(? 1340-1400), English poet. The name Chaucer, a
French form of the Latin _calcearius_, a shoe-maker, is found in London
and the eastern counties as early as the second half of the 13th
century. Some of the London Chaucers lived in Cordwainer Street, in the
shoemakers' quarter; several of them, however, were vintners, and among
others the poet's father John, and probably also his grandfather Robert.
Legal pleadings inform us that in December 1324 John Chaucer was not
much over twelve years old, and that he was still unmarried in 1328, the
year which used to be considered that of Geoffrey's birth. [Sidenote:
Life.] The poet was probably born from eight to twelve years later,
since in 1386, when giving evidence in Sir Richard le Scrope's suit
against Sir Robert Grosvenor as to the right to bear certain arms, he
was set down as "del age de xl ans et plus, armeez par xxvij ans." At a
later date, and probably at the time of the poet's birth, his father
lived in Thames Street, and had to wife a certain Agnes, niece of Hamo
de Compton, whom we may regard as Geoffrey Chaucer's mother. In 1357
Geoffrey is found, apparently as a lad, in the service of Elizabeth,
countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, duke of Clarence, entries in two
leaves of her household accounts, accidentally preserved, showing that
she paid in April, May and December various small sums for his clothing
and expenses. In 1359, as we learn from his deposition in the Scrope
suit, Chaucer went to the war in France. At some period of the campaign
he was at "Retters," i.e. Rethel, near Reims, and subsequently had the
ill luck to be taken prisoner. On the 1st of March 1360 the king
contributed L16 to his ransom, and by a year or two later Chaucer must
have entered the royal service, since on the 20th of June 1367 Edward
granted him a pension of twenty marks for his past and future services.
A pension of ten marks had been granted by the king the previous
September to a Philippa Chaucer for services to the queen as one of her
"domicellae" or "damoiselles," and it seems probable that at this date
Chaucer was already married and this Philippa his wife, a conclusion
which used to be resisted on the ground of allusions in his early poems
to a hopeless love-affair, now reckoned part of his poetical outfit.
Philippa is usually said to have been one of two daughters of a Sir
Payne Roet, the other being Katherine, who after the death of her first
husband, Sir Hugh de Swynford, in 1372, became governess to John of
Gaunt's children, and subsequently his mistress and (in 1396) his wife.
It is possible that Philippa was sister to Sir Hugh and sister-in-law to
Katherine. In either case the marriage helps to account for the favour
subsequently shown to Chaucer by John of Gaunt.
In the grant of his pension Chaucer is called "dilectus vallectus
noster," our beloved yeoman; before the end of 1368 he had risen to be
one of the king's esquires. In September of the following year John of
Gaunt's wife, the duchess Blanche, died at the age of twenty-nine, and
Chaucer wrote in her honour _The Book of the Duchesse_, a poem of 1334
lines in octosyllabic couplets, the first of his undoubtedly genuine
works which can be connected with a definite date. In June 1370 he went
abroad on the king's service, though on what errand, or whither it took
him, is not known. He was back probably some time before Michaelmas, and
seems to have remained in England till the 1st of December 1372, when he
started, with an advance of 100 marks in his pocket, for Italy, as one
of the three commissioners to treat with the Genoese as to an English
port where they might have special facilities for trade. The accounts
which he delivered on his return on the 23rd of May 1373 show that he
had also visited Florence on the king's business, and he probably went
also to Padua and there made the acquaintance of Petrarch.
In the second quarter of 1374 Chaucer lived in a whirl of prosperity. On
the 23rd of April the king granted him a pitcher of wine daily,
subsequently commuted for an annuity of 20 marks. From John of Gaunt,
who in August 1372 had granted Philippa Chaucer L10 a year, he himself
now received (June 13) a like annuity in reward for his own and his
wife's services. On the 8th of June he was appointed Comptroller of the
Custom and Subsidy of Wools, Hides and Woodfells and also of the Petty
Customs of Wine in the Port of London. A month before this appointment,
and probably in anticipation of it, he took (May 10, 1374) a lease for
life from the city of London of the dwelling-house above the gate of
Aldgate, and here he lived for the next twelve years. His own and his
wife's income now amounted to over L60, the equivalent of upwards of
L1000 in modern money. In the next two years large windfalls came to him
in the form of two wardships of Kentish heirs, one of whom paid him
L104, and a grant of L71: 4: 6; the value of some confiscated wool. In
December 1376 he was sent abroad on the king's service in the retinue of
Sir John Burley; in February 1377 he was sent to Paris and Montreuil in
connexion probably with the peace negotiations between England and
France, and at the end of April (after a reward of L20 for his good
services) he was again despatched to France.
