SOURCE: Axton, Richard. “Gower—Chaucer's heir?” In Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, edited by Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, pp. 21-38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Axton determines that Gower was indebted to Chaucer, despite being the elder poet.]

The idea of Gower as Chaucer's heir looks at first unpromising. It seems that Gower was the older and that, although he outlived Chaucer and the century by eight years, by then he was blind and poetically inactive. ‘Chaucer's master’, as Dr Johnson called him, has usually been counted as creditor and Chaucer as debtor in scholarly reckonings of the literary commerce between them. Gower appears older and also older-fashioned in liking long allegorical complaint poems and in choosing French and Latin for his first and second great works. When he turned to English narrative verse at the age of about fifty, it was to octosyllabic couplets—the form used by Chaucer in his earliest poem, the Book of the Duchess, and in the Roman de la Rose.¹ The typical differences in language and metre between the two poets make it hard to trace possible allusions from one to the other. For, if poetic allusion to the words of another poet depends on the text of the earlier work already being established and familiarly resonant, then the case of Chaucer and Gower is problematic. As co-workers in the newly-delved field of authorial poetry in English, it is doubtful that either could assume that the words of any text of the other's making would be recognized in quotation.² Yet the poets allude to each other's work and appear to be mutually indebted. Beyond this there lies a much larger area of common land where the stories, themes and forms of their works coincide. Thus the question proposed—of Gower's debt to Chaucer—needs to be considered in the larger context of their influence on one another.

Gower's late turning to English in order to ‘speke … of love’ must rate as the most significant evidence of Chaucer's influence on him. In this sense, Confessio Amantis may be seen as paying back the trust expressed by Chaucer's dedication of Troilus to his ‘moral’ friend (TC, v, 1856-9). The attribute ‘moral’ points to Gower's fame in about 1385 as arising from his expertise in ‘expounding the precepts of ethical conduct’.³ In turn, ‘moral Gower’ seems to have considered love particularly as Chaucer's field of poetic expertise. This is evident from the terms of his reciprocation, for at the end of Confessio Amantis [CA,](in ‘first recension’) Venus sends word through the poet Gower to her ‘disciple’ Chaucer, urging that,

          he which is myne owne clerk,
Do make his testament of love,
As thou hast do this schrifte above,
So that mi Court it mai recorde.(4)

(CA, viii, 2954-7*)

It sounds natural for the ageing lawyer to invite his friend to match his own poetic testament and recorde it in Venus' court. The metaphorical use of legal language has often been noted as a feature of the Ricardian period, yet with Chaucer and Gower there is more particular point to the allusion. Theirs is a relationship caught and held for posterity in the tangles of the law.

Sixteenth-century biographical tradition, which gentrified the literary pair, gave Chaucer a share in Gower's legal education. Thomas Speght says in his ‘Life’ of Chaucer (1598):

It seemeth that both these learned men were of the inner Temple: for not many yeeres since, Master Buckley did see a Recorde in the same house, where Geoffrey Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan fryer in Fleetstreete.⁵

Gower says of himself in his Mirour de l'Omme (21772-4) that he is not a cleric but has donned ‘la raye mance’, i.e. the striped robe that was the distinctive dress of serjeants-at-law and of certain court officials.⁶ Though Chaucer need not have been a student at the Temple to have taken part in the street brawl for which he is commended by his Protestant editor, most scholars have thought it likely that part of his education took place at the Inn.⁷ The first evidence of the very existence of the Temple in the time of Richard II as ‘England's third university’ comes from Chaucer's own account of the Manciple ‘of a temple’, who was ‘wise in byynge of vitaille’ and who

Of maistres hadde he mo than thries ten,
That weren of law expert and curious,
Of which ther were a duszeyne in that hous
Worthy to been stywardes of rente and lond
Of any lord that is in Engelond.

([Canterbury Tales]CT, i, 576-80)

A legal connection crops up in the summer of 1378, when Chaucer was sent to Lombardy on the King's business and made Gower his attorney.⁸ Finally, Chaucer's plainest allusion to the poetry of Gower is made through the mouth of the Man of Law (CT, ii, 77-89), a figure identified with Gower by some scholars.⁹ The law thus loosely fences Chaucer and Gower in an area of shared experience, a common ground lying between Chaucer's field of love and Gower's field of ethics.

Clearly Chaucer and Gower read many of the same books. Thematic parallels in their writings have been well explored by Gower's biographer John Fisher. While never insisting that a single word or phrase constitutes a deliberate echo, Fisher rests his case that Gower was Chaucer's senior and ‘mentor’ on the anthropologists' notion of ‘stimulus diffusion’; Gower is seen as a think-tank, ‘a sort of conscience to his brilliant but volatile friend, encouraging him both by precept and example to turn from visions of courtly love to social criticism’.¹⁰ From the Mirour de l'Omme, written in the impersonal and encyclopedic tradition of French plainte, Gower turned to more pointed political advice in Latin, disguising his own opinions, often in allegorical form, as Vox clamantis, vox populi. For Confessio Amantis, the third of his great poetic works, he chose the English language; he recast his social and political concerns in terms of the behaviour of individuals acting under the influence of love; and he developed his powers as story-teller. Chaucer, in contrast, apparently began with dream visions of love, modelled on the French court poets, then turned to Italian and classical narratives and, finally, to social satire.

