Heere may men seen that dremes been to drede: The Dream from Chaucer to Milton

As A. C. Hamilton writes in his introduction to the Faerie Queen, Spenser is “our contemporary,” one who “who need not have been recognizable to his first readers as their contemporary, for we recreate his poem within our culture, in our image rather than theirs […] It speaks to us directly in our time” (1). Classic texts are in dialogue with each generation of reader both as a creation of the past, but as mirrors to our contemporary selves. This is the context I want to pull on one the thematic threads of these texts to look at the think about them as texts themselves and in dialogue with current readers by mirroring  timeless themes.  In the remainder of the essay, we will consider the role of dreams and explain what they add to Chaucer’s "The Nun’s Priest’s Tale", Book 1, canto 1 of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Book V of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Specifically, we will see how dreams in all three texts relate to themes of gender and believability, the existence of free will, and how dreams are interpreted.

The conceit of the larger Canterbury Tales is the narrator joins a company of twenty-nine pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. Each of these pilgrims will tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. The reader does not see the full Canterbury Tales. Chaucer had the misfortune of dying before he finished his work, and there is controversy over if the initial plan in the prologue was scaled back as Chaucer was in composition of the work (“Introduction” x). What we do have in existence are several complete tales: from a Knight telling of love and a Miller telling tales of seduction. The structure of the Canterbury tales allows Chaucer as the poet to inhabit many different narrative voices and to show off his virtuosity in terms of genre, writing from romance to epic to mock epic beast fables.

The reader is introduced to the dreamer Chauntecleer and his wife in a prologue where the Knight is asking for a counterpoint to the Monk’s tale. Instead of tragedy, he wants to see a story of someone not brought low, but “As whan a man hath been in povre estaat, / And clymbeth up and wexeth fortunate” (VII.3572-3). This segues into the introduction of a cottage yard, where an old woman lives with her daughters, but that is just the setting. The center of the tale is Chauntecleer. He is described in heroic terms with a fine red comb and a black beak. The reader also meets Pertelote, a very lovely hen as well and they were both in love, even though Chauntecleer has many concubines. The action of the tale can be boiled down simply. One night, Chauntecleer has a bad dream where a beast “bitwixe yellow and reed” (VII.3699) comes upon him and wanted to kill him. Later, when he is happily walking around, he has a “sorweful cas” (VII.4002) and that night a fox comes into the yard. The fox flatters our hero by saying what a good singer he is, and when Chauntecleer goes to sing he is taken up the neck and grabbed by the fox. But that is not the end of our hero. The table turns when the fox is convinced to turn towards his pursuers and brag that Chauntecleer is his. Chauntecleer flees and the narrator tells the reader that the ultimate moral is that these are things that happen when you “truste on flaterye” (VII.4234).

A summary of the plot, however, glosses over the key event in the story. What is at the center of the tale is the dream of Chauntecleer and his conversation with Pertelote about the ultimate meaning of that dream with the beast. D. P Baker calls this “a playful comment on a particular philosophical and theological problem of recurrent interest to Chaucer: namely, the question of whether future events are still undecided ('contingent') or happen by necessity, especially given God's foreknowledge of the future” (236). In the conversation there are two different interpretations of what a dream means. On the side of Chauntecleer, he runs through many stories telling his wife about how one should pay attention to the meanings of the dreams in terms of premonitions. He gathers evidence from the sources and tells stories of travelers who were separated and then one traveler dreamed of his friend warning him and he was able to show his murder. There is another story of other travelers, and dreams of a ship falling apart, and being saved by listening to the dreams. On the other side of the argument is Pertelote. She has her own authorities to cite, but she is not arguing for a Chauntecleer as a seer, but as one of physical causation. She tells her husband that he needs a laxative and get his humors in balance, as Pratt notes, “both Rhazes and Petrus de Abano state that too much "red cholera" causes men to dream of strife” (544).

  What the tale does is present a ambiguity in how to read it. Chauntecleer has his dream and has his argument about why he should trust this dream, but ultimately, lets the argument drop in favor of his lover’s more physical argument in favor of humoral imbalances. The problem is that for the reader, there is no clear right or wrong. The woman is listed to, but at the expense of not being prepared when later the fox is in the cottage yard and chasing after Chauntecleer. This sets her up as either negligent or as a traitor to the man, prefiguring the fall. But the fall is not purely biblical, though foregrounded in the text (VII.4054-5). There is a mirroring in terms of pride. When the fox comes into the yard, he can trick Chauntecleer by his pride as well as Chauntecleer tricking the fox. The ultimate result being that Chauntecleer was right to be wary of the beast in his dream, but also that the dream did not set reality in stone. He was, through his own wiliness, able to change the facts of his premonitions. For the world of the cottage yard, dreams are not destiny, but should be heeded.

