The Legend of Good Women: (Annotated Edition)

Much of this poem is devoted to the first use of the heroic couple by Chaucer to retell in lyrical form the tragic love stories of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis and Hypermnestra. The primary authors of the primary sources of these stories from which Chaucer makes his own adaptations are Ovid and Boccacio with some pinching from Plutarch and Guido delle Colonne as well. Many of these love stories end with the suicide of the female resulting either from a broken heart at losing their true love or a broken heart at being seduced and abandoned. The overwhelming critical consensus is that taken either individually or collectively, the non-original adaptations of existing tales of tragic love are inferior to the Prologue which sets the stage for why he has chosen to revisit those timeless stories of myth and history. That Prologue begins by introducing a topic that at the time was a poetic debate of monumental proportions: does one prefer the leaf or the flower? Although professing to excuse himself from involvement this highly contentious argument, ultimately, he comes down fairly obviously within the camp of the cult of the daisy; the daisy being a standard thematic symbol of love poetry. That encampment sets the stage for the meat of the Prologue which in turns provides the narrative thrust for the tragic love affairs to follow.