ABSTRACT
Chaucer's House of Fame is strikingly different to his other dream visions. The range of imagery and ideas and the imaginative energy of the poem are such, that at times the text threatens to exceed the boundaries of poetic decorum and convention. Chaucer seems to be genuinely excited by the poem to the extent that the reader is often hard pressed to follow his exploration of such things as conflicting accounts of history, science, the relativism of an individual's knowledge and much else besides. The narrator, having briefly considered various causes of dreams, falls asleep and dreams that he is inside a temple of glass, where he sees depicted various scenes from the story of Dido and Aeneas. He goes outside to discover that the temple is located in a vast desert. After being carried by an eagle up into the heavens, the narrator is taken to visit the palace of Fame, where everything that is said in the world is recorded and disseminated according to that goddesses capricious designs. Following this he is taken to the house of Rumour, where he hears all manner of things spoken before the text breaks off, apparently unfinished, with the arrival of 'A man of gret auctorite' (2158). The poem is eclectic in its structure, imagery and subject matter. Because it is so varied and dream-like in its association of different forms and ideas it is resistant to any all-embracing reading or interpretation, and demands a detailed and varied approach.
