himself to love but instead commits himself voraciously
to further reading.
Focusing on the common good as the poem’s core
leads to a similar impasse. While it is clear that Scipio
the Elder advises his grandson to work for “commune
profyt” in the Dream of Scipio itself, Scipio does not
explicitly address this idea when he appears in the nar-
rator’s dream. Furthermore, the opening universal
view in which the poem advances the notion of “com-
mune profyt” as a model for human behavior is under-
mined by the fi ghting amongst and within species
during the debate. This is particularly the case since
the one bird that refers to the “commune spede” (com-
mon good, l. 507) is the cuckoo, who is looked down
upon by the other birds and who has no higher pur-
pose than simply wanting to get the debate over with.
It is also diffi cult to discern how the second part of the
poem (the garden and Venus’s temple) serves the com-
mon good.
More and more, the Parliament’s inconclusiveness
has come to be seen as crucial to unlocking the poem.
The poem offers its audience a variety of choices as it
resists a notion of objective truth. One aspect of this
interpretive openness involves Chaucer’s use of previ-
ous writers. The confl icting worldviews of Macrobius’s
Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, Dante’s Commedia,
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO’s Teseida, Alan of Lille’s De planctu
Naturae, and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s
Roman de la Rose—to pick but the most important
examples—are all woven into the Parliament’s odd tap-
estry. Commentary on these texts prior to Chaucer
(such as the commentaries on Dante’s Commedia or
Boccaccio’s own glosses on his Teseida) already sug-
gests their interpretive complexity; Chaucer puts these
fertile texts in tension with one another and further
complicates matters by reinterpreting each one to suit
his own purposes. The result is a somewhat bizarre
hybrid of styles, poetic registers, and viewpoints.
Chaucer’s refusal to provide clarity for the reader
may serve to put the responsibility upon the reader’s
own judgment. Reading the poem would thereby
become an act of the will. Alternately, Chaucer may be
responding to philosophical debates of his time over
how we know the world, and the Parliament would
then not be centered so much on will as on knowledge,
particularly our inability to acquire determinate mean-
ing. Whether Chaucer was equally concerned with
love or the good of society (or other matters suggested
in recent discussion on the poem, such as homoerotic
desire, or nature and the feminine), it seems clear that
Chaucer was fundamentally meditating on the human
condition of trying to understand a vast world that is
always fi ltered through a variety of authorities.
FURTHER READING
Aers, David. “The Parliament of Fowls: Authority, the
Knower and the Known.” Chaucer Review 16 (1982):
1–17.
Leicester, H. M., Jr. “The Harmony of Chaucer’s Parliament:
A Dissonant Voice.” Chaucer Review 9 (1974): 15–39.
Pinti, Daniel. “Commentary and Comedic Reception: Dante
and the Subject of Reading in The Parliament of Fowls.”
Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New
Chaucer Society 22 (2000): 311–340.
Ruud, Jay. “Realism, Nominalism, and the Inconclusive
Ending of the Parliament of Fowls.” In Geardagum: Essays
on Old and Middle English Language and Literature 23
(2002): 1–28.
John Kerr“PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS
LOVE, THE” CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1599)
Though contemporary allusions to “The Passionate
Shepherd to His Love” suggest that it was composed
during the middle to late 1580s, it was fi rst printed in
1599, six years after CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’s death,
when an untitled and anonymous four-stanza version
of the poem appeared in the poetry anthology The Pas-
sionate Pilgrim. A year later, a six-stanza version appeared
in the poetic anthology England’s Helicon. This anthology
supplied the title “The Passionate Shepherd to His
Love” and identifi ed the author as “Chr. Marlow.” This
longer and textually superior version is normally used
for modern editions of the poem.
The “his” of the title identifi es the shepherd as male.
Some recent critics have noted that this title may have
been an editorial addition when England’s Helicon was
published, and argue that if one looks only at the text
of the poem, there is nothing to indicate whether a
man or woman is speaking, or indeed whether the one
being spoken to is a man or woman. A key point in the“PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE, THE” 309