[F. N. Robinson is the editor of the widely used The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer noted for its extensive textual notes and introductions to Chaucer's works. In the following essay originally published in 1933, Robinson discusses the Legend of Good Women in relation to its sources and other works by Chaucer.]

Next to the description of April "with his shoures sote" at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales, probably the most familiar and best loved lines of Chaucer are those in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women which tell of his adoration of the daisy. Both passages are notable examples of the freshness and simplicity—the "vernal spirit which soothes and refreshes"—long ago praised by [James Russell] Lowell as characteristic of Chaucer. The quality is truly Chaucerian, and by no means restricted to descriptions of outward nature. But the secret of it is hard to discover. It is partly, without doubt, the effect of the language,—not of the "quaintness" falsely ascribed to Chaucer's speech by those to whom it is simply unfamiliar, but of a real simplicity of structure in early English, found also in Old French and comparable to that which distinguishes Homeric Greek from the later Attic. In part, too, the freshness of Chaucer's poetry is a reflection of his age, of a certain youthful directness in its relation to life. And in great measure it is an expression of his own mind and temperament. In any case it is not to be set down to naïve simplicity on the part of the poet or his contemporaries. Nor in the two poems which have been mentioned is the effect in question due to the avoidance of literary material or, it must be granted, to the direct observation of nature. The passage in the "General Prologue" follows an established convention, in which, to be sure, it surpasses all its models; and the panegyric on the daisy is almost a cento of quotations or imitations of contemporary poetry, French and perhaps Italian. Indeed the whole "Prologue" to the Legend is steeped in literary associations. The truth of its description and sentiment is not for that reason to be denied or disparaged. But the reader cannot understand the "Prologue" aright without knowing something of the conventions which underlie it and the fund of poetry on which it has drawn for its enrichment.

Like the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, and the Parliament of Fowls, the Legend of Good Women is a love-vision. But before the relation of the actual dream, the scene is set by an account of the poet's worship of the daisy on the first of May. In that passage, besides the simple delight in nature which has endeared it to generations of readers, must be recognized the skilful use of literary and social conventions. The relative merits of the flower and the leaf were a subject of poetic debate in Chaucer's time, as they were in the next century, when the poem entitled the Flower and the Leaf was composed. The ladies and gentlemen of the court—so the "Prologue" to the Legend indicates—divided themselves into two orders, devoted one to the Leaf and the other to the Flower. Similarly there is evidence, in both French and English poetry, of the existence of a cult of the marguerite. Both these courtly fashions are reflected in the "Prologue." In the controversy of Flower against Leaf Chaucer refuses to take sides. But he proclaims his utter devotion to the daisy, and his celebration of this queen of flowers contains many lines and phrases paralleled in Deschamps, Machaut, and Froissart, and some perhaps from Boccaccio. To complete theglorification of the daisy he invents a happy metamorphosis, worthy of the old mythologies, and represents the flower as a transformation of the queen Alceste, the leader of his "good women," who appears in his vision as an attendant of the god of Love.

According to the central fiction of the "Prologue," Chaucer is condemned by the god of Love for having written heresies against his law—in particular, for having defamed women by composing the Troilus and translating the Roman de la Rose. As a penalty for his misconduct he is commanded to write a legendary of Cupid's saints—that is, of women who were good according to the standard of the religion of Love. The Legend thus falls at once into the ancient category of palinodes, known in literary history from the time of Stesichorus, who first wrote an ode against Helen of Troy, and then composed his Palinodia in her praise. Perhaps the most familiar Latin example of the type is Horace's "O matre pulchra filia pulchrior," and among classical writings known to Chaucer Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Book III, and his Remedia Amoris form a kind of double palinode. In mediæval French literature the fashion was revived. Jean le Fèvre, who translated the strongly antifeminist Lamentationes Matheoli, composed his Leesce as a contrepeise, and Nicholas de Bozon atoned for his Char d'Orgeuil by his counterplea De la Bonté des Femmes. Machaut's Jugement dou Roy de Navarre was not only a palinode, but may also have furnished an actual suggestion for Chaucer's Legend. Again in the fifteenth century, in English, the Dialogue with a Friend by Hoccleve, Chaucer's disciple, still continues the convention. In writing such a recantation, then, Chaucer was following a familiar custom. And perhaps the occasion of his palinode was not wholly fictitious. Just as Ovid's Remedia Amoris is held to have been his apology to the gossiping critics of the Amores, so, it has been not unreasonably suggested, Chaucer's defense of good women may have been called forth by actual condemnation of his Troilus.