On the accession of Richard II. Chaucer was confirmed in his offices and
pensions. In January 1378 he seems to have been in France in connexion
with a proposed marriage between Richard and the daughter of the French
king; and on the 28th of May of the same year he was sent with Sir
Edward de Berkeley to the lord of Milan and Sir John Hawkwood to treat
for help in the king's wars, returning on the 19th of September. This
was his last diplomatic journey, and the close of a period of his life
generally considered to have been so unprolific of poetry that little
beyond the Clerk's "Tale of Grisilde," one or two other of the stories
afterwards included in the _Canterbury Tales_, and a few short poems,
are attributed to it, though the poet's actual absences from England
during the eight years amount to little more than eighteen months.
During the next twelve or fifteen years there is no question that
Chaucer was constantly engaged in literary work, though for the first
half of them he had no lack of official employment. Abundant favour was
shown him by the new king. He was paid L22 as a reward for his later
missions in Edward III.'s reign, and was allowed an annual gratuity of
10 marks in addition to his pay of L10 as comptroller of the customs of
wool. In April 1382 a new comptrollership, that of the petty customs in
the Port of London, was given him, and shortly after he was allowed to
exercise it by deputy, a similar licence being given him in February
1385, at the instance of the earl of Oxford, as regards the
comptrollership of wool. In October 1385 Chaucer was made a justice of
the peace for Kent. In February 1386 we catch a glimpse of his wife
Philippa being admitted to the fraternity of Lincoln cathedral in the
company of Henry, earl of Derby (afterwards Henry IV.), Sir Thomas de
Swynford and other distinguished persons. In August 1386 he was elected
one of the two knights of the shire for Kent, and with this dignity,
though it was one not much appreciated in those days, his good fortune
reached its climax. In December of the same year he was superseded in
both his comptrollerships, almost certainly as a result of the absence
of his patron, John of Gaunt, in Spain, and the supremacy of the duke of
Gloucester. In the following year the cessation of Philippa's pension
suggests that she died between Midsummer and Michaelmas. In May 1388
Chaucer surrendered to the king his two pensions of 20 marks each, and
they were re-granted at his request to one John Scalby. The transaction
was unusual and probably points to a pressing need for ready money, nor
for the next fourteen months do we know of any source of income
possessed by Chaucer beyond his annuity of L10 from John of Gaunt.
In July 1389, after John of Gaunt had returned to England, and the king
had taken the government into his own hands, Chaucer was appointed clerk
of the works at various royal palaces at a salary of two shillings a
day, or over L31 a year, worth upwards of L500 present value. To this
post was subsequently added the charge of some repairs at St George's
Chapel, Windsor. He was also made a commissioner to maintain the banks
of the Thames between Woolwich and Greenwich, and was given by the earl
of March (grandson of Lionel, duke of Clarence, his old patron) a
sub-forestership at North Petherton, Devon, obviously a sinecure. While
on the king's business, in September 1390, Chaucer was twice robbed by
highwaymen, losing L20 of the king's money. In June 1391 he was
superseded in his office of clerk of the works, and seems to have
suffered another spell of misfortune, of which the first alleviation
came in January 1393 when the king made him a present of L10. In
February 1394 he was granted a new pension of L20. It is possible, also,
that about this time, or a little later, he was in the service of the
earl of Derby. In 1397 he received from King Richard a grant of a butt
of wine yearly. For this he appears to have asked in terms that suggest
poverty, and in May 1398 he obtained letters of protection against his
creditors, a step perhaps rendered necessary by an action for debt taken
against him earlier in the year. On the accession of Henry IV. a new
pension of 40 marks was conferred on Chaucer (13th of October 1399) and
Richard II.'s grants were formally confirmed. Henry himself, however,
was probably straitened for ready money, and no instalment of the new
pension was paid during the few months of his reign that the poet lived.
