The Legend of Good Women is a poem in the form of a dream vision by Geoffrey Chaucer during the fourteenth century. The poem is the third longest of Chaucer's works, after The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, and is possibly the first significant work in English to use the iambic pentameter or decasyllabic couplets which he later used throughout The Canterbury Tales. This form of the heroic couplet would become a significant part of English literature possibly inspired by Chaucer. Summary Prologue The prologue describes how Chaucer is reprimanded by the god of love and his queen, Alceste, for his works—such as Troilus and Criseyde—depicting women in a poor light. Criseyde is made to seem inconstant in love in that earlier work, and Alceste demands a poem of Chaucer extolling the virtues of women and their good deeds. The incomplete nature of the poem is suggested by Chaucer's Retraction from The Canterbury Tales which calls the work the xxv. Ladies. Fifteen and nineteen are also numbers used to describe the work. In the prologue several women are mentioned—Esther, Penelope, Marcia Catonis (wife of Cato the younger), Lavinia, Polyxena and Laodamia—whose stories are not recorded and the nineteen ladies in waiting of Alceste mentioned in the prologue might suggest an unfulfilled structure. The command of queen Alceste is said, by John Lydgate in The Fall of Princes, to be a poetic account of an actual request for a poem by Anne of Bohemia who came to England in 1382 to marry Richard II. If true this would make Chaucer an early poet laureate. Joan of Kent, Richard's mother, is also sometimes considered a model for Alceste. The supposed royal command is one suggested reason for the poem's unfinished state as Chaucer got bored with the task and gave up. Several passages hint at Chaucer's dissatisfaction: These lines, late in the poem, could simply be occupatio or paralipsis, the rhetorical device common in Chaucer of bringing up a subject merely to say you will not mention it. Whether the poem's state is due to Chaucer becoming bored with it is uncertain, but it is not now regarded among his best work, despite being popular when first written. One early fan is Chaucer's own character, the Man of Law, who praises Chaucer and the poem which he calls Seintes Legende of Cupide. The work is rather inconsistent in tone, with tragedy