If there is truth in this general outline of paths crossing, then the literary relationship of Chaucer and Gower may be seen as mutual attraction and responsiveness. Verbal evidence for such a symbiosis is often inconclusive: it is possible that Chaucer ‘got some ideas’ for Troilus from the Mirour de l'Omme (which was finished by 1378), yet, however suggestive the parallels are, the French octosyllabics do not seem to have exercised textual force on the composition of Chaucer's poem.¹¹

This distinction between ideas and texts works in both directions. In the course of his writing Gower refers seven times to the story of Troilus. Yet none of these allusions betrays any distant verbal sense of Chaucer's working of the story. Sometimes it seems as if Chaucer is recalling a motif from Gower: ‘And sche which mai the hertes bynde / In loves cause and ek unbinde’ (CA, viii, 2811-12) may recall Troilus' prayer (TC, iii, 1766). Again, Gower's ‘In [love] ther can noman him reule, / For loves lawe is out of reule’ (CA, i, 17-18) may hark back to the Knight's Tale: ‘Who shal yeve a lovere any lawe?’ (CT, i(a), 1164). But this, as Arcite admits, is ‘olde clerkes sawe’. Both poets are rooted in the proverbial. Phrases which might look like borrowings often turn out to be commonplaces. Moreover, the poets have a common schoolmaster in Ovid:

Ovide ek seith that love to parforne
Stant in the hond of Venus the goddesse,
Bot whan sche takth hir conseil with Satorne,
Ther is no grace, and in that time, I gesse,
Began mi love …

(CA, viii, 2273-7; cf. CT, i(a), 1328)

A modern reader might want to hear an echo of the Knight's Tale but Gower's more natural allusion is to the classic of their common schooling. There was hardly yet time in 1390 for Chaucer to have acquired Ovid's canonical status.

Ovid stands behind both poets as the medieval authority on love and as mediator of classical legends.¹² He may be seen as a sort of broker in the relationship between Chaucer and Gower, a third party in whose presence poetic intercourse can take place. Standing at the convergence of their paths, he held out a fabulous wealth of story which had never before been turned into English. Composition of Confessio Amantis, of the Legend of Good Women and of Canterbury Tales must have proceeded in large part simultaneously, involving the two poets in telling substantial narratives of the same eleven Ovidian heroines and three other non-Ovidian tales.¹³

The best evidence for mutual exchange between Chaucer and Gower is, of course, the similarity in the general conception of the Legend of Good Women [LGW] and Confessio Amantis. There is the matter of royal command: Gower (in the unrevised ‘Prologue’), rowing upon the Thames, ‘under the town of new Troy’, is summoned aboard the royal barge and bade to ‘doon his business’ and make a book of ‘some newe thing’. Chaucer, in his (unrevised) Prologue, compliments Queen Anne as the ‘day's eye’ and is commanded by Alcestis, impeccably wifely Queen of Love, to write a legendary of love's martyrs,

And whan this book is maad, give it the quene,
On my behalf, at Eltham or at Sheene.

(LGW, f, 496-7)

In each work, some of the same French sources are used to create a dream vision of a delightful ‘grene’ or May meadow, with a King and Queen of Love; these are familiar presiding deities from the world of courtly ‘game’, with its enigmatic cult of the flower and the leaf, rather than classical deities. The lovers who throng their garden scene are Ovidian heroines and heroes and the majority of guests are the same in both parties. In both scenes Alcestis is picked out and her authoritative matrimonial presence casts a questioning light on the unstable—often tragic—lives of the lovers around her. This courtly and bookish vision is not accepted at its own valuation, but is seen within the larger frame of human society.¹⁴ In both works the figure of the poet is presented with humorous detachment; he is chastised by the deity of love, and intercession is made to the queen of love. Gower confesses his ‘sins’ and receives shrift. Chaucer is given a penance to perform. Both works have a ‘religious’ framework for a collection of amorous stories gleaned largely from Ovid.

In this shared enterprise, the difficulties of establishing a firm chronology of composition seem insuperable. The fact that Chaucer's dream and appraisal of his own writing comes in his Prologue, setting in motion his martyrology, while Gower's comes towards the end of his final book, may mean that Gower borrowed the idea of his dream vision from Chaucer; yet even if he did, the conclusion of Confessio does not appear improvised, but, rather, as beautifully integrated in his dramatic structure.¹⁵

Chaucer's example may most have helped Gower to find an English voice and in cultivating a sophisticated attitude towards both his reader and his subject matter. In comparison to Chaucer's, Gower's voice sounds mild, thin, impersonal. In Vox Clamantis he claims only to say ‘what is in the air’. References to himself are confined to naming himself in dedications and to a colourless narrative ‘I’. In the ‘Prologue’ [‘Pr.’]to Book I he includes a pedantic riddle spelling out his own name. The prologues to Books II and III express fear of detraction and disclaim any authorial responsibility for the opinions in the book: ‘I speak only as the people do’.¹⁶

But in Book I of Confessio Gower relaxes, to find a more intimate and conversational voice:

Forthi the Stile of my writinges
Fro this day forth I thenke change
And speke of thing is noght so strange,
Which every kinde hath upon honde,
And whereupon the world mot stonde …

(CA, i, 8-12)

The explicit intention to ‘speke of thing is noght so strange’, to find a theme which touches ‘every kinde’ and ‘any man’, ‘And that is love, of which I mene / To trete …’ may best be understood as a response to royal suggestion that Gower come down from his ivory tower. In the discarded ‘Prologue’ Gower carefully projects his self-esteem by distinguishing ‘royal heste’ from ‘jangling tunges’, and suggests that ‘To make a bok after his [King Richard's] heste’ is to write in

                                        such a maner wise
Which may be wisdom to the wise
And pley to hem that lust to pleye

(CA, ‘Pr.’ 83-5)

Tentative as this is, these look like the first steps into a territory of writing-as-entertainment (‘pleye’) that was already occupied by Chaucer.

