Introduction Chaucer : Life and Works : Chaucer : Prologue to Canterbury Tales
Introduction Chaucer : Life and Works : Chaucer : Prologue to Canterbury Tales
Though The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde are the most widely known of Chaucer’s poems, he also wrote four ambitious dream allegories (two of which were left unfinished), a considerable body of lyric poetry, translations of Boethius and at least a part of the Romance of the Rose, and a technical scientific treatise on the use of the astrolabe in astronomical observations and computations. The volume and variety of his literary production are all the more remarkable when we remember that, though his poetry won royal favour and thus aided his career as a civil servant, it was never his primary occupation. His life was crowded with public business ranging all the way from soldiering in France and carrying out diplomatic missions in Italy to serving as a member of Parliament from Kent, as Controller of Customs of the Port of London, and as Clerk of the King’s Works in charge of docks, walls, bridges, sewers, etc., on the lower Thames.
The England in which Chaucer played his many roles was in transition between the Middle Ages and the modern world. The feudal system still existed, but it was becoming increasingly easy for serfs to run away from the estates where they belonged and find employment in the cities, or, with the seller’s market in labour created by the Black Death, to hire themselves out as independent agricultural laborers. The king still claimed tremendous power, but the rise of the cities and of large-scale manufacturing and trade had created a wealthy and influential middle class of merchants and artisans who governed London. The royal court however, was still a source of power and pageantry, and it continued to give an artistic and intellectual stimulus to the courtiers. Also, a number of complex causes, including the Hundred Years’ War with France, were producing a national consciousness quite different from the earlier regional and personal loyalties. England was becoming a nation, and its citizens were proud of her.
Chaucer’s father was a member of the rising middle class, a prosperous wine merchant with modest connections at court. We know nothing of the poet’s formal studies (if any), but we do know that at some time during the course of his life he acquired a good deal of knowledge of bookkeeping, civil law, philosophy, and astronomy, and learned to handle French, Italian, and Latin competently. In his teens he served as a page in the household of King Edward III’s second son. Later he rose to the rank of Esquire in the royal household and received a stipend for life from the royal exchequer.
It is customary to divide Chaucer’s literary production into three periods, according to the dominant influence under which he was writing: a French period (to 1372), an Italian period (1372-82), and an English period (1386-1400). This division is useful and essentially true if we remember that the periods are not so much successive as cumulative. The Canterbury Tales, for example, belongs to the English period and is dominated by the contemporary English scene, but it still owes a great deal to both French and Italian models, and many of the Tales themselves are directly based on French and Italian sources.
Chaucer began his literary career under the influence of a medieval French literature which included satires, romances, fabliaux, and such contemporary poets as Deschamps, Machaut, and Froissart and the allegorical mode of literary expression. Under French influence he began his translation of the Romance of the Rose, and, more important, produced his first ambitious original poem, The Book of the Duchess (1369). This is an elegy on the death of Blanche, the wife of Chaucer’s patron John of Gaunt, written in the form and manner of contemporary French poets, and with considerable borrowing from them. But already in this poem, as in the other dream allegories that followed, there are distinctive marks of Chaucer’s individual genius—the use of the setting to intensify the dreamlike mood of the poem, the sense of immediacy in the portrait of the bereaved knight, and the characteristic flashes of psychological insight. With remarkable originality and tact, Chaucer made himself merely a well-meaning but obtuse listener and put the praise of Blanche into the mouth of her husband.
In 1372-73 Chaucer went to Italy (probably for the first time) to arrange a commercial treaty with the Genoese. This journey, reinforced by another visit to Italy in 1378, had a tremendous effect on Chaucer. Dante, dead for half a century, was already a classic, and Petrarch and Boccaccio were nearing the end of their literary careers. Not only did Chaucer draw heavily on the works of these three for the rest of his life, but they taught him to understand the importance of narrative structure and technique, to individualize his characters and give them dramatic intensity, and to seek the rhythms and idioms of popular speech. Thus the poems of Chaucer’s Italian period show progress in his mastery of thematic technique, style, and meter. The House of Fame (c. 1372-80) and The Legend of Good Women (1380-86) are still dream allegories containing many of the old familiar features of the French literary type, but Chaucer breaks with the conventional patterns with his broader range of ideas, his greater subtlety of characterization, and his attitude of humorous detachment. In The House of Fame the poet is carried by an eagle to the House of Fame, where he is to hear important tidings of love. The poem breaks off just as these tidings are about to be announced, but the ostensible purpose of the poem could hardly have been as rewarding as the comic characterization of the learned, vicarious, and somewhat pedantic eagle. The Parliament of Fowls tells how the birds assemble on St. Valentine’s day to choose their mates, and the courtly and chivalrous eagles, platitudinous geese, common-sense duck, romantic dove, and jiring cuckoo are masterpieces of comic satire. The poets give a more comprehensive picture of society as presented through the different birds. Though still allegorical in mode, Chaucer is moving out of the limited aristocratic world of courtly love. The Legend of Good Women (“Legend of Cupid’s Saints”) has a remarkably fresh and original prologue telling how Chaucer came to write a set of accounts of women who—whatever their other failings—were faithful in love even unto death. Chaucer left it unfinished, and it is not hard to see why. It calls for too much repetition of what is essentially the same story, and the poet admits at one point that he is becoming bored with writing about these melancholy jilted females. The great masterpiece of Chaucer’s Italian period, however, is Troilus and Criseyde, an amazingly rich and original work inspite of the fact that it is based on a narrative poem by Boccaccio and follows the well-worn conventions of courtly love. A brief summary of the story could be given. Troilus and Criseyde comes before the Legend of Good Women which was written as a kind of expiation for having created the character of Criseyde who became a prototype of the faithless woman.
The great work of the English period is The Canterbury Tales, with its realistic setting in contemporary England. Here we immediately notice a difference from the other periods: the English influence is not a literary one, like the French and Italian, but is simply the influence of the breadth, scope, and zest of Chaucer’s own land and age. The specific literary influences are still French, Italian, and Latin, but the setting is no longer in dreamworlds or in ancient Troy: it is on the road between London and Canterbury. Into this setting Chaucer could pour the whole wealth of his reading, his knowledge, his wide experience of men, and his humorous tolerance.
Even when following earlier writers, Chaucer was always an innovator. He introduced Italian literature to England. He was the first to use many of the meters and stanza forms which have become standard in English poetry. He was the first English poet to deal consistently with the contemporary scene, to draw sharply individualized portraits, to analyze his characters psychologically, to impress his readers as a personality in his own right. It is a tribute to him that since his death each age has admired him, but for different reasons ranging all the way from his satire on religious corruption to his humanism and his realism. Even at his funeral he made an innovation which established a new tradition, for he was buried in what has come to be “The Poets’ Corner” of Westminster Abbey.
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Introduction Chaucer : Life and Works : Chaucer : Prologue to Canterbury Tales
Introduction Chaucer : Life and Works : Chaucer : Prologue to Canterbury Tales