Sublunary Recurrence and Performance in Chaucer's Legend

the chaucer review, vol. 52, no. 3, 2017.Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

The Circle, the Maze, and the Echo: Sublunary Recurrence and Performance in Chaucer’s Legend of Ariadne

sarah harlan-haughey

ABSTRACT: This article argues that Chaucer’s tragic works explore the nightmare of the cyclical, and that an analysis of the Legend of Ariadne as a defining text at the center of Chaucer’s writing career reveals his careful repetition of emotionally and philosophi-cally charged images. The Legend of Ariadne provides a key to understanding Chaucer’s conception of the Legend of Good Women as a series of echoing narratives, bound together by a series of curated repeating motifs. His condensed and crystallized deploy-ment of classic Chaucerian themes such as the circle, the maze, and the echo gives us a sharp sense of Chaucer’s tragic reading of history. To Chaucer, this doomed world is paradoxically always the same in its repetition, and constantly changing: generations die only to be replaced by others who will make the same mistakes.

KEYWORDS: Ariadne, cyclicity, history, Legend of Good Women, performance, tragedy

All perform their tragic play,There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia.

—w. b. yeats, lapis lazuli1

I am grateful to Andrew S. Galloway, S. Melissa Winders, Richard Brucher, Elizabeth Neiman, Joshua Roiland, Gregory Howard, David Raybin, Susanna Fein, and the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions for this study. 1. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran, 2nd edn. (New York, 1997), 300–301 (lines 9–11).

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The Chaucer Review342

The Legend of Ariadne has been a particularly unpopular tale in the generally unpopular anthology of classical legends of “good women.”2 Chaucer, as narrator, seems disgusted with Theseus’s behavior, bored with the story, and so heartsick for Ariadne that he skips over large chunks of the well-known narrative. But Chaucer’s narration of the Ariadne legend is far from a prime example of the tedium and the lack of art that have disappointed some modern critics of the Legend of Good Women.3 A close reading of this leg-end’s tightly-packed visual structure reveals a carefully constructed architec-ture. Three important interconnected themes—the circle, the maze, and the echo—together constitute a poetics of recurrence that can serve as a key to understanding Chaucer’s accomplishment in the Legend of Good Women. In this work, Chaucer explores the idea of history as a closed and doomed cycle. Chaucer makes us feel the nightmare of the cyclical through an interrelated complex of collocated words, spatial ideas, and visual motifs that emphasize the notion of tragic repetition and cyclicity in women’s lives—arguably the greater point of the Legend of Good Women as a collection.4

The repeated images and rhetorical constructions not only add an eerie atmosphere of inevitability to a well-known classical tale but also help us understand Chaucer’s idiosyncratic historical philosophy throughout his poetic corpus. Within the relatively small space of the Legend of Ariadne, Chaucer reveals a system of images that appear elsewhere in his poetic works in a more diffuse way, and he “stages” the action of the poem, marking indi-vidual action and spatial experience in ways that enhance his vision of histori-cal repetition. This aesthetic philosophy appears in many Chaucerian works, but most notably in the Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, and the

2. Few articles have offered an in-depth treatment of the story of Ariadne in Chaucer’s LGW, and book-length studies of this poetic work generally spend more critical energy on the intriguing textual problems of the prologue or the legends with more immediate interpretive interest—those of Dido, Lucretia, or Philomena. But see now the recent special issue On Looking Forward, Looking Back on The Legend of Good Women, guest edited by Betsy McCormick, Leah Schwebel, and Lynn Shutters, Chaucer Review 52 (2017): 1–166. 3. For an early summary of the idea of Chaucer’s boredom with or distaste for LGW, see Robert Worth Frank Jr., “The Legend of the Legend of Good Women,” Chaucer Review 1 (1966): 110–33. See also Nicola F. McDonald, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Ladies at Court and the Female Reader,” Chaucer Review 35 (2000): 22–42, on the narrator being “vociferous in his complete and utter boredom” (22). 4. As L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Beauty and Boredom in The Legend of Good Women,” Exemplaria 22 (2010): 65–83, puts it, “In the legends, monotony functions to show that this kind of story repeats itself in ‘life’ because it is embedded in exchange (including exchanges of faith), and hence in practices that are likely to recur. . . . Not unlike a collection of pulp fiction stories or vam-pire tales, the legends show us what we look like from the standpoint of our enjoyment by showing us, over and over again, the terrifying nature of the ordinary, the everyday, the things we take for granted, the things we do to each other all the time” (78–79; her italics).

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sarah harlan-haughey 343

House of Fame.5 Reading the Legend of Ariadne closely, we discover a poetics of circles, echoes, and mazes, which clarifies Chaucer’s unsettling depiction of the spinning maze of Rumor in the House of Fame—a wheeling labyrinth—as well as his generally disturbing vision of history elsewhere.6 Finally, this sequence of spatial images is distinctly performable, and I hypothesize that it may have been. The structural repetition of the three themes across the Legend of Good Women has a dramatic quality that suggests oral performance of the successive legends, perhaps in the form of festive entertainment or a miniature pageant.