It has been argued that Gower learned from the French poets, particularly in Machaut and Froissart, to develop the persona of the petis servans of the god of love, the quizzical, self-deprecating ‘amant couart’.¹⁷ By combining this received stereotype with the persona of senex amans he generates a wintry pathos that is also humorous and elusive. Critical disagreement about the age of Amans, inconsistencies in his dramatic presentation, together with the contradictory pictorial evidence in the manuscripts, all suggest how difficult it is to interpret Gower's autobiographical mode.¹⁸

Granted the guiding spirits of the French poets, is it not also the case that Chaucer's presence hovers here? The light, self-mocking humour of the non-playing spectator of the game of love is like Chaucer, though the underlying sense of pathos and helplessness is different from Chaucer's images of aged sexuality (in, for example, the Wife of Bath or the Reeve). Gower also includes a formal signal of the Chaucerian debt. Advised by Genius that it is time to withdraw from the blind world of love and to live under the law of reason, Amans makes a last bid for pity, composes a letter to Venus, which Genius agrees to deliver. The supplication (CA, viii, 2217-300) consists of twelve seven-line stanzas in rhyme royal. This shift from the informal, ‘spoken’ short lines into the higher epistolary register, which Chaucer had developed in Troilus, anticipates Gower's memorial image of the famous lovers themselves.

From this point in Book VIII possible allusions to Chaucer suggest themselves with increasing frequency. In his perplexity and despondency in love Amans thinks of Pan, ‘which is the god of kinde’. Chaucer had found the same correspondent to look over the ‘sorwe’ and ‘hevy thought’ of the Black Knight:

For he had wel nygh lost hys mynde,
Though Pan, that men clepe god of kynde,
Were for hys sorwes never so wroth.

([Book of the Duchess] BD, 511-13)

Amans' proverbially wry judgement,

For evere I wrastle and evere I am behind

(CA, viii, 2241)

recalls not Pan but Pandarus:

‘How ferforth be ye put in loves daunce?’
‘By God,’ quod he, ‘I hoppe alwey byhynde!’

(TC, ii, 1106-7)

Having despatched Genius with his supplication, Amans is left waiting

And I bod in the place stille,
And was there bot a litel while
Noght full the montance of a Mile,
Whan I beheild and sodeinly
I sih wher Venus stod me by.
So as I myhte, under a tre
To grounde I fell upon mi kne,
And preide hire forto do me grace:

(CA, viii, 2310-17)

Curious here is the index of time: it is Genius who walks away, Amans who stays ‘noght full the montance of a Mile’. There is nothing remarkable about the idiomatic use of walking distance to indicate time, except that this is the only occasion in his writing that Gower uses the word ‘montance’. In the corresponding scene in the Legend of Good Women (where a company of nineteen ladies kneels upon the green and the poet kneels with them, in honour of the King and Queen of Love), Chaucer observes:

Ne nat a word was spoken in the place
The mountance of a furlong wey of space.

(LGW, f, 306-7)

The goddess now admonishes Gower by name, ‘“Now John” quod sche …’ and proceeds to enumerate his complaints against Nature. How far Gower has come from the elaborate pedantic self-naming of Vox Clamantis towards the idiom of Chaucer!

‘Geffrey, thou wost ryght wel this,
That every kyndely thyng that is
Hath a kyndely stede …’

([House of Fame]HF, 729-31)

Venus finds no pleasure in the figure of the aged poet:

For loves lust and lockes hore
In chambre acorden neveremore,
And thogh thou feigne a yong corage,
It scheweth wel be the visage
That olde grisel is no fole:
There ben fulmanye yeres stole
With thee and with suche othre mo,
That outward feignen youthe so
And ben withinne of pore assay.

(CA, viii, 2403-11)

Is Chaucer included in that knowing phrase, ‘such othre mo’? ‘Old Grisel’ is of course proverbial, but it is a phrase which comes to Chaucer's lips in his more complex and humorous essay in the same vein—the Envoy to Scogan:

Now certes, frend, I dreede of thyn unhap,
          Lest for thy gilt the wreche of Love procede
On alle hem that ben hoor and rounde of shap,
          That ben so lykly folk in love to spede,
          Than shal we for oure labour han no mede;
But wel I wot, thow wolt answere and say:
‘Lo, olde Grisel lyst to ryme and playe!’

(29-35)

These lines were probably written around 1393, but the vein is one that Chaucer had begun to explore much earlier, in the banter of the Eagle in the House of Fame and in the badinage of Pandarus. It is not altogether surprising, then, that the green garden of love with its garlanded routs, ‘Some of the lef, some of the flour’ (CA, viii, 2468) for which Chaucer expresses such poetic indifference (in the unrevised, ‘courtly’ text, LGW, f, 188-93) contains also strains of rougher music. Gower's ‘piping and melodie’ include also,

                                        such a soun
Of bombard and of clarion
With Cornemuse and Schallemele,

(CA, viii, 2481-3)

—instruments that make up the ‘lowde mynstralcies’ in the House of Fame (‘In cornemuse and shalemys’, ‘In trumpe, beme, and clarion’, HF, 1218-40).

Like Chaucer, Gower casts himself as an outsider viewing the young people as they ‘springe and dance’, ‘laghe and pleie’. He is also, like Chaucer, bemused by ‘tidings’ in the House of Fame, an eavesdropper; he draws attention to the physical distance which separates him from the origin of the sounds he hears, placing a question mark over the faithfulness of his own recording of such ‘matiere’:

And overthis I understood,
So as myn Ere it mythe areche,
The moste matiere of her speche
Was al of knyhthod and of Armes,
And what it is to ligge in armes
With love, whanne it is achieved.

(CA, viii, 2494-9)

The gentle and well-worn word-play upon the achievements of knighthood (night-hood?) recalls Chaucer as outsider in the Hall of Fame, listening to the confused voices of the world for something to make poetry out of.

