When in 1700 Dryden first endowed Chaucer with the title «Father of English Poetry», he provided a nomenclature for a general Renaissance understanding¹. Spenser, for example, had commonly referred to Chaucer in terms that assumed originality: first invoking «some little drops» from «the spring [that] was in [his] learned hedde» («June», 93-94), he later called him the «well of English vndefiled» (Faerie Queene, 4.2.32) and claimed that «in [his] gentle spright/ The pure well head of Poesie did dwell» (FQ, 7.7.9). As the metaphors imply, Chaucer was for Spencer a fans et origo of poetic inspiration whose powers were not transmitted by imitation but instead inherited through an intimate, familial relationship. Similarly, Sidney had reinterpreted the traditional designation of Chaucer and Gower as the English equivalents to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio by setting all of these moderns over against the ancient founders of Latin poetry — a prefiguration of Dryden’s comparison of Chaucer to Homer and Virgil². As even these brief notices suggest, two, not entirely compatible assumptions govern the Renaissance investment of Chaucer with paternity. One is that he is the originator, the poet who breaks with the past and presides over the future — in short, the first modern poet in English. The other is that the idea of literature and literary history (what Dryden called «lineal descents and clans») is as natural as the patriarchal family itself. Literature is a transhistorical object always available to writers of genius: what the Greeks and Romans had possessed, Chaucer introduced into England. Neither of these assumptions are easily accepted today. Both philology and philosophy have taught us to mistrust claims to originality, while the idea of literature is widely recognized as a historical category that must be continually reconstituted and redefined.

While Chaucer’s medieval successors of course recognized (and were intimidated by) his preeminence, they did not in fact endow him with the patriarchal status that came so naturally to the Renaissance. When Lydgate said that Chaucer was the first to «fonde the floures… of Retoryke» with which to «enlumyne» «Our Rude speche», he was thinking not of origination but enhancement: finding an English that was «rude and boistous», Chaucer «Gan oure tonge first to magnifie/ And adourne… with his elloquence»³. He represents not a clean break from a rejected past but instead a transformation of that which was given: «Wyth al hys rethorykes swete» he «amendede our langage»⁴. Analogously, Chaucer is not a source but a model, a «maister» who can teach his pupils a technical lesson rather than a father from whom derives an intangible and so all the more indispensable aptitude. Indeed, this very question of paternity versus mastery is at the center of one of the earliest fifteenth-century response to Chaucer’s poetry, Henry Scogan’s Moral Balade⁵. While the poem is addressed to the royal princes to whom Scogan was tutor as to «my sones» from «your fader called, unworthily», it sets aside this patriarchal model in favor of discipleship precisely by invoking Chaucer. «My mayster Chaucer», says Scogan, has taught us that «the fader whiche is deed and grave,/ Biquath nothing his vertue with his hous/ Unto his sone» (65-69). On the contrary, virtue can be acquired only from God and must be earned through virtuous deeds, a traditional teaching that Scogan enforces by citing both the Wife of Bath and by then reproducing, in its entirety, Chaucer’s Gentilesse. The very frankness of his citations confirms his difference from the master whom he here imitates. Far from claiming for himself a Chaucerian inspiration, he relies instead upon the specific lessons the master taught him, a wisdom he must learn rather than simply absorb. «Therfore laborious/ Ought ye to be» (69-70), he tells his own pupils; «thinke on this word, and werke it every day» (47). They are sons who will not simply inherit but disciples who must acquire for themselves the wisdom he purveys⁶.

Dryden’s Chaucer enacts the inevitable quarrel of the ancients and moderns by establishing a new and definitive origin, the break from the past that the modernist Dryden himself sought to achieve. But Scogan sees Chaucer as instead resisting patriarchy by referring all acts of invocation beyond earthly fathers to a transcendent fons et origo: in true medieval fashion, he understands history as a realm of mediation that can never in itself yield a definitive origin. Thus for him, as for Lydgate, and for the fifteenth century as a whole, Chaucer is not a father but a master, a writer who showed how the English language with which both he and his «prentises» were endowed could be made expressive⁷. Rather than breaking with the past, Chaucer renewed it; rather than exercising patriarchal authority over the future, Chaucer empowered it by his example.

My purpose in this essay is to argue that while Dryden is by no means entirely wrong, this fifteenth-century understanding is a largely accurate reflection of Chaucer’s own sense of the dynamics of literary history. If Chaucer displays a vivid sense of his own modernity, nonetheless the cultural and social conditions that governed his writing defined his relation to the literary past, and to temporality per se, in a way that precluded the modernism that was so important to the humanist project. Humanism posited a double moment of originality: the moment now, which establishes the break from the immediate past (what the Renaissance came to call the Middle Ages); and the moment then, the Antiquity which provides the foundation upon which the future is to be built. Chaucer is as acutely aware as any of his trecento colleagues of the need for innovation, and he too turns to classicism to distance himself from the past. However, he is finally too medieval to believe that the realm of history can itself yield a transhistorical originality, that the web that binds past to present can be definitively ruptured by a merely historical action. As I hope to show, his classicism does not attempt to recover Antiquity as a self-coherent and autonomous cultural period⁸. But neither does it consist in a naive appropriation of classical topoi to medieval meanings: in distinction from his French contemporaries, Chaucer’s is no «clergial» classicism that uses the materials of antique legend simply for illustrative and ornamental purposes. On the contrary, because Chaucer’s classicism developed as a solution to a specifically social problem — the need to liberate writing, and the writer, from an increasingly constricting courtly ideology — and was enacted without the benefit of a widespread sense of cultural renewal, it came to express a sophisticated understanding of the complex negotiations that typify our own sense of the relation of past to present. Paul de Man has argued that modernity consists in the paradoxical discovery of the impossibility of being modern⁹. It is just his recognition — which we might now wish to designate as postmodern — that informs Chaucer’s powerfully ambitious yet darkly self-cancelling sense of modernity.

This is an argument I will articulate in two stages. First, if we are to identify that which Chaucer sought to modify in constituting a new, «literary» way of writing — that which represented the past over against which his modernity was to enact itself — we will find it not in the relentlessly didactic sententiousness that we now think of as typically medieval but rather in the fashionable discourse of courtly versifying, what Chaucer and his contemporaries called makyng¹⁰. And we need not (as is usually assumed) wait for the Canterbury Tales in order to see this process in action; on the contrary, it is within Chaucer’s early, courtly writing itself that the modernist initiative and the dilemmas that attend its emergence become visible. Second, I wish to offer a commentary on an early, courtly poem that confronts the question of modernity, the little-read but quite brilliant Anelida and Arcite.

II.