Chaucer’s Recurrent History

Chaucer’s concern with the nightmare of the cyclical, especially in his tragic works, is familiar. In his influential Chaucer and the Subject of History, Lee Patterson argues that “Chaucer is persistently, even painfully, aware of the affili-ations that bind together past and present into a seamless and finally inescapable web.”7 Chaucer practices “an economy of historical recursiveness” that offers little chance of escape for its players. It is true that his characters are often like flies caught in the spiderweb of recurring history, bound by an endlessly repeat-ing set of actions and a known outcome that engulfs their individual agency. As Patterson argues, “both Anelida and Arcite and Troilus and Criseyde are deeply self-concealing texts that call into question the very possibility of historical action per se.”8 Can one have any true agency in a world where the nightmare of history eternally repeats? In the case of Troilus and Criseyde, the “circularity of Theban history . . . stands in a complex and potentially subversive relation to the transcendental circularity of Boethianism (in which being proceeds from and returns to the summum bonum)”9 In Troilus and Criseyde, there may be a god or a higher good, or even a point to all the fighting, but it is hard to see on

5. On some themes shared by these three works, see Steve Ellis, “Chaucer, Dante, and Damnation,” Chaucer Review 22 (1988): 282–94. 6. The motifs of sound, maze, recurrence, and circularity all appear in the odd image of the House of Rumor in HF, which is another nightmarish Chaucerian creation. A further study could further link these motifs, as well as draw in Troilus’s vision of his past from the walls of Troy and his ultimate negation of human life in his ascension to the heavens. For an analysis of the repeated theme of walls in LGW, see Steven F. Kruger, “Passion and Order in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” Chaucer Review 23 (1989): 219–35, at 232. 7. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, 1991), 61. 8. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 25. 9. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 23, and see also: “Thebanness is a fatal doubling of the self that issues in a replication history that preempts a linear or developmental progress. Theban history in its pure form has neither origin nor end but only a single, infinitely repeatable moment of illicit eroticism and fratricidal rivalry” (77).

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the human level. Donald Howard’s useful analysis of the strange impersonality of history in this great tragedy clarifies Chaucer’s perception of time:

The unique historical event is one in a series of endless repetitions. This repetitive quality in human experience invites the author to associate events with the cycle of seasons; Troilus’s experience of three years is equated in the poem’s imagery with a single revolution of the seasons and with the turning of Fortune’s wheel.10

As in the more specific case of Theban history, when he tells romantic stories within historical contexts in the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer uses spa-tial and performative indicators as a means to present this almost nihilistic notion of endless repetition—a repetition that his characters cannot escape, even in death, as dying does not lead one back to God in a pagan world, and their daughters remain to reenact the next installation of the eternal tragedy.

Chaucer’s “good women” enact their abandonment or betrayal in spa-tialized gestures that echo one another—leaving the audience with a sense of inevitability, and in some ways taking away the heroine’s uniqueness and agency.11 L. O. Aranye Fradenburg expresses a common response to the vari-ous women in the Legend when she remarks:

We feel their heaviness somewhat, as bodies in physical space, since they are usually stuck on rocks or imprisoned in caves. So far from seeming “lifesaving,” the legends are “wooden,” like marionettes. The stories of good women are stories of the loss of sentience, vivacity, plasticity. They affect us the way they do because they both concern and formalize the process of distancing, of finding the strange and frightening in the familiar [old tales].12

So how do we make sense of these puppetlike ladies who perform their predestined fates over and over? How do they fit into Chaucer’s vision of time and his understanding of human agency? Within the context of romantic trag-edy, such eternal cyclicity becomes even more disturbing because it is more personal.13

10. Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, 1976), 78. 11. For a convincing argument that LGW was written to and for ladies in the Ricardian court, see McDonald, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” 22. 12. Fradenburg, “Beauty and Boredom,” 74. 13. I argue this somewhat against Laura J. Getty’s view of Chaucer’s bathetic repetitions as a series of historical trifles (“‘Other smale ymaad before’: Chaucer as Historiographer in the Legend of Good Women,” Chaucer Review 42 [2007]: 48–75). Getty convincingly argues that Chaucer intends these histories to emulate the “trifles” of popular historical chronicles.

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Standing as it does at a central moment of Chaucer’s career—after Anelida’s repetitive complaint and the exploration of eternal recurrence in Troilus and Criseyde, but before Custance’s lengthy performance of exile and Griselda’s perpetual and pointless trials in the Canterbury Tales—the Legend of Good Women may be the apex or (perhaps more accurately) the nadir of Chaucer’s nihilistic vision of the cyclicity of romantic trag-edy. Many critics have presented variations on the theme that Chaucer finds courtly “making” discursively imprisoning in the Legend of Good Women.14 I push this insight in a slightly different direction: the Legend of Good Women is the most complete, and thus to some the most unpalatable, of the Chaucerian texts exploring the notion of eternal return. The mak-ing is not what is discursively imprisoning; it is the overarching vision of human history as a series of failures. This is not an uncommon historiciz-ing move in the fourteenth century. Gower makes the same sort of claim in his poetics, for example in his repetitive historical examples of the same moral failings in Confessio Amantis.15 But Chaucer’s textualized personal reaction to such repetition is unique in its affect and has justifiably drawn much attention.

In the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer often protests that he is “sick at heart” relating such depressing stories, and when he says of Tereus “I am wery of hym for to telle” (2258), this seems like more than a codified poetic interjection. Readers need not take Chaucer at his word—that is, by assum-ing that his repeated abbreviatio and occupatio are meant to hurry along a project that bores him—but, rather, we should read for repetition that could elicit a real emotive response—that is, read for something so deeply troubling in its recurrence that it really might make one sick at heart and not simply bored with dull “rehersings” of tragedies long passed. This heart sickness, though sincerely felt, could be ironized in the legends’ performance.16 We see a prime example of recurrence and tragic history in Chaucer’s “rehersing” of Ariadne’s troubling story.

The Circle

The Legend of Ariadne, a retelling of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, with its regular sacrifice of young souls to King Minos, is fundamentally

14. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 59. 15. Chaucer comments on this sort of thing, perhaps, in his reference to the dramas of LGW as “small things”; see Getty, “‘Other smale,’” 48. 16. Thus I am not reading entirely against the arguments of scholars like Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley, 1994), and Florence Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge, U.K., 1998), who hold the legends to be parodic.