So, when Gower comes to review the world's famous lovers and to make his own testament of love, revealing at last the face of John Gower, the aged poet behind the youthful lover he had feigned, the shadow of Chaucer is already falling over his page. Yet, in celebrating the most famous of Chaucer's lovers, Gower reveals how different is his own kind of poetry from Chaucer's. Among the company that Gower sees (or seems to see: ‘Me thoghte that I sih’) in his bemused state are Troilus and Criseide. The figures are abstract, devoid of detail, and betray no debt to Chaucer's mnemonic portraits (TC, v, 799-840). At first sight, Gower's Criseide appears to stand between her two lovers. But whether Diomede is presented to the reader's view or not is unclear. The focus on Troilus is anything but static and monumental; even as we watch, the play of emotions across his face reveals the pain of his story as he resists the knowledge of Criseide's infidelity. Like so many of Gower's Ovidian heroes, he is seen experiencing change, caught in the process of metamorphosis:

And Troilus stod with Criseide,
Bot evere among, although he pleide,
Be semblant he was hevy chiered,
For Diomede, as him was liered,
Cleymeith to be his parconer

(CA, viii, 2531-5)

Gower's company of noble wives and lovers is neither strictly a review of the protagonists of tales he has told nor an entirely random list chosen from within the Ovidian canon. It seems, rather, to contain recollections of stories which formed part of the common enterprise with Chaucer. The ghost of Chaucer may perhaps be sensed in Gower's vision of

                                        the wofull queene
Cleopatras, which in a Cave
With Serpentz hath hirself begrave,

(CA, viii, 2572-4)

where he seems to recall the death of Cleopatra as it occurs in Chaucer's telling, uniquely:

Among the serpents in the pit she sterte
And there she ches to have hire buryinge.

(LGW, f, 697-8)

Similarly when Gower recollects Thisbe—Chaucer's next in order. Like Ovid, Chaucer keeps his urgent narrative teetering on the edge of comedy, assigning the cause of the tragedy to Pyramus' tardiness: ‘But al to long, allas, at hom was he.’ In Gower's five-line recapitulation, we hear Thisbe complain, ‘Wo worthe alle slow!’¹⁹ So Gower moves through his gallery of Ovidian memories, to the four chaste wives, while Elde ‘cam a softe pas’, creeping up almost unnoticed and casting a chill shadow over the bright spring scene. In a series of perfectly paced shifts of mood and temperature, Gower shapes his ‘quiet close’.²⁰

Repentant, shriven, chastened by his apprehension of Elde and by Venus' reasonable reminders of the course of Nature, Gower is turned back towards the proper—and earlier—subjects of his bookish concerns:

Mi Sone, be wel war therfore
And kep the sentence of my lore
And tarie thou mi court nomore,
Bot go ther vertu moral duelleth,
Wher ben thi bokes, as men telleth,
Which of long time thou hast write

(CA, viii, 2922-7)

as if he has been trespassing all along.

Venus' admonition of her doting clerk is a timely reminder that Gower's English voice is not confined to the plaintive strain of the first person Lover. In this final address, Venus adopts the form of speech that Genius has taken towards his recalcitrant pupil, ‘Mi Sone’. The formula is both priestly and Solomonic. The dialogic device of the confession has allowed Gower to create two voices for his English poetry, one mild and complaining, deferential, courtly, the sound of the amant couart; the other fatherly, a steady, admonishing voice of moral authority with ready access to bookish and proverbial wisdom—the voice of Solomon to his son. This voice of parental authority is one that echoes in Chaucer's verse only once—in the Manciple's Tale.

Gower's advice to Chaucer is—playfully distanced through Venus and the fiction in which she appears—to think on his end and make his poetic reckoning:

And gret wel chaucer whan ye mete,
As mi disiple and mi poete:
For in the floures of his youthe
In sondri wise, as he wel couthe,
Of Ditees and of songes glade,
The whiche he for mi sake made,
The lond fulfild is overal:
Wherof to him in special
Above alle othre I am most holde.
For thi now in hise daies olde
Thow schalt him telle this message,
That he upon his latere age,
To sette an end of alle his werk,
As he which is myn own clerk,
Do make his testament of love,
As thou hast do thi schrifte above,
So that mi Court it mai recorde.

(CA, viii, 2941-57*)

The salutation of Chaucer, though it was later omitted,²¹ is no spontaneous afterthought; it rises, rather, to the playful surface from a current flowing deep and almost transparent within the stream of Gower's own verse.

Whether or not as a result of this banter, Chaucer clearly attended to both tasks. His detailed listing of his works—in the Prologues to the Legend and to the Man of Law's Tale and, finally, in the Retraccions, is specific and tendentious where Gower is merely general in his appreciation of Chaucer's ‘ditees and … songes glade’. Interestingly, Chaucer's revision of the Prologue (where f makes nothing of the poet's age), between mention of the ‘Romauns of the Rose’ and ‘the bok How that Crisseyde Troylus forsok’, adds:

And thynkest in thy wit, that is ful col,
That he nys but a verray propre fol
That loveth paramours, to hard and hote.
Wel wot I thereby thow begynnest dote
As olde foles, whan here spiryt fayleth;
Thanne blame they folk, and wite nat what hem ayleth.

(LGW, g, 258-63)

It is as if he now follows Gower's lead, confessing that they grow old together.

Though Chaucer probably rewrote his Prologue after the death of Queen Anne in 1394 (three or four years after Gower finished the Confessio) he did not ‘finish’ the Legend, presumably because he found the Canterbury Tales more exciting. He found there the greatest possible freedom as story-teller, a framework hospitable not only to ‘wicked women’ left over from Ovid (the story of Phebus' wife and the crow), but even to a further reviewing of his own poetic production. In the substantial Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale he draws up a list of Ovidian work-in-progress, which turns—almost inevitably—from humorous advertisement of what he has achieved to repudiation of what he has left alone. Scholars are almost unanimous in seeing here an allusion to Gower's work, but there is disagreement about Chaucer's tone. Did he really find Gower's stories of incestuous Canacee and of Apollonius ‘horrible’ and ‘unkynde abhomynacions’? It seems he did. Gower's most celebrated story (the tale of Pericles) is one which Chaucer makes a great fuss about not telling.