As its subject matter, intricate verse form, and manuscript provenance all declare, Anelida and Arcite is writing generated within and direct toward courtly culture, the writing Chaucer and his contemporaries called makyng¹¹. Displacing minstrelism in the baronial and royal courts of England in the second half of the fourteenth century, makyng is the literary practice through which Chaucer initially defined his authorial identity, and to enumerate its characteristics is to sketch out the presuppositions in relation to which a Chaucerian poetic emerges¹². To begin with, makyng is a site of play. Written to serve the recreative needs of the court, makyng stands apart from the constraining ideological pressure of both the dogmatic spiritualism of religion (the writer as moralist) and the narrow pragmatism of political and economic necessity (the writer as adviser to princes)¹³. On the contrary, the maker provides the materials of courtly diversion, the texts that were not merely the occasion for courtly conversation (as is clearly envisaged, for instance, by the demande d’amour) but themselves both provided paradigms for and constituted that conversation¹⁴. It is from the world of what the Gawain-poet called «luf-talkyng» that these texts arise and to which they refer: they are surviving fragments of an otherwise ephemeral social activity. Thus freed from any overt ideological purpose, makyng was able to define itself as the realm of the aesthetic. Constantly drawing attention to its technical intricacy, basing its generic distinctions on prosody rather than content, and deploying a polysemous discourse of riddles, doubles entendres, allegory, and allusion, makyng explored the potentialities inherent in language as both a signifying and a phonetic system. As Robert Guiette has said, it is a «jeu des formes», a practice that aspires to pure aestheticism¹⁵. And the total effect is to create what Paul Zumthor has suggestively called a cultural hortus conclusus, a site where an aristocratic «culte égocentrique» can find an unconstrained fulfillment denied it in the threatening world of late fourteenth century history¹⁶.

Yet of course the aesthetic is in no sense outside ideology, nor can history be so wilfully set aside. The very privileging of play served itself as an important marker of social identity, declaring the nobility to be, as a class, released from the penance of both labor and prayer. And the aestheticization of life, of which the formalism of makyng was simply one aspect, was central to the ideological project of class self-definition and self-legitimization in which late medieval aristocratic culture was ceaselessly engaged. Just as its cuisine transformed food into art, just as its fashion transformed the body into a visual display, so the makyng of the court transformed words into elegant discursive artifice¹⁷. What the courtly maker taught was, again in the words of the Gawain-poet, «the teccheles termes of talkyng noble». The obsessive focus upon love that characterizes this verse supports this project as well, not just by demonstrating over and over again that «pitee renneth soone in gentil herte», but by fashioning the turbulence of erotic feeling into the elegant artifice of lyric. As Derek Pearsall has said of the complaint, perhaps the most quintessentially courtly of lyric forms, «There is no movement, no action, only the lover and his mistress for ever frozen into ritual gestures of beseeching and disdain»¹⁸. Like the other kinds of fetishized objects with which the aristocratic world adorned itself (tapestries, jewelry, books), the complaint beautifully stages, over and over again, a reified extravagance, a petrified excess.

The primary purpose of makyng was the ritualistic rehearsal, with minute variation, of familiar tropes of socially valuable modes of speaking and feeling. The courtly text asks not to be interpreted but imitated: it is a paradigm for social reproduction rather than an agency of cultural understanding. In Anne Middleton’s words, it serves a «socially or cultically reaffirmative function», and Zumthor has shown how the «register» of the grand chant courtois articulates the shared assumptions that bind together poet and audience¹⁹. It objectifies and beautifies — but does not analyze or understand — courtly subjectivity, just as the books in which these texts were inscribed were themselves objects placed in the service of ostentatious selfdisplay²⁰. Correspondingly, the task of the maker was to provide the aristocracy with languages, pastimes, modes of feeling, and objects that confirmed their nobility. Social historians have shown that in the late fourteenth century the English aristocracy was seeking, under the pressure of far-reaching economic changes, to transform itself from a loosely organized and permeable class into a hereditary caste defined by a highly distinctive life-style²¹. The aesthetic transformations accomplished by courtly makyng thus served a crucial ideological function in fulfilling this purpose.

In thus subordinating itself to its ideological function, however, courtly makyng necessarily called into question its own status as an independent cultural activity, and with it the status of the maker himself. If makyng were to provide a discourse by which the aristocracy could identify itself, then it had to be one that the aristocracy could speak itself. Hence the late fourteenth-century demise of the minstrel must be understood not simply as the shift from one kind of taste to another but as the deprofessionalization of writing per se²². Hence the apparently paradoxical fact that Chaucer’s career seems not to have been in any way advanced by his literary activity, and that not a single one of the large number of documents that record his career refers to him as a writer²³. For to have acknowledged that Chaucer could do something special that other members of the court could not would have been to undermine the very ideological function that his makyng was designed to fulfill. That a great many courtiers could in fact write poetry is another sign of this function: we have the names and some of the poems of over a dozen noble makers from late medieval England, as well as the typically bizarre fact that Richard II wanted his epitaph to compare him to Homer²⁴.

Given the thoroughness with which courtly makyng was absorbed by its social context, we should hardly be surprised that Chaucer’s courtly poetry — which comprises virtually everything he wrote prior to the Canterbury Tales — should display signs of discontent. And while its critical perspective upon the social ground of its own existence is present throughout this body of writing, its sense of alienation becomes most explicitly in evidence in the last of these poems, the Legend of Good Women. Here an irascible God of Love (with unmistakeable affinities to Richard II) reads the complex contextualization of eroticism accomplished by the Troilus as a simplistic attack on love per se. Insisting upon turning all cultural products to the task of self-legitimization, the courtly patron seeks to govern both the production and the reception of the text, insisting that it signify a monolithic, self-identical meaning, that it rehearse and celebrate but never analyze much less criticize courtly values²⁵. This is an absolutism that Chaucer then ironically inflects through both his own incomplete submission to the patron’s commission and through the tyranny to which his saintly heroines are subjected. In short, for all its linguistic playfulness and apparent recreative freedom, courtly makyng is experienced by Chaucer as being as ideologically imprisoning as the didactic sententiousness to which it stood in opposition within the system of medieval vernacular writing.

But if the writing of neither sentence nor solaas provides an appropriate discursive form — if neither allows for the generation of what we have come to call literature — then where is Chaucer to turn²⁶? The answer that has traditionally been given is that it was not until the Canterbury Tales that Chaucer turned away from the court and returned to his bourgeois roots²⁷. But this line of analysis immediately raises a host of objections: it misrepresents Chaucer’s own social origins, which are within a merchant patriciate with profound affiliations to the seigneurial class, as Chaucer’s long-standing residence within noble courts attests; it assumes that the Canterbury Tales is somehow a bourgeois text, for which there is almost no evidence; it ignores the fact that his critique of courtly norms is already established in the poetry of the pre-Canterbury Tales’ period; it posits a sharp line between bourgeois and aristocratic tastes that is in pratice difficult if not impossible to draw²⁸; it ignores the fact that what texts there were that appealed primarily to the bourgeoisie were precisely those engendered within the context of sententiousness — Middleton’s «public poetry»; and above all, and in my view decisively, it assumes that Chaucer’s opposition to aristocratic ideology was staged in terms of a social (and hence, inevitably, political) opposition — when in fact everything about both Chaucer’s life and writing bespeaks his discomfort with socially oppositional modes of thought and action. In other words, we cannot understand the emergence of Chaucer’s kind of writing by appealing to that all purpose deus ex machina of historical explanation, the rise of the middle class.