Nevertheless, on the strength of his expectations, on the 24th of
December 1399 he leased a tenement in the garden of St Mary's Chapel,
Westminster, and it was probably here that he died, on the 25th of the
following October. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and his tomb
became the nucleus of what is now known as Poets' Corner.
The portrait of Chaucer, which the affection of his disciple, Thomas
Hoccleve, caused to be painted in a copy of the latter's _Regement of
Princes_ (now Harleian MS. 4866 in the British Museum), shows him an old
man with white hair; he has a fresh complexion, grey eyes, a straight
nose, a grey moustache and a small double-pointed beard. His dress and
hood are black, and he carries in his hands a string of beads. We may
imagine that it was thus that during the last months of his life he used
to walk about the precincts of the Abbey.
Works.
Henry IV.'s promise of an additional pension was doubtless elicited by
the _Compleynt to his Purs_, in the envoy to which Chaucer addresses him
as the "conquerour of Brutes Albioun." Thus within the last year of his
life the poet was still writing. Nevertheless, as early as 1393-1394, in
lines to his friend Scogan, he had written as if his day for poetry were
past, and it seems probable that his longer poems were all composed
before this date. In the preceding fifteen--or, if another view be
taken, twenty--years, his literary activity was very great, and with the
aid of the lists of his works which he gives in the _Legende of Good
Women_ (lines 414-431), and the talk on the road which precedes the "Man
of Law's Tale" (_Canterbury Tales_, B. 46-76), the order in which his
main works were written can be traced with approximate certainty,[1]
while a few both of these and of the minor poems can be connected with
definite dates.
The development of his genius has been attractively summed up as
comprised in three stages, French, Italian and English, and there is a
rough approximation to the truth in this formula, since his earliest
poems are translated from the French or based on French models, and the
two great works of his middle period are borrowed from the Italian,
while his latest stories have no such obvious and direct originals and
in their humour and freedom anticipate the typically English temper of
Henry Fielding. But Chaucer's indebtedness to French poetry was no
passing phase. For various reasons--a not very remote French origin of
his own family may be one of them--he was in no way interested in older
English literature or in the work of his English contemporaries, save
possibly that of "the moral Gower." On the other hand he knew the _Roman
de la rose_ as modern English poets know Shakespeare, and the full
extent of his debt to his French contemporaries, not merely in 1369, but
in 1385 and in 1393 (the dates are approximate), is only gradually being
discovered. To be in touch throughout his life with the best French
poets of the day was much for Chaucer. Even with their stimulus alone he
might have developed no small part of his genius. But it was his great
good fortune to add to this continuing French influence, lessons in plot
and construction derived from Boccaccio's _Filostrato_ and _Teseide_, as
well as some glimpses of the higher art of the _Divina Commedia_. He
shows acquaintance also with one of Petrarch's sonnets, and though, when
all is said, the Italian books with which he can be proved to have been
intimate are but few, they sufficed. His study of them was but an
episode in his literary life, but it was an episode of unique
importance. Before it began he had already been making his own artistic
experiments, and it is noteworthy that while he learnt so much from
Boccaccio he improved on his originals as he translated them. Doubtless
his busy life in the service of the crown had taught him
self-confidence, and he uses his Italian models in his own way and with
the most triumphant and assured success. When he had no more Italian
poems to adapt he had learnt his lesson. The art of weaving a plot out
of his own imagination was never his, but he could take what might be
little more than an anecdote and lend it body and life and colour with a
skill which has never been surpassed.
