Eagles Mating with Doves: Troilus and Criseyde, II, 925–931, Inferno v and Purgatorio ix*

Abstract

CHAUCER's use of Dante was subtle and complex. Recent critical positions have called into question Chaucer's reception of Dante's fictional afterlife but there can be no doubt that the poetry of the Commedia had a vitalizing effect on Chaucer's own poetic development. One small example of such complex textual interaction comes with the figure of Criseyde's dream of the eagle at the end of Book II of Troilus and Criseyde. Book II of Troilus and Criseyde opens with Pandarus awakening to the birdsong of the swallow. Her lamentations (described as a ‘sorowful lay’ and ‘waymentynge’) are almost pointed at Pandarus, as if they were a frustrated attempt to tell him of her metamorphosis and its gruesome cause: ‘Til she so neigh hym made hire cheterynge/How Tereus gan forth hire suster take’ (lines 68–9).1 Pandarus gets up and prepares his errand of the day, to tell Criseyde of Troilus’ feelings for her. The ambiguity of Ovid's account of Procne and Philomena in the sixth book of Metamorphoses has led to two literary traditions in which Procne is transformed into either a swallow or a nightingale. Chaucer has interpreted Procne as the swallow and Philomena as the nightingale, and included the tale in the Legend of Good Women (F 2228–2393). This is the tradition of the Roman poets, and it is the tradition Petrarch follows, for example in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 310. Dante, on the other hand, follows a second tradition where Procne is transformed into a nightingale, and Philomena a swallow, a tradition that dates back to Aristotle's Rhetorica (III.3.1406b15–19). Despite these differing traditions, the unmistakable Dantean echo in the ‘sorowful lay’ brings us to Dante's Purgatorio: Ne l’ora che comincia i tristi lai la rondinella presso a la mattina, forse a memoria de’ suo’ primi guai (Purg. ix, 13–15) [‘At the hour near morning when the swallow begins her plaintive songs, in remembrance, perhaps, of her ancient woes’]2