In spite of all the shared poetic interests, at heart the two poets are very different. The murky and dangerous material that they found in Ovid's Metamorphoses brought quite different poetic responses from them. This is plainest in those tales where they both confront sex and violence and the magic of metamorphosis. Gower's sense of man's creatureliness—rather than his beastliness—enables him to render wonderfully the love-making of Ceyx and Alcyone, even as they are changing to sea-birds (CA, iv, 3106-12): clearly such a scene could have had no part in the decorous consolations offered by the Book of the Duchess. Ever sceptical of all forms of magic, Chaucer systematically avoided metamorphosis wherever he could or (as in the Wife of Bath's Tale and Manciple's Tale) made it merely perfunctory. By contrast, Gower is intimate with Ovid's sense of man as ‘Semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem’. The savage tale of the rape of Philomela (Metamorphoses, vi, 424-605) brings out most strongly these temperamental differences; Gower's success and Chaucer's self-confessed repudiation of the story shed a good deal of light on the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale.

In the simplest terms, Gower is able to retell the whole story, dreadful as it is, while Chaucer must omit for the purpose of his Legend the atrocious revenge of the ‘good’ women so wronged by Tereus, and seems often to be averting his eyes from the events he does tell. Gower is closer to Ovid in his fascination, which is neither morbid nor prurient, with the vision of man as half-beast. In the psychology of his Confessio Amantis, Rape is classed as a branch of Avarice, a violent extortion which stems from loss of reason. To this extent Gower (like Chrestien before him) thinks of Tereus' rape of his wife's young sister as within Nature, though against ‘kynde’ because unreasonable. Gower's Tereus acts in a rage of self-forgetting and

Foryat he was a wedded man,
And in a rage on hire he ran,
Riht as a wolf which takth his preie,
And sche began to crie and preie,
‘O fader …’

(CA, v, 5631-5)

The violence of the verbal play here anticipates metamorphosis at the climax of the story.²² It is because Tereus' act is seen as within the laws of nature (though not of reason), that the conclusion of the tale in lyrical evocation of the changing seasons is not felt to be incongruous. The violence of the story subsides as ‘the wodes and the greves / Ben heled al with grene leves’ (v, 5965-6), to hide the pain and shame of Philomene's wounded form.

Chaucer's considered response to the story comes in his Prologue to Philomene, written, he says, after composing the narrative. For him, the story has no redeeming qualities and most critics have seen him as making a mess of telling it. His fussy, sympathetic, narratorial voice intrudes as if to shield the violence of the events he must relate, even assuring the heroine that help is at hand, when patently it is not so. The tone seems uneasy, embarrassed, finally dismissive. He cuts the story short with never a hint of metamorphosis (‘The remenaunt is no charge for to telle’); instead, there is only a startlingly lame moral, ‘be war of men’. Yet Chaucer almost redeems the botched telling with the pained and sombre prologue. The words he speaks in his own person take up the last cry of Philomene before her tongue is cut out, ‘Help me, God in hevene.’ It is, however, the Christian God he addresses, the Author of Nature, ‘Thow yevere of the formes, that hast wrought / This fayre world’ (LGW, 2228ff.).

Not content with asking—more directly, perhaps, than anywhere else in his work—where evil originates in creation, Chaucer turns in his anguish from reflection upon God's responsibility as author of nature to his own, secondary, authorial responsibility: merely to retell Ovid's story seems to be to pollute the world. The tendency of modern moral thought favours Gower's reading of violent sexual crime rather than Chaucer's, preferring the idea of beastly human nature to the more disconcerting idea of evil. Yet the sincerity and pain of Chaucer's indignation seem to me undeniable and the seriousness of his sense of authorial responsibility is not anything a modern reader can lightly dismiss. The Prologue is like a cry of betrayal, betrayal of the author Chaucer by his story-master Ovid; its seriousness provides a point of view from which to gauge the tone of the Man of Law, when he distinguishes the stories of Ovid's lovers told by Chaucer from those of his friend and rival John Gower.

In the Introduction of the Man of Law's Tale Chaucer starts a new fragment, and takes stock of his own—and Gower's—part in the Ovidian enterprise. Chaucer has had enough of his large volume, ‘Cleped the Seintes Legende of Cupide’:

For he hath told of loveris up and doun
No more than Ovide made of mencion.

(54-5)

But at least he has not written of incest (‘Canacee, / That loved hir owene brother synfully’), nor of incestuous rape (King Antiochus). Chaucer would never write of such things, says the Man of Law with complacent piety:

He nolde nevere write in none of his sermons
Of swiche unkynde abhomynacions.

(87-8)

Who writes sermons—Chaucer or Gower? Chaucer's own work is more moral, he claims. The tone is bantering, but the attitude seems consistent with the heavy-weight philosophical reaction to the story of Philomene.

Chaucer completes the self-reflexive joke by having his Man of Law propose to speak in prose, because

Me were looth be likned doutelees
To Muses that men clepe Pierides—
Methamorphosios woot what I mene.

(91-3)

A wink here—for those of Chaucer's audience that know—hints that the author of Metamorphosis or, more likely, Gower will understand the allusion. In referring to the nine daughters of Pierus transformed into magpies for presuming to compete with the Muses, there lurks an idea which Chaucer will brilliantly expand in his Manciple's Tale.