Like the Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s The Faerie Queen was an ambitious text that was pared back from its initial designs as it saw its way into print. In the “Letter to Raleigh,” a preface to the first edition, Spence mapped out his plan as “I labour to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelue priaute morall vertues.” (Spenser 715). From this initial ambition, the completed text as it comes down to us is in six books, with two more short cantos added at the end.

There are several dreamers in Spenser’s poem, but here we want to explore the Redcrosse Knight, the personifications of “Holinesse”. The larger arc of his story is the whole of book one, where he is tasked with killing a dragon (I.i.3). This dragon and the task will win him honor from Gloriana, the queen of the book, and the alternate-reality Queen Elizabeth I, to which the work is dedicated.  In the first cantos, we can find Redcrosse wandering with a woman and a dwarf. After a breaking storm, they find they are in a forest and by a cave, in which they find Error, “A monster vile, whom God and man does hate” (I.i.13.7). Once the beast is defeated, they continue until they meet a man who seems to be a hermit who invites them to rest at his home. While there, our heroes fall asleep and the reader finds that the hermit is in fact a sorcerer.  The sorcerer, Archimago, calls spirits to tempt Redcrosse. The first gives him a dream of “lustful play”, the second takes the form of Una, “Her all in white he clad” (VI.i.45.8), to beguile our hero.

Spenser’s first book sets up some allegorical tales for the reader. Redcrosse, as the representation of Holiness, cannot be wholly holy without having faced temptation and turned away from it. It is in the first canto where he battles with Error and her whole brood, where it is noted her “vomit full of books and papers was,” (I.i.20), noted in the gloss as both catholic and pagan tracts as well as the books of the sorcerer Archimago later in the canto. By defeating this error and going on the way to meet Archimago himself in the guise of the hermit who is alone biding his beads like the rosary, the reader sees the dichotomy of the Roman Catholic church and that of the Church of England headed by the Queen, the font herself of Holiness.

Archimago’s attempt to beguile and tempt Redcrosse are a second potential way to pull the Holy Knight away from his quest. Like the dream of Chauntecleer, it hinges on interpretation. If Redcrosse believes either his dream, or his vision upon waking are real, then he has been removed from his quest of Holiness and of killing the dragon. There is an interesting turn in that he dismisses the first instance of waking up next to Una after his dream but falls for the false image and runs off. Redcrosse was able to trust in his faith and ignore the dream but was unable to deduce the truth behind the evidence of his eyes, as he did when not seeing through the hermit to begin with in this section of the poem. The episode at the hermitage is also one that brings into questions of omniscience and free will for the characters, as Broaddus notes, “the action in the episode at Archimago’s hermitage says as much about how God allows Satan to tempt and entrap one of his elect as preparation for the time when he will extend the inward calling as it does about Redcrosse’s culpability” (582). Archimago as an agent of evil can separate Redcrosse from Una though his machinations. The challenge to the faith is a question of Theodicy as this evil exists in a world where Holiness should be attainable, but it is only through tribulation that it can be reached, a holiness that needs to be earned through actions and not automatically conferred upon the characters.

The last of our dreamers comes from Paradise Lost. In this poem, John Milton takes a familiar story in the western canon even today and dramatizes it. He takes the first couple pages of Genesis and makes it more real, by doing what the author of Genesis fails to do – he takes Adam and Even and makes them human. Milton also makes Satan human in a way that makes him a more interesting and complex character than that of the absolutely flip side of the all good creator God presented in the bible.  The poem opens after the war in heaven, Satan and his allies are trying to figure out what to do next. Instead of fighting again, they take another tack to trick man. Entering the garden of man, Satan tempts Eve to defy the Lord’s one commandment, to not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Adam then follows Eve in disobedience, and their innocence is lost and both tempter and tempted are punished, Adam and Eve expelled from paradise.

What is interesting structurally about the poem is that it is bookended by two falls. The first fall is the fall of Lucifer and the third of the heavenly host that followed Lucifer in the poem in his desire to no longer serve the God. The fall at the end being the second disobedience where Adam and Eve, tempted by the first sinner, become aware of their humanity and must venture out into the postlapsarian world. Satan’s fall prefigures the fall of our first parents and leads to it directly, as Satan is the first sinner and the first tempter.  David Mikics brings to attention Stanley Fish’s insistence "the fall is not a moment in the poem, that it has, instead, always-already "occurred," as a frame for our every interpretive move. But Milton's point is precisely to dramatize the fall, to act as if it were not always-already there” (33). What this structure does with the familiar narrative is to create a dramatic irony for the reader. We already know about the fact of the fall, but how it comes to be is a surprise in the more developed world of Paradise Lost as compared to its biblical sources.

