Making Chaucer's Book of the Duchess by Jamie C. Fumo;

Author:Jamie C. Fumo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

5

REREADING THE BOOK (II)

Literary Reception up to the Sixteenth Century

As the previous chapter demonstrated, the early textual transmission of BD reveals a powerful trend of completion and supplementation. Although the poem was not literally ‘continued’ by early editors, as was the unfinished House of Fame, it was liberally contextualized and re-integrated into larger narratives such as Chaucer’s biography and popular discourses of marriage and misogyny. The early literary responses examined in the present chapter, spanning the late fourteenth to the sixteenth century, evoke a complementary pattern; at the same time, they underscore an early familiarity with BD of considerable creative reach, contrasting markedly with the underwhelming representation of the poem in MSS. It is certain from the literary appropriations datable to the earlier part of the fifteenth century that BD was well known to at least some readers before the production of the MS anthologies – the earliest surviving witnesses of the poem – in the middle of the century. The range of early poetic responses outlined here is impressive both in variety and depth; indeed, the first two hundred years of BD’s afterlife emerge as a period of efflorescence without parallel until the resurgence of critical interest in the poem in the twentieth century, when similar levels of richness were discovered in it.

Early poetic appropriators of BD engage its cruxes to varying degrees, but they are all attuned to the ‘openness’ of its textuality, its various prompts and solicitations for rewriting. In the examples given here, BD functions as a point of departure for the development of prequels and sequels; it invites correction, interpolation and reversal; and it contributes to an incipient discourse of vernacular authority. What connects most of these disparate literary re-creations, apart from their common inspiration, is their tendency to respond to the poem that BD was not – be it a ‘traditional’ elegy or a straightforward love-vision. Frequently, these adaptations plug gaps and smooth over inconsistencies, repairing the aporia that creates in BD a sense of both unevenness and profundity. In these ways, early poets think their poems into Chaucer’s, collaborating in the production of their own ‘Chaucerian’ texts: indeed, several of the works under consideration were absorbed into Chaucer’s canon through the early modern period.

While it is impossible in the space available to detail every instance of literary response to BD, rewarding a project as that would be, the following case studies are advanced as representative of the chief literary coordinates in play up to the sixteenth century. For practical reasons, the examples offered here are confined to English-language appropriations; the still inconclusive state of opinion on the priority of BD over certain related French-language dits, discussed earlier in this book, makes non-anglophone patterns of response hazardous to venture. Quite possibly, new paths of research on the multilingual aspects of literary and cultural exchange in the English court (see chapter 2 for an overview) will clarify the issue so that a fuller picture of the earliest literary conversations with BD can one day be drawn.

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