Before turning to that final riposte to Gower, it is worth pondering some strategic implications of Chaucer's response. As Chaucer developed his plan for the Canterbury Tales rivalry with Gower certainly played a part; it may help to explain two notorious changes of Chaucer's mind. In the first, the Man of Law, promising a tale in prose, delivers up a tripartite poem in ‘high-style’ rhyme royal, ostentatiously pious, adorned with homiletic tropes and astrological flourishes. Twice he hints that ‘other men’ have told the story differently. That Chaucer has in mind here to outdo Gower's tale of Constance in Book II of Confessio Amantis is now maintained by a majority of scholars. There are nine passages in Chaucer that suggest precise verbal recollection of Gower.²³ Problematic too is the connection of the Prologue proper (in rhyme royal) with the Man of Law. Based on part of De miseria condicionis humane by Innocent III, its wry-sounding dispraise of poverty is offered to ‘riche marchauntz’, who are commended for their wealth and jovially greeted, ‘At Cristemasse myrie may ye daunce.’ In conclusion, the Man of Law, claiming otherwise to be ‘of tales desolaat’, attributes his effort to ‘a marchaunt, goon is many a yeere’. The text registers a number of changes of direction. Since the prose tale of Melibee would seem to fit the Man of Law very well—even to his legalistic idiom²⁴—and constitutes an essay on political morality in a genre more frequented by Gower than Chaucer, there is a tantalizing coherence in the puzzles presented. The identity—or association—of Gower with the Man of Law repeatedly suggests itself, and Chaucer's change of plan appears at least partly to have been a response to the publication of Gower's Confessio. This likelihood is strengthened by consideration of the second crux, involving the Wife of Bath's and Shipman's Tales. For Chaucer's decision to sever the fabliau from its knowing female teller (vestigially present in ‘we sely women’ of the Shipman's speech) and develop richer possibilities for the Wife, led him to the folk-tale which Gower had treated as the Tale of Florent (CA, i, 141ff.). Here, characteristically, he made fun of the magic and played down the climactic metamorphosis. In two instances where Chaucer changed his plan while imperfectly adjusting the dramatic framework of the Canterbury Tales the shift may be viewed as part of his creative response to Gower.

Chaucer's final response to Gower is another tonally complex piece: the Manciple's Tale. It seems to develop out of a seed in the Man of Law's Introduction and it is taken from the Metamorphoses. Ovid's fable of ‘How the crow became black’ reached both Gower and Chaucer through the Ovide moralisé, where it is explained as a warning against slander.²⁵Ovide moralisé takes a sympathetic and courtly view of adultery and blames the lady's slanderers. In the Confessio Amantis (CA, iii, 768ff.) Gower retells the story as an exemplum of Cheste (backbiting), and a warning against fault-finding and not keeping counsel. As is usual in the Confessio, the moral is explicitly stated by the priest confessor; its proverbial nature is reinforced by the usual Solomonic form of address to the penitent.²⁶

Mi sone, be thou war ther by,
And holde thi tunge stille close.

(CA, iii, 768-9)

Again, at the end,

My son, be thou non of tho,
To jangle the telle tales so.

(831-2)

Chaucer's harsher version is, characteristically, self-reflexive. For him the essence of the sour little story lies in an English pun: the tell-tale bird is a teller of tales. The most important thing about Chaucer's crow is not (as Ovid has it) its beautiful plumage, but its voice. The crow is Apollo's bird (as white as his traditional sweet-singing swan) and Phebus Apollo is the god of poetry:

Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a crowe
Which in a cage he fostred many a day,
And taughte it speken, as men teche a jay.
Whit was this crowe as is a snow whit swan
And countrefete the speche of every man
He koude, whan he sholde telle a tale.

(ix(h), 130-5)

The syntax is ambiguous here. Who originates tales, a man or the crow? The crow is a mimic, but does he counterfeit the speech of a man-telling-a-tale or does he counterfeit the speech of the right sort of man when he (the crow) wants to tell a tale? Does the poet report or does he make up his fictions?

For Chaucer the story is not really about Coronis' adultery, but about social and linguistic decorum: How do you tell a man (or a god of poetry) that he is a cuckold? The tale becomes a reflection on how to tell a tale. Hence the relevance of the Manciple's long digression on whether to call a man's mistress his lady or his wench or his lemman. The crow's problem is how to tell his master that he is abused. First he tries a traditional voice, one unpleasing to the married ear:

And whan that hoom was come Phebus, the lord,
This crowe sang, ‘Cokkow, Cokkow, Cokkow!’
‘What, bryd!’ quod Phebus, ‘What song syngestow?’

(ix(h), 242-4)

But the courtly Phebus cannot understand, ‘Allas, what song is this?’ So the crow lets him have it more rhetorically:

‘By God’, quod he, ‘I synge nat amys.
Phebus’, quod he, ‘For al thy worthynesse,
For al thy beautee and thy gentilesse,
For al thy song and al thy mynstralcye,
For al thy waityng, blered is thyn ye
With oon of litel reputacioun,
Noght worth to thee, as in comparisoun,
The montance of a gnat, so moot I thryve!
For on thy bed thy wyf I saugh hym swyve.’

(ix(h),248-56)

The polite crescendo of qualifying clauses winds to a climax on the vulgar word. In the ‘brode’ speech register of Chaucer's fabliau tellers the word passes without notice. Here it is all the more shocking for the Manciple's squeamish digression on linguistic decorum. It is a shock that Gower would have registered; for all modernity of his moral thinking, his choice of words is always delicate and the word ‘swyve’ does not occur once in his entire writing.²⁷

Phebus understands the message and slays his wife, instantly regretting it. More significantly, the god of poetry now destroys his musical instruments:

For sorwe of which be brak his minstralcie,
Both harpe and lute and gyterne and sautrie.

(ix(h), 267-8)

Phebus however convinces himself that he has been rash and that the crow has been lying, so ‘out at dore hym slong’, commending him to the devil. Such is the reward for telling the truth.