The correct answer, I believe, is that Chaucer pried himself loose from courtly ideology by means of what he called poetrye — by which he meant the writings of the ancients and of their trecento inheritors, Dante, Petrarch, and the unacknowledged but all the more ubiquitous Boccaccio. According to a familiar ratio, Chaucer sought to be modern through a return to antiquity; by establishing a relation to a recuperated past he projected himself into a new future. The distinction between courtly makyng and the poetrye of the ancients and of their imitators was, as Glending Olson has shown, ubiquitous within Chaucer’s literary world, and one that he himself maintains rigorously throughout his work²⁹. Yet as he makes explicit at the conclusion of the Troilus, but as is implicit throughout, he cannot quite conceive of himself as a poet:

Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye,

Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye,

So sende myght to make in som comedye!

But litel book, no makyng thow n’envie,

But subgit be to alle poesye;

And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace

Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace (5.1786-92).

In the final line Chaucer reconstitutes Dante’s «bella scola» of Inferno IV, with the significant substitution of the epic Statius for Horace the satirist — a Statius who plays a crucial role in Chaucer’s attempt to write a more than courtly poetry, and nowhere more powerfully than in the Troilus itself and, as we shall see, in Anelida and Arcite. But far from allowing himself to be incorporated within this group as an equal, as had Dante, Chaucer remains «subject», a petitioner whose humble posture reinvokes the courtly configuration of dominance and submission that Dante’s vision of humanistic fellowship — «each shares with me the name [of poet]», says Virgil — had supplanted. So that even the form in which the maker imagines his relation to poetrye figures his distance from it.

Moreover, although Chaucer’s initial impulse toward classicism clearly derived from the Italian humanists — there is hardly an ancient text that he does not approach through their mediation — the relation he establishes to antiquity is in fact far different. Rather than seeking to recuperate antiquity in all its otherness, an otherness that can then provide the terms by which a modern or Renaissance self can define itself, Chaucer is persistently, even painfully aware of the affiliations that bind together past and present into a seamless and finally inescapable web. Similarly, while the humanist conception of the poet offers the courtly maker an opportunity to establish a secure professional identity within a posture of cultural superiority, its grandiose claims strike Chaucer as both intimidating and foolish³⁰. But the classics do provide Chaucer with two things: first, a form of writing that allows for meaningfulness — for interpretability — while resisting the preemptive hermeneutics of allegorical exegesis; and second, a prospect upon life that is capacious and synoptic but not dismissively transcendental — in other words, a historiography. For Chaucer, as for many other medieval readers, the classical poets, and especially Virgil and Statius, were essentially historians; and they provided him with an historical vision that allowed him to step outside the suffocating narcissism of courtly makyng and to recognize the mutual interdependence of subjectivity and history³¹. And yet this effort at escape was incomplete: the failure of classical history, and of the poets who are its historians, to provide an escape from history is, in large part, the topic of both the Troilus and the Knight’s Tale. It is also the topic of Anelida and Arcite.

III.

Of all Chaucer’s poems that stage the dilemma of the modern poet in the late Middle Ages, perhaps the most brilliant, and certainly the most compact, is the text entitled in the manuscripts «The Compleynt of Feire Anelida and Fals Arcite» — a title that misleadingly attempts to fit into a familiar courtly category a poem that in fact asserts an almost sui generis idiosyncracy³². For a number of reasons the poem is no critical favorite³³. It is radically, almost self-destructively segmented, being comprised of what appear to be two distinct fragments: first are ten rhyme royal stanzas that invoke Mars, introduce Theseus, and recapitulate the story of the Seven against Thebes; then follows a wholly amorous account of a love affair between the two protagonists, an account that itself fall into two parts, a 140 line narrative of love won and then betrayed, and Anelida’s 140 line complaint in an elaborate French rhyme scheme. This second, two-part romantic fragment bears apparently no relation to the epic opening, a discontinuity that critics have usually explained by pleading incompletion. But while four of the thirteen witnesses to the text do append a stanza that promises more to come, this addition is almost certainly scribal, while the explanation of incompletion is in any case a desperate remedy that begs the questions the poem poses³⁴.

Indeed, the reduplicative structure of the poem as we have it — an opening 70 lines that are then doubled into a 140 line segment that is then itself in turn replicated by another 140 lines — is itself thematically expressive; and despite its peculiarity the poem is in fact a recognizable kind of Chaucerian writing. It is a miniaturized conjunction of epic and romance as they are articulated, in more fully amplified forms, in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale; and its closest analogue in the Chaucerian canon is the so-called «Broche of Thebes», a diminutive poem with similarly divided loyalties that literally fell apart in the fifteenth century, becoming the poems we now know as the «Complaint of Mars» and the «Complaint of Venus»³⁵. These-four poems are articulated, in typically Chaucerian fashion, according to a series of oppositions: love is juxtaposed with war as both astrologized mythography (Venus and Mars) and genre (romance and epic); a transcendental rationality conceived in Boethian terms is set over against the irreducible specificity of individual experience; and above all, the discourse of contemporary courtly makyng is set within a classical context derived primarily from Virgil, Ovid, and Statius, with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as mediatory figures. The result are poems that explore the relation of past to present as both cultural and psychological events: the cultural project of classicism is inflected into the psychology of a lover’s memory, and the recovery of antiquity is enacted in terms of the drama of loss and reparation staged by the amorous complaint.

As I have suggested, Anelida and Arcite is double in both inspiration and structure. Establishing at the outset a literary context that is martial in tone, narrative in form, and male in ideology, it then modulates into a venerean world of amorousness that culminates in a highly aestheticized female lyricism. Chaucer ascribes these two elements of his poem to two different sources: «First folowe I Stace, and after him Corynne» (21). The Thebaid is a powerful if significantly obscured presence throughout the first ten stanzas, but we cannot be sure even whom Chaucer means by Corinna: he may be thinking of the Theban poetess of that name, or a feminine Ovidian voice with links to the puella of the Amores, or both³⁶. But whoever she is, she functions as both an alternative and a counterpart to Statius, enforcing the differences between the poem’s two parts but suggesting as well a complementary relationship. We are thus encouraged to read this female romanticism as both a modern graft onto an antique epic and as a coherent part of the poem as a whole, a gloss that constitutes as well as interprets the text. It is at once superior to the epic history it explicates and yet absorbed by and made one with it. And the ambiguous relationship between these two literary elements typifies the ambivalence that inhabits Chaucer’s thought about the relationship of both the classical past to the medieval present and of the epic world of history to the romantic world of love. On the one hand the erotic is an organon to explain the historical: just as the failed love of Troilus and Criseyde can presumably teach us about the failure of Troy, so can Theban compulsions be explicated by reference to Anelida and Arcite. But conversely, the historical is a determinant of the erotic and the past of the present: historical precedents impose dark coercions upon young lovers seeking to escape a similar fate, and the local enclave of love is subsumed by the tangled world of history it seeks to explicate. Hence we are forced to acknowledge that a linear model of cause and effect (love engenders war, war dooms love) must be replaced by a model of replication, in which love equals war. And the ultimate cause — the origin — must either lie somewhere else or, more likely, be itself subsumed within the pattern of replication.

