Petrarch and Chaucer on Fame
35
corruption of his texts in the hands of inadequate copyists, which
implicitly betrays his telltale angst about what will become of his
literary production. In his advanced years, Chaucer in the
“Retraction” bitterly regrets having written the
House of Fame
and
other morally lax works, yet many critics read this gesture as a way
to map out the canon of his works.
45
In summary, though we can
never exactly reconstruct Chaucer’s innermost feelings in different
phases of his life, these musings on the nature of fame bespeak that
Chaucer was haunted by this kind of consideration.
These reflections on fame would not have come about if
Chaucer, as some critics have claimed, had been totally immune to
the lure of fame. Like Petrarch, Chaucer successfully depicts the
unpalatable aspects of worldly fame
—
arbitrary, fickle, and short-
lived, to name just a few, but the driving force of this debunking
might originate from a fervent desire for it. To put it another way,
it is the longing for worldly glory that prompts Chaucer to dissect
its nature in the first place, even though it turns out that the
essence of worldly fame is repulsive. More importantly, as
mentioned earlier, in his portrayal of the nine groups of petitioners
suing for the grace of Fame, Chaucer seems to hint that few, if any,
people can be perfectly impervious to the appeal of fame even
though all its undesirable traits have been exposed.
What distinguishes the
House of Fame
from Chaucer’s other
poems and other contemporary English works is its pioneering
reflection on the production and evaluation of literary works.
Regarding this aspect, Howard’s praise of this work is felicitous,
since it may be “the greatest poetical statement” in English about
“the nature of poetic influence and poetic tradition” (1987: 252).
This work meanwhile offers a rare glimpse of the sense of
And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.
Efforts have been made to identify “Adam”among three likely candidates—
Adam Stedeman, Adam Acton, or Adam Pinckhurst, but the question remains
moot (Minnis, Scattergood, & Smith, 1995: 501).
45
See, for example, Sayce (1970: 230-248).
