One of CHAUCER’s most unusual works, Anelida and
Arcite is a curious and clearly experimental combination of narrative and lyric, in which the English
poet seems to have been trying to find an effective
way of combining the lyrical love COMPLAINT of his
French models, like Guillaume de MACHAUT, with
his newfound passion for Italian narrative poetry,
particularly as found in BOCCACCIO’s TESEIDA. Most
critics have found the lyric portion of the text far
more successful than the narrative.
The poem begins with not one but two epicstyle invocations, the first to Mars and Bellona
(Roman god and goddess of war), the second to
the muses, asking for their help in telling the story
of Queen Anelida and her false lover Arcite. A narrative of about 200 lines follows, which Chaucer
claims to be taking from Statius, author of the
Latin Thebaid, and from an unknown (and probably spurious) poet named Corrine. In fact, he bases
the first part of the narrative on the Teseida, describing Theseus’s triumphant return from battling the Amazons, then switches the scene to
Thebes, where Anelida, queen of Armenia, is
wooed and then abandoned by the false Arcite—a
name Chaucer also borrowed from a completely
different character in the Teseida. No source has
been found for this story, which was probably
Chaucer’s own invention.
This Chaucer follows with an elaborate “Complaint,” nearly as long as the narrative, in which
Anelida laments her desertion by the false Arcite.
The poem consists of a Proem, a Strophe, an Antistrophe, and a Conclusion. The Proem and Conclusion are in exactly the same verse form, while
the Strophe and Antistrophe precisely parallel one
another, and the poem ends with a line that echoes
its beginning. Praised for its metrical versatility, the
“Complaint” has also been admired as a realistic
exploration of a mind disturbed by grief.
A final stanza in which Anelida goes to the Temple of Mars follows the complaint, but the poem
abruptly breaks off after this. Most critics have
therefore assumed that the poem is unfinished,
and some have made conjectures about what the
poem would have been had Chaucer completed it
(James Wimsatt suggests that a long lyric of comfort would have balanced Anelida’s lament;
Michael Cherniss that the poem would have
moved into a DREAM VISION). However, as John
Norton-Smith has pointed out, only half of the
eight surviving manuscripts of the poem contain
the final stanza, and it may well be a later scribal
addition. If Chaucer meant to end the poem after
the “Complaint,” this poem has precisely the same
structure as another of Chaucer’s short poems, the
“Complaint of Mars.” Like that poem, Chaucer’s
concern seems to have been to place the conventional, universal concerns of the traditional lover’s
complaint into a narrative context that would give
it some specificity.
Ultimately most readers have found the poem
unsatisfactory. The extremely complex verse form
shows Chaucer at his lyrical best, though he never
attempts so elaborate a form again in any of his
shorter poems. Certainly the brief love narrative is
disappointing after the epic machinery that begins
it, though it gave Chaucer practice in writing the
kind of short tale of a woman abandoned in love
that filled his later LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN. The
use of lyric within narrative that Chaucer practices
here is a technique that Chaucer ultimately perfects in TROILUS AND CRISEYDE. If Anelida and Arcite
is an experiment, it is one that bears valuable fruit
later on in Chaucer’s career.
Bibliography
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Some Conjectures,” Chaucer Review 5 (1970):
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as a Source for Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of
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