Chaucer’s House of Fame

Recently, while I was reading in bed — as is my nightly habit — I came across some lines (641-660) from Book II of Chaucer’s early poem, House of Fame, in a recently purchased book on his prologue to the Canterbury Tales (a small 1960 reprint of a 1903 original picked up at the local used book store). I’ve seen the 2,158-line poem (Wikipedia says 2,005 but that’s wrong) in my Riverside Chaucer, but never paid it much attention and can’t recall ever reading it beyond the opening lines. I’ve always focused more on the major works: Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Cressida.*

This time, however, it intrigued me, in part I suppose because as I read those lines, the image of the author sitting alone, surrounded by books in his empty house seems particularly poignant. I could see myself in it. And I thought Chaucer’s snarky, and no doubt self-deprecating comment about the lonely reader cut off from the outside world because he is lost in his books was unkind: reading can be a journey to other worlds; worlds filled with people, animals, even aliens.

It also reminded me of Niccolo Machiavelli’s letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, in which he talks about returning home after his day to retreat to his study to read the classics. For me, that image of sitting alone in a library with all those books to read is as comforting as it was to Machiavelli.**

These few lines made me want to read Chaucer’s poem in its entirety and to know more about it. I came across a good blog post about it that inspired me to do so on forthewynnblog.wordpress.com. I have since been reading the poem and reading about it. That aforementioned blog says “The nature of authority is a major subject of Chaucer’s poem, and it posed questions that evidently troubled him.” How contemporary: the nature of authority is a hot topic today in the era of would-be-king Donald Trump and his cultish courtiers.

But it’s also about another contemporary topic: the nature of fame and reputation —another topic that Machiavelli wrote about. The poem, framed as a dream, has Chaucer taken by a giant eagle up to the House of Fame itself. As For the Wynn describes it:

The House of Fame, to which the eagle brings the poet, stands upon a rock of ice, into which the names of famous people have been carved, though many have melted away in the sunlight.

Fame is fleeting, he says, and there is no immortality even in greatness. Who remembers the names that melted? Who even cares? That reminds me of the famous sonnet Ozymandias by Shelley, who recalled reading the Roman-era historian Diodorus Siculus describing an inscription on a statue of Ozymandias (aka Rameses II) boasting about the long-dead king’s greatness.***

Again, I thought about those melted names and archeologists dusting clay tablets that record the name of some forgotten Sumerian or Babylonia warrior or king. Not only have they been forgotten, but what they learned in their rise to greatness, in their entire lives, has been, too. I recalled the famous quote by philosopher George Santayana, who wrote (emphasis added), “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

And again, today with the election of a fascist with neo-Nazi leanings to the White House, we see the results of people forgetting the lessons of the past. Not millennia past, not even a century since WWII. How quickly some people forget in these modern times and in eager ignorance of it condemn themselves to see their democracy demolished and repeat the horrors of the Nazi regime.

For the Wynn continues:

Inside, Chaucer sees the great men of history standing upon pedestals, and, at the centre of it all, great Lady Fame herself, who casually dispenses good and bad reputations to people on a whim, completely regardless of whether their lives were good or bad.

That’s a bit of a poke in the eye of narcissists who believe their fame and reputation will last. Here, fame (and by association, the immortality of memory) is randomly distributed regardless of who those ‘great men’ think they are. The egregiously self-centred egotists Trump and his co-owner Elon Musk come to mind. History often judges us differently from how we hope to be remembered. But, Chaucer adds, fame and reputation are enveloped in an always-spinning web of gossip and rumour that colour our reputation regardless of our own efforts to preserve it:

Meanwhile, outside of the temple, the poet sees a gargantuan house made of something like wickerwork, the Domus Dedaly (sometimes called the House of Rumour), which constantly spins, and is full of entrances and exits, through which gossip and news of all kinds constantly pass, and inside of which thousands of people are crammed, constantly telling stories one to the other which fly straight to Lady Fame…

Chaucer’s dream journey also allows him to comment on the differences between reality and illusion, or more widely on the nature of perception. What is a dream, he asks, and what is a nightmare. Why do we all have different visions? Why do we dream at all? I also thought that he was making the point that fame itself is merely a tenuous, diaphanous dream, not reality. It fades as easily as the inscriptions on the ice in the sunlight.

The poem has a Dante-like feel, especially since Chaucer invokes Virgil as one of the characters and the voyage starts near the river Lethe which flows through Hades (Dante’s Divine Comedy was in Chaucer’s personal library, as were other books, like Virgil’s Aeneid).

As noted in the Riverside Chaucer;

Chaucer exhibits a remarkable range of reading, as he alludes to and adapts Virgil and Ovid, other classical and medieval Latin authors, the Bible, Boethius, and the French love poets…
The House of Fame, above all, is Chaucer’s fullest exploration of the poet’s position and responsibilities, the sources of his knowledge, and the limits of his vision.

