Geoffrey Chaucer

(1343-1400)

Life

We do not know the exact date of Chaucer's birth, but it must have been a few years before the middle of the century. He was the son of John Chaucer, a wine-merchant. He married, at least once, and is presumed to be the father of two sons. Virtually the only evidence we have of his life is the fragmentary information regarding his career at court and in the diplomatic service. He was very active, and in some ways it is quite surprising that he ever had time to devote himself to literature (in fact several of his poems are unfinished). He entered the court while still a boy and served as a page to Princess Elizabeth, daughter-in-law of Edward III. In 1359, while with the army in France, he was captured and imprisoned until the following year. He participated in peace negotiations with France in 1360 and obviously served the king well, since he was granted a life pension in 1367, and defined as a well-beloved personal attendant. In the years that followed he undertook a number of diplomatic missions abroad, in particular to Italy where he visited Genoa and Florence, which were undoubtedly a powerful stimulus to his literary activity. He then occupied an administrative post in London (Controller of Customs) and lived in a house above the city wall, at Aldgate. Further missions to France and Italy followed, but problems at court in 1386 led to his withdrawal from London, although by 1389 he had returned, appointed to a more important job as Clerk of the King's Works. During this period, until the end of his life, he worked on The Canterbury Tales, regarded as his masterpiece. He died in 1400 and was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey.

Chaucer's Works

Chaucer's earliest surviving poem is a translation, and this is indicative of the fact that one of his greatest achievements was to make the fruits of French, Latin and Italian literature, which were more refined than the English literature of the time, available in English, and, in the process, to create a new style, naturalizing the foreign influences into something distinctively English.

His first main original work was The Book of the Duchess, written on the death of Lady Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt, the most powerful member of the royal family during the later years of Edward Ill's reign. It is in the form of a dream-allegory, a popular genre in the Middle Ages, and combines material from Ovid, Machaut, Froissart, as well as the long poem Roman de la Rose.

His next work, The House of Fame (unfinished), is also a dream-allegory and borrows extensively from foreign influences, Chaucer's French contemporaries Froissart and de Margival, but also Dante. There follows The Parliament of Fowls, another dream-allegory that deals with the meeting of all the birds on St Valentine's day to choose their mates. His last dream-allegory is The Legend of Good Women, which is an unfinished collection of tales and represents his first use of decasyllabic couplets, the standard poetic form used in much of The Canterbury Tales.

Troilus and Criseyde is his longest complete work and has been compared with the modern psychological novel because of its deep analysis of love. It deals with the love affair between Criseyde, the daughter of a fortune teller who predicted the fall of Troy, and Troilus, the son of King Priam. After some complicated manoeuvres, they consummate their love and live in happiness until they are separated after an exchange of prisoners between the Greeks and the Trojans. Criseyde refuses to run away with Troilus, saying that she will find a way to be reunited with him, but instead she becomes the mistress of a Greek. Troilus, mad with grief, is killed in battle.

The Canterbury Tales is widely considered to be Chaucer's masterpiece. It is a collection of tales told by pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury (murdered by Henry ll's knights in the cathedral in 1170). Although Chaucer was presumably familiar with Boccaccio's Decameron, from which he borrows the idea of the collection of tales by different people, the end result is very different. Chaucer's pilgrims come from all classes and areas of society, and he uses the connecting links between tales, as well as the prologue with a description of all the pilgrims, to paint a rich portrait of fourteenth-century life.

For the most part, the tales are designed to fit the teller, and illuminate his or her particular worldview, with insights into the social divisions and popular beliefs of the time. Chaucer even includes a rather ironic self-portrait: a rather hesitating pilgrim who tells a clich d tale in verse and another, even more boring, in prose before he is interrupted by the Host, the leader of the party. Chaucer's deep humanity and acute observation of the social milieu of his time are abun­dantly evident. He is also particularly critical of the Church figures among the pilgrims, who, apart from the Poor Parson, are not at all what they should be, and likewise he is critical of the emerging middle classes (the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Man at Law). But Chaucer's method is to use irony to let the characters condemn themselves through their own words and behaviour.

The work is unfinished: the original plan was for two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back by all thirty pilgrims, instead only twenty-four were completed. They range from the courtly (the Knight's Tale) to the downright vulgar (the Miller's Tale), are particularly vigorous in their telling and offer an unprecedented variety of styles and material.