eoffrey Chaucer,
English poet (?1340-1400). Geoffrey was appointed at seventeen
page to Elizabeth de Burgh, wife of Lionel, Edward III’s
third son. We next find him serving under Edward III, in the
French campaign (1359), where he was taken prisoner at Retiers,
in Brittany, but was released next year under the treaty of
Bretigny. In 1367 he received a life pension of 20 marks (£13 6s.
8d.), as one of the "valets" of the king’s chamber.
He was frequently employed abroad, travelling in Italy thrice -
while he did secret-service work in Flanders and elsewhere in
1376 and 1377. He treated with France for peace (1377), also
regarding the marriage of King Richard II (1378) - this period of
his life being marked by signs of great prosperity, and for about
ten years from 1374 on he held offices in the customs. John of
Gaunt, to whose party the poet attached himself, granted him a
pension of £10. In addition to his official income, the poet had
his share of the frequent dues occurring under the feudal system.
In 1386 he sat, as knights of the shire for Kent, in the
Parliament held at Westminster. But misfortune now fell on him.
Whether owing to genuine dissatisfaction with his work, or to the
accession to power of Gloucester, the rival of John of Gaunt,
Chaucer was deprived of his offices in December, 1386, and was
reduced to raising money on the security of his pensions. These
were also taken from him in 1388. An annual pension of £20,
granted in 1394, left him still in difficulties, and four years
later he received letters of protection against arrest for debt.
The accession of Henry IV, son of his old protector John of Gaunt,
brought him some relief: he received a new pension of 40 marks.
The earliest of his poetical works whose date can exactly be
fixed is the Book of the Duchess, written in 1369 on the
death of Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt. To this early period may
also be ascribed the translation of the Romaunt of the Rose,
which we know Chaucer made, but which is not to be wholly
identified with the version that has come down to us. The second
period of the poet’s life (1369-86) is credited with the
Parliament of Birds, the House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women,
the first draft of the Knight’s Tale, and other works
afterward incorporated into the Canterbury Tales, such as the
Clerk’s Tale (Griselda), the Second Nun’s tale (St.
Cecilia), and the Monk’s tale (De Hugolino Comite Pise) -
all of which show the strong and direct influence exercised on
Chaucer by the Italian poets. The plan of the Canterbury Tales,
and the execution of many of them, including the writing of the
wonderful Prologue, were the work of the poet’s final and
most troubled period. Chaucer, like Cervantes, had ample
experience of life, and the result is that the Canterbury Tales,
like Don Quixote, are not merely a work of genius, but the
embodiment of an epoch. He is the "father of English poetry,"
inventing the seven-line stanza and championing portrayal of the
life and philosophy of the common people written in natural as
opposed to courtly style. Consult Kittredge’s Chaucer
and His Poetry; MacCracken’s The College Chaucer;
the Chaucer Society publications, especially the six-text edition
of the Canterbury Tales by Furnivall; and Skeat’s The
Chaucer Canon. [World Wide Encyclopedia, 1935]
Chaucer, Geoffrey (1343?-1400),
one of the greatest English poets, whose masterpiece, The
Canterbury Tales, was one of the most important influences on
the development of English literature. His life is known
primarily through records pertaining to his career as a courtier
and civil servant under the English kings Edward III and Richard
II.
The son of a prosperous London wine merchant, Chaucer may have
attended the Latin grammar school of Saint Paul's Cathedral and
may have studied law at the Inns of Court. In 1357 he was page to
the countess of Ulster, Elizabeth, the wife of Prince Lionel,
third son of Edward III; there, he would have learned the ways of
the court and the use of arms. By 1367 Chaucer was an esquire to
Edward. About 1366 he married Philippa Roet, a lady-in-waiting to
the queen and afterward in the service of John of Gaunt, who was
duke of Lancaster and Edward's fourth son. Chaucer served as
controller of customs for London from 1374 to 1386 and clerk of
the king's works from 1389 to 1391, in which post he was
responsible for maintenance of royal buildings and parks. About
1386 Chaucer moved from London to a country residence in Kent (probably
Greenwich), where in 1386 he was justice of the peace and
representative to Parliament. He traveled on several diplomatic
missions to France, one to Spain in 1366, and two to Italy from
1372 to 1373 and in 1378. In the last year of his life, Chaucer
leased a house within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. After
his death, he was buried in the Abbey (an honor for a commoner),
in what has since become the Poets' Corner.
Early Works
Chaucer wrote for and may have read his works aloud to a
select audience of fellow courtiers and officials, which
doubtless sometimes included members of the royal family. The
culture of the English upper class was still predominantly French,
and Chaucer's earliest works were influenced by the fashionable
French poets Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart and by the
great 13th-century dream allegory Le Roman de la Rose, by
the French poets Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The common
theme of these works is courtly love.
Chaucer claimed to have translated Le Roman de la Rose,
but if he did, all that survives is a fragment. His first
important original work, The Book of the Duchess, is an
elegy for John of Gaunt's first wife, Blanche, who died in 1369.
