Chaucer et la danse de Vénus, ou les délices de l’adultère

In the last stanzas of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, the goddess of love mourns the lover, now dead, who rejected her, and curses all future lovers. Thus love, the very feeling she is supposed to defend, is doomed to failure. But Shakespeare is not the first English poet to create the figure of a potentially malevolent divinity beyond that of the classical protectress of love. Two centuries earlier, in his narrative poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer had fashioned the literary figure of a double-sided Venus: an ironical character, whose dance among the lovers she ostensibly protects, could adumbrate either the pleasures of mutual love or the qualms of cuckolded husbands. This paper intends to explore the proleptic aspects suggested by the poetic motif of the multifaceted dance of Venus