Chaucer and the European Rose

Chaucer and the European Rose David Wallace University ofTexas M y bdcf fot th� papc, wa.s to b,idgc the two halves of om session on Chaucer and the Continent. This made my choice of subject relatively straightforward. Most modern and medieval critics (with the exception of Petrarch) would acknowledge, with Charles Muscatine, "the priority, the breadth, and the centrality of French literature in the Middle Ages."1 Nothing expressed this French priority better than did the popu­ larity, the all-inclusive profusion, the European diffusion, and the univer­ sal authority of a single text: the Roman de la Rose. Five generations of Italian poets, from Brunetto Latini to Petrarch, defined their individual enterprise against the constant standard of the Rose. Chaucer, I shall argue, concentrated the efforts of these five Italian generations into a single English lifetime as he struggled to fashion a vulgaris illustris2 from the scant resources of a retarded vernacular. The Rose is itself, of course, the work of two generations. The first part was composed by Guillaume de Loris between 1225 and 1230, and the second byJean de Meun between 1269 and 1278.3 The Italianization of the Rose actually began beforeJean de Meun got to work. During the period of his political exile in France, 1260-66, Brunetto Latini read Guillaume's Rose and was moved to compose an Italian poem in seven-syllable couplets known as the Tesoretto.4 Brunetto was evidently embarrassed by the defects of his poetic language and by the limitations imposed by meter; he apologizes and complains aloud on several occasions, obviously yearning 1 Charles Muscatine, Chaucerandthe French Tradition (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1957), p. 7. 2 See Dante Alighieri, De VulgariEloquentia, ed. and trans. A. Marigo, 3d ed. updated by P. G. Ricci (Florence: Le Monnier, 1957), 2.4.1-3 (and pp. cxx-cxxi). 3 Such is the approximate dating given by the Roman de la Rose, ed. Felix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Paris: H. Champion, 1965-70), 1:viii. 4 For a convenient text see Poeti de/Duecento, ed. G. Contini, 2 vols. (Milan-Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1960), 2:175-277. 61 RECONSTRUCTING CHAUCER for the less restrictive medium ofprose. The encyclopedic ambitions which strain the poem were more fully realized in the Tresor, a work in French prose with which the Tesoretto is closely associated. Such ambitions com­ pare with those worked out in the second part ofthe Rose, and Brunetto's employment of Latin learning, his urbane manner, and his occasionally sarcastic wit are remarkably anticipative of the work ofJean de Meun. The narrative action ofthe Tesoretto sees an inquisitive, impressionable, and faintly comical narrator escorted through landscapes that are familiar from the French tradition ofthe dits amoreux which grew out ofthe Rose. Having lost his way in a forest, Brunetto receives instruction from alle­ gorical figures such as Nature, Philosophy, and Virtue before setting out in search of Love and Fortune. Having fallen under Love's spell, Brunetto employs the ingenuity of Ovid to escape from Love's kingdom, and repents. Renouncing his desire to find Fortune, Brunetto finds himself at the peak of Olympus. From this great height he surveys the world. He meets Ptolemy, who is about to grant his request for an account ofthe four elements when the poem breaks off, at line 2944. It is not, perhaps, so surprising that Brunetto's Tesoretto and Chaucer's House ofFame should have so much in common. Both poems are written by learned laymen who stand near the beginnings oftheir respective native traditions. Both writers attempt to expand the capabilities of their native vernacular by employing a French-inspired narrative framework to contain their particular sentimental, speculative, and scientific interests. Both apply themselves to the task armed with Latin learning, in which Boethius, Macrobius, and Alain de Lille figure prominently, and both are well versed in the rhetorical arts. Both poets find the verse form that they derive from Guillaume's octosyllabic couplets restrictive, and both are plainly embar­ rassed by the limitations of an inchoate poetic diction. Both poems end incomplete, at a point high above the earth, at a moment when the poet­ narrator is about to...