CHAUCER, Geoffrey

CHAUCER, Geoffrey [1343?–1400] Poet of MIDDLE ENGLISH and one of the foremost figures in ENGLISH LITERATURE. No record remains of the education that gave Chaucer lifelong familiarity with Latin and several vernacular languages and literatures. However, as the son of a well-off London vintner, he had educational and social advantages that must have helped form his views. He may have attended the Inner Temple; by 1357, he was in the household of Edward III's daughter-in-law; in 1360, the king paid Chaucer's ransom after his capture by the French; by 1367, he had become a member of the king's household, and later he undertook many royal commissions to France, Spain, and Italy, some of them secret. In 1374, the king appointed him controller of the custom on wool, sheepskins, and leather in the Port of LONDON, the first of several increasingly important offices he held by royal appointment. From 1374 onwards, he also received various grants and annuities from the Crown. He was elected Member of Parliament for Kent in 1386.

Works

Chaucer's first important poem appears to have been the Book of the Duchess, a memorial to John of Gaunt's first wife, who died in 1368 (though the poem may be several years later). Other major works were The House of Fame (1378–80), The Parliament of Fowls (1380–2), Troilus and Criseyde (1382–6), and The Canterbury Tales, some of them written earlier but assembled with others written c.1388–1400. In addition to these, Chaucer produced a great many translations, including a fragment of the Romance of the Rose (a version of the French Roman de la Rose), and a translation of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae (On the Consolation of Philosophy). As a result, a French contemporary saluted him as a ‘good translator’, the earliest explicit literary response to him. Though his official duties left many records, in his lifetime only Thomas Usk mentioned Chaucer's ‘manly speech’ (1385), and John Gower his ‘glad songs’, remarks that do not account for his later reputation as the founder of literary English.

Language

The East Midland dialect of late 14c English, as Chaucer's works record it, differed from Modern English in structure, vocabulary, and especially spelling and pronunciation:‘So faren we, If I shal seye the sothe.’
‘Now,’ quod oure Hoost, ‘yit lat me talke to the:
Why artow so discoloured of thy face?’
‘Peter!’ quod he, ‘God yeve it harde grace,
I am so used in the fyr to blowe. …’
(Canon's Yeoman's Prologue)
Spelling poses the chief obstacles for a modern reader, for whom the second line would end ‘yet let me talk to thee’. Aloud the passage is likely to be more difficult still. Because of the GREAT VOWEL SHIFT, which began c.1400, the second line included words that sounded like noo now, may me, toe to, and they thee, the third line words that sounded like whee why, saw so, and fahce face. Chaucer's English also pronounced almost all the consonants, including the l in talke and the r in harde. His yeve is akin to modern give, which however descends from a different variety of Middle English: see CHANCERY STANDARD. The quotation contains other clues to Chaucer's pronunciation: he must have said sothe like SAWthuh, so when it rhymes with to the, we have evidence that the second line had eleven syllables, stressing Now, Hoost, lat, the first syllable of talke, and to. The same evidence also shows that the in the second line was a form of thee with a spelling to reflect the unstressed pronunciation thuh. Modern personal pronouns also have unstressed forms, but conventional spelling does not represent the y'see or have ʾem sent of more informal writing. The grammatical forms of Chaucer's English in these four lines are familiar, except for the thee, artow art thou, and thy, which are no longer part of English outside of special, usually religious, contexts. Chaucer had some verb endings that no longer remain, such as the -en in faren we. Nowadays, the subjunctive construction God yeve it would be May God give it, to indicate a wish for the action. Cast in modern spelling and grammatical forms, Chaucer's vocabulary is rarely strange. Here, only fare get along, sothe truth, and quod said, are obsolete, though all were current in Chaucer's time and continued to appear in much more recent works than his. Discoloured is familiar, but was probably not so to Chaucer's first readers: it came into English only in the decade when he wrote this passage, as did much of his poetic vocabulary.

Style

In pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, Chaucer was largely at one with his time and place, but in his use of these resources he was entirely singular. It was for his style that later centuries most admired him: William Dunbar called him ‘rose of rethoris all’ (the rose of all rhetoricians) and ‘the noble Chaucer, of makaris flour’ (flower of poets), William CAXTON praised his ‘crafty and sugred eloquence’, and Edmund Spenser deemed him ‘the well of English undefiled’. Certainly his style varied, from the monosyllabism of the passage above to Criseyde's noble protest:What, is this al the joye and al the feste?
Is this youre reed? Is this my blisful cas?
Is this the verray mede of youre byheeste?
Is al this paynted proces seyd—allas!—
Right for this fyn? O lady myn
(Troilus and Criseyde, Book 2)
Like the earlier passage, these lines purport to be direct quotation of spontaneous speech, but here the poetry is marked with rhetorical figures: a repeated rhetorical question (‘Is this …?’), the anaphora varied at last with ‘Is al this …?’, sarcasm (‘my blisful cas’), alliteration (‘paynted proces’), apostrophe (‘O lady myn’), and more, just within these few lines. Chaucer's age respected and studied the ‘arts of language’: such rhetorical poetry was praiseworthy and often poetically effective. So Chaucer drew not only on traditional rhetoric but on traditional views of language itself: ‘Eke Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede, / The words moote ben cosyn to the dede’. Elsewhere, he conveyed his own observations of language, that it varied in time (‘Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge / Within a thousand yeer’: Troilus and Criseyde, Book 2, cf. Horace, Ars poetica) and that it varied in space, for in The Reeve's Tale he used dialect to portray two students from the North of England, including features of their grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, such as gas for southern goeth. The evidence of his ear for language variety is consistent with everything else we know about Chaucer, whom John Dryden called ‘the father of English poetry’. See COCKNEY, DICKENS, NORMAN FRENCH, PLAIN ENGLISH, PROSE, SATIRE, SLANG, STANDARD ENGLISH.