Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer: Illustration from Cassell's History of England, circa 1902.

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – October 25, 1400) was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat (courtier), and diplomat. Chaucer is best known as the author of The Canterbury Tales. He is sometimes credited with being the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language, rather than French or Latin. He is considered by many to be the most important author of the Middle English period.

Life

Chaucer as a pilgrim from the Ellesmere manuscript

Chaucer was born around 1343 probably in London, although the exact date and location is not known. His father and grandfather were both London wine merchants (vintners) and before that, for several generations, the family were merchants in Ipswich, and although not of noble birth, were extremely well-to-do.

The young Chaucer began his career by becoming a page to Elizabeth de Burgh, a Countess of Ulster. In 1359, Chaucer travelled with Lionel of Antwerp, Elizabeth's husband, as part of the English army in the Hundred Years War. After his tour of duty, Chaucer travelled in France, Spain and Flanders, possibly as a messenger and perhaps as a religious pilgrim. In 1367, Chaucer became a valet to the royal family, which position he traveled with king, performing any number of odd jobs.

On one such trip to Italy in 1373 Chaucer came into contact with medieval Italian poetry, the forms and stories of which he would use later. While he may have been exposed to manuscripts of these works the trips were not usually long enough to learn sufficient Italian. It is speculated that he had learned Itlain due to his upbringing among the merchants and immigrants in the docklands of London.

In 1374 Chaucer becameComptroller of the Customs for the port of London for Richard II. While working as comptroller Chaucer moved to Kent and became a Member of Parliament there in 1386, and later assumed the title of clerk of the king's works, a sort of foreman organizing most of the king's building projects. In this capacity he oversaw repairs upon Westminster Palace, and St. George's Chapel.

Soon after the overthrow of his patron Richard II, Chaucer vanished from the historical record. He is believed to have died of unknown causes on 25 October, 1400 but there is no firm evidence for this date which is from the engraving on his tomb, built over one hundred years after his death. There is some speculation—most recently in Terry Jones' book Who Murdered Chaucer? : A Medieval Mystery—that he was murdered by enemies of Richard II or even on the orders of his successor Henry IV.

Works

Chaucer's first major work The Book of the Duchess was an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster. The most important work of this early period, however, is Troilus and Criseyde. Like many other works of his early period (sometimes called his French-and-Italian period) Troilus and Criseyde shows structural influence from contemporary French and Italian poets, as well as subject material drawn from classical sources.

Troilus and Criseyde

Troilus and Criseyde is the love story of Troilus, a Trojan prince, and Criseyde. Many Chaucer scholars regard this as his best work.

Troilus is a character who appears in numerous medieval and Renaissance versions of the Trojan War legend. He is a Trojan prince, and son of the god Apollo, who falls in love with Cressida, a Greek woman captured and enslaved by the Trojans. Cressida pledges her love to him, but when she is returned to the Greeks in a hostage exchange, she goes to live with the Greek hero Diomedes.

An oracle prophesies that Troy will not be defeated as long as Troilus reaches the age of twenty alive. Achilles, however, seeing Troilus lead his horses to the fountain, falls in love with the beautiful long-haired boy. He ambushes him and his sister, Polyxena, who escapes. Troilus, however, rejects Achilles' advances, and takes refuge inside the temple of Apollo Timbraeus.

Achilles, enraged, slays Troilus on the altar. When the Trojan heroes, too late, ride to the rescue, he whirls the head by the hair and hurls it at them. This affront to the god - killing his son and desecrating the temple - has been conjectured as the cause of Apollo's enmity towards Achilles, and, in Chaucer's poem, is used to tragically contrast Troilus' innocence and good-faith with the arrogance and rapaciousness of Achilles.

Chaucer's main source for the poem wasBoccaccio, who wrote the story in his Il Filostrato, itself a re-working of Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, which was in turn an expansion of a passage from Homer.

