THE UNDERWORLD OF CHAUCER'S HOUSE OF FAME: VIRGIL, CLAUDIAN, AND DANTE

John Kerr

Introduction

The House of Fame invites its readers to draw correspondences between itself and Dante's Commedia} Chaucer's poem makes frequent allusion to the Commedia, and shares with it a three-book structure. While a few scholars have attempted to see the House of Fame as pointing toward a transcendent reading comparable to Dante's, most agree that Chaucer resists the supernatural poetics associated with his Florentine predecessor, instead grounding the House of Fame in the experience of the earthly.2 Such a view of the poem taps into the House of Fame's larger concern with the instability of human language and thought, a crisis which the poem never surrenders.3 By the end of the poem Chaucer depicts the passage of knowledge—fame—as an inevitable blending of true and false ('fais and soth compouned').4 I shall be showing how the poem's emphasis on epistemological uncertainty.hinges upon a particular conception of underworld which Chaucer inherited from classical and medieval lore. Specifically,

1 For Chaucer's relationship with Dante in the House of Fame and in his other poems, see the bibliography provided in KRUGER, 'Imagination and the Complex Movement of Chaucer's House of Fame* n. 13, as well as SYPHERD, Studies in Chaucer's Hous of Fame, 44-72; FYLER, Chaucer and Ovid, 23-64; SHOAF, Dante, Chaucer, and the Cunency of the Word; BOITANI, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame; NEUSE, Chaucer's Dante; CHANCE, The Mythographw Chaucer, 45-82; SHOAF, 'Noon Englissh Digne'; FRANKE, 'Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees'; STEINBERG, 'Chaucer in the Field of Cultural Production.' 2 For the exceptions, see particularly KOONCE, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame, and PAYNE, The Influence of Dante. 3 For the classic study on this crisis see DELANEY, Chaucer's (House of Fame'. Along with the texts cited in n. 1 above and in KRUGER, 'Imagination and the Complex Movement of Chaucer's House of Fame,' n. 3, see also EDWARDS, The Dream of Chaucer, 93-121; KISER, Truth and Textuality in Chaucer's Poetry; TERRELL, 'Reallocation of Hermeneutic Authority'; MGGERR, Chaucer's Open Books; LYNCH, Chaucer's Philosophical Visions, 61-82; ST. JOHN, Chaucer's Dream Visions, 63-123. 4 House of Fame 11.129. All quotations from Chaucer are taken from The Riverside Chaucer. 186 JOHN KERR

'underworld' meant for Chaucer the entire region below the sphere of the moon, the realm of uncertainty and incessant change which was ruled by the goddess Proserpina. In examining Chaucer's poem as an infernal project, I will begin with a consideration of his explicit references to Virgil, Claudian, and Dante as authorities on hell in Books I and III, then move on to discuss Chaucer's conception of underworld (with particular attention to Proserpina), and conclude with a close reading of the House of Fame that hinges upon an intertextual relationship with Dante's Inferno. These brief forays will provide a sense of the sources, themes, and depth of Chaucer's infernal under• taking, as well as the prominent position of Dante at every step.

Virgil, Claudian, and Dante as authorities on hell

The House of Fame manifests its resistance to closure from the outset. In the proem to Book I, the narrator, 'Geffrey', withholds any con• clusive judgment on the causes of dreams, as well as their variety of potential interpretations: 'For I of noon opinion/Nyl as now make mensyon' (1.55-56). Instead, he proceeds to invoke Morpheus, 'the god of slep,' for assistance in retelling his dream (1.69). This invo• cation serves a comic enough purpose, but also lays an infernal groundwork, since Morpheus is said to dwell 'in a cave of stoon/ Upon a strem that eometh fro Lete,/That is a flood of helle unswete' (1.69-71). As this invocation governs the poetic retelling of the dream experience, it implies a hellish genesis not only for Geffrey's dream, but also for the poem as a whole.5 Throughout Geffrey's dream journey, the House of Fame establishes itself as a self-consciously literary poem. Book I sets this literary tone in an unparalleled way, plunging Geffrey into a dream world where he encounters Virgil's Aeneid written on a tablet of brass. Chaucer provides a narrative synopsis of Virgil's epic which dedicates all but 17 lines to the first six books, focusing attention on the story of Dido. Chaucer complicates the Dido account by bringing in the per• spective of Ovid's Heroides. After lengthily evoking Dido's words and

5 This alignment of Geffrey's dream with hell may be underlined by the poem's unusual setting, which has never been sufficiently explained: the dream occurs not in the characteristic May time of re-greening, but instead on December 10, approach• ing the death of winter.