“Je maviseray”: Chaucer’s Anelida, Shirley’s Chaucer, Shirley’s Readers

In Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20, intended to circulate among both his mercantile London friends and the social circles of the earl of Warwick, Shirley connects Chaucer’s poetry to the French-inflected fifteenth-century English enthusiasm for poems featuring women’s concerns about fin’amors. In his verse prologue and in his heading for Chaucer’s Anelida’s Complaint, Shirley encourages his readers to think of themselves as having a personal stake in the issue of romantic fidelity that plagues Anelida and other female characters in Chaucer’s shorter works. Furthermore, quires xix–xxii of the manuscript juxtapose Anelida’s skepticism about fin’amors with moralizing voices in French, both male and female, that either express cynicism about the posturing people do in the courtly milieu or urge rejection of such worldly concerns. ¹ Encountering Anelida’s Complaint in such a context, Shirley’s audience is positioned to imagine Chaucer as a sympathetic adviser who thinks that upper-class women would be justified in treating fin’amors protestations of love with a degree of skepticism. In contrast, Shirley’s well-known marginal remark in Mumming at Wyndesor focuses on the misogyny of Lydgate. Although Trinity, R.3.20 is not specifically a Chaucer anthology, its contents nevertheless show that the cultural issues that so intrigued Chaucer similarly fascinated his fifteenthcentury readers: how women should respond to male fin’amors rhetoric, and how texts do—or should—represent women. Compiled around 1432, Trinity, R.3.20 also demonstrates the continuing importance of French literature as a context for Chaucer’s early fifteenth-century reception, and anticipates by several decades the mid-fifteenth-century compilers and early printers who put Chaucer’s shorter poems in conversation both with Lydgate’s poetry and with French poems in translation.

I. “Trouthe” and the Female Reader: Chaucer’s Anelida, Shirley’s Audience

Chaucer evokes a female-voiced skepticism about male fin’amors rhetoric in several of his shorter poems. Anelida’s Complaint is an excellent example of this critique, which usually emphasizes four points: the plausibility of male lovers’ rhetoric, the female capacity for fidelity, the male propensity for fickleness, and a direct warning to the female audience to beware of men. Anelida herself spotlights the plausibility of Arcite’s deceptive rhetoric, asking “Alas! Wher is become your gentilesse, / Youre wordes ful of plesaunce and humblesse . . . upon me, that ye calden your maistresse?” (lines 247–48, 251).² In contrast to Arcite, Anelida is so scrupulously faithful a fin’amors partner that she voluntarily shows to Arcite any letter that she receives from another man (264– 66). He bears a strong similarity to the villains of The Legend of Good Women, by “kinde” unable to remain with one woman. Anelida universalizes this shortcoming in her complaint, asking “Where is the trouthe of man? Who haath hit sleyn? / Who that hem loveth shal hem fynde as fast / As in a tempest is a roten mast” (312–14). Unencumbered by the multilayered voicing and ironic metastructures in much of Chaucer’s other work, this poem’s condemnation of men such as “fals Arcite” is unambiguous. Anelida was taken unawares; alas, she understands too late that “hit availeth not for to ben trewe” (216).

Shirley expects his audience to be actively invested in the importance of “trouthe.” In the verse prologue he composed for Trinity, R.3.20, Shirley wishes his readers success in love, but only if their intentions are sincere and they remain faithful:

And all that in this company ben knight squyer or lady or other estat what euer they be the god of loue where so that he be in heauen or here in thearth he brynge them to the heuen forthe if they in loue be founden true with stedfast hert and nought renew nether in ernest nor in game but kepe ther worship and ther name he send them lord such guerdonynge as they deserue in ther menynge be hit female be hit male now seche and rede some other talle. Explicit.

(91–104)³

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