Hypermnestra

At the beginning of this tale, Chaucer engages in a bit of euhemerism, rationally explaining the fifty sons of Danao and the fifty daughters of Egiste as bastards, products of illicit love. (Chaucer reverses the fathers' names, not without precedent.) Danao spawns offspring "As swiche false lovers ofte conne" (2565), while Egiste "was of love as fals as evere hym liste" (2571), so that of his many daughters only one is "gat upon his ryghte wyf" (2573): the youngest, Hypermnestra. This legitimate child is beloved of the gods, "That of the shef she sholde be the corn" (2579). In the Prologue, the Narrator had asserted that his aim in making poetry is to praise neither flower against leaf nor corn against sheaf (F 188–90), so that there is perhaps a reminder here of the earlier locus, a reminder that is reinforced by another line describing how "The flour, the lef" is torn up to make wedding garlands for the young couple (2613). Further on, the natural/botanical imagery continues when Hypermnestra is compared with "the lef of aspe grene" as to quaking, with "an ash" as to pallor (2648–49), and again to "the braunche that Zepherus shaketh" (2681) for trembling. She is, we see, a natural woman—and more evidently good than some of the other heroines. As Mary Shaner points out (109—11), the Heroides scholia do not describe Hypermnestra as "stultus." On the contrary, she is commended for marrying dutifully, for mercy, and for wedded chastity. Moreover, she does not regret her generosity (as do Medea and Ariadne), and neither is she betrayed.

Yet I suggest that even this portrait participates in the general strategy of the series, albeit in somewhat subtler ways. To begin with, the Narrator does take the trouble to point out that the mar-

riage of Linus and Hypermnestra is incestuous (they are first cousins, hence within the officially forbidden degrees of consanguinity):

To Danao and Egistes also
Althogh so be that they were brethren two—
For thilke tyme was spared no lynage—
It lykede hem to make a maryage
Bytwixen Ypermystre and hym Lyno¼ .                                  (2600–2604)

The marriage is thus already compromised, and, in view of medieval and particularly Chaucerian attitudes toward the violation of natural law (see above, "Cleopatra" and "Dido"), so is the bland excuse the Narrator gives here.

If the preceding tale of Phyllis reveals an orthodox Christian subtext, the ideological orientation of Hypermnestra is, on the contrary, destiny and stellar fatalism. "The Wirdes, that we clepen Destine" (2580) determine the heroine's virtues: Venus, Jupiter, and the waning power of Mars decree that she will be beautiful, prudent, and unable to handle a knife (2584—95). In much the same way, the Wife of Bath would account for her particular temperament by referring to her natal stellar influences (609–20). If the effect is different, the methodology is identical—and, to a Christian rigorist, deplorable. These "Oriental" attitudes, which came to the medieval West through Arab translations of Greek and Latin philosophers, would be further exploited by Chaucer in the Man of Law's Tale, where they form a counterpoint to the proper Christian understanding of Providence and the exercise of free will. Here, there is no explicit counterpoint, so that interpretation of this theme is left to the reader—a valorization of interpretive activity quite consistent with what has come before in the Legend. Hypermnestra's father, Egiste, continues the theme when he asserts the influence of "the fatal systren" on his "dom" (2630). If we have taken the point of all that precedes in the Legend, we shall, I believe, be able to see the stellar account of Hypermnestra's virtue, or of Egiste's vice, as having very limited explanatory power indeed.

The young woman does give her own reasons for not following her father's inhumane command, and they are terribly superficial. At no point does she penetrate to the heart of the matter and say, or think, that murder is wrong. Instead, we have protracted tergiversation: she is afraid to incur her father's threat of death; she is a

virgin (the marriage has apparently not been consummated on the wedding night); her hands are not made for a knife (2684–95) or for murder. (One notes parenthetically that this last appears to be an Ovidian formula, for in Heroides , beside Hypermnestra's "quid mihi cum ferro?" [14.65], Canace also says that the knife is not fit for her womanly hand [11.19–20]). Nonetheless, despite its lack of moral dignity, the monologue does rise to the occasion and the heroine manages to do the right thing:

"yit is it bet for me
For to be ded in wifly honeste
Than ben a traytour lyvynge in my shame."                               (2700–2702)

If Hypermnestra's monologue lacks dignity, so does the treatment as a whole. Chaucer's rhetoric, in the second part of the story, includes a number of words that seem to trivialize the narrative in their colloquialism, to be more appropriate in context of village than of court. The heroine's father coyly says that they will have a "biker" (quarrel [2661]) if she refuses his demand; this is also a masterpiece of understatement, since he has threatened to have her killed if she disobeys. He offers her a "costret," or flask ("In the Craven dialect, a costril is the little wooden barrel carried by reapers" [Skeat, 196]). The princess swears by the "devel" (2694); belittles her decision with the rather cynical line "Be as be may, for ernest or for game" (2703); determines to send Linus away "Out at this goter" (2705), and "roggeth" her husband awake (2708).

It has been proposed that the present ending is all that was ever intended; it has also been suggested that the ending has been lost. The very debate shows that the ending must minimally be acknowledged as what Barbara Hermstein Smith has called "weak poetic closure," if indeed it is closure at all. Following Smith's terminology (34, 210, 221), we might at best consider it "closural failure" or "disappointment," and if it fits any of her types, it might be "cheap closure" or, more charitably, open-ended or an anti-closural ending. Yet if closure "creates in the reader the expectation of nothing," that is, nothing more, nothing to follow, then this seems a good reason not to see the end of the Legend as closure, for it seems to end in a colon. On the other hand, that may have been the intention. On the other hand again, Beverly Boyd has suggested that the conditions

of production and consumption of the Chaucerian book may account for the fact that "Chaucer's store of unfinished works is very large for a poet of his reputation" (115). She adduces two possibilities: first, that oral presentation of a work before a live audience would remove pressure to bring the work to a final state; second, that presentation of a portion of a larger work to an individual friend or patron would have the same effect.

As with the House of Fame, the lack of an explicit or at least an obvious conclusion to the Legend does not hamper, in the main, the work of interpretation. Incompleteness, not necessarily at the end, is a condition Chaucerians are accustomed to, for the Canterbury Tales, which has a very powerful ending, nonetheless remains a work in progress. Beside the "missing" tales, the Cook's Tale is unfinished, and the Squire and Narrator (and perhaps Monk) are interrupted in theirs. Troilus also has a strong and wonderfully orchestrated ending, although critics endlessly debate its tone and suitability. Even the beautifully finished Parliament of Fowls defers the conclusion of its narrative to outside the poem, and falls deliberately one line short of its perfect seven hundred. The two prose treatises—the Astrolabe and the Equatorie —are evidently incomplete, or not, at least, completed according to plan. Beginnings seem to be less problematic with Chaucer than endings, whether deliberately or not. But if art imitates life despite its best intentions toward fictionality, then I suppose that is what we might fairly expect. Indeed, through the idea of the book of judgment, in which one's good and bad deeds are recorded against the day of doom, the Middle Ages had a very firm sense of life-as-text, and as uncompleted text. A variant, based on Apocalypse 20: 12, is developed by the London preacher Thomas Wimbledon, in a sermon composed in 1387. Here, a book of individual conscience and a book of Jesus's teachings will be opened:

In the first bok schal be write al that we have do; in the tother book schal be write that we schulde have do. And than shulle dede men be demed of thilke thyngis that beth writen in the bookis¼ . For the dom schal be yove aftir oure werkis. (122–23)

By comparison with the exemplar, most copies will be imperfect: what we should have done will remain always unwritten.