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a story of circularity and recurrence: young people are born only to die.17 Although Chaucer’s version states that the tithe occurs only every third year—

And every thridde yeer, withouten doute,They caste lot, and as hit com abouteOn riche, on pore, he moste his sone take,And of his child he moste present makeUnto Minos, to save hym or to spylle

(1932–36)—

he was familiar with versions of the story that described the tithe as yearly.18 And Chaucer certainly emphasizes the idea of an annual sacrifice in the sur-rounding exposition; he uses the phrase “from yer to yer” three times in thirty-two lines. The first two times he uses it to describe the horrible sacrifice exacted from the Athenian people: “Minos hath so driven / Hem of Athenes that they mote hym yiven / From yer to yer hire owene children dere / For to be slayne” (1924–27), and Minos makes “hem of Athenes his thral / From yer to yer, whil that he liven shal” (1940–41).19 The third time it is used, the phrase appears, sig-nificantly, in Chaucer’s foreshadowing censure of Theseus’s betrayal of Ariadne:

Wel maystow wepe, O woful Theseus,That art a kynges sone, and dampned thus.Me thynketh this, that thow were depe yholdeTo whom that savede thee from cares colde!And if now any woman helpe the,Wel oughtestow hire servaunt for to be,And ben hire trewe lovere yer be yere!

(1952–58; my italics)

17. In this version, with the conflation of King Minos of Crete with Minos the judge of Hades, the sacrifice is literally a tithe to Hell, which links it either coincidentally or purposefully to British folklore invoking a similar tithe to Hell on the part of the fairies. See Child Ballad 39 Tam Lin for a classic example of this motif (Francis James Child, Helen Child Sargent, and George Lyman Kittredge, eds., English and Scottish Popular Ballads [Boston, 1904], 66–69 [stanza 24]). 18. Most pertinently, Gower’s in the Confessio Amantis 5.5231–495 (although the two works are independent, it seems possible that Chaucer and Gower could have discussed this or shared notes). See also Guillaume de Machaut’s Jugement dou Roy de Navarre, where the tithe is annual (Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, Vol. 1, ed. Ernest Hœpffner [Paris, 1908], 230 [lines 2707–22]). 19. All quotations from LGW are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Boston, 1987). It is interesting to note that the phrase “yer by yere” appears at an important place in the Prologue, for as Fradenburg points out, the project “is, after all, penance: ‘Thow shalt, while that thou lyvest, yer by yere, / The moste partye of thy tyme spende / In makyng of a glori-ous legende / Of goode wymmen’ (481–84).” This language recalls the length and repetition of penitential arithmetic: “yer by yere” (“Beauty and Boredom,” 75).

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By reiterating the notion of a ritualized and damaging cyclical time and then explicitly connecting it with Theseus’s betrayal of the cyclical expectations of marriage, Chaucer draws our attention to the idea that this short tale is fun-damentally a study in cycles, both broken—in the case of the broken marriage and the destroyed monster who has been devouring yearly sacrifices—and eternal, in the case of the eternally abandoned women and the eternally rotat-ing Wheel of Fortune.20 In fact, circularity and recurrence, as signified most famously by the spinning Wheel of Fortune, is the central theme of this tale, and Chaucer uses a subtle yet powerful set of revolving images to express it.21

The circle recurs in a series of images that cue the audience to think about space and time as inescapable and endlessly repeating in a Borgesian mise-en-abîme.22 The scope and breadth of the poem’s spatial structure is arresting, as it begins with an infernal invocation, as Minos, king of Crete, has been (intentionally?) conflated with Minos, judge of Hades: “Juge infernal, Mynos, of Crete kyng, / Now cometh thy lot, now comestow on the ryng” (1886–87; my italics). We then look to heaven, as the narrator describes the gods’ disap-probation of Theseus’s betrayal of Ariadne—“Of Theseus the grete untrouthe of love; / For which the goddes of the heven above / Ben wrothe, and wreche han take for thy synne” (1890–92)—before finally settling the narrative eye on the image of the soon-to-be-betrayed Scylla, who “stod upon the wal” watch-ing Minos’s siege of her town and, enamored, chooses to let him in. In this choice, Scylla betrays her father, as Ariadne will do in her echo of this story:

on a day befel an aventure,That Nysus doughter [Scylla] stod upon the wal,And of the sege saw the maner al.So happed it that at a scarmishyng,She caste hire herte upon Mynos the kyng,For his beaute and for his chyvalrye,So sore that she wende for to dye.And, shortly of this proces for to pace,

20. Delany notes the repetition of themes in the story of Minos and the Legend of Ariadne (The Naked Text, 209). 21. Here, again, I write pace Kruger, “Passion and Order,” 220; and Lisa Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Ithaca, 1983), who argues that LGW is a hilarious sendup of the “desire to have literature that is simple, unambiguous in its moral force, and part of an endless repetition of the same witless theories” (130). 22. For another thoughtful reading of LGW as a theme with variations, see Janet M. Cowen, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women: Structure and Tone,” Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 416–36, at 421. Cowen also notes the juxtaposition of the high structure on which the sisters talk (the tower) and the low depths from which Theseus is heard (the foreyne) (428).

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She made Mynos wynnen thilke place,So that the cite was al at his wille,To saven whom hym leste or elles spille.But wikkedly he quitte hire kyndenesse,And let hire drenche in sorwe and distresse.

(1907–19)

Looking down from her privileged height above the chaos of the siege, Scylla loses her heart—or, as Chaucer puts it, she casts it down, perhaps in the sense of throwing it away—to the monstrous, blood-thirsty man she sees below. Her fall in love will destroy her.

