(Note that the name ‘Canace’ is used by Gower so as to rhyme with ‘place.’)
In spite of the character of the subject, it must be allowed that Gower tells the story in a very touching manner, and he shows good taste in omitting some of Ovid’s details, as for example those in Ep. 39-44. The appeal of Canace to her father as given by Gower is original, and so for the most part is the letter to her brother and the picturesque and pathetic scene of her death. On the whole this must be regarded as a case in which our author has greatly improved upon his authority. Lydgate obviously has Gower’s story before him when he introduces the tale (quite needlessly) into his Fall of Princes. It may be noted that in Ovid also the catastrophe is given as a consequence of ungoverned anger:
‘Imperat, heu! ventis, tumidae non imperat irae.’
172. lawe positif: see note on Prol. 247. Gower’s view is that there is nothing naturally immoral about an incestuous marriage, but that it is made wrong by the ‘lex positiva’ of the Church. This position he makes clear at the beginning of the eighth book, by showing that in the first ages of the world such marriages must have been sanctioned by divine authority, and that the idea of kinship as a bar to marriage had grown up gradually, cousins being allowed to marry among the Jews, though brother and sister might not, and that finally the Church had ordered,
‘That non schal wedden of his ken
Ne the seconde ne the thridde.’ viii. 147 f.
If attacked by Chaucer with regard to the subject of this story, he would no doubt defend himself by arguing that the vice with which it dealt was not against nature, and that the erring brother and sister were in truth far more deserving of sympathy than the father who took such cruel vengeance. Notwithstanding his general strictness in matters of morality, Gower was something of a fatalist, cp. the recurring phrases of 1222, 1348, 1677, iv. 1524, &c., and he repeatedly emphasizes the irresistible character of the impulses of nature in love; cp. i. 17 ff., 1051 ff., 2621, vi. 1261 ff., and here l. 161 (margin), ‘intollerabilem iuuentutis concupiscenciam.’
219. ‘the child which was,’ cp. i. 10.
253 f. Ovid, Her. Ep. xi. 96,
‘Et iubet ex merito scire quid iste velit.’