There’s a translation of House of Fame into modern English on Poetry in Translation by A.S. Kline. Although I feel my ability to read the original Middle English (ME) is adequate for the task (although I sometimes still consult a glossary to be sure of some words), I downloaded it so I could refer to it if I felt stuck in the ME original.

Middle English, by the way, is a catch-all term used to describe a variety of dialects spoken in England between about 1100 (shortly after the Conquest) to 1500 (shortly after the development of printing). Chaucer’s writing straddles “Central Middle English,” spoken between roughly 1250 and 1400CE and “Late Middle English,” spoken between 1400 and 1500CE by which time Early Modern English was taking over (also called Early New English)

Chaucer spoke and wrote in the London dialect, which by 1430 (when the Chancery Standard of written English for government and official documents emerged) had come to dominate the others: five other main dialects, including  Kentish, Southern, Northern, West Midlands, and East Midlands (see note below).****

The lines I read in the book are, in its original form:

Wherfor, as I seyde, y-wis,
Iupiter considereth this,
And also, beau sir, other thinges;
That is, that thou hast no tydinges
Of Loves folk, if they be glade,
Ne of noght elles that god made;
And noght only fro fer contree
That ther no tyding comth to thee,
But of thy verray neyghebores,
That dwellen almost at thy dores,
Thou herest neither that ne this;
For whan thy labour doon al is,
And hast y-maad thy rekeninges,
In stede of reste and newe thinges,
Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon;
And, also domb as any stoon,
Thou sittest at another boke,
Til fully daswed is thy loke,
And livest thus as an hermyte,
Although thyn abstinence is lyte.*****

You can probably read most of this without a glossary or any previous knowledge of Middle English (sometimes it helps to pronounce unfamiliar words out loud). However, you can read the modern version, below. The poem ends abruptly and was either unfinished or a portion has been lost.

I am still reading the poem, slowly working my way through the ME version with help from various sources. But this experience reminded me again about the reach and the wisdom of Chaucer and has encouraged me to read more of his minor or lesser works in the near future.

Notes:

* From Wikisource:

The House of Fame is a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, it is one of his early works, probably written between 1379 and 1380. The poem is regarded as the first of Chaucer’s Italian-influenced period and there are echoes of the works of Ovid, Virgil’s Aeneid and particularly Dante’s Divine Comedy. The three-part structure and the name-dropping of various personalities suggests to some that the poem was meant as a parody of the Divine Comedy, but it seems rather a weak parody. The work shows a significant advancement in Chaucer’s art from the earlier Book of the Duchess. A reference at the end of the work to a “man of great authority” reporting tidings of love has been interpreted as a reference to the wedding of Richard II and Anne or the betrothal of Philippa of Lancaster and John I of Portugal but such great events are treated so irreverently to make this unlikely. As with several other works by Chaucer the poem is apparently unfinished, although whether the ending was indeed left incomplete, has been lost, or is a deliberate rhetorical device is uncertain.

** On 10 December 1513, Machiavelli wrote:

On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.
And because Dante says it does not produce knowledge when we hear but do not remember, I have noted everything in their conversation which has profited me, and have composed a little work On Princedoms, where I go as deeply as I can into considerations on this subject, debating what a princedom is, of what kinds they are, how they are gained, how they are kept, why they are lost.

*** Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

**** Wikipedia divides it into only Early (1150-1350) and Late Middle English (to 1500CE). A Book of Middle English (J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, Blackwell, 1996) divides the dialects into Northern, East and West Midlands, South West and South East. It also divides the time into Early and Late.

The London dialect came to dominate in part because after the Black Death (1347-49 and again 1361-1362CE), there was considerable migration from the countryside into London. The Black Death killed anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of the population in the first wave, and another 20 percent in the second, which also reduced the number of speakers of other dialects, especially in rural areas. By the mid-14th century, the English parliament did all its business in English.

Scots developed from the regional dialect of ME spoken in Northumbria, Durham, and SE Scotland.

***** In Kline’s modern English version this is:

Wherefore, as I said, it is
That Jupiter takes account of this
And also, good sir, other things:
That is, that you receive no tidings
Of Love’s folk, whether they are glad,
Nor of ought else that God has bade;
And not only that from far country
No tidings ever come to thee,
But of your very own neighbours
That dwell almost at your doors,
You hear neither that nor this;
For when your labours finish,
And you’ve made your reckoning,
Instead of rest and new things,
You go home to your house anon;
And, as dumb as any stone,
You sit down to another book
Till full dazed is your look,
And live thus like a hermit,
Though abstaining never a bit.

In The Portable Chaucer (Penguin, 1977), translator Theodore Morrison uses the word “eremite” (generally used for a religious recluse) instead of hermit in the second last line. He also uses Jove instead of Jupiter. Poetry in Translation calls it “a dream-vision poem that explores celebrity and renown. It examines the ways in which people’s achievements are communicated and remembered or, conversely, how they can be forgotten… This allegorical structure embodies the transient nature of fame.”

Words: 2,290