Geoffrey Chaucer – An Overview of the Poet and His Age
The Normans brought with them the French language and culture. The two centuries after the Conquest were a period of consolidation, as the two languages struggled to integrate: bilingualism was widespread, with French being widely read and written in England from the twelfth century to the late fourteenth century. It was, however, only after 1204, when King John’s losses of French lands led the aristocracy to opt for England or France, that the Norman conquerors themselves began to develop a fuller English identity and a desire to use the English language. Subsequently, more and more French words entered the English language.
The idea of an
author comes into English literature significantly with Layamon, in the early thirteenth century. He wrote Brut,
the first national epic in English, taking material from many sources and
recounting tales of the Dark Ages, the two centuries between the departure of
the Romans at the beginning of the fifth century and the first traces of the
culture of the Britons. He takes the story up to the arrival of Saint
Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, in 597, telling the story of
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table – which will feature time and
again in English literature as a mixture of history, legend, myth and magic.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, 1338−1400.
Chaucer (the name is French and seems to have meant originally ‘shoemaker’) came into the world
probably in 1338, the first important author who was born and lived in London,
which with him becomes the centre of English literature.
Chaucer was a
professional courtier, a kind of civil servant. His patron was Duke John of Gaunt. His writing was a sideline
rather than a vocation: the full-time English writer was still a couple of
centuries in the future. Geoffrey Chaucer used a wide range of cultural
references from throughout Europe in his writing, but he wrote almost
exclusively in English.
Chaucer was born
into a family of wine traders; he was thus from the class of the new wealthy
city gentleman. His work took him to Kent (which he represented in Parliament
from 1386), to France, and twice to Italy, where he made the acquaintance of the works of writers such as Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio.
Chaucer's poetry
falls into three rather clearly
marked periods. First is that of
French influence, when, though writing in English, he drew inspiration from the
rich French poetry of the period. Chaucer's second period, that of Italian influence, dates from his first
visit to Italy in 1372−3, where at Padua he may perhaps have met the fluent
Italian poet Petrarch, and where at any rate the revelation of Italian life and
literature must have aroused his intense enthusiasm. From this time, and
especially after his other visit to Italy, five years later, he made much
direct use of the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio and to a less degree of those
of their greater predecessor, Dante, whose severe spirit was too unlike Chaucer's
for his thorough appreciation. The longest and finest of Chaucer's poems of
this period, 'Troilus and Criseyde' is based on a work of Boccaccio; here
Chaucer details with compelling power the sentiment and tragedy of love, and
the psychology of the heroine who had become for the Middle Ages a central
figure in the tale of Troy. Chaucer's third
period, covering his last fifteen years, is called his English period,
because now at last his genius, mature and self−sufficient, worked in essential
independence. First in time among his poems of these years stands 'The Legend
of Good Women,' a series of romantic biographies of famous ladies of classical
legend and history, whom it pleases Chaucer to designate as martyrs of love;
but more important than the stories themselves is the Prolog, where he chats
with delightful frankness about his own ideas and tastes.
Chaucer’s first work, The
Book of the Duchess, is a dream-poem on the death in 1368 of Blanche,
Duchess of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt (third son of King Edward III).
It is a poem of consolation, modelled
on French examples.
The House of Fame
(c.1374–85) is another dream-poem, this time influenced by the Italian of
Dante. It is the first time that Dante’s epic of a journey to Paradise,
Purgatory, and Hell – The Divine Comedy (1310–20) – is echoed
in English. Here Chaucer becomes a participant in his own writing. He is
the ingenuous poet who visits the Latin
poet Ovid’s ‘house of fame’ to learn about love. He brings together aspects
of love which will become the frequent subject matter of poets throughout the
ages. Cupid and Venus, passion and desire, innocence and knowledge, are all
invoked, using the new verse form of the rhyme-royal
stanza. (The name derives from its later use by Scottish King James I in
his Kingis
Quair, c.1424.)
The subject of
love is taken up again in Chaucer’s two greatest poems before The Canterbury Tales: Troilus
and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women. The first
takes the Italian writer Boccaccio as
its source. It brings together the classical Trojan war story, the Italian
poetic version of that story, and the sixth-century philosophical work of
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy. Like Layamon, Chaucer consciously uses
other writers’ books, and deliberately gives himself the role of intermediary,
relating, revisiting and refining old stories.