Around two hundred and eighty-five lines later, the poem concludes in exactly the same spatial sequence, only in reverse order, forming a mirror image of the opening of the poem; Ariadne stands “hye upon a rokke” (2195) in front of the moon, looking down at her traitorous lover, who sails away. Then we turn to the heavenly consolation of her stellification as a crown in the constellation of Taurus.23 Finally, the legend ends with a damnation of Theseus—“the devel quyte hym his while!” (2227)—invoking hell. So the chi-astic structure of the beginning and end of the poem is Hell : Heaven : Woman Standing on High Promontory : Betrayal = Betrayal : Woman Standing on High Promontory : Heaven : Hell. This structure bespeaks a careful mirroring.24

The image of the woman standing on a high wall or rock begins and ends the poem, and it is repeated at the center as well. Internally, this image recurs at another pivotal moment of female decision. While standing outside on the labyrinth’s battlements over the imprisoned Theseus’s dungeon, Ariadne and her sister Phedra “herden al / His [the imprisoned Theseus’s] compleynynge as they stode on the wal / And lokeden upon the bryghte mone” (1970–72); after discussing Theseus’s plight, they decide to help this king’s son. With this repetition, Chaucer recreates the imagery seen at the beginning and end of his legend. He begins with an image of Theseus in a dungeon deep in the bowels of the labyrinth, a powerful evocation of damnation and perdition. He even uses the word “damned” explicitly (“Wel maystow wepe, O woful Theseus, / That art a kynges sone, and dampned thus,” emphasizes Theseus’s moral depravity by placing him in a foreyne or privy [1962]). Chaucer then takes the

23. The moon appears in Ovid’s Heroides as well, but it is mentioned by his distraught Ariadne almost as an afterthought. Many critics have noted that Chaucer significantly simplifies the com-plicated story of Ariadne’s rescue by Bacchus by skipping over to her stellification; see, for example, Cowen, “Structure and Tone,” 428; and Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, 181–85. 24. See Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 151, for an analysis of chiastic structures, circularity, and doubling in Tr.

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audience up to the high wall where the two maidens contemplate succour, and then finally into the heavens with the image of the moon hanging in the sky.

In this central instance of the same visual sequence, the structure is Hellish Depth : Woman on High Promontory : Heaven. The moon—the most power-ful sign of mutability next to the Wheel of Fortune—does not appear in the first instance of this repeating structure of Hell : Woman on High Promontory : Heaven, in the description of Scylla’s relationship with Minos. But Chaucer gives a substitute in that first instance by using the word aventure instead; it too sug-gests change and chance. He uses this term to maintain the “historicity” of the daytime siege narrative while preserving his carefully-wrought parallel struc-ture. His substitution of the abstract concept aventure for the symbolic moon is apt, since both moon and aventure embody notions of mutability and cyclical change that suffuse this story and inform the greater work.25 The moon appears behind Ariadne again when she stands abandoned on the island’s rocks.26

The moon is but one of a series of circular images. The ring appears as a governing shape in Chaucer’s opening invocation of the hellish King Minos when he asks him to “come into the ring” of the narrative. This is a meaningful pun, referring to the ring of the city walls, with the ring, in the sense of a ludic space for wrestling and other entertainments, encompassing both the poem’s action and the narrative’s ring structure. The ring is a space of performance associated equally with games of love and war—two states of being Chaucer often juxtaposes because they cancel each other out.27 The ball of wax and tow (2004) and the clewe of twine (2016) offer contrasting images of circles that can be unwound and made linear as a means to escape, if only temporar-ily, from labyrinthine recurrence.28 Similarly, Ariadne’s transformation into a crown in the sky is another form of escape from the horrifying recurrence embodied by this tale (although an escape into the stasis of history and of completed action).29 Admittedly, this stellification is a bowdlerization of

25. Many critics have noted that aventure in Chaucer’s poetics is deeply associated with Boethian imagery of fortune and cyclicity. A good example is Jill Mann, “Chance and Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale,” in Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), 93–111. 26. This time, the moon cannot be taken for anything other than a symbol of cosmic mutability. If, in the earlier instance, the moon could be interpreted as a sign of women’s fickleness, here such a reading is much more difficult. For a reading of LGW as a body of narrative “built up around a resonant core of redeployed antifeminist commonplaces,” see McDonald, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” 31. 27. See, for example, the temples of Venus and Mars in KnT. 28. For a totally different reading of this passage as sexual humor, see Sheila Delany, “The Logic of Obscenity in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” Florilegium 7 (1985): 189–205, at 196–97. See also Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, 147. 29. See Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, 181.

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Ariadne’s orgy with Bacchus, but Chaucer omits that compromising portion of the classical story for the sake of narrative economy and the more powerful force of his repeated motifs.

The eerily luminous nocturnal scene of the two sisters on the wall is reproduced at the end of the poem with great dramatic impact, as Ariadne stands alone on the high rocks in front of that same changeable moon:

And to the stronde barefot faste she wente,And cryed, “Theseus, myn herte swete!Where be ye, that I may nat with yow mete,And myghte thus with bestes ben yslayn?”The holwe rokkes answerde hire agayn.No man she saw, and yit shyned the mone,And hye upon a rokke she wente sone,And saw his barge saylynge in the se.Cold wex hire herte, and ryght thus seyde she:“Meker than ye fynde I the bestes wilde!”

(2189–98)

Many elements in this scene hauntingly echo previously mentioned images. The man-made structure of the labyrinth is replaced by the wild landscape of the desert island, high walls are replaced by high rocks, and the two sisters in loving conference are contrasted with an abandoned woman’s lonely com-munion with the inhuman echoes from the rocks. And the wild beasts, which may soon tear the abandoned Ariadne limb from limb, may be more humane than their human counterpart—the demonic Theseus, whom Chaucer repeatedly damns to hell for his beastly behavior.30

The Maze

In connection with these image sequences of recurring, inescapable cycles of time stands the image of the labyrinth. As noted above, the labyrinth appears in the central example of the “woman on high” motif, and it is thematically suggested in the circular city that Scylla stands above at the beginning, and

30. But see Kruger: “the facile statements which reiterate the prescribed narrative pattern seem overly simple, plainly inadequate. The last two lines of Ariadne sum up that legend by explicitly calling to mind the Prologue’s demand for ‘trewe’ women and ‘false’ men (F 485–86): ‘. . . thus this false lovere can begyle / His trewe love, the devel quyte hym his while!’ (2226–27). Such a summary can hardly do justice to the complexities of Chaucer’s story” (“Passion and Order,” 222).

