ABSTRACT
The creation of individualized characters is more properly the province of narrative literature: the drama or novel or, in medieval times, narrative poetry like the Canterbury Tales. In his lyric poems, however, Geoffrey Chaucer more commonly employed another logical development of that same individualizing tendency: the creation of a narrative context into which the speaker-character could be placed. In Chaucer’s experimental attempts to provide a context for the lyric utterance, none is as curious as this lyrical-narrative hybrid which he experimented with, first, in the Complaint unto Pity, and again later in the Complaint of Mars and Anelida and Arcite. One of Chaucer’s more unusual lyrics is the short poem usually entitled Fortune, or the Balades de Visage sanz Peinture. Though the debate genre was a conventional type of poetry, Chaucer seems to have wanted to use it especially to provide a situational context for the thematic pattern of his lyric.