If Chaucer had
never gone on to write The Canterbury
Tales, Troilus and Criseyde would
remain as one of the outstanding poems in European literature of the mediaeval
period. It has even been called ‘the first modern novel’.
All Chaucer’s
earlier writing can be seen to lead to his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. He
probably began writing it around 1387 and the work was uncompleted at his death
in 1400.
Originally, 120
tales were planned, with each of thirty pilgrims from Southwark to Canterbury telling two tales on the way there and
two on the way back. Rather less than a quarter of the project was realised,
but the whole range of genres, styles, and subjects which history and
tradition, England and Europe offered Chaucer were exploited in these tales.
Why Canterbury? Why Southwark? Why, indeed, April, in the famous opening lines
of the prologue?
Canterbury and Southwark bring together the religious
and the secular. Canterbury Cathedral was the site
of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas à
Becket in 1170, during the reign of Henry II. As such, it became a shrine,
the object of pilgrimage in a British sense, reflecting the duty of pilgrimage to
Jerusalem which was the inspiration for the Crusades in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries.
The starting point of the journey, the Tabard Inn at
Southwark, represents the city, the new focal
institution in society. The inn’s role as meeting place and hostelry affirms
the importance of drinking and conviviality in this society.
In Southwark, at The Tabard, as I lay
Ready to go on pilgrimage and start
For Canterbury, most devout at heart,
At night there came into that hostelry
Some nine and twenty in a company
Of sundry folk happening then to fall
In fellowship, and they were pilgrims all
That towards Canterbury meant to ride.
(The General Prologue – in modern English)
The knight, the
miller, the wife of Bath, the prioress, the cleric, and others are all
identified by their occupation or marital status, but the narrator’s
descriptions of them as individuals – and their tales and the telling of them –
not only bring out individual differences and characteristics, but invite the
reader to recognise and identify the pilgrims as stereotypical characters.
Chaucer himself
(or his narratorial persona) prefers not to take sides and does not overtly
judge the characters he presents, but he allows the reader a new degree of
interpretative freedom, based on the recognition of an ironic gap between how
the characters see themselves and how others see them. This is new to English
literature.
Why April? we asked. April
is the spring month when the showers bring new fertility to the earth, when
there is a reawakening, a rebirth, and the rigours of winter are overcome. This
is, together with the Christian pilgrimage, an almost pagan element of ritual
spiritual renewal, which finds echoes throughout literature from the Dark Ages
as far as the ‘wastelands’ of twentieth-century writing. A land, a kingdom,
awaits rebirth, and then gives thanks for that rebirth, for the continuity of
life that it inspires.
So there is a
great deal going on in the seemingly simple framework of The Canterbury Tales. It gives a wide-ranging view of the late
fourteenth-century world and its people. The specific people and places
described become emblems of their period and the text becomes an image of its time.
Chaucer’s irony permits the reader to see
the knight, ‘a very perfect gentle
knight’, not as the true model of courtly perfection (as these words suggest)
but as a mercenary soldier who will fight for anyone who pays him.
A similar gentle
irony may surround the nun, a prioress,
Madame Eglantyne. She is a sensual woman, one who enjoys the pleasures of
the senses. Hanging from the bracelet around her wrist, there is not a cross
(as the reader might expect) but a ‘brooch’ with the motto in Latin, ‘Love
conquers all’. Again critics have shown that this is ambiguous, to say the
least. Love of Christ and sensual love are brought together in one very
vivacious female character. Her tale is a fairly traditional, uncritical story
of murder and religion, which is surprisingly open in its conclusions.
The Miller’s Tale is an
old-fashioned fable, a story of deception in love, in almost complete contrast
to The Knight’s Tale, and full of earthy humour.
The Wife of Bath was based
on a favorite joke of the Middle Ages, the domineering wife. The wife of Bath –
Dame Alice - gives a staunch defence of having had five husbands, and her tale,
set at the time of King Arthur, opens up the question of what women really
‘most desire’ – again a challenge to courtly values.
The Clerk of Oxford, a
student, stepped forward next. He was the opposite of Alice. He, like a priest,
was a man focused on moral virtue. Dame Alice stood for everything that he
despised. He has not forgotten that, at one point, Dame Alice said that no clerk
could speak well of women. This provoked the Clerk to tell the story of Griselda, the most patient wife who ever
lived. [Griselda, more than any other woman in literature at the time,
appealed to male authors. In the fourteenth century, Boccaccio created her
character in The Decameron. The Clerk
of Oxford in The Canterbury Tales
used allegory, making Griselda the personification of patience. Petrarch wrote
the same story in Latin, while a French writer named Menatier also wrote about
the patient Griselda as the kind of woman every man wanted].
