Geoffrey Chaucer

c. 1340–1400

Poet
Court administrator

A Life at Court.

Geoffrey Chaucer, arguably the greatest English writer before Shakespeare, was born in London in the early 1340s to a merchant family; the family name suggests the shoe trade, though there is some record of their having been wine merchants. He quickly made his way in the world, apparently acquiring some legal training at the Inns of Court, and by 1357 was in royal service. His wife, Philippa, was an attendant to the queen, and her sister, Katherine Swynford, was the mistress and later wife of John of Gaunt, one of the king's sons. Both through family connections and, most importantly, through his own abilities as an administrator, Chaucer quickly made his way in the royal household and traveled abroad on the king's business several times, holding the posts of controller of the customs and clerk of the king's works. It is chiefly through these positions and various grants and gifts in payment for his services that Chaucer's life is documented; there is no independent record of his activities as a poet. It is clear, however, that during his early years in royal service, Chaucer was reading deeply in French courtly poetry by such poets as Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart (about 1368–1375), on whom he relied heavily in composing his own early works in dream narrative form. He also read Italian literature by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the last of whom he resembles in using a framing narrative of tales told by a group of travelers.

The Canterbury Tales.

Judging from some of the story lines he sketched out in the 1370s and 1380s, Chaucer was already meditating the Canterbury Tales, his best known work, in which a variety of different stories, exemplifying a wide range of literary genres, are told by pilgrim travelers on their way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Thomas Becket. Each pilgrim—including Chaucer, who pretends to be a pilgrim also—is supposed to tell two tales going to the cathedral and two coming back again, though this plan is interrupted. While Boccaccio had introduced the idea of using non-aristocratic characters in the tales told by his wealthy young Florentines, Chaucer goes a step further by including people from all walks of life among the pilgrim story-tellers themselves, ranging from a knight and his son to a physician, a lawyer, several nuns, a monk, a lower-middle-class widow, a miller, a sailor, and even a plowman. The work as a whole seems to have been put together about 1385 to 1395, but it was never actually finished. The different manuscripts reflect differing arrangements of the parts.

Range and Influence.

Chaucer's other greatest work was Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380), a poem of some 8,000 lines in an elevated style, which relies on Boccaccio's Filostrato for its classical plot. Chaucer tells the story of how Criseyde, a widow in the besieged city of Troy, is loved by and then loves Troilus, but then gives him up to try to save herself through another man, Diomede. In a wonderful mix of comic and tragic, aristocratic and bourgeois, this poem, though set in ancient Troy, reflects the changing world of late fourteenth-century England. In addition to other poems of his own, Chaucer did many translations of classic medieval works such as the Romance of the Rose and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, as well as a group of lyric poems. His use of English, rather than French, for courtly poetry is sometimes credited with helping to bring the dialect of London into prominence as the standard for all speakers of English.

sources

Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds., The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Vittore Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works. Trans.

Richard Monges (New York: New York University Press, 1976).

Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Class and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1957; reprint, 1966).

Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwells, 1992).

Barry A. Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).