CHAUCER’s first extant sustained literary effort, The
Book of The Duchess is a DREAM VISION in octosyllabic couplets that is concerned with the death of
Blanche, duchess of Lancaster and wife of
Chaucer’s very powerful patron, JOHN OF GAUNT.
The poem, a narrative of some 1,334 lines, was
purportedly written at the request of the bereaved
widower. Whether it was written shortly after the
duchess’s death from the plague in 1369 or sometime later is a matter of some scholarly debate.
In the poem an insomniac narrator is finally
able to fall asleep after reading the tale of Ceys and
Alcyone from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He dreams
that he is awakened by the song of birds to find
himself within a chamber adorned with stained
glass windows that tell the story of the fall of Troy,
and frescoes that depict scenes from the ROMAN DE
LA ROSE. From his chamber, he rides out with a
group of hunters to seek the “hert”—a pun on
“hart” and “heart.” While in the wood, he encounters a knight dressed in black. The mourning
knight speaks to the poet about his sorrow, which
he describes figuratively as a chess match during
which his opponent Fortune has destroyed his
happiness by taking his queen. The literal-minded
narrator sees no great sorrow in this loss, and the
Black Knight goes on to describe at great length the
beauty of “fair White,” the woman he loved (White
is the English translation of “Blanche”), and how
he met and wooed her. The apparently slow-witted
narrator still cannot understand the knight’s grief
until the frustrated lover blurts out plainly “She ys
ded!” (Benson 1987, l.1309), at which the narrator
expresses his own pity and thus ends the “herthunting.” The knight returns to his “long castle” (a
pun on Gaunt’s title, the duke of Lancaster—that
is, long castle), and the dreamer awakens.
While no extant manuscript of the poem attributes it to Chaucer, it is clearly his work, and he
refers to it both in the prologue to the LEGEND OF
GOOD WOMEN, where he calls it “the Deeth of
Blaunche the Duchesse” (l. F 418; G 406) and in
his Retraction to the CANTERBURY TALES, where he
calls it “the book of the Duchesse” (X, 1086).
Scholars have noted that Chaucer owes much to
courtly French sources, including the ROMAN DE
LA ROSE; Jean FROISSART’s Paradys d’amour; Guillaume de MACHAUT’s Dit de la Fonteinne amorese
and Remede de Fortune; and in particular
Machaut’s Jugement dou Roy de Behainge, in
which a noble woman mourns the death of her
lover. The consolation for the lady’s death in the
poem has been compared to that offered in
BOETHIUS’s CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY, though
Chaucer’s translation of that work was probably
not made until well after he wrote The Book of the
Duchess.
Critics have focused on a number of aspects of
the poem. The relationship of the Ceys and Alcyone story to the knight’s grief is unclear, though it
certainly sets an appropriate mood for the poem.
The question of the poet’s own troubled mind
that prevents his sleeping is another area of critical concern. Chaucer’s use of the allegory of the
chess game has interested some critics, while others have debated whether or not the knight in the
poem is intended to represent John of Gaunt. But
most important is the question of whether the
dreamer is naïve and therefore blunders into the
knight’s final declaration or is a subtle psychologist whose naïve pose deliberately draws the
knight out. In any case the realistic psychology of
the poem has particularly impressed modern
readers of the poem.
The most significant aspect of The Book of the
Duchess is Chaucer’s deliberate decision to write a
courtly elegy in English. It was the first time that
English had been used for serious poetry of the
court, and Chaucer’s success in the genre—his
poem, dealing as it does with a serious event of
real significance, is much more widely admired
than any of his French models—ensured the establishment of a true, serious literary tradition in
English.
Bibliography
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Playing with Chess in the Book of the Duchess,”
Chaucer Review 34 (1999): 125–138.
Boardman, Phillip C.“Courtly Language and the Strategy of Consolation in the Book of the Duchess,” English Literary History 44 (1977): 567–579.
Bolens, Guillemette, and Paul Beekman Taylor. “The
Game of Chess in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess,”
Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 325–334.
Butterfield, Ardis. “Lyric and Elegy in The Book of the
Duchess,” Medium Aevum 60 (1991): 33–60.
Bronson, Bertrand H. “The Book of the Duchess Reopened,” PMLA 67 (1952): 863–881.
Clemen, Wolfgang. Chaucer’s Early Poetry. Translated
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Wimsatt, James. Chaucer and the French Love Poets:
The Background of the Book of the Duchess.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
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