The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer, however, is almost certainly best known for his long poem, The Canterbury Tales. The poem consists of a collection of 14 stories, two in prose and the rest in verse. The tales, some of which are originals and others not, are contained inside a frame tale and told by a group of pilgrims on their way from Southwark to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket's at Canterbury Cathedral^[1].

The poem is in stark contrast to other literature of the period in the naturalism of its narrative, the variety of stories the pilgrims tell, and the varied characters who are engaged in the pilgrimage, setting apart from almost anything else written during its period. Many of the stories narrated by the pilgrims seem to fit their individual characters and social standing, although some of the stories seem ill-fitting to their narrators, probably representing the incomplete state of the work. The many jobs Chaucer held in medieval society: page, soldier, messenger, valet, bureaucrat, foreman and administrator probably exposed him to many of the types of people he depicted in the Tales. He was able to ape their speech, satirise their manners and still, in the end, use their idioms as a means for making art.

The themes of the tales vary, and include topics such as courtly love, treachery and avarice. The genres also vary, and include romance, Breton lai, sermon, and fabliau. The characters, introduced in the General Prologue of the book, tell tales of great cultural relevance, and are among the most vivid accounts of medieval life that we have today. Chaucer provides a "slice-of-life", creating a picture of the times in which he lived by letting us hear the voices and see the viewpoints of people from all different backgrounds and social classes.

Some of the tales are serious and others humorous; however, all are very precise in describing the traits and faults of human nature. Chaucer, like virtually all other authors of his period, was very interested in presenting a moral to his story. Religious malpractice is a major theme, appropriate for a work written on the eve of The Reformation. Most of the tales are interlinked with similar themes running through them and some are told in retaliation for other tales in the form of an argument. The work is incomplete, as it was originally intended that each character would tell four tales, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the return journey. This would have meant a possible one hundred and twenty tales which would have dwarfed the twenty-six tales actually written.

It is sometimes argued that the greatest contribution that The Canterbury Tales made to English literature was in popularising the literary use of the vernacular language, English (rather than the French or Latin then spoken by the noble classes). However, several of Chaucer's contemporaries—John Gower, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet—also wrote major literary works in English, and Chaucer's appellation as the "Father of English Literature," though somewhat true, is an overstatement.

Much more important than standardization of dialect was the introduction, through The Canterbury Tales, of numerous poetic techinques that would become standards for English poesy. The poem's use of accentual-syllabic meter, which had been invented a century earlier by the French and Italians, was revolutionary; after Chaucer, the alliterative meter of Old English poetry would become completely extinct. The poem also deploys, masterfully, iambic pentameter, which would become the de facto measure for the English poetic line. Chaucer was the first author in English to write in pentameter, and The Canterbury Tales are his masterpiece of the technique. The poem is also one of the first in the language to use rhymed couplets in conjunction with a five-stress line, a form of rhyme that would become extremeley popular in all varieties English verse after The Canterbury Tales' publication.

Translation

Chaucer, in his own time, was most famous as a translator of continental works. He translated such diverse works as Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose, and the poems of Eustache Deschamps, who wrote in a ballade that he considered himself a "nettle in Chaucer's garden of poetry". In recent times, however, the authenticity of some of Chaucer's translations have come into dispute, with some works putatatively attributed to Chaucer having been proven as authored by anonymous imitators. What is more, it is somewhat difficult for a modern audience to distinguish Chaucer's poetry from his translations; many of his most famous poems consist of long passages of direct translation from other sources.

Historical Representations and Context

Early on, representations of Chaucer began to circle around two co-existing identites: 1) a courtier and a king's man, an international humanist familiar with the classics and continental greats; 2) a man of the people, a plain-style satirist and a critic of the church. All things to all people, for a combination of mixed aesthetic and political reasons, Chaucer was held in high esteem by high and low audiences—certainly a boon for printers and booksellers. The sixteenth-century folio editions of Chaucer's Works were seminal events in the construction of this national literary forefather who could be read in support of both radical and conservative positions as well as different historical narratives: a popular reformation from below and a court-controlled reformation from above. His enduring popularity is attested to by the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Chaucer was printed more than any other English author.

