Chaucer’s Early Poem “Book of the Duchess”: Features of Topics

Abstract

The article discusses the meaning of the poem The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer, which is considered as a multi-layered structure. Traditionally popular topics in Chaucerian studies related to this work are those that involve discussion of questions about the validity of the publishers’ choice of one of the surviving titles for the poem, about the correlation of the images of the main characters, including the Dreamer, in the plot and narrative, about the motivation for the two-part type of composition (The Proemium and The Dream) and the function of using in the plot of the retelling from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (the story of Ceyx and Alcyone), and finally, about the connection of this retelling with the “Boethian” poems of Guillaume de Machaut. The author of the article consistently touches on the essence of the listed issues, in order to finally present his own concept of the form and meaning of Chaucer’s early poem. In particular, the primacy of the image of the lady lost by the knight is questioned. The author of the article proposes to consider the structure of the work as a voluminous, multi-layered object, under the outer layer of which (the praising of the queen stolen by Fortune, whose prototype was Blanche the Duchess of Lancaster) there is a layer with a focus on the complaining knight (and the implicit function inherent in the elements of this layer of praising this knight for his courtliness, education, and qualities of a lover), which, in turn, hides the third layer, the semantic core of which is in the theme of Chaucer’s own competition with Guillaume de Machaut and Ovid in the realm of poetic fantasies.

Keywords

• geoffrey chaucer
• topics
• the book of the duchess
• la fonteinne amoreuse
• scachs d’amor
• chivalric romance
• dream motif
• genre of complaint
• chess metaphor
• boethian consolation