A DREAM VISION by CHAUCER, The House of Fame is
a poem of three books in octosyllabic couplets.
Most scholars believe that it was written after The
BOOK OF THE DUCHESS but before The PARLIAMENT
OF FOWLS. The verse form and focus on love put the
poem, like The Book of the Duchess, in the tradition
of French love visions that begins with the ROMAN
DE LA ROSE. Like the Parliament, though, The House
of Fame shows the strong influence of the major
Italian writers, particularly DANTE, but also, to a
lesser extent, BOCCACCIO. In book 2 of the poem,
Chaucer refers to his work as customs officer,
which indicates that the poem must have been
written after his appointment to that post in 1374.
But the influence of BOETHIUS in book 3 of The
House of Fame suggests a date of 1378–80, when
Chaucer was likely working on his translation of
The CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY. Thus a date
around 1379 seems most likely for the poem.
Like Dante in the DIVINE COMEDY, Chaucer divides his poem into three parts. The poem begins
with allusions to Virgil, describes a fabulous journey, and utilizes a guide ordained by heaven. But
Chaucer’s comic tone contrasts with Dante’s high
seriousness, even to the point of including mockheroic invocations to the gods and the muses.
Like Chaucer’s other dream visions, The House
of Fame begins with allusions to classical literature,
but instead of reading a text that puts him to sleep
(as he does in the Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls), this time the Dreamer sees the
text of Virgil’s Aeneid reenacted within his dream,
as paintings on the wall of a temple in which his
dream begins. It is the story of Aeneas’s desertion
of Dido, presented as an illustration of a false lover.
After viewing the frescoes, the Dreamer leaves the
temple to find himself standing in a desert wasteland, wondering what to do next, when suddenly a
huge golden eagle swoops down and snatches him
up, carrying him into the heavens. The desert may
suggest the wasteland in which Dante finds himself
at the beginning of the Comedy, while the eagle almost certainly is drawn from canto 9 of the Purgatorio, where an eagle carries Dante to the first
ledge on the mountain of Purgatory.
Book 2 of The House of Fame is justly the most
admired and popular part of the poem. Certainly it
is the most humorous. The Eagle, we learn, has been
sent from Jupiter, who has taken pity on the
Dreamer’s long and fruitless service of Cupid and
Venus. The bird has been sent as a guide to teach the
Dreamer about love, and he is to bring the Dreamer
to the House of Fame, where he will hear tidings of
love, both true and false. The humor in the vision
lies partly in the Eagle, who comes across as a
pedantic and irrelevant lecturer, and partly in the
characterization of the Dreamer: The Eagle calls
him “Geffrey,” and paints a picture of him as a bureaucrat buried in his books at the office, and at
home holed up in his study writing, a hermit with
no sense of what goes on out in the world. It is an
amusing self-caricature, and the most detailed autobiographical passage in Chaucer’s poetry.
In book 3, the Eagle deposits Geffrey at the castle of Fame. He finds great classical poets as well as
popular entertainers at the castle. Suddenly a great
crowd bursts in, and much of the third book is
taken up by seven groups of petitioners who approach the throne of the goddess Fame to make requests. The goddess grants or denies their requests
for no apparent reason, demonstrating, apparently,
how completely random is her distribution of respectable or dishonorable reputations—as such,
she is reminiscent of the fickle goddess Fortune in
Boethius, and indeed, in that work, fame is one of
the areas within the control of Fortune.
Ultimately a stranger approaches Geffrey to ask
him if he has come seeking fame himself. When
Geffrey denies the suggestion, the stranger leads
him into another house, the house of Rumor,
telling him he will hear what he desires here. From
this spinning house, truth and falsehood are emitted, all mingled together. Geffrey is told that a man
“of gret auctoritee” is about to make an announcement. At this point, the poem breaks off.
Just what this announcement would have been
has been the object of a good deal of conjecture by
critics, in particular those trying to date the poem
by internal evidence. Some have held that the announcement pertained to the marriage of King
RICHARD II to ANNE OF BOHEMIA. Others have proposed it may have been intended as a greeting for
Queen Anne when she arrived in England. Still
others have suggested it concerned the pending betrothal of John of Gaunt’s daughter Philippa. All of
these might be appropriate if the date of the poem
were 1379. Some who believe the poem is earlier
have suggested the announcement may concern
Richard’s anticipated engagement in 1377 to
Marie, the young princess of France. Twice the
poem specifies the date of December 10, but no
one has satisfactorily explained the significance of
this date. If the poem was intended to commemorate some important occasion, there is no consensus as to what that occasion was.
Nor is it clear whether the ending of the poem
has been lost or the poem was simply left unfinished. Since only three manuscripts of the poem
are extant, it seems unlikely the poem was well
known in its own time (although Thomas USK
may allude to it in his Testament of Love). It may
be that whatever anticipated event was to be announced by the man of “great authority” never occurred.
Beyond the occasion for the poem, it has been
suggested that Chaucer may be facing in The House
of Fame a turning point in his own development
as a poet. Certainly after this poem he turned to
Italian influences in his poetry far more than
French. Perhaps, for himself, he saw that as the
route to lasting fame.
Bibliography
Amtower, Laurel. “Authorizing the Reader in
Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Philological Quarterly
79 (2000): 273–291.
Bennett, J. A. W. Chaucer’s Book of Fame. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968.
Boitani, Piero. Chaucer and the Imaginary World of
Fame. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984.
Delany, Sheila. Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of
Skeptical Fideism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1972.