The terms in which Thebanness is represented in Anelida and Arcite are suggested by the Muse to whom the poet calls for inspiration. Ignoring epic Calliope and lyric Erato, Chaucer here invokes Polyhymnia (15). Literally the muse of many songs, Polyhymnia was in the classical period given responsibility for the mimic arts, while medieval mythographers ascribed to her the magna memoria necessary for all poetry; in this poem she sings with «vois memorial in the shade,/ Under the laurer which that may not fade» (18-19)³⁷. Anelida and Arcite is an explicitly memorial poem, seeking to preserve an «olde storie» (10) that «elde… Hath nygh devoured out of oure memorie» (12-14). Moreover, when Anelida turns to «write» her «compleynynge» (209-10), she is impelled by what she calls «the point of remembraunce» — a phrase that is in the first instance a recollection of Dante, and then of itself, serving the complaint as both its opening and closing lines (211, 350). Indeed, the poem witnesses to and represents the workings of a memory that is at once compulsive and incomplete. Both Anelida’s complaint and the poem in which it is embedded are ostentatiously and deliberately incomplete; each represents a consciousness in medias res, burdened with a multiplicitous past but incapable of being subordinated to a controlling understanding that would allow for a satisfactory closure. Anelida and Arcite articulates a form of consciousness that remembers everything yet understands nothing, that recapitulates an unforgettable past by unwittingly reliving it in the present, that finds no ending because it is unable to grasp its beginning. Most tellingly, however, this disturbed mnemonics is represented in the poem not only in terms of the abandoned lady and her false lover but also of the recording poet, in which it in effect constitutes Chaucerian literary modernity. While Chaucer engages in a continuous and respectful recourse to his predecessors, he is simultaneously aware that such recourse is typical of all literary production, including theirs; and his scepticism about his own achievements, implicit in the diminutive and even dismissive self-representations that pervade his work, extends to a larger scepticism about the availability of a legitimizing originality. On the one hand, the modern poet is in danger of becoming nothing more than an impersonator standing at an alienating distance from the sources of Western writing; on the other hand, those very sources are of uncertain reliability.

The poem establishes the thematic opposition between Anelida and Arcite in the apparently straightforward and unqualified terms of her singleness of purpose set against his duplicity. She is «pleyn» (116) while he is «double in love and mothing pleyn» (87); her «entent» is set wholly «upon trouthe» (113) while he is «fals» and «feyned» (97, et passim). But while the narrative is posited upon Anelida’s moral integrity, it simultaneously reveals her love to be almost literally self-divisive. Compulsively thinking of Arcite, Anelida barely attends to her food (134-35); lying in bed, «on him she thoght alwey» (137); «whan that he was absent any throw,/ Anon hir thoght hir herte brast atwo» (93-4). And having warred against herself in a futile effort to become wholly at one with her lover, Anelida reacts to her abandonment with a violence that brings her to the edge of self-extinction:

She wepeth, wailith, swowneth pitously;

To grounde ded she falleth as a ston;

Al crampyssheth hir lymes crokedly;

She speketh as hir wit were al agon;

Other colour then asshen hath she non;

Ne non other word speketh she moche or lyte

But «Mercie, cruel herte myn, Arcite!» (169-75)

This is a scene that mixes pathos with horror, and invites sympathy while insisting upon judgment. If Anelida is betrayed by Arcite, she is also self-betrayed; and when Arcite unjustly accuses her of duplicity — he swears that «he coude hir doublenesse espie,/ And al was falsnes that she to him ment» (159-60) — we recognize that beneath the literal misrepresentation lies a metaphoric truth. Divided against herself first in her love and then in her grief, Anelida surrenders herself to a necessarily interminable process of self-destruction. As she herself says in her subsequent complaint, «Thus ferforth have I my deth sought;/ Myself I mordre with my prevy thoght» (290-91)³⁸.

The extent of Anelida’s self-division is made vivid by the way in which the complaint aspires to the self-possession of understanding — to recollection as self-collection, in the Augustinian sense — and yet falls far short³⁹. Anelida begins in the confident voice of the moralist: the sententia she seeks to demonstrate is the sad lesson that «whoso trewest is, hit shal hir rewe» (217), and the illustrative exemplum is the speaker herself. «I wot myself as wel as any wight» (220), she says, meaning three things: she knows the lesson herself, she knows herself as well as anyone else knows her, and she knows herself as well as anyone else knows her or himself. But these ambitious claims are undone by the rest of the complaint, which shows Anelida as still possessed by the very experience she seeks to understand. Far from standing outside her experience and looking back upon it, she remains wholly absorbed within it. «That I have seid, be seid for evermore!» (246), she bravely asserts, yet she is referring not to the moralizing sententia that would seek to categorize and so dismiss the past as a grievous if instructive mistake, but to her earlier and foolish commitment to a faithless lover. The complaint is baffled at every turn, and by composing it as a letter for Arcite she acknowledges her self-chosen imprisonment. «I wil ben ay ther I was ones bounde» (245), she says, using an amorous metaphor that also has powerful, if here unacknowledged, Boethian implications⁴⁰. While the mood of the complaint is largely interrogative, only once do the questions rise to the level of philosophical inquiry: «Almyghty God, of trouthe sovereyn,/ Where is the trouthe of man? Who hath it slayn?» (311-12). But no answer is forthcoming, and Anelida’s questioning remains merely rhetorical: «Who may avaunte hir bet of hevynesse/ Then I? (196-97); «Shall I preye or elles pleyne?» (282); «Allas! wher is become your gentilesse?» (247); «My swete fo, why do ye so, for shame?» (272). The very possibility of enlightenment is preempted by the anxiety of the fearful lover: «Now merci, swete, yf I mysseye!/ Have I seyd oght amys, I preye?»⁴¹ (317-18).

The final stanza of the complaint opens with a brave effort at conclusiveness: «Then ende I thus, sith I may do no more,/ I yeve it up for now and evermore» (342-43). But what is being abandoned is not her love for the faithless and unworthy Arcite but her attempt to understand that love: «But me to rede out of this drede, or guye,/ Ne may my wit, so weyk is hit, not streche» (340-41). Anelida will never «lerne of love the lore» (345), neither an ars amatoria nor the wisdom that unhappy love might teach. Hence she misunderstands the genre of the Chauntepleure, taking it to be not a moralizing poem that instructs one in the falseness of a world that passes soon as flowers fair but rather as a vehicle for expressing, and reenacting, the turmoil of uninstructed emotion⁴². In attempting to understand her past, Anelida has revealed how powerfully present it is; trying to append a dismissive explicit, she finds herself hopelessly implicated. The conclusion to the complaint is thus appropriately inconclusive. The last line — «thirled with the poynt of remembraunce» (350) — exactly replicates the first (211): memory encapsulates the complaint as it engrosses the speaker, and her ending returns her to her beginning in an endless cycle of repetition. This is surely why the complaint is, as Skeat long ago noted, formally circular: the first six stanzas are exactly matched, in content as well form, by the last six⁴³. Lacking a fixed perspective outside her experience from which to understand it, Anelida is condemned to repetition.

The final stanza of the complaint also contains an allusion to another famous complaint that serves to raise larger questions about the recursive shape of literary history as a whole, and about the position of the medieval poet within this history:

But as the swan, I have herd seyd ful yore,

Ayeins his deth shal singen his penaunce,

So singe I here my destinee or chaunce (346-48).