It was the Franklin, however, who spoke about
true love, with neither spouse competing for mastery.
The friar is described not
as a holy figure, but as ‘wanton and merry’. He tells a teasing tale about an
extortionate religious figure, a summoner, who is carried off to Hell by the
devil. The Friar is hence portrayed as corrupt and hypocritical. The clergy on
the whole were supposed to be closer to God, but often the contrary was true.
Priests were underpaid, so they were quick to sell their services. Offerings
were expected for every service they performed, even for Communion. They also
took bribes.
The Pardoner was painted as
the most evil of the pilgrims because he used the church and sacred objects for
personal profit.
The summoner then answers
this with a comic story of a greedy friar, again using low humour to mock
religious attitudes.
This gentle mocking of heroic courtly values
reveals that Chaucer’s intention is more than just to describe the world in
which he lived. Although himself conservative, he examines, and wants the
reader to see, the changes that society is undergoing. There is a sense of
shifting emphasis as older values are questioned and new values affirmed.
Throughout the Tales there is also a joyful sense of humour, of enjoyment of
sensual pleasures, and of popular, earthy fun. Serious and comic intentions go
hand in hand, and give a new vision of a fast-developing and richly textured
world. Above all, individual self-interest is more important than social,
shared interests. Many of the characters are seen to be set in their ways. They
are old-fashioned and unwilling to change. But, again, Chaucer does not judge –
it is the reader who must enjoy, evaluate, and decide.
The host, Harry Bailey,
is in charge of this early package tour, and it is he who keeps harmony among
the diverse characters, classes and professions, and who, incidentally, underlines
the need for drink to keep the group from dissension.
It is from
Chaucer that later writers began to trace the history of English poetry,
beginning with George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie,
published in 1589.
The East Midland
Dialect: The range and variety of Chaucer’s English did much to establish
English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation
of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands region which
was basically the dialect of London which Chaucer himself spoke. The cultural,
commercial, administrative and intellectual importance of the East Midlands
(one of the two main universities, Cambridge, was also in this region), the
agricultural richness of the region and the presence of major cities, Norwich
and London, contributed much to the increasing standardisation of this dialect.
His Metrical Skill: In the
matter of poetical technique English literature owes much to Chaucer. He
virtually imported the decasyllabic line from France - it had been employed
hardly at all in England previously - and he used it in both stanzaic and
couplet forms. The seven-lined
stanza a b a b b c c has become known as the Chaucerian or rime royale.
Note:
Italian poet
Giovanni Boccaccio had a great influence on Geoffrey Chaucer’s work. In fact,
as was common during that time, Chaucer borrowed from Boccaccio’s work.
Boccaccio’s Testide became “The
Knight’s Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
Points To Ponder: The
characters and their tales were arranged as follows: Knight, Miller, Reeve (Estate Manager), Cook, Man of Law,
Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner; Clerk, Merchant; Squire, Franklin (landowner), Physician, Pardoner;
Shipman, Prioress, Sir Thopas, Melbee, Monk, Nun’s Priest; Second Nun, Canon’s
Yeoman; Manciple (Business Manager),
and Parson.
1. Now, Why do you think Chaucer opens his narrative with the ‘knight’s
tale’?
2. Who calls Chaucer,
‘the well of English undefiled’? Why?
3. Bring to mind
some other epithets used to describe Chaucer, like ‘Chaucer was called a ‘vivid painter of life’, etc.
4. Wade through each
character to get a unique portrait of them all – their idiosyncrasies – their specific traits – like for example, the Wife of Bath was deaf, and also with the
duties of a Manciple, a Reeve, a Franklin, a Prioress, etc.
Source(s)
English Literature by Edward Albert
[Revised by J. A. STONE]
History of English Literature, by
Legouis and Cazamian
Chaucer: Celebrated Poet and Author
by Janet Hubbard-Brown
The Routledge History of Literature
in English: Britain and Ireland, by Ronald Carter and John McRae
Picture Courtesy: DeviantArt.Com
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