Chapter 22 - Rival Poets: Gower’s Confessio and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women

Summary

The Man of Law's Tale was based on the account of Constance's travels written first by John Gower, and The Wife of Bath's Tale derives from the Tale of Florent in Confessio Amantis. The fact that both of Chaucer's source-texts occur early in Gower's collection even suggests some preliminary access to the Confessio as a work-in-progress in the late 1380s. In addition to sharing manuscripts back and forth, literary rivalry can be detected in Chaucer's attempts at re-writing these tales, some playful competition rather than the quarrel speculated by Thomas Tyrwhitt in the 1770s. In The Man of Law's Prologue, Chaucer encrypts a sly portrait of Gower as the legal professional, who held power of attorney while Chaucer travelled to Italy in 1378, but also a severe critic of his poetry; in The Man of Law's Tale, Gower's alter ego narrates a new and improved version of his own tale of Constance.

This paper explores further the collegial exchanges between the two poets in terms of the Confessio and the Legend of Good Women by proposing that influence, as such, continued to flow in the direction proposed by John Leland around 1540 – ‘de Govero plura in Chaucero dicemus’ – from Gower to Chaucer. My argument requires two radical claims. First, the received chronology of Chaucer's canon needs adjusting in order to position the Legend in the F Prologue as well as the G version later than Gower's collection datable to the early 1390s. And second, Gower (b. 1330?) assumes the position of an older brother asserting influence and generating anxiety for his slightly younger contemporary Chaucer (b. 1340?), something like the competitive relationship better documented between Petrarch and Boccaccio. No weakling in this challenge for making literary history, Chaucer qualifies as one of Harold Bloom's ‘strong poets’ who ‘make that history by misreading one another so as to clear imaginative space for themselves’. Chaucer plays with his adaptations of tragic love-stories in the Legend, while both Legend Prologues take Gower's lucky encounter with Richard II on the royal barge and recast the scene as Chaucer's nightmarish interrogation before the tyrannical God of Love.