Cloacina’s Office: Pope’s <i>Temple of Fame</i> and the Ripples of Chaucerian Obscenity

ABSTRACT This article examines ideas of obscenity in Chaucer by considering his reception and afterlife in eighteenth-century literature. It focuses on Aesop at the Bear-Garden (1715), a scatological satire of Alexander Pope’s Temple of Fame (1715) that sought to humiliate Pope on two fronts: by suggesting that he was indebted not to Chaucer but to the more contemporary Hudibras; and by turning the Temple into a public lavatory. The article argues that attitudes towards Chaucer in eighteenth-century poetry were often motivated by a desire to rescue the poet from a double charge of “rude speech”: on the one hand, linguistic impenetrability, and, on the other, coarse vulgarity. In this context, we might read Aesop at the Bear-Garden as an example of a work that introduces obscenity into Chaucer instead of sanitizing him for more sensitive readers.