List of Works

The following major works are in rough chronological order but scholars still debate the dating of most of Chaucer's output and works made up from a collection of stories may have been compiled over a long period.

Major works

• Translation of Roman de la Rose, possibly extant as The Romaunt of the Rose
• The Book of the Duchess
• The House of Fame
• Anelida and Arcite
• The Parliament of Fowls
• Translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy as Boece
• Troilus and Criseyde
• The Legend of Good Women
• Treatise on the Astrolabe
• The Canterbury Tales

Short poems

• An ABC
• Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn
• The Complaint unto Pity
• The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse
• The Complaint of Mars
• The Complaint of Venus
• A Complaint to His Lady
• The Former Age
• Fortune
• Gentilesse
• Lak of Stedfastnesse
• Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan
• Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton
• Proverbs
• To Rosemounde
• Truth
• Womanly Noblesse

Poems dubiously ascribed to Chaucer

• Against Women Unconstant
• A Balade of Complaint
• Complaynt D'Amours
• Merciles Beaute
• The Visioner's Tale
• The Equatorie of the Planets - Rumored to be a rough translation of a Latin work derived from an Arab work of the same title. It is a description of the construction and use of what is called an 'equatorium planetarum', and was used in calculating planetary orbits and positions (at the time it was believed the sun orbited the Earth). The belief this work is ascribed to Chaucer comes from similar 'treatise' on the Astrolabe. However, the evidence Chaucer wrote such a work is questionable, and as such is not included in The Riverside Chaucer. If Chaucer did not compose this work, it was probably written by a contemporary (Benson, perhaps?). (S. Curran)

Works mentioned by Chaucer, presumed lost

• Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde, possible translation of Innocent III's De miseria conditionis humanae
• Origenes upon the Maudeleyne
• The book of the Leoun - An interesting argument. The Book of the Leon is mentioned in Chaucer's retraction at the end of the Canterbury Tales. It is likely he wrote such a work; one suggestion is that the work was such a bad piece of writing it was lost, but if so, Chaucer would not have included it in the middle of his retraction. Indeed, he would not have included it at all. A likely source dictates it was probably a 'redaction of Guillaume de Machaut's 'Dit dou lyon,' a story about courtly love, a subject which Chaucer scholars agree he frequently wrote about (Le Romaunt de Rose).

Pseudepigraphies and Works Plagiarizing Chaucer

• The Pilgrim's Tale — Written in the sixteenth-century with many Chaucerian allusions
• The Plowman's Tale AKA The Complaint of the Ploughman — A Lollard satire later appropriated as a Protestant text
• Pierce the Ploughman's Crede — A Lollard satire later appropriated by Protestants
• The Ploughman's Tale — Its body is largely a version of Thomas Hoccleve's "Item de Beata Virgine"
• "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" — Richard Roos' translation of a poem of the same name by Alain Chartier
• The Testament of Love — Actually by Thomas Usk
• Jack Upland — A Lollard satire
• God Spede the Plow — Borrows parts of Chaucer's Monk's Tale

See also

• Literature
• Middle English
• Middle English literature
• Middle English poetry
• Medieval literature
• Chaucer College, a graduate school of the University of Kent, England; North Petherton.
• Asteroid 2984 Chaucer, named after the poet
• The movie A Knight's Tale was very loosely based on The Knight's Tale, one of the Canterbury Tales, and a fictionalised Chaucer himself appears as a character in it.

External links

• Works by Geoffrey Chaucer. Project Gutenberg

• Chaucer's Official Life by James Root Hulbert
• Anthology of Middle English Literature
• Early Editions of Chaucer

Educational institutions

• Caxton's Chaucer Complete digitized texts of Caxton's two earliest editions of the Canterbury Tales from the British Library
• Chaucer Metapage - Project in addition to the 33rd International Congress of Medieval Studies
• Chaucer Page by Harvard University
• Three near-contemporary portraits of Chaucer
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