This is a citation of Dido’s epistle in the Heroides, and by alluding to it here Chaucer invokes both the specific text that ultimately underwrites the amorous elements of Anelida and Arcite and the classical genre upon which he modeled the epistolary complaints that appear throughout his work⁴⁴. Both Anelida’s complaint and the poem as a whole are pervaded with echoes of Dido’s epistle, and there is a deep affinity of purpose between the two texts: both are largely interrogative efforts to achieve a self-understanding that will emancipate the speaker from the corrosive ambivalence of her feelings, and both come ultimately to naught⁴⁵. There are as well obvious affinities between «quene Anelida» (47) and Dido regina⁴⁶. Both are royal, both exiles, both in love with a man who represents a great political hegemony (Thebes, Rome) and yet proves to be «fals» (perfidus), and false in ways that are, as we shall see, oddly similar.

By invoking Dido here Chaucer establishes a curious but telling chronological disjunction. In terms of the fictive time of her complaint, Anelida speaks now as Dido will come to speak later, a priority that is stressed by having Anelida close with the image of the swansong with which Dido will «later» begin. But in terms of the time of literary history, priority goes to Dido: the image of the swansong is originally hers. The effect of this temporal amalgamation is thus not to adjudicate originality but to challenge the very concept of an origin. Complaint is a form of speech that transgresses the usual temporal categories, both in the individual sense that it elides temporal divisions — before and after, then and now, past and present, are distinctions the plaintive voice refuses to observe — and in the general sense that it is always with us: Anelida speaks in Thebes as Dido speaks in Carthage and, as the elaborately contemporary rhyme scheme of her complaint reminds us, as women still speak in the courtly world of Chaucer’s England⁴⁷. The swansong of complaint is thus both always original and already belated: a first utterance that breaks a lifelong silence, it issues forth at the point of extinction and bespeaks a helplessness before the temporality that has inflicted a mortal wound. This is what it means, then, to speak while «thirled with the poynt of remembraunce». Apparently «pleyn», Anelida’s «compleynynge» is an echoic doubling that turns back upon itself not only formally and psychologically but also temporally.

As with Anelida’s self-division, Arcite’s duplicity — «he was double in love and no thing pleyn» (87) — is an erotic disorder with an Ovidian aetiology. His «falsnes» mimics the Ovidian Aeneas’s perfidiousness, and his restless questing after «another lady» (144) parallels Aeneas’s attraction to an always beckoning alter amor (17)⁴⁸. «Put by your wanderings», Dido urges Aeneas, and her phrase — ambage remissa (149) — points as well to the evasive circumlocutions with which he first won her love and has now rejected it. Whether the goal be empire or love, the questing impulse remains the same, and both Aeneas and Arcite are insatiable, satisfied only with dissatisfaction. Facta fugis, facienda petis (13), Dido accuses Aeneas: «You flee what has been done; what is to be done, you seek». If for Ovid the characteristically feminine erotic disorder is endless pining, the masculine counterpart is endless discontent⁴⁹ . As the Amores explore in detail, the elaborate system of impediments and frustrations that typifies Ovidian eroticism, and that Chaucer here and elsewhere calls «daunger» (186, 195), is established for no other reason than to forestall the disappointment of full possession. As Ovid says to an inattentive rival, «If you feel no need of guarding your love for yourself, you fool, see that you guard her for me, that I may desire her the more! What is permitted is unwanted, but what is forbidden burns all the more sharply»⁵⁰.

Chaucer’s term for this discontent, in this poem and elsewhere, in «newefangelnesse» (141), and here he tells us twice that it is «kynde of man» (149) to be afflicted with it:

The kynde of mannes herte is to delyte

In thing that straunge is, also God me save!

For what he may not gete, that wolde he have. (201-3)

Although this condition, like Anelida’s «languisshing» (178), can be adequately glossed by reference to Ovidian texts, Chaucer in fact thinks of it in larger, philosophical terms. As the language of this passage suggests, a suggestion supported by a series of cognate passages elsewhere in his work, Chaucer’s understanding of the newfangleness of sexual infidelity is informed by a number of subtexts. This is suggested in part by the anachronistic reference to Lamech, «the firste fader that began/ To loven two, and was in bigamye» (152-53); the biblical Lamech is not only a bigamist but a homicide, a self-confessed member of the fratricidal race of Cain — a scriptural analogue, as it were, to the Thebans of classical mythology⁵¹. Evidently more is at issue than Ovidian wit would suggest, and this allusion begins to invoke the darker passions that lie behind Arcite’s eroticism.

We can locate the center of Chaucer’s concern by collating the newfangleness of Anelida and Arcite with cognate texts from elsewhere in Chaucer’s poetry. Most directly relevant is the complaint of the falcon in the Squire’s Tale, a complaint that echoes Anelida and Arcite in a number of other instances as well⁵². In explaining the tercelet’s infidelity, the falcon has recourse to a Boethian allusion:

I trowe he hadde thilke text in mynde,

That «alle thynge, repeiring to his kynde,

Gladeth hymself»; thus seyn men, as I gesse.

Men loven of propre kynde newefangelnesse,

As briddes doon that men in cages fede. (607-11)

Even if a bird is fed on delicacies, continues the falcon, it will prefer worms, «So newefangel been they of hire mete,/ And loven novelries of proper kynde» (618-19). In the Manciple’s Tale the same exemplum reappears, again designed to show that «flessh is… newefangel» and that men «konne in nothyng han plesaunce/ That sowneth into vertu any while» (193-95)⁵³.

Both of these cognate texts are in the first instance comic and even frivolous: the falcon’s objection to her avian lover is that he has, unsurprisingly, behaved just like a bird, while the Manciple’s allusion is part of a complex set of evasive insults. But in both instances a serious question is at issue: by what means can the natural man be redeemed? In the Squire’s Tale it is the redemptive powers of culture — what the Squire calls «gentilesse» — that are tested and found wanting, while the vividness with which the Manciple’s classical fable represents the corruptions of the flesh preempts the very possibility of cultural redemption and thus provides a fitting preparation for the Parson’s terminal Christian prescriptions. Moreover, the seriousness of all three of these Chaucerian meditations on the newfangleness of sexual infidelity becomes clear when we invoke the Boethian subtext that lies behind all of them. This is meter ii of Book 3, which describes how Nature «restreyneth alle thynges by a boond that may nat be unbownde» (3.ii.6-7). Boethius gives several examples of this binding: tamed lions that become wild again upon tasting blood, the caged bird that scorns the luxurious food of its captivity and sings always of the shadowed wood, the bent bough that springs upright when released, the westering sun that returns to its orient source. These natural bindings are small instances of the cosmic binding that orders the universe as a whole. «Alle thynges seken ayen to hir propre cours [recursus]», says Boethius in the same meter, «and alle thynges rejoysen hem of hir retornyng ayen to hir nature» (39-42). Just as it is right for the bird to return to the wood, so the proper course for man is to return to his heavenly origins. This is a homecoming that is to be accomplished through a philosophical pedagogy that will enable man to gaze once again upon that «clere welle of good» (3.xii.l-2) that is itself both «the begynnynge of alle thinges» (3.10.100) and the «oon ende of blisfulnesse» (3.2.8). To possess this knowledge is to enjoy «the ferme stablenesse of perdurable duellynge» (3.11.185-86), what Boethius elsewhere calls «the ende of alle thinges that ben to desire, beyonde the whiche ende ther nys no thing to desire» (4.2.165-67).

