The House of Fame

The House of Fame (Hous of Fame in the original spelling) is a Middle English poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, probably written between 1374 and 1385, which places it among his earlier works. It was most likely composed after The Book of the Duchess, though its exact chronological relation to his other early poems is uncertain. Running to over 2,000 lines in three books, it takes the form of a dream vision written in octosyllabic couplets.

The poem opens with reflections on the nature and causes of dreams. The narrator promises to tell his "wonderful" dream in full and invokes the god of sleep so that no one, out of ignorance or spite, will misjudge its meaning. In the first book he finds himself in a glass temple full of fine art and displays of wealth. Recognizing images of Venus, Vulcan and Cupid, he concludes it is a temple to Venus. On a brass tablet he reads the story of the Aeneid, which Chaucer treats at length in Aeneas's betrayal of Dido. He then lists other women of Greek myth abandoned by their lovers, an interest in wronged women that he would develop later in The Legend of Good Women, written in the mid-1380s. Leaving the temple, he finds a featureless plain, prays to Christ to be delivered from illusion, and sees a golden eagle descending toward him.

In the second book the eagle seizes him and carries him aloft. It explains that it serves Jove, who wishes to reward Chaucer's unrequited devotion to Venus and Cupid by taking him to the House of Fame, the goddess who hears everything that happens in the world. To explain how Fame can hear it all, the eagle invokes the doctrine of the 'natural abode', by which every body seeks its proper place: sound is broken air, light and therefore rising, so its natural home lies in the heavens. The eagle illustrates this with the ripples on water. It offers to tell Chaucer about the stars, but Chaucer declines, saying he is too old.

The third book describes their arrival at a house built upon a rock that proves to be ice engraved with the names of famous people; names that have melted into illegibility belonged to those not sheltered by the house's shadow. Inside, Fame has countless tongues, eyes and ears, and partridge wings on her heels, signifying what is spoken, seen and heard, and the speed of its spread. She distributes fame and infamy without always regard to merit, and after each judgment Aeolus sounds one of two trumpets, Clear Laud or Slander. A guide then takes Chaucer to a valley where he sees a vast, rapidly spinning wicker house, the home of rumour and hearsay. He listens to truths and lies there until the crowd falls silent at the arrival of a man of "great authority", and the poem breaks off before his identity is revealed.

The House of Fame rests on columns bearing poets and historians who carry the fame of their stories: Josephus, Statius, Homer and other writers of the Troy material, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan and Claudian. Chaucer adds a note of irony, including a quarrel among the Troy writers in which Homer is accused of inventing fables. The work marks the start of a period more influenced by Italian literature, with echoes of Boccaccio, Dante and Boethius, and its three-part structure has led some scholars to read it as a possible parody of the Divine Comedy. Its advance in craft over The Book of the Duchess is considerable.

The poem is apparently unfinished, though it is unclear whether the ending was lost or left incomplete deliberately. Its greatest significance for the English language is that it contains the earliest known uses of the words 'galaxy' and 'Milky Way'. Its imagery was later borrowed in 1609 by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones for a masque commissioned by Anne of Denmark, consort of James I.