The most direct example of Chaucer's French studies is his translation
of _Le Roman de la rose_, a poem written in some 4000 lines by Guillaume
Lorris about 1237 and extended to over 22,000 by Jean Clopinel, better
known as Jean de Meun, forty years later. We know from Chaucer himself
that he translated this poem, and the extant English fragment of 7698
lines was generally assigned to him from 1532, when it was first
printed, till its authorship was challenged in the early years of the
Chaucer Society. The ground of this challenge was its wide divergence
from Chaucer's practice in his undoubtedly genuine works as to certain
niceties of rhyme, notable as to not rhyming words ending in _-y_ with
others ending _-ye_. It was subsequently discovered, however, that the
whole fragment was divisible linguistically into three portions, of
which the first and second end respectively at lines 1705 and 5810, and
that in the first of these three sections the variations from Chaucer's
accepted practice are insignificant. Lines 1-1705 have therefore been
provisionally accepted as Chaucer's, and the other two fragments as the
work of unknown translators (James I. of Scotland has been suggested as
one of them), which somehow came to be pieced together. If, however, the
difficulties in the way of this theory are less than those which
confront any other, they are still considerable, and the question can
hardly be treated as closed.
While our knowledge of Chaucer's _Romaunt of the Rose_ is in this
unsatisfactory state, another translation of his from the French, the
_Book of the Lyon_ (alluded to in the "Retraction" found, in some
manuscripts, at the end of the _Canterbury Tales_), which must certainly
have been taken from Guillaume Machault's _Le Dit du lion_, has
perished altogether. The strength of French influence on Chaucer's early
work may, however, be amply illustrated from the first of his poems with
which we are on sure ground, the _Book of the Duchesse_, or, as it is
alternatively called, the _Deth of Blaunche_. Here not only are
individual passages closely imitated from Machault and Froissart, but
the dream, the May morning, and the whole machinery of the poem are
taken over from contemporary French conventions. But even at this stage
Chaucer could prove his right to borrow by the skill with which he makes
his materials serve his own purpose, and some of the lines in the _Deth
of Blaunche_ are among the most tender and charming he ever wrote.
Chaucer's _A.B.C._, a poem in honour of the Blessed Virgin, of which the
stanzas begin with the successive letters of the alphabet, is another
early example of French influence. It is taken from the _Pelerinage de
la vie humaine_, written by Guillaume de Deguilleville about 1330. The
occurrence of some magnificent lines in Chaucer's version, combined with
evidence that he did not yet possess the skill to translate at all
literally as soon as rhymes had to be considered, accounts for this poem
having been dated sometimes earlier than the _Book of the Duchesse_, and
sometimes several years later. With it is usually moved up and down,
though it should surely be placed in the 'seventies, the _Compleynt to
Pity_, a fine poem which yet, from its slight obscurity and absence of
Chaucer's usual ease, may very well some day prove to be a translation
from the French.
While Chaucer thus sought to reproduce both the matter and the style of
French poetry in England, he found other materials in popular Latin
books. Among his lost works are renderings of "Origenes upon the
Maudeleyne," and of Pope Innocent III. on "The Wreced Engendring of
Mankinde" (_De miseria conditionis humanae_). He must have begun his
attempts at straightforward narrative with the _Lyf of Seynt Cecyle_
(the weakest of all his works, the second Nun's Tale in the Canterbury
series) from the _Legenda Aurea_ of Jacobus de Voragine, and the story
of the patience of Grisilde, taken from Petrarch's Latin version of a
tale by Boccaccio. In both of these he condenses a little, but ventures
on very few changes, though he lets his readers see his impatience with
his originals. In his story of Constance (afterwards ascribed to the Man
of Law), taken from the Anglo-Norman chronicle of Nicholas Trivet,
written about 1334, we find him struggling to put some substance into
another weak tale, but still without the courage to remedy its radical
faults, though here, as with Grisilde, he does as much for his heroine
as the conventional exaltation of one virtue at a time permitted. It is
possible that other tales which now stand in the Canterbury series were
written originally at this period. What is certain is that at some time
in the 'seventies three or four Italian poems passed into Chaucer's
possession, and that he set to work busily to make use of them. One of
the most interesting of the poems reclaimed for him by Professor Skeat
is a fragmentary "Compleynt," part of which is written in _terza rima_.
While he thus experimented with the metre of the _Divina Commedia_, he
made his first attempt to use the material provided by Boccaccio's
_Teseide_ in another fragment of great interest, that of _Quene Anelida
and Fals Arcyte_. More than a third of this is taken up with another,
and quite successful, metrical experiment in Anelida's "compleynt," but
in the introduction of Anelida herself Chaucer made the first of his
three unsuccessful efforts to construct a plot for an important poem out
of his own head, and the fragment which begins so well breaks off
abruptly at line 357.
