With ‘Name in Honde’

Macrobius makes a curious remark in Book V, chapter 13 of the Saturnalia when he compares a Homeric personification with its imitation by Virgil. Homer’s Strife (Eris) and Virgil’s Fama both start small but soon grow huge, their heads touching the heavens with their feet still on the ground. Macrobius says that this is fitting enough for Strife, since contention is contention no matter how large it grows. Virgil, though, has dropped the ball: when a rumour grows so big, he says, it ceases to be a rumour and instead becomes the consciousness of a known fact.¹ It is a neat observation: could that be said to be a rumour which is everywhere known? The sphere of fama is one where knowledge and the word can get into some interesting knots, a world where seeming is sometimes so close to being as to be identifiable with it. ‘Hyt is not al gold that glareth’ (l. 272), as we read in The House of Fame, where Chaucer seems alive to the fact that, at times and with enough glare, who is to say?

Fama is big. There are many meanings that jostle behind this little word – fame, rumour, report, renown, tradition, and, most simply, ‘something said’, or by extension, written – and any glance at the relevant puns, personifications, and plots of Virgil and Ovid will show that such meanings were traditionally understood as a cohesive if chaotic body to the imagination. It has, fittingly, been a very changeable one through time: from Virgil’s grotesque giantess, covered in eyes and ears and filling the world with rumours, to Ovid’s brilliant innovation with Fama: he dropped her altogether, leaving only her windy house full of open doors and windows where little truths and falsehoods clamour, fly about, and occasionally fuse. Rumour herself never makes an appearance and, in wonderful irony, is perhaps only a rumour. Understanding of the possibilities of this changeability persists through late and post-classical incarnations, but it obtains in an especially striking way in the case of Chaucer, who is both seminal in terms of fame discourse and a figure of fame on any terms for the later English tradition.

Chaucer does not seem to have read the Saturnalia, but fame could be a curious enough thing in his own time. On the question of whether or not Paradise had ever existed on Earth, Ralph Higden’s Polychronicon (in John Trevisa’s 1387 translation) has it that one reason for the truth of the fame of Paradise on Earth rests on its having endured all this time. This sense of fama diuturna, ‘long-during fame’, gets at something of Macrobius’s insight into the trickiness of seeming and being with regard to the unbound word. ‘Paradise’, though, adds a layer of tradition that is important, for the trecento conceptions of literary fame and authority which influence Chaucer and mediate his sense for classical authors arose in a broadly shared culture in which glory was to be transferred heavenwards in a new way (there had always been stellification, of course), leaving vainglory and opinion to recomplicate notions of earthly fame and authority. Boethius, a figure in between the late classical and the Christian, is a case in point, and it is no surprise that he is added to the great mingling of authors comprised by the House. In fact the combination of Boethius’s Philosophia with Virgil’s Fama in Chaucer’s Lady Fame (who resides in a palace resembling Ovid’s House of Fame) is emblematic of much of the poem: its philosophical worrying away at the problems of fame; their classical origins but new growths; their tendency to illusion and allusion (sometimes hard to separate: think ‘Lollius’ in relation to Boccaccio). Chaucer is very much alive to the trickiness of seeming and being in these accretions of context, and he can seem to shift from appearing cheerfully credulous of old books (Legend of Good Women) to being deeply sceptical...