How it comes to be starts in a dream. Satan, in the garden in book IV, transforms himself into a toad to whisper in Eve’s ear. The dream, as she relates it to Adam, being one where she finds herself alone and follows a voice to the tree of knowledge. There she finds and angel who eats from the tree and eats the fruit takes Even on a flight above the earth with him (V.31-93).  Eve’s dream is a prefiguration of the ultimate fall and brings into question what it means to know good and evil in a world without sin as of yet. Here the plot again hinges upon the interpretation of what that dream means, as Adam comforts Eve with the knowledge that humans are a creature capable of reason. Milton shows that there is a knowledge of good and evil: “Evil into the mind of god or man / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave” (V.117-8). Here Adam is dismissive of Eve’s dream by allowing a knowledge of evil to be possible. It is not through the mind that the fall happens but only in the act of eating the fruit when the fall truly comes. Like Redcrosse, Adam and Eve have been tasked in the poem to be people, but also symbols. Adam and Eve are the first sinners, but there is a problem of how you know sin, and what is wrong and understand what consequences are without having a sense of the dichotomy between right and wrong. Redcrosse had to be challenged in his faith as Adam and Eve must be challenged in their obedience, but it is more a gradation. As Howison notes, “When Milton's God forbids the tree, it is clear that he

does not, as Satan assumes, also forbid knowledge, for knowledge is in fact provided - in other ways - to the pre-lapsarian Adam and Eve” (530-1). What it means to have knowledge of good and evil is to make the sinner more culpable in a way because then they do understand just what it means to be evil, even if “what in sleep thou didst abhor to dream, / Waking thou never wilt consent to do' (v, 120- 1). Eve’s dream can be read either as a prophecy or a warning against falling into temptation, as well as the temptation itself since the author of the dream was Satan himself. Were this read as a warning by Eve or interpreted as such by Adam, perhaps our ancestors could have avoided the fall. Unfortunately for them, the reader carries with them the knowledge of the fall. Had they not fallen, the poem would never have been written. Man, as Adam said, has reason, but he also has free will, the best and the worst of our gifts from our creator.

The England of any time before the nineteenth century can be other place.  As context is lacking which can make act of reading these texts isolated to the text themselves and not as part of a conversation with the author and history and the intertextual reading of the poems in dialogue with their sources and inspirations have a missing link to a more modern reader. The themes move you beyond that surface level of plot and to read into the text, as those barriers fall away. What we need to do to is pull these threads to realize what really ties these works and their authors together is that they are classic in the canon, for better or worse. They continue to be passed down not because they are exemplars of the craft in their time. Instead, they tell stories that hit on universal themes. And they tell these stories in the English tongue, our common tongue.

Works Cited

Baker, D P. A Bradwardinian Benediction: The Ending of the Nun's Priest's Tale Revisited. Medium aevum 82.2 2013: 236. Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. 21 Jan 2019.

Broaddus, James W. "Spenser's Redcrosse Knight and the Order of Salvation." Studies in Philology, vol. 108, no. 4, 2011, pp. 572-604. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.roosevelt.edu:2048/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.roosevelt.edu:8443/docview/906491755?accountid=28518, doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.roosevelt.edu:2048/10.1353/sip.2011.0024.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, and A. C. Cawley. Canterbury Tales. Knopf, 1992.

Hamilton, A. C. “General Introduction”. The Faerie Queene. Longman, 2001.

Howison, Patricia M. "Memory and Will: Selective Amnesia in "Paradise Lost"." University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 4, 1987, pp. 523.

Mikics, David. "Miltonic Marriage and the Challenge to History in Paradise Lost: Document View." Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Austin, TX), vol. 46, no. 1, 2004, pp. 20.

Milton, John, and Alastair Fowler. Paradise Lost. Longman, 1998.

Pearsall, D. “Introduction”. Canterbury Tales. Knopf, 1992.

Pratt, Robert A. “Some Latin Sources of the Nonnes Preest on Dreams.” Speculum, vol. 52, no. 3, 1977, pp. 538–570. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2854898.

Spenser, Edmund, et al. The Faerie Queene. Longman, 2001.