Man is impelled on this quest for stability by a force that Boethius metaphorically designates «ayen-ledynge fyer» or ignis revertus (3.ix.38) and, in more philosophical language, intentio naturalis or «nature! entencioun» (3.11.15455). This intention is a kind of love: Boethius calls it caritas, a word Chaucer translates with the doublet «this charite and this love» (3.11.175-76). It represents at the level of subjectivity the force that governs the recursive action that characterizes being as a whole: all things are «constreynede… into roundnesses» and «comen… eftsones ayein, by love retorned [converso… amore], to the cause that hath yeven hem beinge» (4.iv. 56-9). And at the level of ethics it is the love that «halt togidres peples joyned with an holy boond, and knytteth sacrement of mariages of chaste loves» (2.viii.21-23). Its opposite is what Boethius calls the «willeful moevynges of the soule» (3.11.153-54) that deflect men into «myswandrynge errour [and] mysledeth hem into false goodes» (3.2.24-25). It is above all else that regressive Ovidian love that possesses Orpheus, in Boethius’s most famous meter, and that persuades him to turn his eyes backward, in an infernal parody of the authentic recursive gaze, upon the doomed Eurydice.

In the figure of Arcite Chaucer’s depiction of the «newefangelnesse» of Ovidian erotic restlessness invokes this kind of Boethian critique. Willfully rejecting Anelida’s chaste love, Arcite rejects as well a fully human nature that ineluctably tends towards the true end of things, aligning himself instead with a less than human self that «delyte[th]/ In thing that straunge is» (201-2). Hence he is throughout the poem subjected to metaphors drawn from the animal world. He behaves «ryght as an hors, that can bot bite and pleyn» (157); «His newe lady holdeth him so narwe/ Up by the bridil, at the staves ende» (183-84); and in following her «he is caught up in another les» (233). Anelida herself completes this pattern of judgment with a final, plaintive question that returns us to the Boethian passage from which we began: «is that a tame best that is ay feyn/ To renne away, when he is lest agast?» (315-16). It is this self-division, between a truly human nature and a less than human hankering after the unavailable and the forbidden, that most profoundly defines Arcite as «double in love» (87) and that links him to the ironically self-divided lady whom he seeks to abandon. What also links him to Anelida is his disordered memory, for his negligence of his lady is a sign of a larger forgetfulness. Arcite is one of those who has, in Lady Philosophy’s words, «foryeten hymselve» (1.2.22): he no longer remember[s] of what cuntre» he is born (1.5.16-7) nor «remembres… that is the ende of thynges, and whider that the entencion of alle kynde tendeth» (1.6.37-9). «Drerynesse hath dulled my memorie» (1.6.41), says the prisoner in the Consolation, and the philosophical understanding to which the dialogue with Philosophy is devoted is defined as a process of remembering or anamnesis⁵⁴. Man, says Lady Philosophy, «alwey reherceth and seketh the sovereyne good, al be it so with a dyrkyd memorie; but he not by which path, ryght as a dronke man not nat by which path he may retorne home to his hous» (3.2.83-88) — a passage that is later cited by the Arcite of the Knight’s Tale⁵⁵. Just as Anelida’s obsessive memory forecloses her future, so does Arcite’s darkened memory keep him wandering in quest of a «suffisaunce» that was once his but which he has now abandoned. And as Arcite is alienated from his true origin so is Anelida denied access to a transcendent end, and together they are condemned to an endless repetitiveness that stands as a sad parody of the authentic recursions of Boethianism.

In soliciting a Boethian reading of its lovers, Anelida and Arcite prefigures the more extensive Boethianism of «The Complaint of Mars», Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale. What is important for interpretive purposes, however, is that such a reading opens a prospect upon the complex affiliations that Chaucer establishes throughout his work among Boethian philosophy, Ovidian love, and Thebanness. Ironically, in exploring these affiliations we shall come to understand how insecurely grounded is the interpretive authority we are encouraged to cede to Boethianism. For if Thebanness stands as the other that Boethianism suppresses, this is because its configurations provide a dark mirroring of Boethian idealism that raise disquieting and finally unanswerable questions. The Theban story is itself about disordered memory and fatal repetition, about the tyranny of a past that is both forgotten and obsessively remembered, and about the recursive patterns into which history falls. In its fullest form, the story begins with acts of sexual violence — the abduction of Europa by Jove — and paternal tyranny: Agenor unfairly commands Cadmus either to recover his sister Europa or go into permanent exile, a command that in the Metamorphoses Ovid designates as pius et sceleratus eodem (III, 5). Necessarily failing in his quest, Cadmus wanders in exile until Apollo leads him to Boeotia where he is to found Thebes. But this originary act, despite its divine superintendence, is both flawed in itself and proleptic of the disasters to follow: slaying a serpent sacred to Mars, Cadmus is told that he will himself end his days as a serpent, and when he sows the serpent’s teeth there spring up warriors who engage in fratricidal slaughter. Born from the earth, these first Thebans now return to it; in Ovid’s phrase (which Chaucer remembered when writing the Pardoner’s Tale), they beat on the warm breast of their mother for reentry: tepido plangebant pectora matrem (III, 126). Here is the central, recursive act of Theban history, the first instance of a chthonic return that is then endlessly repeated.

The details of this recursion are articulated in the history of «the broche of Thebes» to which Chaucer alludes in the «Complaint of Mars». The brooch is itself a sign of illicit sexuality: it is made by Vulcan as a bitter wedding gift for Harmonia, the daughter of Mars and Venus, when she marries Cadmus — a marriage that causes their exile from their city and transformation into the originary serpents. The next owner is Semele, struck by Jove’s lightning; then Agave, driven mad by the Furies; then Jocasta; then Argia, wife of Polynices, who gives it to Euripyle if she will reveal the hiding place of her husband Amphiauraus so that he may become one of the seven against Thebes, an act of betrayal that issues in his all-too-Theban engulfment in the earth. When Euripyle is then murdered by her vengeful son Alcmaeon, Ovid tellingly designates the crime as pius et sceleratus eodem (IX, 408), the same phrase he had earlier applied to Agenor’s exile of Cadmus at the beginning of Theban history. The final owner of the brooch is Orestes, whom it incites to repeat an identical act of filial vengeance against his mother, Clytaemnestra⁵⁶. Like the boar that becomes the heraldic device of the Theban family of Tydeus in the Troilus, the brooch is an object of desire whose possession is inevitably fatal; as Chaucer’s Mars says in his complaint, its owner has «al his desir and therwith al myschaunce» (241)⁵⁷. It arouses emotions that are in the first instance erotic (Harmonia, Semele, Agave, Jocasta) but which entail deadly consequences, and it functions in a context in which the venerean and the martial are in a continual process of mutual subversion, in which amorousness and violence are metamorphosed and finally fused, whether as internecine vengeance or romantic betrayal. Descending down through the Theban line — longa est series, says Statius (II, 267; cf. I, 7) — the brooch metonymically represents the primal polymorphousness of Theban emotions and the self-destructive regressiveness that results from submitting to a self unknown.