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in the wilderness of Naxos where Ariadne weeps at the end of the poem. The labyrinth, in this legend, echoes the moon and the other circular images of changeability explored above; it is the earthbound, sublunary counterpart of the celestial symbols. In her study of the figure of the labyrinth in medi-eval literature, Penelope Doob concludes that “The maze [in the Legend of Ariadne] is mere scenery, even though it might easily have symbolized the intricacies of passionate love, and even though elsewhere Chaucer uses the metaphorical potential of the maze with inventiveness and subtlety.”31 Doob’s reading of labyrinthine motifs in other Chaucerian works is useful, and it could be applied successfully to this poem’s imagery of labyrinthine entrap-ment and recursion. Suzanne Hagedorn begins to build upon the reading of the Minotaur’s labyrinth by pointing out Chaucer’s indebtedness to Ovidian commentary, where “the Labyrinth is given doctrinal interpretation as world, flesh, and/or devil.”32 I augment Hagedorn’s reading by arguing that the laby-rinth at the center of the poem emphasizes the governing ideas of recursion, wheeling circularity, and dead ends.33

The central maze, the terrible Minotaur’s lair in Crete, is not simply an obstruction to escape; it actively sucks in human lives every three years, and thus symbolically stretches its tentacles outwards into the world. This vora-cious maze is echoed by the besieged town at the beginning of the poem and the desert island at its end. The echoes suggest that this mortal life of desire and betrayal is a maze everywhere one looks.34 The similarities among the town, the maze, and the island should strike Chaucer’s audience and fill them with horror: the labyrinth, while fearsome in its own way, seems a preferable landscape to the unknowable wilderness that traps Ariadne as completely as any man-made maze might. Both are circular structures constrained by walls and bound to earth. The island’s walls may be sea, but they are as imprisoning as any building. The maze of this wretched life is inescapable.

31. Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1990), 147. See also Kruger on the labyrinth as an allegory for the passionate disorder of humanity (“Passion and Order,” 232). See, too, Delany on the labyrinth as an “image of (urban) life as a site of confused communication” (The Naked Text, 211). 32. See Suzanne C. Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer (Ann Arbor, 2004), 211. The reading of the labyrinth as flesh is an amusing one because Theseus is first heard from a privy in the bowels of the labyrinth. 33. Hagedorn, Abandoned Women, 163–64. 34. John Lydgate, a devoted student of Chaucer’s poetics, sums up this philosophy succinctly in A Kalendare: “Teche us to lyue wel, o bysshop Seynt Blase, / For is wrecchid lyfe is but as a mase” (The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part I, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS e.s. 107 [London, 1911], 363–77, at 364 [lines 34–35]).

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Thus, in the Legend of Ariadne, Chaucer expands the notion of the labyrinth and its application. A medieval maze was circular, a powerful image of near-random recursion and failure within a perfect, containing circle. It was a figure comparable to a typical medieval town, which is a labyrinth of nonlinear paths and dead ends tidily contained inside a circular wall (like Scylla’s walled city), or even to the world itself, which is also a physical jumble of continents, seas, roads, and cities within a containing sphere (like Naxos, an island world in miniature). One need only see the famous Hereford Map—a jumble of landforms and cities contained within the globe’s perfect circle—for an example of how easy it would have been to infer the similitude. The labyrinth and the circle are not only related figures; they are meant to be understood together as two sides of a phenomenon that explains the entrap-ment of mortal life better than any other.35

The repetition of circles and labyrinths suggests that Chaucer saw the two figures as interconnected. In his creative duplication of other “dead-end,” entrapping spaces throughout the Legend of Good Women, the poet ratchets up a sense of sublunary entrapment. He made similar thematic connections in earlier works. In Troilus and Criseyde, Troilus is able only infrequently to stand outside of the maze of human affairs: in the moment when he stands on the walls of Troy and revisits in memory his tragic love affair; and in his ultimate negation of human life during his laughing ascension to the heavens. These passages are ambivalent in the extreme, and one is left in doubt as to whether Troilus has escaped the human labyrinth to go a better place, or sim-ply given in to a nihilism as complete and world-negating as it is inevitable.

Even more interesting in comparison with the labyrinthine theme of the Legend of Aridane is the House of Rumor appearing at the end of the House of Fame. Patterson notes that the spinning wicker labyrinth is at the same time circular and monstrously inescapable: “The metaphor of labyrinthine inter-weaving does invoke a recursive secular history. The wicker cage in which the eagle deposits Geoffrey is this insubstantial historical world.”36 Indeed, it is such a dead end that the narrative stops because of it. This strange figure, which has drawn so much critical attention, makes more sense when seen in the context of the Legend of Ariadne: Chaucer sees images of wheeling circles and mazes as deeply and tragically related. Indeed, Chaucer explicitly compares that monstrous spinning structure to the “Domus Dedaly, / That Laboryntus cleped ys” (HF, 1920–21)—the very labyrinth we see in the Legend

35. On the effect of the labyrinthine aesthetic, see Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth, 193. 36. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 100.

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of Ariadne. Piero Boitani has argued that in Chaucer’s poetry the labyrinth is “an all-encompassing image—life, the world, art—dominated by confu-sion and error,” and certainly such can be said for the labyrinths in both the Legend of Ariadne and in the House of Fame.37 And it is significant that these two important Chaucerian labyrinths appear in conjunction with images of cyclicity and circling because the labyrinth, which echoes throughout the Chaucerian corpus, mirrors the wheel. Moreover, the very notion of echo—the aural equivalent of the mirror—becomes useful for our understanding of Chaucer’s aesthetic of time in the Legend of Good Women and elsewhere.

