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A LEGAL READING OF CHAUCER'S HOUS OF FAME R. J. SCHOECK ONE of Chaucer's early works, The Hous of Fame, generally dated about 1375-9 during Chaucer's years as controller of the customs, is in the words of a recent literary historian "a badly proportioned, incomplete, and utterly delightful poem.'" Most scholars, not knowing the occasion and intention of the poem, have felt much of this dissatisfaction with the form of the poem, yet nearly all have felt the utter delight of Chaucer's playfulness. If one took Chaucer seriously, the division into three books with all the epic machinery of invocations, proems, and the like would indeed be top-heavy. In the first hook (to summarize the action as briefly as possible) , the poet dreams he is in the temple of Venus, and when he steps out of doors he sees flying toward him a great eagle that shines like gold. This eagle seizes him and carries him into the air. The second book tells of the eagle's flight, and the contrast of the eagle's talkativeness --he familiarly calls the poet Geoffrey-with the poet's speechlessness -for he answers only in monosyllables, "Yes" or "nay" and "well"-is comedy indeed. The third book, in which the eagle sets the poet down outside of Fame's house, takes us only to the point where he is about to hear an announcement from "a man of gret auctorite" and there the poem ends, or breaks off. Some scholars have doubdess taken the poem too seriously in seeing it as an allegory of the poet's life or as a conventional love vision. Those who have attempted to solve the problem in terms of the news which is about to be given by the "man of gret auctorite" have not been successful in persuading their colleagues. I offer this summary of previous interpretations not to minimize the work of Chaucer scholars more learned than I but to suggest that there may be something external to the poem which modem readers lack, and that this is the reason why the poem has kept its secret forever: (in Coghill's words) "for Chaucer 's courdy audience it was probably an open secret, an occasional poem of which they knew the occasion." And so I think that the original setting of Chaucer's poem was a now unknown occasion that was generally known to his friends, perhaps even to many of his contemporaries , and that therefore much of the poem's original meaning has been lost because it depends upon a ritualistic world (not unlike the ceremonial aspects of the medieval knight's homage and fealty) whose meanings and ceremonies were not written down. lAlbert C. Baugh, A Literary History of England (New York, 1948 ), 253. 185 Vol. XXIII, no. 2, Jan., 195~ 186 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY These ritualistic elements are outside the poem, to be sure. After considering them, I shall move to the poem itself and try to suggest in the light of them another reading of it. Though it may be true that the secret of the poem has been lost forever, we cannot ignore any possible clues to the secret; and for this reason the rather oblique allusion of an obscure sixteenth-century writer is of unique importance and offers, I think, a new approach to Chaucer's Hous of Fame? Let us tum then to Gerard Legh's Accedence of Armorie, a work of heraldry first published in 1562 and followed by a half-dozen editions.' On folio 11B Legh pictures Pegasus on a "scutcheon of renown" and beside it writes as follows: He beareth Azure, a Pegasus Argent, called the horse of honour whose condition Sorares the xxiii. Emperour of Assiria honored so much for his swift course, as he judged him not framed of the gross mass of common horses. And therefore S. GefIreye Chaucer buylte unto him (after of his owne nature & condition, a house called Fame, a place mete for the horse of honour) whose original the Pactes faine was, when valiant Perseus the soldier of the goddess Pallas, in dangerous fight, achieved by help of her glittering shield...

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