For a time the _Teseide_ seems to have been laid aside, and it was
perhaps at this moment, in despondency at his failure, that Chaucer
wrote his most important prose work, the translation of the _De
Consolatione Philosophiae_ of Boethius. Reminiscences of this helped to
enrich many of his subsequent poems, and inspired five of his shorter
pieces (_The Former Age, Fortune, Truth, Gentilesse_ and _Lak of
Stedfastnesse_), but the translation itself was only a partial success.
To borrow his own phrase, his "Englysh was insufficient" to reproduce
such difficult Latin. The translation is often barely intelligible
without the original, and it is only here and there that it flows with
any ease or rhythm.
If Chaucer felt this himself he must have been speedily consold by
achieving in _Troilus and Criseyde_ his greatest artistic triumph.
Warned by his failure in _Anelida and Arcyte_, he was content this time
to take his plot unaltered from the _Filostrato_, and to follow
Boccaccio step by step through the poem. But he did not follow him as a
mere translator. He had done his duty manfully for the saints "of other
holinesse" in Cecyle, Grisilde and Constance, whom he was forbidden by
the rules of the game to clothe with complete flesh and blood. In this
great love-story there were no such restrictions, and the characters
which Boccaccio's treatment left thin and conventional became in
Chaucer's hands convincingly human. No other English poem is so instinct
with the glory and tragedy of youth, and in the details of the story
Chaucer's gifts of vivid colouring, of humour and pity, are all at their
highest.
An unfortunate theory that the reference in the _Legends of Good Women_
to "al the love of Palamon and Arcyte" is to a hypothetical poem in
seven-line stanzas on this theme, which Chaucer is imagined, when he
came to plan the _Canterbury Tales_, to have suppressed in favour of a
new version in heroic couplets, has obscured the close connexion in
temper and power between what we know as the "Knight's Tale" and the
_Troilus_. The poem may have been more or less extensively revised
before, with admirable fitness, it was assigned to the Knight, but that
its main composition can be separated by several years from that of
_Troilus_ is aesthetically incredible. Chaucer's art here again is at
its highest. He takes the plot of Boccaccio's _Teseide_, but only as
much of it as he wants, and what he takes he heightens and humanizes
with the same skill which he had shown in transforming the _Filostrato_.
Of the individual characters Theseus himself, the arbiter of the plot,
is most notably developed; Emilie and her two lovers receive just as
much individuality as they will bear without disturbing the atmosphere
of romance. The whole story is pulled together and made more rapid and
effective. A comparison of almost any scene as told by the two poets
suffices to show Chaucer's immense superiority. At some subsequent
period the "Squire's Tale" of Cambuscan, the fair Canacee and the Horse
of Brass, was gallantly begun in something of the same key, but Chaucer
took for it more materials than he could use, and for lack of the help
of a leader like Boccaccio he was obliged to leave the story, in
Milton's phrase, "half-told," though the fragment written certainly
takes us very much less than half-way.
Meanwhile, in connexion (as is reasonably believed) with the betrothal
or marriage of Anne of Bohemia to Richard II. (i.e. about 1381-1382),
Chaucer had brought to a successful completion the _Parlement of
Foules_, a charming sketch of 699 lines, in which the other birds, on
Saint Valentine's day, counsel the "Formel Egle" on her choice of a
mate. His success here, as in the case of the _Deth of Blaunche the
Duchesse_, was due to the absence of any need for a climax; and though
the materials which he borrowed were mainly Latin (with some help from
passages of the _Teseide_ not fully needed for _Palamon and Arcyte_) his
method of handling them would have been quite approved by his friends
among the French poets. A more ambitious venture, the _Hous of Fame_, in
which Chaucer imagines himself borne aloft by an eagle to Fame's temple,
describes what he sees and hears there, and then breaks off in apparent
inability to get home, shows a curious mixture of the poetic ideals of
the _Roman de la rose_ and reminiscences of the _Divina Commedia_.