The Echo in the Legend of Ariadne and Beyond

The inanimate rocks’ echoing response to Ariadne’s bootless complaints is more than a powerful way to end this poem. It also highlights Chaucer’s intentions as a poet to explore the nightmare of the eternal recurrence of betrayal. Theseus’s abandonment of Ariadne is merely an echo of Minos’s betrayal of Scylla, as well as an inverse echo of the sisters’ previous merci-ful response to Theseus’s complaints.38 Whereas, earlier, Ariadne and Phedra had responded with pity, now the immobile and heartless landscape mocks Ariadne’s complaints. The island scene echoes that other moment of entrap-ment, when Scylla had stood on the wall of her besieged (insular) city and chose to set in motion a fatal chain of events. When Ariadne is abandoned on her own desert island, no decisions remain; the story has reached its last dead end. The poem is thus a study of the dark side of the moon, the downswing of Fortune’s wheel, but beyond that, it is a surreal exploration of the most ter-rifying of notions: that history—and, more frighteningly, personal history—and, most specifically, women’s history—is a nightmare from which one tries in vain to awaken. It is a poetic rereading of the old legend of Ariadne that only a poet like Chaucer, with his strong sense of tragic time, could create. And it is a formal masterpiece, that is, a study in echoes.

All these carefully planned sequences of images point to an overarching notion of a recurrent event that stretches backwards and forwards in time from

37. Piero Boitani, “Chaucer’s Labyrinth: Fourteenth-Century Literature and Language,” Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 197–220, at 210. 38. As Getty notes: “The implicit comparison between Scylla and Ariadne is a form of body-swapping, which reminds the readers that many of the victims are interchangeable. Scylla helps Minos, he rejects her, and the gods take pity on her; Ariadne helps Theseus, he rejects her, and the gods take pity on her” (“‘Other smale,’”64). Scylla’s crime against her father (and Ariadne’s) is elided in favor of this correspondence: Chaucer makes her into another “good woman.” See Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, 181–82.

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the action in the tale. It gives meaning—albeit a nihilistic meaning—to a work that many critics have seen to be a domestic tragedy repeated ad nauseum, either as a joke or as a failed experiment. If we reenvision this Ariadne episode as a key to Chaucer’s philosophical agenda in the Legend of Good Women, and potentially as a key to episodes beyond its scope, we come to understand more deeply Chaucer’s vision of love and betrayal as a series of variations on one desolate theme.39 Ariadne’s entrapment inside an eternal echo helps us read many of the other legends. The heroines in The Legend of Good Women seem trapped in an echo chamber. Their histories are inevitable, as they are so well known, but somehow, their placement in a series that repeats through time makes us feel each tragedy paradoxically both less and more. They call out in an echoing chorus of doomed voices, strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage whilst “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time.”40

In the Legend of Good Women, all perform their tragic play—the same drama is played out by actors from Dido to Cleopatra in similar tableaus in the Legend of Good Women, and ad infinitum outside it. In the Legend of Thisbe, Chaucer’s use of the moonlit night to emphasize the drama of romantic loss and ultimate desolation is in many ways similar to that in the Legend of Ariadne. Although we are introduced to the young lovers while a hopeful sun rises, as their story reaches its climax and comes to its precipitate end, the actors move about the stage in front of a bloated full moon (812, 825), which lends a certain eeriness and sense of inevitability to the scene. Another repeated visual move is the lovers’ kissing of stone. At first the lovers kiss the cold marble of the separating wall. Upon the conclusion, Thisbe kisses her cold lover, and by this gesture the story comes full circle: dead end to dead end.

The Legend of Dido, longer and more complex than most of the other stories, is replete with returning visuals. Chaucer may have included it in his anthology because its subject matter was appropriate to the general theme, but it was not coeval nor was it written with the same effect in mind as the other simpler, more performable legends. But even here the emphasis on “seeming” makes the entire narrative seem hopeless and doomed.41

39. This argument regarding LGW as a series of variations on a theme has been made before, for example, by Cowen, “Structure and Tone,” 421. Other passages that might be examined in this context are Troilus’s standing on the walls of Troy as he revisits in his memory his tragic love affair, and later his nihilistic laugh as he ascends through the heavens after his death. 40. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, ed. Nicholas Brooke (Oxford, 2008), 5.5.19–21. 41. If, indeed, the gestures in this series were performed by masked actors while a reader recited the poetry, the notion of fals semblant brought so assiduously to the fore in Chaucer’s reinterpreta-tion of the Aeneid would be further emphasized by creative conventions of masking. On this, see Laura Kendrick, Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, 1988), 7.

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The Legend of Lucrece and the Legend of Cleopatra both examine the interior and the exterior spaces of conflict. Both heroines suffer in private. At times, the outer world encroaches upon their interior, feminized, domes-tic spaces in violent and catastrophic ways, and possibilities for mimetic performance inside such spatial structures suggest themselves. Beyond the Legend of Good Women, similar tableaus are established in the performances of Griselda, Custance, Anelida, and Emelye. We are meant to understand that, on endless stages in endless fictitious worlds, countless women perform countless gestures of heartbreak and bereavement.42 A particularly strong echo of Ariadne’s psychospatial entrapment in a world of heights, hellish depths, and eternal change is Dorigen’s circular monomania as she stands above the “grisly rokkes blake,” imagines them to be the work of a malevolent Creator, and wishes “alle thise rokkes blake / Were sonken into helle” (FranT, V 859, 891–92). This vision of the Chaucerian corpus may be startlingly bleak, but its profundity enhances our reading of what has been one of the least pal-atable Chaucerian works for modern readers. The desolation of the repeated domestic drama, in the Legend of Good Women in particular, is a problem for audiences, especially when they can only read the printed page. What might happen were we to reevaluate this desolation in terms of its exceptional visu-ality? I will next begin to explore the affective possibilities that open up were the Legend of Ariadne to be read aloud or even performed.