At the center of Theban history is Oedipus, the tragic figure who encapsulates the Theban fate with terrifying economy. The profound circularity of Thebanness, its inability ever to diverge from the reversionary shape ordained in and by its beginning, is reflected in the details of Oedipus’s life as the Middle Ages reconstructed them. At once malevolent and pitiable, Oedipus becomes both agent and victim of the self-imposed genocide that decimates Thebes. As a son he kills his father Laius — one medieval text has him say that he «struck iron through my father’s loins» — and as a father he reenacts his primal crime by cursing his sons with what the same text has him describe as «the sword of my tongue»⁵⁸. Similarly, he reenacts the return of the dragon-warriors to their mother earth in his incest with Jocasta, performing what is described by both Statius and Seneca as a revolutus in ortus⁵⁹. Even the smallest details of his life express the compulsions of repetition and circularity: exiled as an infant to Mount Cithaeron by his father, he is in his old age exiled there once again by Creon, and the riddle that marks him as extraordinary presents his life, and all life, as inescapably replicating. In the Roman de Thebes and its prose adjuncts the riddle is itself given a duplicative form: «I have heard tell of a beast», says the Sphinx, «that when it first wishes to walk on the ground it goes on four feet like a bear; and then comes a time when it has no need of the fourth foot and it moves with great speed on three; and when it has greater strength it stands and goes on two feet; and then it has need of three, and then four. Friend, tell me if you have ever seen such a beast?»⁶⁰ Man is the beast, and whether he is figured as a bear or, as in the Troilus, as a boar, it is his irredeemable animality that lies at the heart of Theban history, just as it lies at the center of Arcite’s Theban consciousness in Anelida and Arcite.

Thebanness is a fatal doubling of the self that issues in a replicating history that preempts a linear or developmental progress. Theban history in its pure form has neither origin nor end but only a single, infinitely repeatable moment of illicit eroticism and fratricidal rivalry — love and war locked together in a perverse fatality. In its circular recursions, moreover, it stands as a dark echo of the idealistic recursus of Boethianism, a specular impersonation that destabilizes the interpretive authority with which the Consolation is invested. Like the Theban dragon warriors and their Oedipal descendants, the Boethian philosopher is also engaged in a revolutus in ortus, a return to the fons et origo from which all being descends. For Boethius this origin is celestial: as Chaucer’s most securely Boethian poem advises its readers, «Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;/ Hold the heye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede»⁶¹. But the lesson about origins that the Theban legend teaches is epitomized in a phrase from the Thebaid: crudelis pater vincit. Whether personified as father Oedipus or the dragon-warriors’ mother earth, the parent ineluctably calls the Theban back, either temporally by enacting the past or spatially by reentering the earth, the chthonic source of life. According to Boethius’s Platonic rationalism, moral failure is a function of intellectual error: an undiverted intentio naturalis directs us to the «good [that] is the fyn of alle thinges» (3.2.230), and it is only «myswandrynge errour [that] mysledeth [men] into false goodes» (3.2.23-5; cf. 3.3.6-8). Boethian caritas is an amor conversus that irresistibly returns us to the divine origin. But the amor that motivates the Theban, however well-intentioned, has a twofold character (pius et sceleratus eodem) that leads him inevitably to disaster. The Theban legend harshly argues that the natural self is by definition ill-behaved and self-defeating, an unconstrained appetitiveness that bespeaks not a transcendent origin but a primordial and earthbound animality.

This Theban economy has a powerful relevance as well to a poet like Chaucer, whose own habits of literary recall witness to a dynamic strikingly similar to that articulated by Theban history. If we return now to Anelida and Arcite in order to examine the intertextual relations that inform it, we can begin to understand the way in which Chaucer’s poetics of memory stand as a compositional version of Thebanness. An important instance is Anelida’s echoed phrase, «the poynt of remembraunce» (211, 350) — a phrase that derives from Purgatorio XII, where Dante and Virgil tread upon the figured pavement of the cornice of pride. This is the terrace where the «gran tumor» (XI, 119) of Dante’s own artistic pride is put down by a discussion of the fruitless rivalry between artistic generations. The divine images with which the cornice is adorned are compared to the sculptured paving stones that cover the tombs set into the floor of the church nave:

in order that there be memory of them, the stones in the church floor over the buried dead bear figured what they were before: wherefore many a time men weep for them there at the prick of the memory [la punctura de la rimembranza] that spurs only the faifhful⁶².

Bearing an artistic refiguring of the original that lies within, the sculptured stones are memorial images that spur the pious with the punctura de la rimembranza. Chaucer’s own poem is a similar act of piety toward his dead poetic precursors: Corinna, Ovid, Statius, Dante himself, even the stubbornly unacknowledged Boccaccio. As with Anelida’s lament over the departed Arcite, the poem testifies to the presence of those who are absent, and Chaucer presents himself, here as elsewhere, as a merely curatorial figure. He is the scribe who will «endyte/ This olde storie in Latin» (9-10), as if not even translation were necessary, and will loyally «folowe» (21) in the footsteps of Statius and Corinna. But the poem itself refuses to endorse even the possibility of such an unmediated access to the past. For it argues throughout, and especially in the first ten stanzas, that the foundations of the poet’s literary heritage are only fitfully available in their original and authentic form, and that he must instead make do with artful refigurings, modern rewritings that stand always at some distance from the original.

Such an understanding of the poetic past is implicit in the enigma of Corinna, whether she be the Theban tenuis Corinna [artful Corinna] of Statius’s Silvae, who could have been at most only a name to Chaucer, or the Roman versuta Corinna [well-versed Corinna], who is implied throughout Ovid’s Amores but, represented only as the figure of the poet’s desire, has herself no voice⁶³. Whoever she is, the name signifies a presence that devouring time has taken from us, leaving behind only a verbal image. Time has likewise but differently distanced us from the poem’s other announced source, for Statius’s Thebaid is everywhere present in the first ten stanzas, but present in a way that insists upon distance. For what a close comparison of these ten stanzas with the Thebaid reveals is that Statius appears in the poem only accompanied by his belated imitator Boccaccio, whose rewriting of his master’s poem — the Teseida — permeates these lines. If we start with the three opening stanzas, we find them to be a rewriting of the comparable opening stanzas of the Teseida, which is Boccaccio’s own rewriting of the Thebaid. They are, moreover, a rewriting with a difference, for they both reverse the order of Boccaccio’s stanzas — 1,2 and 3 here become 3, 2 and 1 — and in one crucial point flatly contradict them. Whereas Boccaccio says that the storia antiqua he will tell has never been told by a Latin author, Chaucer assures us that he found the «olde storie» precisely «in Latin» (10)⁶⁴. Contravening his authority in order to invoke an authority, Chaucer uses the same gesture both to demonstrate and to deny his own originality; and he implies that it is not pious accuracy that characterizes the relation of follower to precursor but deformation and even reversal.

