The Place of the Bedchamber in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess

Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, a dream-vision, begins and ends in a bedroom. A point of departure for the dream that forms the poem’s central narrative, the bedroom also comes stunningly outfitted with luxury goods. Opening with a long insomniac meditation in which the narrator strategizes about ways to get to sleep, The Book of the Duchess invokes increasingly lush imaginary interiors in which the bedroom becomes a scene of invention, not just for the dream but for the poem as well. Unable to sleep, the narrator starts his story with himself sitting in bed late at night, eschewing the sociable activities of chess and backgammon for romance reading. Then, having read a story—Ovid’s tale of Ceyx and Alcyone, which involves Morpheus, the god of sleep—he concocts a plan for bribing Morpheus, first by offering him a featherbed of pure white doves’ down, striped with gold and covered in black satin from abroad, and many pillows, with every pillowcase made from “cloth of Reynes,” or fine linen from Reims in France:

Yif he wol make me slepe a lyte,Of down of pure dowves whiteI wil yive hym a fether-bed,Rayed with gold and ryght wel cledIn fyn blak satyn doutremer,And many a pilowe, and every berOf cloth of Reynes, to slepe softe—

(249–55)¹

The narrator then ups the ante by including other furnishings—“al that falles [belongs] to a chambre”—and offering to paint Morpheus’s halls with gold and to cover the walls with tapestries:

And I wol yive hym al that fallesTo a chambre, and al hys hallesI wol do peynte with pure goldAnd tapite hem ful many foldOf oo sute; this shal he have(Yf I wiste where were hys cave),Yf he can make me slepe sone.

(257–63)

The imaginary bribe works. Immediately the narrator falls asleep, and in his ensuing dream he even seems to be living in the elegant house he promised to Morpheus, or at least one of equivalent style. In his dream he awakens to the sound of birds singing from their perches on the tiles of his bedroom roof, and to his room filled with sunlight. The walls of his room are painted with scenes and gloss from The Romance of the Rose, and his windows are not only fully glazed but also painted with the entire Troy story.

What, for Chaucer, is the value of a bedroom? As readers have long recognized, The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s first long poem in English, is a bricolage of echoes from Ovid—the Metamorphoses and the French Ovide moralisé—and from courtly dits amoureuses by Machaut, Froissart, Guillaume de Lorris, and others.² A public poem, The Book of the Duchess was almost certainly written for an occasion commemorating the 1368 death of Blanche, first wife of John of Gaunt, and would have been presented to a London court audience versed in French love poetry and accustomed to hearing occasional poetry read in French, not in English.³ Chaucer’s choice to write in English measures an important step in his own growth as a writer as well as a milestone in the history of English.⁴ As Ardis Butterfield has noted, Chaucer’s choice to write the Duchess in English articulates the increasing acceptance of English, which had achieved sufficient stature to legitimize a translation project: French poetry can be reworked in English.⁵ Taking pieces of well-known French verse, translating some of them and reworking others in an English-language occasional poem that will then be read before an audience versed in the French poetry of Guillaume de Lorris and Machaut, Chaucer offers in the Duchess a public performance of English as well as a strategic act of language promotion. Do it once and you can do it again.

The Duchess’s vernacular reprisal of French love poetry may also involve the promotion of a certain vision of Englishness, other readers have suggested. Lexical analysis of the poem...