As the _Hous of Fame_ is most often remembered and quoted for the
personal touches and humour of Chaucer's conversation with the eagle, so
the most-quoted passages in the Prologue to the _Legende of Good Women_
are those in which Chaucer professes his affection for the daisy, and
the attack on his loyalty by Cupid and its defence by Alceste. Recent
discoveries have shown, however, that (besides obligations to Machault)
some of the touches about the daisy and the controversy between the
partisans of the Flower and of the Leaf are snatches from poems by his
friends Froissart and Deschamps, which Chaucer takes up and returns to
them with pretty compliments, and that he was indebted to Froissart for
some of the framework of his poem.[2] Both of the two versions of the
Prologue to the _Legende_ are charming, and some of the tales, notably
that of Cleopatra, rank with Chaucer's best work. When, however, he had
written eight and part of the ninth he tired of his scheme, which was
planned to celebrate nineteen of Cupid's faithful "saints," with
Alcestis as their queen. With his usual hopefulness he had overlooked
the risk of monotony, which obviously weighed heavily on him ere he
broke off, and the loss of the other ten stories is less to be regretted
than that of the celebration of Alceste, and a possible epilogue which
might have exceeded in charm the Prologue itself.
Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer's failure to complete the scheme of the _Legende of Good Women_
may have been partly due to the attractions of the _Canterbury Tales_,
which were probably taken up in immediate succession to it. His
guardianship of two Kentish wards, his justiceship of the peace, his
representing the county in the parliament of 1386, his commissionership
of the river-bank between Greenwich and Woolwich, all make it easy to
understand his dramatic use of the merry crowds he saw on the Canterbury
road, without supposing him to have had recourse to Boccaccio's
_Decamerone_, a book which there is no proof of his having seen. The
pilgrims whom he imagines to have assembled at the Tabard Inn in
Southwark, where Harry Bailey was host, are said to have numbered "wel
nyne and twenty in a company," and the Prologue gives full-length
sketches of a Knight, a Squire (his son), and their Yeoman; of a
Prioress, Monk, Friar, Oxford Clerk, and Parson, with two disreputable
hangers-on of the church, a Summoner and Pardoner; of a Serjeant-at-Law
and a Doctor of Physic, and of a Franklin, or country gentleman,
Merchant, Shipman, Miller, Cook, Manciple, Reeve, Ploughman (the
Parson's brother) and the ever-famous Wife of Bath. Five London
burgesses are described in a group, and a Nun and Priest[3] are
mentioned as in attendance on the Prioress. Each of these, with Chaucer
himself making the twenty-ninth, was pledged to tell two tales, but
including one second attempt and a tale told by the Yeoman of a Canon,
who overtakes the pilgrims on the road, we have only twenty finished
stories, two unfinished and two interrupted ones. As in the case of the
_Legende of Good Women_, our loss is not so much that of the additional
stories as of the completed framework. The wonderful character sketches
of the Prologue are carried yet farther by the Talks on the Road which
link the different tales, and two of these Talks, in which the Wife of
Bath and the Pardoner respectively edify the company, have the
importance of separate Tales, but between the Tales that have come down
to us there are seven links missing,[4] and it was left to a later and
weaker hand to narrate, in the "Tale of Beryn," the adventures of the
pilgrims at Canterbury.
The reference to the _Lyf of Seynt Cecyle_ in the Prologue to the
_Legende of Good Women_ gives external proof that Chaucer included
earlier work in the scheme of the _Canterbury Tales_, and mention has
been made of other stories which are indisputably early. In the absence
of any such metrical tests as have proved useful in the case of
Shakespeare, the dates at which several of the Tales were composed
remain doubtful, while in the case of at least two, the Clerk's tale of
Grisilde and the Monk's tragedies, there is evidence of early work being
revised and supplemented. It is fortunately impossible to separate the
prologue to the charmingly told story of "yonge Hugh of Lincoln" from
the tale itself, and with the "quod sche" in the second line as proof
that Chaucer was here writing specially for his Prioress we are
forbidden to limit the new stories to any one metre or tone. There can
be no doubt, however, that what may be called the Tales of the Churls
(Miller, Reeve, Summoner, Friar, &c.), and the conversational
outpourings of the Pardoner and Wife of Bath, form, with the immortal
Prologue, the most important and distinctive additions to the older
work. In these, and in the Pardoner's story of Death and the Three
Revellers, and the Nun's Priest's masterly handling of the fable of the
Cock and Fox, both of them free from the grossness which marks the
others, Chaucer takes stories which could have been told in a short page
of prose and elaborates them with all the skill in narration which he
had sedulously cultivated. The conjugal reminiscences of the Wife of
Bath and the Reeve's Tale with its abominable climax (lightened a little
by Aleyn's farewell, lines 316-319) are among the great things in
Chaucer, as surely as _Troilus_, and _Palamon and Arcyte_ and the
_Prologue_. They help notably to give him the width of range which may
certainly be claimed for him.
