Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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This is an excerpt from Geoffrey Chaucer's *The Legend of Good Women* (late 14th century), a frame-narrative poem in the tradition of courtly literature that presents a series of verse tales about women who suffered faithfully for love. The passage covers two legends: Cleopatra, who follows Antony into death by leaping into a pit of serpents after retrieving and enshrining his embalmed body; and Pyramus and Thisbe, who communicate through a crack in a wall, arrange a secret meeting, and each die believing the other already dead. Chaucer draws on Ovid's *Metamorphoses* for Pyramus and Thisbe and on classical history for Cleopatra, retelling both with brisk narrative economy — explicitly skipping ceremony and detail in favor of emotional effect. The distinctive claim running through both legends is that women are paragons of faithful love while men prove unreliable or blundering: Chaucer closes the Cleopatra legend with a sardonic wager that no man will ever match such devotion, and frames Thisbe's death as proof of a fidelity no man deserves. The poem thus operates as a kind of mock-hagiography of wronged and faithful women, written with wry irony toward male constancy rather than straightforward praise of female virtue.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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