The next three stanzas of Anelida and Arcite, however, do return us directly to a Theban master source in Statius’s Thebaid: describing the return of Theseus from the conquest of Hippolyta, they begin by closely translating sixteen lines from Statius’s last book (XII, 5 1 9-35)⁶⁵. But before they finish they again veer off into the Teseida by invoking the non-Statian Emily and establishing the terms for Boccaccio’s story (38-42). When Statius does appear, then, and even here in what are close to his own words, it is in service to Boccaccio, his belated imitator from whom he seems never to be quite free. Then in the seventh stanza Chaucer begins a final effort to return to the original version of the Theban story: leaving Theseus «in his weye rydynge» (46) towards Athens, the poet doubles back to the chronologically prior Theban War of which Statius is the chronicler, describing both his rhetorical turn and the Theban matter itself with the elliptically echoic phrase, «the slye wey»⁶⁶. But this return to the origin is also predictably thwarted: when in stanzas 8-10 the story of the Theban War is summarized, it appears in a precis drawn not from the Thebaid but from the unavoidable Teseida. The Theban matter cannot, it would seem, be represented in its original Statian form; just as classical texts are encrusted with medieval glosses, so does Statius come to Chaucer embedded within a Boccaccian context.

Nor should we assume that the difference between original and imitation is so radical as to guarantee their distinction. However unlike the Thebaid the Teseida may appear to us, it is clear that Boccaccio intended his poem to be a vernacular recreation of the classical epic. Divided into twelve books and containing, in some manuscripts at least, the identical number of lines as the Aeneid, the Teseida deploys elaborate mythographical and even archaeological allusions, articulates sentiments and values appropriate to the preChristian past, and appends to its classicized text a medieval gloss. Of course it is also a frankly medieval poem, but while it draws heavily upon the vernacular romanzi of contemporary Italy, it locates these medieval forms in the service of a classical subtext. Like «Anelida and Arcite» and the Knight’s Tale, the Teseida is an attempt to translate the compulsions of Theban history into the terms of a chivalric ideology — to show, in other words, how the regressive rivalry and eroticism of the Theban past continue to be enacted in the medieval present. As a humanist homage to the classics, the Teseida thus implies its own critique by suggesting that its historicist piety is itself a form of Thebanness. But in the last analysis Boccaccio evades the conclusion towards which his own narrative directs him. Arcita may be a victim of the Theban curse, but he is the last victim, and his finally selfless love for Emilia makes possible a healing reconciliation with Palemone that lays the past to rest. For Boccaccio, modern love can redeem ancient hatreds, and his romantic grafts onto the epic stock are not infected by the original malignity but serve to redeem the whole⁶⁷. Thus for Boccaccio the Teseida bespeaks a medieval mastery over the classical past; while Chaucer’s poetry, here as in the Troilus and the Knight’s Tale, witnesses to the almost atavistic power of the classical world.

If it is true, then, that the original voice is confusingly doubled by later echoes, is it any longer possible to speak of an original or authentic story at all? This question becomes pressing in light of all the other Theban voices that Chaucer seems to have heard, including Ovid, Seneca, the so-called Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, the anonymous authors of the Roman de Thèbes and the Planctus Oedipi, and Dante⁶⁸. And what effect does the mysterious Corinna have upon Statius’s authority? Can we any longer assume that the poet whom Chaucer in the House of Fame identified as a native of Toulouse is himself the original Theban poet⁶⁹? Just as Anelida and Arcite is hardly the last word on Thebes, neither surely is the Thebaid the first. Statius himself implies as much at the beginning of his own poem: longa retro series, he says (I, 7), and whatever starting point is chosen must be arbitrary⁷⁰. Every beginning is in medias res, every account a selection, every telling a retelling. Far from being a straightforward linear development, the history of Theban writing is what Chaucer in the Boece calls a «replicacioun of wordes» (3.12.160-61), and to enter upon it is to broach a labyrinthine way, «so entrelaced that it is unable to ben unlaced» (3.12.157)⁷¹. Haunted by a past that is at once sustaining (like a pavement) and galling (like a spur), Theban writing simultaneously salves and reopens the wound caused by «the poynt of remembraunce»; and Chaucer, by invoking Thebes as an early and recurrent locus of his own work, and as a metaphor for his own poetics of memory, sets himself in a relationship with origins so skeptical that it will never receive a final resolution until (which will never happen) the pilgrims arrive at Canterbury.

IV.

In a recent discussion of early twentieth-century Modernism, Perry Anderson has argued that one of the necessary preconditions for its emergence was «the imaginative proximity of social revolution. The extent of hope or apprehension that the prospect of such a revolution arouses varies widely, but over most of Europe it was ‘in the air’ during the Belle Epoque itself»⁷². It was «in the air» in late fourteenth-century Europe too, and not least of all in England: the Rising of 1381 was the most visible expression of an upsurge of new forces that were felt to pervade social, political, and economic life⁷³. Yet while the Modernists of our own century may have been empowered by the possibility of revolution, their specific response was overwhelmingly conservative, both in the explicity reactionary political programs to which they subscribed and, more profoundly, in the formalist aesthetic that largely governed their own cultural production. History enabled their innovations, but it was a history from which they sought to flee.

Something of the same could be said of Chaucer’s own meditation on modernity. By seeing it as an essentially literary question, by allowing his writing to remain within the highly stylized aesthetic of courtly cultural production (however modified), and by staging the problematic of historical action in terms of antiquity, Chaucer in effect ruled out much of his contemporary historical world as an object of poetic attention. Moreover, the ostentatious formalism of his writing (a quality that has helped to preserve its canonicity in contemporary academia) locates it within the hortus conclusus of aristocratic aestheticism, a world where tyranny and victimization, possession and privation, however apparently irreparable, are domesticated and disarmed by means of a highly traditional amorous etiology. Indeed, given the sense of powerlessness and obsolescence that afflicted the late medieval aristocracy, one of the attractions of courtly makyng must have been just the sense of control with which it endowed the maker himself, a control that Chaucer deploys with effortless authority⁷⁴. And when he does consider the problem of change directly, he calls it «newefangelnesse» and locates it in the realm not of social and political analysis but of moral psychology. Rather than a legitimate interest in change, «newefangelnesse» is here an erotic instability to be diagnosed as «falsnes» and «doublenesse».

Yet this cannot, finally, be the whole story. For if Chaucer is no revolutionary (and who ever thought otherwise?), he does remain a writer committed not just to innovation but to the understanding of innovation. Certainly such self-reflection may lead to a deManian paralysis, and Anelida and Arcite is a deeply self-cancelling text that calls into question the very possibility of historical action per se. Yet it is also bravely exploratory, at the levels of both literary construction and conceptual penetration. No one else in England, perhaps even in Europe, could have written it: in the imprecise way we usually use the word, it is an original. Finally, if we must measure the degree to which it stands apart from history — and deMan has reminded us that the proper antithesis to modernity is not antiquity but history itself — we should also see it as a gesture toward rapprochement. For only in this way can we understand how it could be that Chaucer concluded his career by writing the text that provides us with the shrewdest and most capacious analysis of fourteenth-century English society we possess. History impelled Chaucer toward the modern and he accepted the challenge by investigating not just the idea of history, as in Anelida and Arcite, but, in the Canterbury Tales, history itself.