ABSTRACT
The poems show the early Geoffrey Chaucer writing conservatively within the courtly love tradition. Thus in poems like the Complaint of Venus, Against Women Unconstant, Merciles Beaute, and To Rosemounde, Chaucer creates individual speakers. Chaucer implies that true love, the law of kynde, should recognize the individual, and not worship idols. The “rebellious lover” convention also influences one of the most delightful of Chaucer’s courtly love lyrics, the triple roundel appropriately entitled, in the single manuscript in which it survives, Merciles Beaute. The Complaint of Venus is a free translation of three ballades written in French by the Savoyard knight, Oton de Granson, to which Chaucer added an original envoy. Chaucer overtly attaches no significance to the poem’s female addressee. Galway acknowledges the necessity of these kinds of changes, but then goes on to say “but where such alternatives were not required the English rendering is a marvel of word for word fidelity,” implying that this is to Chaucer’s credit.