Possibilities for Performance

The idea of eternal performance points to one of the practical ramifica-tions I see proceeding from this study of the careful structure of the Legend of Ariadne. What follows is meant to serve as a provisional exploration of the possibilities for the performance of this and other legends of “good women.” In the case of the Legend of Ariadne, Chaucer’s recurrent move-ment of Hell : Woman on High Promontory : Heaven suggests an atten-tion to a reproducible space that is meaningfully reminiscent of a kind

42. See Julia Boffey, “‘Twenty Thousand More’: Some Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Responses to The Legend of Good Women,” in A. J. Minnis, ed., Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, 2001), 279–97. For other critical readings of repeated images that emphasize the circularity of women’s tragedy, see McDonald, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” 31, where she discusses repeated characterizations of Jason as a bestial devourer and his female prey as “tender creatures”; and Carolyn P. Collette, Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Woodbridge, 2014), who notes recurrent images that link many narratives: “water, the sea, caves, interior spaces and weather—images and themes that appear centrally in the Troilus and in poems like ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ and ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, all stories of women’s exemplary virtue” (8). See also Fradenburg, “Beauty and Boredom,” 68.

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of simple stage direction. If these legends were meant to be performed, it is easy to see how a spatialized tableau could be played out repeatedly in the performance of this poem.43 John M. Ganim has pointed out this theatricality:

The Legend of Good Women impresses one with the radically narrative character of its stories. The spectacular death scenes in these stories may owe something to the tradition of saints’ plays epitomized in the plays of Hroswitha.”44

This possibility seems likely, for the entire Legend is in intertextual conversa-tion with hagiographic traditions. V. A. Kolve, in his analysis of the “narrative image serving as a means of exploration” in the Chaucerian corpus, has also emphasized the orality and visual qualities of the Legend of Good Women in particular, suggesting the possibility that this set of poems was composed for mimetic performance.45 Performance would have highlighted the struc-tural repetition of this poem and called the audience’s attention to Chaucer’s deeper meaning. Moreover, dramatized visual cues would further emphasize, by making literal, the process of putting good women on a pedestal, which we see throughout the Legend of Good Women, and deemphasize the irony and tedium so many have seen in the work. It would become drama, not melodra-ma.46 A performative context would also help to explain Chaucer’s repeated abbreviations of long narrative in the interest of brevity and conciseness—

43. In Legend of Lucrece, the structure of interior and exterior space—deployed to such great dramatic effect here and in Legend of Cleopatra—could, for example, be explored using archi-tectural features of the room at hand. A make-shift tent or even a curtain could serve to repre-sent the interior space of domesticity so brutally besieged by Tarquin. Similarly, in Legend of Cleopatra, the important contrast between sea (masculinized space of male conflict) and land (feminized home for women’s suffering) could be emphasized with an impromptu prop—a length of silk for the shoreline, for example. On the possible performance of these legends, see William A. Quinn, Chaucer’s Rehersynges: The Performability of The Legend of Good Women (Washington, D.C., 1994). 44. John M. Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton, 1990), 32. 45. V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, 1984), 6, who also notes that, in LGW, Chaucer “speaks of a reader who ‘wol beholde / The storye of Tereus, of which I tolde’” (10). Chaucer also mentions that his audience has “herde me rede” (2139) the tale. These are but two intriguing moments where Legend of Ariadne itself suggests that it, and perhaps the entire series, was composed for performance. Quinn’s Chaucer’s Rehersynges offers a thorough argument that LGW—in particular the F version—was intended as a script for perfor-mance. See also Fiona Tolhurst, “Why We Should Teach—and Our Students Perform—The Legend of Good Women,” in Gail Ashton and Louise M. Sylvester, eds., Teaching Chaucer (New York, 2006), 46–64; and Kendrick, Chaucerian Play, 163–74. 46. On Chaucer’s Ovidian poems as unsuccessful melodrama, see Robert Worth Frank Jr., Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 78.

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certainly a great virtue when it comes to effective drama. He chooses density and intensity of visual and aural elements over extended moralizing, in order to give each individual tragedy more impact.

A few clues suggest that some Chaucerian material, and in particular the Legend of Good Women, was intended for dramatic performance. In her influential book, Joyce Coleman notes that “fictive orality” has been the standard approach to Chaucerian hints at oral performance, and that crit-ics tend to see signs of oral performance as an ironic or vestigial invocation of preliterate or oral deliveries.47 Coleman makes a convincing case for tak-ing Chaucer at face value in many of these instances, arguing that reading and hearing were not class-bound, nor were they developmentally separate.48 Reading out loud was a popular activity in the Middle Ages in general, and in the Ricardian court in particular, and a reevaluation of Chaucerian texts that internally signal prelection is in order. The Legend of Ariadne certainly points in this direction.

Perhaps Chaucer creates material for an impromptu script, a playful opportunity for performance.49 He writes into the Legend of Good Women a set of cues which leave open mimetic possibilities for a casual reading, dra-matic party, or planned festival, as the individual legends in this anthology could be appropriate for all such occasions. Indeed, if the original audience of the Legend of Good Women was “women at play” in the court, who delighted in the erotic and performative qualities of public and private pageantry, as argued by Nicola McDonald, then we must imagine some sort of perfor-mance of the legends.50 The ladies’ role as sponsors and consumers of elabo-rate festivities that “centred on a sumptuous banquet which was followed by elaborate, and regularly ludic, entertainments” would make them an ideal audience for the legends.51 In such a context, Chaucer’s repeated emblem-atic visual sequences would make the Legend of Ariadne more emotionally affecting, and perhaps offer a straightforward set of symbolically charged “stage directions” for such a performance. Several famous moments in the Prologue suggest a lively and vibrant community for the multifaceted perfor-mance of love poetry that stretches into the past, as Chaucer claims to have “gleaned” the artistic leavings of other poetic reapers; to the present, with

47. Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, U.K., 1996), 57. 48. Coleman, Public Reading, 87. 49. If not performance, at least performative discussion; see Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, 198. 50. McDonald, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” 28–30. 51. McDonald, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” 28.

