CHAUCER'S portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Legend of Good Women reflect another side of the Orient: here we find not the rich trading landscape of the Man of Law's Tale, but the locale of secret pleasures and sexual excess. This chapter discusses the legends of these two oriental queens whose claim to sainthood, even in terms of the religion of Cupid, is ambiguous.

Unlike The Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, those long versified romances that he had already written, Chaucer makes the Legend a collection of short narratives on the order of the Canterbury Tales (which he wrote after the Legend). According to the Prologue, the reason for brevity is the many stories the narrator has to tell: “For whoso shal so many a storye telle,/Sey shortly, or he shal to longe dwelle” (F 576–77). The ten stories of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra (eleven, if Alceste is counted) ostensibly offer a defense of the merits of women presented by the poet-narrator, Chaucer, in the fiction of this work, to make amends for his portrait of the unfaithful Criseyde. A playful disclaimer in Book 5 of the Troilus seems to anticipate a collection of lives about “goode wymmen, maydenes and wyves,/ That weren trewe in lovyng al hire lyves” (F 484–85):