the narrator'swhich we are left to sort out. Indeed, the story's "fame" subjects it to this condition. The Latin word itself, fama , is variable in its senses: it can denote rumor, news, and tidings as readily as desire for glory and earned good reputation. And Chaucer develops the theme of ambiguity in every kind of discourse by amalgamating different versions of Fame from Boethius, Virgil, and Ovid.
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The work that most profoundly affected The House of Fame was Dante's Commedia . In the second and third books of Chaucer's comically unnerving vision of our doubt-filled world, there occuralmost run amoka series of richly parodic parallels with Dante's vision of the otherworld. The most memorable of these, based on the eagle in Dante's dream in Purgatorio IX, is the pedantic, garrulous eagle who scoops up the narrator in his claws and carries himthe whole time chatting and lecturing irrepressiblyto the faraway domain of Fame's Temple. The deserted House of Fame may have been a victim of its own overwhelming representations of uncertainty, but there can be no doubt that, in creating its talking eagle, Chaucer discovered a gift for characterization that would be more fully realized before long in Pandarus, Harry Bailly, and Chauntecleer.
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The Parliament of Fowls is also remarkable as a poetic vehicle for a multiplicity of voices in a variety of intellectual, literary, and colloquial registers, from the authoritative discourse of Africanus, both in the account of Cicero's Somnium Scipionis , which is the old book the narrator reads "a certyn thing to lerne" (line 20), and in the narrator's subsequent dream, in which Africanus appears as his guide; to the easy voice of Nature, who gently but firmly instructs her charges on this day of choosing their mates; to the humorous mimetic voicing of those charges themselves, reflecting in its full sweep of species in the kingdom of birds, from royal tercel down to lowliest seed fowl, a counterpart comprising all levels of human society.
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Complementing this harmonious blend of various and sometime discordant voices, a narrative design to be fully orchestrated in the following decade's work on The Canterbury Tales , is a richly interwoven pattern of authors and texts, including Cicero's Somnium Scipionis (and Macrobius's commentary on it), Boethius, Claudian, Dante, Ovid's Fasti , Boccaccio's Teseida , the Roman de la Rose , and most important, Alan of Lille's Deplanctu naturae , on which Chaucer depended primarily for his portrait of Nature. Recent critical views of this pattern of wide-ranging dependencies suggest that it is indicative of authorial
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