Chaucer’s greatness as a poet derives not only from his pride of place as Eng-land’s first major writer and his pioneering mastery of the expressive power of the English vernacular, but also from his fundamental redefinition of the possibility of poetic expression. That the English literary tradition starts with Chaucer is not simply a matter of history—the accidental conjunction of an artistic genius and a time and place. It also stems from the more essential recognition that with Chaucer, English literature became profoundly different from what it had been before. By redefining the literary canon, Chaucer affected the course of literature in fundamental ways. Only a handful of writers exerted this kind of gravitational pull, subsuming the past and altering the future of literature. Soon after Chaucer’s death, Thomas Hoccleve appropriately observed that he was “the first findere of our faire langage.”
We know far more about Chaucer than we do about HOMER [3] or SHAKE-SPEARE [1]. At the center of the English court for most of his life, Chaucer survives in 493 documentary records that trace his career as a page, soldier, squire of the royal household, and governmental and civil servant. There is far less evidence about his life as a poet. Only one of his works, The Book of the Duchess, can be dated with any degree of certainty. The dis-junction between what is known about Chaucer’s public life and what is unknown about his writing life has contributed to the tradition of seeing him as a kind of rough diamond, an accidental progenitor of English literature, whose works say more about the era that produced them than the genius that defined his age.
Yet Chaucer, like all great artists, is best seen in the complex relationship between the age that fashioned him and his art, which reshaped his world.Chaucer was the son of a well-to-do London wine merchant, a member of the increasingly important middle class. His father’s wealth provided him with an education and access to the world of the nobility and royalty. He served as a page in the household of Lionel of Antwerp, the second son of the monarch Edward III; later he became a member of the king’s household and formed a lifelong relationship with another of the king’s sons, John of Gaunt. From then on, Chaucer’s fortunes would be inextricably linked with those of England’s royals, including Edward’s nephew Richard II, who succeeded to the throne in 1377, and John of Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke, who seized the throne in 1399.Chaucer was a participant in and observer of the great events of the 14th century.
As a child he survived the first and most lethal outbreak of the plague, from 1348 to 1349, in which 1.5 to 2 million of England’s population of 4–5 million died, most within eight months. When Chaucer was born, Edward III had reopened the war with France that would continue for the next century. The great English victories at Cricy and Poitiers occurred during Chaucer’s lifetime, and as a soldier he was captured by the French and ransomed by the king (for a lesser sum than the king was forced to pay for his favorite horse). Finally, the dynastic struggle that eventually cost Richard II his throne helped alter the absolute power of the monarch and shook the foundations of the medieval hierarchy.
If there are few direct allusions to specific events in Chaucer’s poetry, the concerns of the age and Chaucer’s depiction of the life around him are at the center of his art. As a soldier, courtier, diplomat, government agent, and member of Parliament, Chaucer was well placed to convert his broad range of experience into poetry.
Chaucer’s poetry also represents a unique fusion of personal genius with the historical moment. During his lifetime, English was to emerge as the national language, replacing the French of the Norman conquerors as the language of culture and commerce, and codified in the Midland dialect of the important trading center, London. Chaucer’s poetic language is the first great flowering of an English vernacular that he helped shape into an expressive artistic form. That Chaucer was a layman, not a cleric, and that his poetry was performed before a court audience, are also important factors in the poetry he produced.The stages of Chaucer’s poetic development have been traditionally divided into three periods. His poetic apprenticeship during the 1360s shows him influenced by French forms. During this period, he produced a translation of the Roman de la Rose and The Book of the Duchess, an elegy for John of Gaunt’s wife, Blanche.
In 1372, while on a trading mission for the crown, Chaucer visited Italy. There he encountered the works of DANTE [2], BOCCAC-CIO [68], and PETRARCH [51], whose influence is seen in his House of Fame, Par-liament of Fowls, and Troilus and Criseide. The final stage represents the work of his full maturity, beginning in 1386 with the distinctly English voice of The Canterbury Tales. A view that posits the synthesis of Chaucer’s native English expression from the influences of French and Italian sources is somewhat misleading. A high degree of originality, along with the reworking of borrowed sources, is present at every stage of Chaucer’s career. His achievement comes not from the absence of derived forms but from his remarkable animation of traditional elements into a fresh and unique artistic vision. His greatness as a poet is demonstrated most clearly in his masterpieces Troilus and Criseide and The Canterbury Tales.Troilus and Criseide, the greatest of Chaucer’s completed works, would have secured his place as one of the giants of English literature even if he never had written The Canterbury Tales.
The poem, set during the Trojan War, has been described by Chaucerian scholar George Lyman Kittredge as “the first novel, in the modern sense, that ever was written in the world.” It tells the story of the “double sorwe of Troilus,” son of King Priam, first in loving Cri-seide, and then in losing her when Criseide, in a prisoner exchange, is taken by the Greeks and proves unfaithful. Chaucer’s principal source is Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato (The Love-Stricken), a shorter, cynical tale of frustrated passion that Chaucer expands into a psychologically rich exploration of the nature of love and its human costs set against the background of war, the conflict between private values and communal responsibility, and the opposition of will and destiny.
His great innovation is in investing his characters with a naturalism that justifies Kittredge’s assessment. The poem also displays Chaucer’s virtuosity as a storyteller and demonstrates his readiness and skill to produce the vast human comedy that would become his most popular and enduring work.Everything about The Canterbury Tales is monumental, beginning with Chaucer’s original conception of a series of tales told by a group of 30 pilgrims journeying to Canterbury. Of the 120 tales originally projected for the series (two for each pilgrim on the way to Canterbury and two more from each on the way back), Chaucer actually completed only 22.
He probably began The Canterbury Tales in 1386 and devoted the last 14 years of his life to the project. Collections of stories linked by a framing device were not original; early in the 14th century Boccaccio had arranged the 100 tales of his Decameron, delivered by 10 characters. What was original was the relationship established between the tellers and their tales and the intricate byplay among the pilgrims that establishes a comic and ironic context for many of the stories, as when the Miller’s silly and cuckolded carpenter offends the Reeve, who retaliates with his own story, using a miller as his comic target.
The effect is a delightful double fiction, with multiple dramatic and literary effects.Through the agency of the pilgrimage, Chaucer not only produced a masterful literary compendium of medieval story genres—romance, fabliau, saint’s tale, beast story, and sermon—but also managed to collect a cross section of medieval society. Chaucer brings his characters to life through a series of colorful portraits in the General Prologue, then has them reveal themselves in all their delightful human frailty during their journey. As John Dryden aptly pointed out, “here is God’s plenty.”Chaucer’s greatness as a poet is most completely demonstrated in his skillful details, which create a complex and ironic texture to his verbal painting.
In The Canterbury Tales, the static and the stylized elements of medieval literature are replaced by dynamic, living portraits of complex individuals—such as the Prioress, the Pardoner, and especially the Wife of Bath—who command our attention not for their high rank or deeds but for their humanity. Chaucer succeeds in creating a new realistic standard in poetry that redefined the subject and treatment of literature. The human behavior of ordinary individuals claims full artistic treatment for the first time, as Chaucer expands the range of poetic expression to embrace all aspects of life and experience.
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