Of all Geoffrey Chaucer's works, The House of Fame is the most intriguing. It is full of speculation (What is it like to fly? What can you see from up there? Author Prescott on p. 11 calls it a "fantasy"; I'd incline to call it genuine Science Fiction). It features one of Chaucer's most hilariously absurd characters (an eagle who carries Chaucer around, lecturing at length and complaining about Chaucer's weight). It gives a certain amount of insight into Chaucer himself (bookish, duh). And it gives us the sociology of Fame and Rumor in the House of Fame (noisy and arbitrary and chaotic) and the House of Rumor (even more noisy and arbitrary and chaotic). It's deeply sad that the book was never finished.

That being so, anything that makes Thus House of Fame more accessible is always welcome. And this book does that in part -- breaking the poem up into parts and presenting a Middle English text, a modernized text, and a comment on the meaning. And there is an introduction with a life of Chaucer and discussion. This would be a good way for a modern to approach The House of Fame.

And yet, there are problems. For starters, the book translates only a "selection" of The House of Fame. How much? No way to know, because the lines are not numbered, meaning that there is no way to cross-reference the work with a real edition of the House, It isn't even clear whose edition of the House is being printed -- and, yes, it matters; there are places where we aren't entirely sure what Chaucer wrote and the editors print different texts.

And the introduction has a number of defects and weaknesses. There are a lot of errors in the life of Chaucer. Just a handful of examples: p. 22 says that King Edward II "abdicated." Not really; formally he signed an act of abdication, but it was in fact a deposition. The same page refers to a peace with France in 1420 -- but the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 did not end the Hundred Years' War (which ended in 1453) and did not end Edward III's campaigns in France (which ended, more or less, with the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360). Page 23 says that Chaucer and his wife Philippa had four children. I know of only three -- his primary heir, his son Thomas; a daughter who went into a convent; and a much later son, Lewis (for whom he wrote the Treatise on the Astrolabe, but who may well have been illegitimate). The same page says that in 1374 Chaucer "and his family" moved into "a grand house over Aldgate." No, he moved into the gatehouse at Aldgate. There is no reason to think his family went there with him -- there is good reason to think that Philippa was serving in a royal household at the time and that she and Chaucer were living apart. There is dispute over whether the Aldgate gatehouse was a decent home (Paul Strohm thinks it was crowded and uncomfortable and without privacy; most others think it at least private). What is certain is that it was not "grand."

Page 25 tells us that Chaucer left Aldgate in 1386 and moved to Kent. There is every reason to believe that he was trying to escape the government purges of the time. I personally don't think Chaucer was guilty of anything other than naïveté, but there is every reason to think he was getting out while he could still do so.

And on and on it goes. I can understand why Preston wants to make Chaucer seem like a great "people person" (although I would have been inclined to stress instead his omnicompetence: Speaker of four or more languages, author of the first scientific textbook in English, diplomat, polymath, the man who introduced iambic pentameter into English!), but I don't understand why she wants to make his life seem so happy and undisturbed. One doesn't have to be a radical revisionist to know it wasn't.

Most of these are minor flaws. One -- the lack of line numbers in the text -- is crippling. Because of that lack, you cannot use this as a commentary on a true text of The House of Fame. ( )