Chaucer was the “unsuccessful lover of the lady to whom he professes himself attached.”2
Godwin based his claim on the passage from The Book of the Duchess, a reading of The Parliament of Foules and a third work known as Chaucer’s Dream. In this poem, the narrator dreams that his beloved consents to his suit but awakens to find it is a delusion: “Lo, here my blisse! lo, here my paine! / Which to my ladie I complaine, / And grace and mercy her requere, / … / That of my dremé [sic] the substaunce / Might turnen once to cognisaunce.”3 If we believe that the narrator is actually referencing his personal experience and that the narrator is Chaucer, then it would seem that the poem confirms Godwin’s notion that Chaucer suffered from unrequited love. The poem was first included in Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer and was accepted by Thomas Tyrwhitt as genuine, so Godwin had good reason to believe that the poem was by Chaucer. By the late nineteenth century, however, scholars had begun to question the Chaucerian attribution, and by 1878 it had been relegated to the ever‐growing Chaucerian apocrypha (it was ultimately renamed The Isle of Ladies).
Despite this setback, some critics continued to insist that the passage from The Book of the Duchess (even in the absence of the evidence from Chaucer’s Dream) was a direct reference to an unsuccessful love suit to some high‐placed member of the court. The most frequently named contender was Joan of Kent, the mother of Richard II.4 Margaret Galway argues that Chaucer would have traveled to Aquitaine with Gaunt in 1370, and would have read his “important new poem at the English court in Angoulême” with Joan (the “Fair Maid”) of Kent presiding.5 The poem would thus have been a courtly compliment to his hostess and her son. Galway goes even further to suggest that Joan “was evidently the subject of all [Chaucer’s] extant serious love‐poems,” especially identifying her with Alceste in The Legend of Good Women.6 Galway argues that Chaucer would have known Joan before her marriage to the Prince of Wales: “it is a priori not improbable that the young court poet paid Joan the compliment of posing as one of her disappointed admirers and vowing that he would always remain her faithful servant.”7 (Nevertheless, others suggest that the reference to Alceste in the Legend is a compliment to Anne of Bohemia, Richard II’s first wife.8)
Interestingly, in this essay from 1945 Galway makes no claims about the poet’s “real” feeling, but her identification of Joan of Kent as the subject of these lines has been interestingly misread as if Galway were making a biographical statement about Chaucer’s state of mind. Galway had first proposed this identification in 1938, and it was the subject of much debate in the 1940s. Most scholars argued against Galway, suggesting that the idea of a long lovesickness was a conventional feature of the French love poetry of the period – especially the poems by Guillaume de Machaut which were the sources for The Book of the Duchess – and so there was no need to argue for a particular candidate. In 1971, though, Edward Condren revived the idea and suggested that in The Book of the Duchess Chaucer is describing his own “profound emotional reaction to the death of Blanche of Lancaster.”9
The argument that a motif, an image, an allusion or a metaphor is “conventional” and therefore less interesting or less worthy than an idea that might come from the poet’s own heart or mind has a long and interesting history in English poetry, and the history of Chaucer criticism plays an important role here. For many decades in the twentieth century it was a truism that Chaucer began his poetic career as a more or less slavish imitator of French poetry, and as a devoted servant of rhetorical models and manuals such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova. He then looked to Italy and the writings of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio as narrative models, before finally developing his own distinctively English poetic style and inaugurating the traditions of English poetry. In an influential essay for the British Academy, J.M. Manly laid out this trajectory of Chaucer moving away from the “thin prettinesses” of the French tradition to a more robust and native poetic line.10 Through articles such as this, the idea of “convention” was devalued, but also strengthened as an explanation for much of Chaucer’s poetry, and there was, we suggest, an insistent masculinization of Chaucer in the critical practice that dismissed biographical equivalents and lovesickness in favor of a learned familiarity with poetic traditions and conventions. As we will see on many occasions in this book, the critical “myths” about Chaucer are deeply imbricated in the politics of changing critical styles.
Derek Pearsall takes a different, more meta view and argues that the lines in The Book of the Duchess are a deliberately opaque allusion that invites exactly this kind of speculation or gossip about the identity of this early love: “At the beginning, the poet pictures himself as sorrowful and unable to sleep, because of some eight‐year sickness that he mysteriously refuses to specify: Chaucer put this in as a talking‐point, and it has certainly provoked a great deal of talk.”11
Indeed, the phenomenon of courtly gossip is important here, and there are a number of myths surrounding the identity and actions of Joan of Kent, who was apparently famous for her beauty as well as her fashion sense.12 In some accounts of the founding of the Order of the Garter by Edward III in 1346, she is identified with the “Countess of Salisbury” (with whom the King was apparently enamored), whose garter embarrassingly fell to the ground (itself an important “myth of origins”13). Joan was first Lady Holland, then Countess of Salisbury, before becoming the Princess of Wales after marrying Edward III’s eldest son, the Black Prince. But as Leo Carruthers points out, there is considerable doubt as to who might have been the Countess of Salisbury at the time of the Order’s founding.14
Even though the critical tradition is at best equivocal about the possibility of diagnosing “genuine” as opposed to a performative, complimentary unrequited love, the idea of Chaucer’s own loves has a second life in the biographical and fictional traditions of medievalism and medievalist historical fiction.
One of the most influential texts here is Anya Seton’s extremely popular fictionalized biography of Katherine Swynford, Chaucer’s sister‐in‐law.15 Katherine, the younger sister of Chaucer’s wife Philippa, was governess to John of Gaunt’s children from his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, including the eldest, who would become Henry IV. She then became his mistress, and the mother of four children with Gaunt, before becoming his third