The form of the work imposed upon Chaucer as a penance is that of a legendary, or collection of lives of saints. The good women whose tragic stories he relates are heroines of classical antiquity who suffered or died out of devotion to their lovers. They are represented as saints or martyrs on Cupid's calendar. So the Legend may be regarded, in the words of a recent critic, as "a cross between the Heroides of Ovid and the Legenda Aurea." In an age which produced a lover's manual of sins—the Confessio Amantis, the Ten Commandments of love, matins and lauds of love sung by the birds, paternosters and credos of love, and masses of Venus, the Legend affords another striking example of the adaptation of Christian ideas and institutions to the affairs of love.

Such are the varied origins and antecedents of the Legend of Good Women. In spite of Chaucer's uncommon skill in combining diverse elements in a simple and artistic design, he was not altogether successful in achieving unity or consistency in the "Prologue." He doubtless realized this himself, and for that reason gave the poem a careful revision. Even in what appears to be the later version, preserved in a single manuscript, the inconsistencies are not wholly removed, though the structure is improved and made more logical. Some of the most delightful poetry is sacrificed in the revision, so that many critics prefer the earlier version. And in fact the charm of the "Prologue" lies not so much in the orderly development of the argument as in the pleasant description and the happy expression of poetic feeling and fancy.

The legends themselves, regarded as narratives, are much inferior to the stories of Chaucer's latest period. They lack the variety, brilliancy, and dramatic reality of the Troilus or the best of the Canterbury Tales. Yet if compared with any contemporary narrative poems except Chaucer's own, they would be reckoned among the masterpieces of the age. They were very likely written, at least in part, earlier than the "Prologue," and represent an important stage in Chaucer's literary development. Composed largely under the influence of Virgil and Ovid, they show a definite advance in narrative structure over the poems of the so-called French period of Chaucer's youth; and though they have not the interest of his more independent works, yet if read attentively and compared with their sources they reveal great care in translation and no small degree of artistry. From his painstaking study and imitation of Ovid Chaucer profited in the niceties of observation and expression.

The monotonous theme of the legend—the praise of faithful women—and its conventional treatment make the stories tiresome to the modern reader; and Chaucer himself appears to have lost interest in them, though he may never have deliberately abandoned them. The introduction to the "Man of Law's Tale" implies that while occupied with the Canterbury Tales he still had in mind the composition of more lives of good women, and he appears to have revised the "Prologue" as late as 1394. But he did not actually bring the series to completion, and we may well suppose that it was simply superseded in his interest by the Canterbury Tales. Indeed critics have questioned whether Chaucer could ever have felt real enthusiasm for the Legend; whether it was ever anything more than a concession to contemporary taste, or perhaps to a royal command. One scholar has gone so far as to suggest that Chaucer composed the work from the outset with satirical purpose—writing, so to speak, with his tongue in his cheek. Some of the good women, this writer reminds us, were anything but good, being guilty of murder and other crimes. Chaucer selected them and praised them, he argues, precisely for the purpose of making his ostensible defense of women ridiculous, and so of perpetrating a huge joke upon critics and patrons. This attempt to find unrecognized humor in the Legend, and so to rescue it from the charge of dullness, even if it seemed needful, is ill-advised. For there can be no doubt that in the mind of Chaucer and his contemporaries the heroines he celebrates were good in the only sense that counted for the purpose in hand—they were faithful followers of the god of Love. The rubric "Explicit Legenda Cleopataras Martiris" has a humor for us that it would hardly have had for the readers at the court of Richard II.

Attempts have been made to date the two versions of the "Prologue" on the evidence of historical allegory. But there is so much doubt about the assumed applications that the arguments are unconvincing. Recent theories on the subject are mentioned in the Explanatory Notes.

Apart from the real interest of its substance, the Legend of Good Women is an important landmark in versification. Chaucer, always an experimenter in meter, here employed—for the first time in English, so far as is known—the decasyllabic couplet, the principal verse-form of the Canterbury Tales and the "heroic couplet" of a long line of English poets.