Chaucer, Geoffrey

Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1343–1400). Chaucer's enduring fame reflects the range and quality of his poetry and prose, but also the accessibility of his midlands-based London English compared with that of works such as the north-western Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His impact on the English language and its poetics through the absorption of French words, ideas, and forms is considerable, as is his influence on writers from Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the ‘Scottish Chaucerians’ onwards.

Born into a family of prosperous vintners, Chaucer served as page then esquire to various aristocratic households, including that of Richard II (1377–99). His wife Philippa Roet, with whom he probably had two sons, Lewis and Thomas, was also in royal service. Chaucer's specific assignments included fighting in the Hundred Years War c.1359, undertaking trade and diplomatic missions to Italy and France, and acting as customs controller at the port of London and clerk of works at Westminster and elsewhere.

Chaucer's life experience doubtless contributed to his ‘most wonderful, comprehensive nature’ ( Dryden), while his situation on the periphery of aristocratic circles perhaps underlies his self-presentation as ‘an elvyssh man’, a bystander at life's games of power and love. How closely the professional and artistic lives interlocked is unclear. A courtly audience seems implied, for instance, by The Book of the Duchess, probably a consolation for John of Gaunt at the death of his duchess Blanche c.1369, while the ballade ‘Lack of Steadfastness’ offers advice to the king; yet no records exist of commissions or payments for poetry. Fellow poets and intellectuals such as ‘moral Gower’ and ‘philosophical Strode’, saluted at the close of Troilus and Criseyde, must have been a valued part of Chaucer's readership.

Like other gifted contemporaries, Chaucer made an art of breathing new life into established conventions, and despite an increasing independence from sources, many of his late, masterly Canterbury Tales are modified translations of existing works. His sources and models include the allegorical love-vision Le Roman de la Rose, and works by Machaut, Froissart, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ovid, Virgil, and Boethius.

Apart from the brilliant five-part tragedy Troilus and Criseyde, the poems are mainly small to medium scale, while in the broken ending of The House of Fame we perhaps see Chaucer losing his direction in an ambitious experimental project. Solemnity rarely goes unpunctured, yet Chaucer is also ‘the noble philosophical poet of love’ (Usk), preoccupied with questions about love, true nobility, and the Boethian opposition between false (worldly) felicity and true (spiritual) felicity. Notable, especially compared with the stiff rhetoric and unambiguous didacticism of much medieval literature, is Chaucer's ability not only to impersonate other voices (from the coy hen falcon in The Parliament of Fowls to the blustering Host in the Canterbury Tales), but also to articulate different world-views with apparent impartiality. This permits a fascinating range of interpretation for many individual poems (reflected in the abundant secondary literature), and occasions ongoing debates about the advancedness or otherwise of Chaucer's views on such issues as love, marriage, war, and the church. The only direct mention of 14th-cent. events is the jocular reference in the Nun's Priest's Tale to Jakke Straw, a leader of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, but the contemporary problems of religious charlatanry and the misuse of money and power are treated in the Canterbury Tales with pervasive irony.

D. C. Whaley