Thisbe

Chaucer's second legend is also an Oriental tale, as Ovid reminds us in the opening of his version (Met. 4.55–58), the main source of Chaucer's. The setting is Babylon, specified in both texts as the city whose baked-brick walls were built by Queen Semiramis. The Eastern location is important to the ideological structure of the Metamorphoses , which, we recall, super-patriotically ends with the apotheosis and stellification of Caesar. Although there may well be irony in this ending, nonetheless the ebb and flow of Oriental ideas is very much at stake in the Thisbe portion of the text. The tale occurs in a series narrated by the daughters of Minyas. They, worshippers of Athena, are boycotting the festival of Asian Bacchus, which has taken all the other women away from their proper domestic duties and off into the streets and woods. The Minyades stay indoors and spin, meanwhile telling cautionary tales of Oriental sensuality and excessive passion. Thus the narrators demonstrate the virtuous gender-behavior that their female character will fatally flout when she wanders into the woods to meet her lover. If Ovid has the Minyades transformed into bats because of their failure to acknowledge the power of Bacchus, this is his indirect critique of the repressive Augustan morality the tale itself overtly supports. The metamorphosis does not, in any case, alter the East-West conflict of values.

Babylon can scarcely portend any good to an author steeped, as Chaucer was, in the scriptural-Augustinian tradition. There Babylon is an enemy of the chosen people and predecessor of Rome as archetypal city of man (cf. City of God 18). Irene Samuel's formidably thorough study shows that it is in the patristic tradition too that Semiramis, formerly a much-honored military leader, becomes a prototype of feminine erotic evil: usurping man's prerogative to rule, murdering her husband to do so, committing incest with her son, and, in some texts, inventing trousers as female attire. In the Man of Law's Tale , Chaucer gives us a closer view of such a figure: the Sultan's mother, who so far transgresses the bounds of femininity that she no longer qualifies as a woman. She is "feyned womman ¼ serpent under femynynytee¼ Virago"—and "Semyrame the secounde" (359–63). The polarities of Occident versus Orient and Christian law versus pagan law make up a basic structural principle

in the Man of Law's Tale, and I think we may see it as developing ideas latent in the Legend .^[6]

Although there is no Western pole in the legend of Thisbe, the tale is already sufficiently defined by its context to make its point about the hazards of unbridled eroticism and unnecessary adventure abroad. Where "Cleopatra" makes that point in the arena of international politics, "Thisbe" domesticates it: she neither gives up a kingdom nor crosses the sea, but she disobeys her parents to wander from home at night. So, of course, does Piramus: again there is no victim, no disloyalty, but a double death freely chosen on both sides. The republican and humanist Boccaccio had already interpreted this medieval Romeo-and-Juliet as a warning against parental interference in adolescent love in his De Claris mulieribus:

Wicked Fortune sinned, as perhaps did their wretched parents. Certainly the ardor of the young should be curbed slowly, lest by wishing to oppose them with sudden impediments we drive them to despair and perdition. The passion of desire is without temperance, and it is almost a pestilence and fury in youth. We should tolerate it patiently. (Concerning Famous Women, trans. Guarini, 27)

For the courtier Chaucer, though—who held the lucrative wardship of two young men's marriages and had three offspring of his own—the pathetic Oriental tale maintains its original Ovidian purpose. The outcome affirms, after all, the wisdom of parents who protect their daughters "lest they diden som folye" (723). In Chaucer's hands, humor or obscenity may neutralize pathos but not morality or prudence. If the story—however amusing or sentimental—suggests that adventures far from home rarely turn out well, this is a sentiment with international as well as strictly domestic weight.