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Chaucer’s metanarrative of a surreal love festival; and on into the future, with the promised legends of good women. Of course, there is a certain irony in this participatory and celebratory move within the dour context of Chaucer’s repetitive domestic tragedy. But such irony was not uncommon in such festivals.52

The individual legends might have lent themselves to a miniature pageant—a kind of impromptu skit or tableau, a little more elaborate than a typical parlor game, involving both female and male courtiers as partici-pants and audience, for, as Carl Lindahl says, “in medieval celebrations the featured performers were amateurs who comprised both the cast and the audience.”53 One or more people might have read the legends, while others mounted informal scenes, dancing or holding positions to illustrate the sense of the poetry, while still others interacted with them as an audience. One can imagine how the iconography of these martyrs to love might work itself out in this kind of performance. The likeness of the “Seintes Legende of Cupide” (MLT, II 61) to hagiography has been noted before; mimetic presentation would further underline the similarities, as the performers might have worn or carried the objects that identify them.54 For example, Ariadne’s iconogra-phy consists of her rocks and twine, Cleopatra’s the asp, Lucretia’s the sword, and so on. Arguably, Chaucer wrote these legends with many different kinds of performance in mind. Full-scale pageantry, individual prelection using dramatic pointing, and voiced readings of multiple readers are all possibili-ties, and all might have been explored by various readers and audiences.

As Richard Firth Green points out with some reservations, the Valentine’s and May Day celebrations incorporating a court/parliament of

52. The somber subject matter and disturbing vision of love performed in Legend of Ariadne and LGW are not incompatible with the festive performance structures of the day. Contrary to modern norms of performance, tragedy needed not to be isolated from other aspects of human life, nor was it generally devoid of festival elements. For an insightful perspective on the switch from participatory performance to a binary divide between audience and performers, see Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Wesleyan, 1998). The tragedies of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, the operas of the great Italian composers, and many other seri-ous works of European dramatic tradition were performed before relatively unruly audiences in the mood for a party. There was little sense of incommensurability between a festive occasion and difficult or disturbing subject matter, as Richard Firth Green points out: “even such sober works as Bokenham’s Life of Mary Magdalene seem to have flourished in this [courtly festival] atmosphere— if, at least, we are to believe the author’s account of how he had been moved to write it after a dis-cussion in Lady Bouchier’s chamber on Twelfth Night, 1445, ‘whyl þis ladyis foure sonys ying / Besy were with reuel & with daunsyng’ (5023–24)” (Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages [Toronto, 1980], 59). 53. Carl Lindahl, Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales (Bloomington, 1989), 50. 54. On the likeness of LGW to hagiography, see Kiser, Telling Classical Tales, 101–11.

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love seem to offer an “example of an actual social practice.” He argues against interpreting these performances as giant, overwrought displays, and sug-gests rather that we see them as a sort of “elaborate parlor game,” that is, a domestic party involving only the familia regis present in court at the time. “On such informal foundations,” he argues, “I believe the poets built up the elaborate structure of the cours amoreuses (and possibly, mutatis mutandis, similar manifestations of the ‘game of love’).”55 It is worthwhile to consider the ramifications of reading the Legend of Good Women as just such an “elab-orate parlor game.”56

The famous Chaucerian protestations of weariness that interlard the Legend of Good Women have historically led readers to interpret Chaucer as somehow disgusted and bored by his subject matter, written under pres-sure from a patron.57 But seen in the context of a story cycle intended for performance, Chaucer’s (or the narrator’s) complaints seem more histrionic than anything else. His impatient cutting-short of speeches and set-piece descriptions make sense when we imagine an easily distracted audience; the narrator’s protestations of heartsickness become a welcome comic relief from what might have otherwise become a depressing masquerade. Chaucer as narrator is not really tired or sick at heart; rather, he uses these commentaries as asides to the audience that reinforce the endless recur-rence of these little tragedies. Thinking about the possibility of a dramatic staging of the Legend of Ariadne and the other legends helps us to under-stand Chaucer’s development. His experimentation with small, performable set-pieces in the Legend of Good Women might have put him on a course toward the more explicitly performative framework of the Canterbury pil-grims’ tale-telling.

I have argued that Chaucer’s tragic works delve into the nightmare of the cyclical, and that an analysis of the Legend of Ariadne as an important text at the center of Chaucer’s writing career reveals his careful repetition of emotionally- and philosophically-charged images. The Legend of Ariadne should be seen as a defining text in Chaucer’s oeuvre, one that not only pro-vides a key to understanding Chaucer’s conception of the Legend of Good Women as a series of echoing narratives, bound together by a series of curated

55. Green, Poets and Princepleasers, 120–22. 56. Nicola McDonald also situates LGW within the performative space of the parlor game, in “Games Medieval Women Play,” in Carolyn P. Collette, ed., The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge, U.K., 2006), 176–97. 57. Analyzing Chaucer’s use of abbreviatio and occupatio, Frank argues that Chaucer is simply trying to condense a lot of material into entertaining chunks, and thus must resort to these rhetori-cal devices often in LGW (Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women, 119).

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repeating motifs, but whose condensed and crystallized deployment of classic Chaucerian themes such as the maze and the circle gives us a sharp sense of Chaucer’s tragic reading of history. To Chaucer, this doomed world is paradoxically always the same in its repetition, and constantly chang-ing. Generations die only to be replaced by others who will make the same mistakes. It is a vertiginous, spinning labyrinth of a place, but it is where we all live. We must stay attuned to the echoes and resonances of history if we wish to make sense of it.

University of MaineOrono, Maine

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Sublunary Recurrence and Performance in Chaucer's Legend