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  Love’s Bysynesse in Chaucer’s Amatory Fiction The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge, .l.l. Al this mene I by Love. [The life so short, the craft so long to learn; the attempt so hard, so sharp the conquering; In all this, I refer to love.] —Chaucer For youre love I swete ther I go. [For your love, I sweat wherever I go.] —Chaucer’s Absalom I Chaucer’s love poetry, like that of Ovid, takes its particular coloring from the discourse of love’s labor, and his labor discourse double-voices not only that of Ovid, Alan of Lille, and the authors of the Roman de la rose but also that of his own contemporary society. Of course, the discourse of love’s labor is placed into dialog with the discourse of passion in many of Chaucer’s works. The love sicknesses of Palamon, Arcite, Troilus, and even Absalom come immediately to mind. However , these are more than counterbalanced by the labor discourses of Pandarus , Diomede, Daun John, Nicolas, Januarius, and the Wife of Bath. As we shall see, Chaucer was a man imbued with a respect for bysynesse, a word that carried little of the negative connotations of the Latin labor or the French travail, in all aspects of life, including love. Since the word’s Latin equivalent, negotium, played no role at all in the discourse of love’s labor in Ovid, Andreas Capellanus, or Alan of Lille, it is noteworthy that bysynesse here plays so large a role. It is a sign, I believe, of the significant “embourgeoisement de l’eros” in Chaucer’s adaptations of the aristo-  cratic traditions of love poetry.1 For example, despite the key role played by Idleness in Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la rose, Chaucer, himself a busy civil servant who had to steal time for his art from the night, found idleness terribly suspect.2 In this chapter’s first epigraph, the narrator of the Parlement of Foules, like Ovid himself, presents love as a craft to be learned. Chaucer’s successful lovers are more often than not those who learn this art well and apply it diligently. Since love is “sharp” in “conquerynge ,” lovers like the Miller’s “hende Nicholas” earn their love by their wits, by their dogged perseverance, and by the “sweat of their brows.” The failed lovers are often the ones who allow passion or otium otiosum to overwhelm their better judgment. Since the general labor situation and labor attitudes of fourteenth-century England were discussed in the previous chapter, a review of these matters is not necessary here. Chaucer has not left us a treatise on his own personal labor ideology. As with the other works treated in this book, one is dealing with ideologies double-voiced in works of creative literature. One can never be absolutely certain, then, how closely the discourse of a particular Chaucerian character reflects the author’s own work ideology. The various texts must be read with care and with tact. Nevertheless, taking into consideration what we know of Chaucer’s soChaucer ’s Amatory Fiction  1. John Scattergood briefly notes the theme of love’s labor in Chaucer’s writings (“The ‘Bisynesse ’ of Love in Chaucer’s Dawn-Songs,” Essays in Criticism 37 [1987]: 110–20). Scattergood does not tie Chaucer’s use of this imagery to the literary tradition or the discourse of love’s labor. In addition, he argues that Chaucer uses love’s labor imagery only with respect to the “work of the night,” that is, sex (118). The discourse of love’s labor is much more pervasive in Chaucer and is used to construct courtship as well as sex. 2. In the House of Fame (HF), Chaucer’s narrator, who shares many personal characteristics with his creator, spends his evenings alone writing and reading in his study until his head aches (The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987], lines 629–40. All quotations from Chaucer’s work will be taken from this edition and cited in the text. Modern English translations are my own). After a full day of regular work, the eagle says: “For when thy labour doon all ys, / And hast mad alle thy rekenynges, / In stede of reste and newe thynges / Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon, / And, also domb as any stoon, / Thou sittest at...

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