Chaucer's Dream Poetry (review)

194 Reviews 1500, (Cambridge, 1958)—a title not included in Owen's bibliographical profiles. Later French romanciers also regaled their listeners and readers with comments about the Scots and displayed awareness of the terrain, its towns and ports, e.g. Froissart's Meliador, the anonymous Perceforest and Ysaie le Tr Apart from Froissart, another chronicler w h o had first-hand knowledge of the Scots was the Northumbrian knight, Thomas Gray. During confinement in Edinburgh Castle in c. 1355, he compiled a Scalacronica in French, purporting to be a history of Great Britain from early times. The subject for discussion in the Appendix is the thirteenth-century mirrorcase preserved in the Perth M u s e u m and Art Gallery. It represents a scene— the earliest recorded in medieval art—of the 'Tryst beneath the Tree' motif belonging to the Tristan legend. Owen's research convinced him 'of its significance in Scotland's cultural history of the period'. There are other elements in Owen's presentation that expand the reader's horizons: a genealogy of William the Lion's family, a chronological table of events between 1057 and 1249, reliable maps of Scotland and disputed territories, and a photographic portfolio depicting abbeys, castles and prominent Scots of the period. Owen's interdisciplinary approach offers an informative synthesis of domestic conditions and external alliances at many points of the compass. It should provide new impetus to the study of Scotland's image in numerous medieval literary and historical creations. K. V. Sinclair Canberra Phillips, Helen and Nick Havely, eds., Chaucer's Dream Poetry (Longman Annotated Texts), London, Longman, 1998; paper; pp. xiv, 438; R.R.P. AUS$69.95. The confusion which the narrator of the House of Fame displays about the causes of dreams and their relative trustworthiness finds a parallel of sorts in the uncertainty many critics feel about the generic status of dream poetry. The title of this book may be read as an assertion by the editors that dream poetry is, indeed, a clearly identifiable genre; the introduction, however, is a little more cautious, acknowledging (with Davidoff) that a dream is only one of a number of possible framing devices, and suggesting that the critical popularity of the term obscures this point. Having admitted as much, the editors nevertheless focus their attention on dream narratives, rather than attempting to deal more widely with framed fictions, rightly believing that here are a group of poems which deserve to be considered 'en bloc'. The general introduction serves to locate Chaucer's dream poems within a literary and historical context, glancing (with regrettable brevity) at some Reviews 195 of the classical and biblical antecedents of dream poetry, and some of the earlier medieval dream narratives, before focussing on a range of theoretical topics relating to the genre, such as the role of the narrator, and the nature of self-conscious fictions and intertextual narratives. There is m u c h that is worthwhile in the introduction (though I would question whether love is 'the central theme' (p. 1) of the House ofFame). The effort to play down medieval dream theory, although mildly overstated, offers a welcome corrective to those critical studies which invest such energy in determining the oracular status of the dream in any particular poem. Equally pleasing to see is the questioning of the 'seductive critical construct of the persona' (p. 13), which has been taken too far in the conception of medieval narrative voices, often without sufficient allowance being made for the peculiar blend of 'half-oral, half-literary' circumstances within which poems were read. Similarly valuable as a corrective is the idea of the fictional dream as a mirror of the imagination rather than a mirror of real-life dreaming, for the kaleidoscopic shifts in dream poets like Chaucer and Langland (and later Dunbar) rarely seem to be efforts to reduplicate the random associations of dreaming. What would have been a welcome addition to this general introduction would be some brief account of the after-life of Chaucer's dream poetry. Linking Chaucer to Clanvowe and Lydgate, to James I, to Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas, and even to Skelton would have suggested some stimulating lines...