In a dream the poet encounters a grieving knight in black (Gaunt)
who movingly recounts his love and loss of "good fair White"
(Blanche). The House of Fame and Parliament of Fowls,
also dream poems, show the influence of Dante and of Giovanni
Boccaccio, whose works Chaucer probably encountered on his first
journey to Italy. The unfinished House of Fame gives a
humorous account of the poet's frustrating journey in the claws
of a giant golden eagle (the idea is from Dante) to the palace of
the goddess Fame. In the Parliament he witnesses an
inconclusive debate about love among the different classes of
birds. All three dream visions, written from about 1373 to about
1385, contain a mixture of comedy and serious speculation about
the puzzling nature of love.
In this period, Chaucer also translated and adapted religious,
historical, and philosophical works: a life of Saint Cecilia; a
series of medieval "tragedies," brief lives of famous
men cast down by adverse fortune; a translation of De
Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy),
written by the Roman philosopher Anicius Boethius to proclaim his
faith in divine justice and providence. The latter work
profoundly influenced Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (1385?)
and The Knight's Tale, both adapted from romances by
Boccaccio.
Troilus, a poem of more than 8000 lines, is Chaucer's
major work besides The Canterbury Tales. It is the tragic
love story of the Trojan prince Troilus, who wins Criseyde (Cressida),
aided by the machinations of his close friend, her uncle Pandarus,
and then loses her to the Greek warrior Diomede. The love story
turns into a deeply felt medieval tragedy, the human pursuit of
transitory earthly ideals that pale into insignificance beside
the eternal love of God. The poem ends with the narrator's solemn
advice to young people to flee vain loves and turn their hearts
to Christ. Chaucer's characters are psychologically so complex
that the work has also been called the first modern novel.
In the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (1386?),
another dream vision, the god of love accuses Chaucer of heresy
for writing of Criseyde's unfaithfulness and assigns him the
penance of writing the lives of Cupid's martyrs—faithful
women who died for love. After completing eight of these legends,
Chaucer probably abandoned the work and by 1387 was engaged on
his masterpiece.
The Canterbury Tales
The Tales is a collection of stories set within a
framing story of a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, the shrine
of Saint Thomas à Becket. The poet joins a band of pilgrims,
vividly described in the General Prologue, who assemble at the
Tabard Inn outside London for the journey to Canterbury. Ranging
in status from a Knight to a humble Plowman, they are a microcosm
of 14th-century English society.
The Host proposes a storytelling contest to pass the time;
each of the 30 or so pilgrims (the exact number is unclear) is to
tell four tales on the round trip. Chaucer completed less than a
quarter of this plan. The work contains 22 verse tales (two
unfinished) and two long prose tales; a few are thought to be
pieces written earlier by Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales,
composed of more than 18,000 lines of poetry, is made up of
separate blocks of one or more tales with links introducing and
joining stories within a block.
The tales represent nearly every variety of medieval story at
its best. The special genius of Chaucer's work, however, lies in
the dramatic interaction between the tales and the framing story.
After the Knight's courtly and philosophical romance about noble
love, the Miller interrupts with a deliciously bawdy story of
seduction aimed at the Reeve (an officer or steward of a manor);
the Reeve takes revenge with a tale about the seduction of a
miller's wife and daughter. Thus, the tales develop the
personalities, quarrels, and diverse opinions of their tellers.
The prologues and tales of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are
high points of Chaucer's art. The Wife, an outspoken champion of
her gender against the traditional antifeminism of the church,
initiates a series of tales about sex, marriage, and nobility
("gentilesse"). The Pardoner gives a chilling
demonstration of how his eloquence in the pulpit turns the hope
of salvation into a vicious confidence game. Although Chaucer in
this way satirizes the abuses of the church, he also includes a
number of didactic and religious tales, concluding with the good
Parson's sermon on penitence; this is followed by a personal
confession in which Chaucer "retracts" all his secular
writings, including Troilus, and those Canterbury tales
that "incline toward sin." Like the ending of Troilus,
the retraction is a reminder that Chaucer's genius was always
subject to orthodox piety.
Significance
Chaucer greatly increased the prestige of English as a
literary language and extended the range of its poetic vocabulary
and meters. He was the first English poet to use iambic
pentameter, the seven-line stanza called rhyme royal, and the
couplet later called heroic. His system of versification, which
depends on sounding many e's in final syllables that are
silent (or absent) in modern English, ceased to be understood by
the 15th century. Nevertheless, Chaucer dominated the works of
his 15th-century English followers and the so-called Scottish
Chaucerians. For the Renaissance, he was the English Homer.
Edmund Spenser paid tribute to him as his master; many of the
plays of William Shakespeare show thorough assimilation of
Chaucer's comic spirit. John Dryden, who modernized several of
the Canterbury tales, called Chaucer the father of English poetry.
Since the founding of the Chaucer Society in England in 1868,
which led to the first reliable editions of his works, Chaucer's
reputation has been securely established as the English poet best
loved after Shakespeare for his wisdom, humor, and humanity.
Contributed By: Alfred David [Microsoft Encarta 98
Encyclopedia]
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