Granted that Chaucer turns the Ovidian tale into a reflection on poetry and truth-telling, why need it refer to Gower? From Chaucer's perspective, Gower was—after the completion of Confessio Amantis—preeminently the provider of morals for stories from Ovid. Moreover, Chaucer's choice of the Manciple to tell this story was not fortuitous. The Manciple's Prologue and Tale form the ninth fragment and—though we cannot know Chaucer's final intention—are generally thought to precede the Parson's Tale. They offer the last secular view of the world that the pilgrimage allows. The sardonic little bird-fable is preceded by some of the nastiest horseplay in the pilgrimage (wine has rendered the Cook ‘sow drunk’ and incapable of speech, the Manciple's sanctimonious denunciation of the poor sot incurs the Host's professional rebuke and the ‘penance’ of a tale). It will be recalled that the Manciple had been represented in the General Prologue as in charge of buying provisions for ‘a Temple’. He is one of the very few figures in the General Prologue for whom no literary model in the estates satire tradition has been found.²⁸ This makes it likelier that the Manciple owes his presence in the Canterbury Tales to Chaucer's recollection of the Inner Temple, an experience of law and business which, I have suggested, he shared with Gower. The Manciple, then, can be seen in this literary exchange as inhabiting that ‘common ground’.

So far as this relationship is inscribed in the writings of the two poets, we have Gower's image of Chaucer as ‘Venus clerk’—a view which Chaucer readily elaborates in the Prologue to the Man of Law's Tale—but we have two Chaucerian images of Gower. One is formal, even reverent—the ‘moral Gower’ entrusted to ‘correct’ Troilus. The other, a teller of immoral tales, ‘abhominations’, in contrast to Chaucer's ‘sermons’. It is the good faith of Gower as moralist that is in question here, and his resourceful credulity in always being able to draw a patent moral from the murky stuff of classical fable.

The Manciple's tale is very short, only 250 lines, and much of this taken up with moralizing digressions. The last fifty lines are devoted to pointing the moral that true wisdom lies in silence:

Daun Salomon as wise clerkes seyn
Techeth a man to kepen his tonge wel.

(ix(h), 314-15)

The proverbial admonition is repeated twenty-two times in these fifty lines and there is a pungent irony in the uncontrollable tell-tale preaching the virtues of silence.

Chaucer seems to be doing two things here: he is parodying the proverbial tale, since no other explanation of the too-muchness of the moralizing seems to me possible.²⁹ He is also, through his cacophony of voices, parodying the work of his friend Gower. Not content with the Manciple's proverbial excess, Chaucer introduces a further-off-stage character in the voice of the Manciple's mother, who is quoted for the final forty-three clamorous lines of the tale. From this parental tongue rattles a volly of Solomonic wisdom directed at ‘My son’; the formula is the one which Gower has worked to death:

My sone, thenk on the crowe, a Goddes name!
My sone, keep wel thy tonge, and keep thy freend.
A wickked tonge is worse than a feend.
My sone, thy tonge sholdestow restreyne
At alle tymes …
… The first vertue, sone, if thou wold leere,
Is to restreyne and kepe wel thy tonge.

(ix(h), 318-33)

What a thankless task, Chaucer seems to say, as he focusses his last sardonic image of the poet as scarecrow, what a thankless task to be an auctour.

My sone, be war, and be noon auctour newe
Of tidynges, wheither they been false or trewe.
Wherso thou come, amonges hye or lowe,
Kepe wel thy tonge, and thenk upon the crowe.

(ix(h), 359-62)

The final reflection on the tell-tale art of tale-telling links two words that had become thematically charged through Chaucer's recurrent use of them: auctour and tidings. An auctour is a poet, a moral authority. ‘Am I an auctour?’ Chaucer humorously asks. Tidings are what Chaucer had searched for in the journey to the House of Fame.³⁰ Tidings are what you make poetry out of, but they are also the report of those events. When the Man of Law addressed the unnamed merchants as ‘fadres of tidynges’ and ascribed the origin of his tale to a merchant, Chaucer was confirming his own use of the word from the House of Fame; he was also acknowledging his debt for a story which ‘father’ Gower had already told.

Chaucer's reflections on his art are bleak and black in the Manciple's Tale: no matter whether you make everything up or are a mere rapporteur (the ambiguity in the function of the Crow), you will have little thanks for telling the truth. The bitter proverbial wisdom mocking Gower mocks Chaucer too, typically and, pointedly, in the last of his fictional tales before Canterbury. If Chaucer's mockery of Gower seems a little ungrateful in view of a lifelong debt to his ‘mentor’ then it is also worth remembering that so far as writing in English is concerned, Chaucer was the master and Gower his poetic son.

Notes

1. Gower's choice of metre is discussed by Bruce Harbert, ‘Lessons from the Great Clerk: Ovid and John Gower’, Ovid Renewed, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge, 1988), p. 87.

2. The same general problem is encountered in judging whether or not Chaucer is quoting himself; even regular decasyllabic lines appearing almost verbatim in Troilus and the prose Melibee are best explained in genesis and function as proverbial. See Carleton Brown, ‘The Man of Law's Headlink and the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales', Studies in Philology, 34 (1937), 8-35.

3. Derek Pearsall, ‘The Gower Tradition’, in A.J. Minnis (ed.), Gower's ‘Confessio Amantis’: Responses and Reassessments (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), p. 179-97, 180.

4. Quotations from CA are from The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 2 vols. (Oxford: EETS, 1900).

5. Chaucer Life Records, ed. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson (Oxford, 1966), p. 12n.

6. Cited by D. S. Brewer, Chaucer and His World, 3rd edn (London, 1978), p. 83.

7. Riverside Chaucer, p. xviii. The educational function of the Temple in Chaucer's time—denied by J. A. Hornsby, Chaucer and the Law (Norman, Oklahoma, 1988), p. 20—is established beyond doubt by Samuel E. Thorne and J. H. Baker, Readings and Moots at the Inns of Court in the Fifteenth Century, vol. ii (London, Selden Society, 1989), pp. xxv-xxxv.

