Chaucer’s Sources and Chaucer’s Lies: Anelida and Arcite and the Poetics of Fabrication

Anelida and Arcite is one of Chaucer’s most abused poems.¹ Regarded by critics alternately as Chaucer’s longest short poem—that is, minor poem—or his shortest and least satisfactory long poem, the Anelida, for many, consists of a distressingly conventional lover’s complaint nested within a lackluster and apparently unfinished frame narrative. Both sections of the work tend to attract enthusiastic comment only for their metrical sophistication—in the world of poetry, that surest form of damnation by faint commendation—or for their delightful adumbration of frame tales and feisty females yet to come.² Moreover, Chaucer himself never acknowledges the poem in any of his own catalogues of his works, although Vincent J. DiMarco, an editor of the Riverside text, assures us of its “unquestioned authenticity.”³ Not only, then, has the Anelida proven especially difficult to place in the chronology of Chaucer’s works,⁴ but we are left to puzzle over where we should understand it as a part of his poetic oeuvre more generally: is it an early poem abandoned in dissatisfaction, a solid anticipatory foundation for later texts, or perhaps not even the work of Chaucer at all?⁵ Since the poem’s invocation contains various shades and quotations of Dante and Boccaccio, in terms of content we might very well describe the poem as one of Chaucer’s “Italian” works, though in form it seems more French, and, finally, according to the narrator, the original source text was written in Latin. As far as centuries of readers have been able to tell, however, Chaucer himself invented the story of Anelida and her false Arcite more or less out of whole cloth, and indeed Chaucer’s complex engagement with the literary-historiographic record in the poem speaks to a far less slapdash set of motivations than is usually granted to the text. Accordingly, I would like to revisit this still-neglected “minor work” with particular attention to Chaucer’s “slye wey” of handling his sources and his precedents (l. 48), in which I see a double-coded articulation of what we might describe as a virtual “poetics of falsification,” or, if—in proper Chaucerian fashion—we wish to soften this description with a polysemous euphemism, we might instead say “a poetics of fabrication.” In essence, then, this narrative of a lover falsed serves, in part, to outline an exuberantly ambivalent poetics of fabrication that positions the inheritor-integrator of tradition as its inevitable marrer, and stands as a fitting enough supplement to the poetics Helen Cooper has ascribed to Chaucer’s two longest poems, which she sees as “exemplify[ing] Chaucer’s practice of raising moral schizophrenia into an artistic principle.”⁶ Neither fully “author” nor fully “compiler” in any of the various senses in which those terms have historically been applied to the poet, Chaucer instead carves out a space for himself as poetic “fabricator.”

My primary intention here is not to rehabilitate the Anelida aesthetically, as some scholars have attempted to accomplish for selected shorter poems, including, for example, the Complaint of Mars.⁷ I would only point out, again, that the poem has endured some curiously unforgiving attacks on its quality, which have no doubt contributed to its history of relative neglect. In 1973, for example, Stephen Knight took a particularly hard stance against it, maintaining that the only scholars who had ever considered the poem “a real success” were a handful of misguided “recent American critics.”⁸ Even the severest of the Anelida’s detractors, however, have by and large remained hesitant to call Chaucer what he is in the poem: a liar. The one exception here is Wolfgang Clemen, who scorns the first three stanzas in particular as “full of promises that are not kept and statements that are not true”⁹—just so, despite the efforts of the few admirers of the Anelida to defend the poet against such an accusation. Robert O. Payne, for one, tactfully exonerates the poet-narrator from any real fault, glossing his invocatory remark that he has...