Campion defends his form and subject matter in his
preface to the collection. He describes the ayre as the
musical equivalent of the EPIGRAM—that is, pithy, brief,
and witty—and asserts that both forms achieve “their
chiefe perfection when they are short and well sea-
soned.” He admits that amorous, lighthearted songs,
like his ayres, are often seen as less worthy than such
serious or divine forms as the motet (a religiously
themed unaccompanied part song), but he asserts that
such apparently frivolous material still has its share of
“Art and pleasure.” Indeed, Campion is anxious to
emphasize the effort and level of skill that goes into
creating such brief poems. He argues that in such a
condensed form, the poet has little to hide behind, and
thus an ayre “requires so much the more invention to
make it please.”
The ayres are strophic poems. They all include at
least two STANZAs, and each stanza repeats the meter
and rhythm of the fi rst. This enables the poems to be
set to the same music for each stanza. Campion’s music
often features internal repeats, where the same music is
used for more than one line, and this economy of mate-
rial enhances the songs. His skillful musical arrange-
ments effectively erase any metrical irregularities. The
musical repetition also enables him to meditate on his
CONCEITs and to develop his themes in a unifi ed way.
See also STROPHE.
FURTHER READING
Davis, Walter R. The Works of Thomas Campion. London:
Faber, 1969.
Lindley, David. Thomas Campion. Leiden: Brill, 1986.
Susan L. AndersonBOOK OF THE DUCHESS, THE GEOFFREY
CHAUCER (ca. 1368–1372) The Book of the Duchess
is the fi rst major work by GEOFFREY CHAUCER, who
wrote it sometime during the years 1368–72. Written
in octosyllabic COUPLETs, the 1,335-line poem is a veri-
table mosaic of several genres—including ALLEGORY,
DREAM VISION, ELEGY, and ROMANCE—infused with
themes of love, loss, and consolation. It was most likely
written as an occasional poem (a poem written to com-
memorate an event) commemorating the death of
Blanche, duchess of Lancaster and wife of John of
Gaunt; she perished from the BLACK DEATH on Septem-
ber 12, 1368. Gaunt had been Chaucer’s patron since
the late 1350s, and it is possible that the annuity the
duke issued to Chaucer in 1374 was payment for writ-
ing The Book of the Duchess.
Because it has been so pervasively presumed that
The Book of the Duchess was written as both an elegy to
Blanche and a consolation for Gaunt, most readers
have assumed that its principal characters are allego-
rized fi gures modeled on real-life personages—that is,
the Black Knight represents John of Gaunt, White rep-
resents Blanche of Lancaster, and the unnamed male
Narrator represents Chaucer. Also prominent within
the poem are the intertextual connections between
these three characters of Chaucer’s invention and those
he borrows from other sources—namely Ceys and
Alcyone, the protagonists of a “romaunce” (l. 48),
derived from OVID’s Metamorphoses, which the Narra-
tor reads prior to his dream vision. Many critics have
suggested that rather than elegizing Blanche explicitly
and addressing John of Gaunt directly, Chaucer instead
elected to portray the fi ctional Black Knight eulogizing
White/Blanche within the Narrator’s vision—a scenario
anticipated by the Narrator’s bedtime reading, wherein
Alcyone mourns the death of Seys.
Chaucer refers to The Book of the Duchess in two of
his other major works. In the prologue to LEGEND OF
GOOD WOMEN, Queen Alceste includes “the Deeth of
Blaunche the Duchesse” in a list of the male Narrator’s
writings (l. 418) and in the (in)famous Retraction to
The CANTERBURY TALES, Chaucer’s narrator mentions
“the book of the Duchesse” (l. 1087) in a repentant
catalogue of his own writings. Thus, though none of
the four known manuscripts of the text name Chaucer,
a 15th-century source, JOHN LYDGATE’s Fall of Princes,
attests to Chaucer’s authorship.
Though infl uenced by VIRGIL, OVID, and BOETHIUS,
The Book of the Duchess remains primarily indebted to
Middle French literature. The insomniac Narrator and
the poem’s dream-vision frame parallel Jean Froissart’s
Le Paradys d’Amours (The Paradise of Love, ca. 1369) a
dream vision that in turn was infl uenced by the writ-
ings of Guillaume de Machaut, including his Le Dit de
la fonteinne amoureuse (Story of the amorous fountain),
which also retells the Ovidian Seys and Alcyone story.BOOK OF THE DUCHESS, THE 89