8. Chaucer Life Records, p. 54 and n.

9. Others have argued for Ralph Strode. ‘Philosophical Strode’, who disputed with Wyclif in his youth and who shared with Gower the dedication of Troilus, became a common sergeant and was pleader-at-law during the period 1374-86 when he was a close neighbour of Chaucer's in Aldgate.

10. John H. Fisher, John Gower (New York and London, 1964), p. 207.

11. For instance, MO, 25-32 (Complete Works: The French Works, ed., G. C. Macaulay, Oxford, 1899), where Chaucer, if he had looked only at the first page, would have read how a man's heart's desire would pass like a dream, ending in sorrow, as all secular love returns in the end to nothing.

12. Chaucer names Ovid eighteen times (also thrice as ‘Naso’ and, possibly—see below—once as ‘Metamorphosios’). In CA Gower refers specifically to Ovid twenty-two times. In an elegant recent discussion of ‘Chaucer and Ovid’ (Ovid Renewed, pp. 71-81), Helen Cooper claims, ‘Chaucer makes more extensive use of him than of any other Roman poet, Virgil included’ (p. 72), and argues that Ovid was the auctor who taught Chaucer not to accept auctoritas on trust.

13. The stories of Cleopatra, Philomela, Alcestis, Lucrece, Thisbe, Phyllis, Ariadne, Hypsipyle, Medea, Dido are told in CA and LGW; the story of Phebus' crow is told in CA and McpT, and of Alcyone in CA and BD. All but the last three appear in the Man of Law's list (Riverside Chaucer, p. 855); of those in the same list, Deianira, Hermione, Hero, Helen, Laodomia, Penelope, Briseis have their stories told in CA, while Hypermnestra is in LGW. In addition, the stories of Constance, Virginia, and Florent (WBT) are told in both CA and CT.

14. See, for instance, Fisher, ch. 4 and Elizabeth Porter, ‘Gower's Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm’ in Responses and Reassessments, ed. Minnis, pp. 135-62. LGW f, 366-408, g, 346-94 (‘tirayntz of Lumbardye’) show one of Chaucer's rare passages of political philosophy. A number of commentators have seen in this speech a serious lecture on the duties of a king addressed to Richard II by Anne in the person of Alceste. This uncharacteristic touch suggests a motive of rivalry with Gower (see Robinson, p. 845). The philosopher of f381 seems to be Aristotle, whose advice to Alexander on the subject of kings in cited by Gower in CA, vii, 2149ff. The rhyme ‘philosophre … gold in cofre’ is repeated in Introduction to MLT, ii, 25ff.

15. This point is well made by John Burrow, ‘The Portrayal of Amans in Confessio Amantis’, in Responses and Reassessments, ed. Minnis, pp. 5-24.

16. The Prologue to Confessio Amantis promises to complain of the same concerns as in both the earlier two works: the state of England, the corruption of the church, the nobles, the commons. Indeed, ‘Gower seems about to rewrite Vox Clamantis in English’, Porter, p. 142.

17. Burrow, pp. 5-15. Bruce Harbert suggests Tristia and Ovid's other exile poems as sources of ‘the persona Gower creates for himself at the end of the Confessio’.

18. Burrow, pp. 11-12; Jeremy Griffiths, ‘Confessio Amantis: The poem and its pictures’, in Responses and Reassessments, ed. Minnis, p. 174-5.

19. The versions of Pyramus by both poets are discussed by Norman Callan, ‘Thyn Owne Book: A Note on Chaucer, Gower, and Ovid’, Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), 269-81: ‘to anyone making a comparison of the first fifty lines it must appear that Gower, far from working from a general recollection [of Ovid], is following Chaucer’, whereas Chaucer wrote ‘from a recent perusal of Ovid’. Callan draws attention to LGW, 706ff. and CA, iii, 1332ff.

20. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936), p. 218.

21. Reasons for Gower's excision of the gracious compliment may have been purely technical. The ‘recension’ manuscripts may date from after Chaucer's death, so there is no need to suppose a falling out between the friends, as elaborated by Fisher. (See particularly P. Nicholson, ‘Poet and Scribe of the MSS of Gower's Confessio Amantis’, in Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer), pp. 130-42.) Since Gower also cut the praise of King Richard in the Prologue, excision may have been to protect Chaucer, a royal favourite.

22. Gower releases murderous possibilities in the most intimate words, as when Tereus, having bound the arms of his victim, ‘clippeth also faste / Her tunge’. The force of Gower's renderings of metamorphosis is well discussed by Christopher Ricks, ‘Metamorphosis in Other Words’, in The Force of Poetry (Oxford, 1984), pp. 1-33.

23. Riverside Chaucer, p. 857.

24. Carleton Brown, ‘The Man of Law's Headlink’, pp. 17-18.

25. Chaucer's indebtedness to Ovide moralisé is not proven. See D. C. Baker, ed. The Manciple's Tale, Variorum Chaucer, vol. 2, part 10 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1984), 4-11; and Cooper, ‘Chaucer and Ovid’, p. 79.

26. Cf. the Sloane MS 2593 song, ‘Kepe thy tunge, thy tunge, thy tunge’ and Pandarus' advice to Troilus: ‘That firste vertu is to kepe tonge’ (TC, iii, 294).

27. A Concordance to John Gower's ‘Confessio Amantis’, ed. J. D. Pickles and J. L. Dawson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987).

28. Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, 1973), p. 174.

29. See R. Hazleton, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 62 (1963), 1-31. For other interpretations of the tale see Riverside Chaucer, p. 952 and A. C. Spearing, ‘The CT IV: Exemplum and Fable’, in The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. P. Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 172-5.

30. Out of thirty-eight occurrences of the word, twenty-two are in that poem.