In or soon after 1391 Chaucer wrote in prose for an eleven-year-old
reader, whom he addresses as "Litel Lowis my son," a treatise on the use
of the Astrolabe, its short prologue being the prettiest specimen of his
prose. The wearisome tale of "Melibee and his wyf Prudence," which was
perhaps as much admired in English as it had been in Latin and French,
may have been translated at any time. The sermon on Penitence, used as
the Parson's Tale, was probably the work of his old age. "Envoys" to his
friends Scogan and Bukton, a translation of some balades by Sir Otes de
Granson, and the _Compleynt to his Purs_ complete the record of his
minor poetry. We have his own statement that in his youth he had written
many Balades, Roundels and Virelayes in honour of Love, and the two
songs embedded respectively in the _Parlement of Foules_ and the
Prologue to the _Legende of Good Women_ are charming and musical. His
extant shorter poems, however, whether early or late, offer no excuse
for claiming high rank for him as a lyrist. He had very little sheer
singing power, and though there are fine lines in his short poems,
witness the famous "Flee fro the prees and dwell with soothfastnesse,"
they lack the sustained concentration of great work. From the drama,
again, Chaucer was cut off, and it is idle to argue from the innumerable
dramatic touches in his poems and his gift of characterization as to
what he might have done had he lived two centuries later. His own age
delighted in stories, and he gave it the stories it demanded invested
with a humanity, a grace and strength which place him among the world's
greatest narrative poets, and which bring the England of his own day,
with all the colour and warmth of life, wonderfully near to all his
readers.
Influence.
The part played by Chaucer in the development of the English language
has often been overrated. He neither corrupted it, as used to be said,
by introducing French words which it would otherwise have avoided, nor
bore any such part in fixing it as was afterwards played by the
translators of the Bible. When he was growing up educated society in
England was still bilingual, and the changes in vocabulary and
pronunciation which took place during his life were the natural results
of a society, which had been bilingual with a bias towards French,
giving an exclusive preference to English. The practical identity of
Chaucer's language with that of Gower shows that both merely used the
best English of their day with the care and slightly conservative
tendency which befitted poets. Chaucer's service to the English language
lies in his decisive success having made it impossible for any later
English poet to attain fame, as Gower had done, by writing alternatively
in Latin and French. The claim which should be made for him is that, at
least as regards poetry, he proved that English was "sufficient."
Chaucer borrowed both his stanza forms and his "decasyllabic" couplets
(mostly with an extra syllable at the end of the line) from Guillaume
Machault, and his music, like that of his French master and his
successors, depends very largely on assigning to every syllable its full
value, and more especially on the due pronunciation of the final -_e_.
The slower movement of change in Scotland allowed time for Chaucer to
exercise a potent influence on Scottish poetry, but in England this
final -_e_, to which most of the earlier grammatical forms by Chaucer's
time had been reduced, itself fell rapidly into disuse during the 15th
century, and a serious barrier was thus raised to the appreciation of
the artistic value of his verse. His disciples, Hoccleve and Lydgate,
who at first had caught some echoes of his rhythms, gradually yielded to
the change in pronunciation, so that there was no living tradition to
hand down his secret, while successive copyists reduced his text to a
state in which it was only by accident that lines could be scanned
correctly. For fully three centuries his reputation was sustained solely
by his narrative power, his warmest panegyrists betraying no
consciousness that they were praising one of the greatest technical
masters of poetry. Even when thus maimed, however, his works found
readers and lovers in every generation, and every improvement in his
text has set his fame on a surer basis.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The _Canterbury Tales_ have always been Chaucer's most
popular work, and, including fragments, upwards of sixty 15th-century
manuscripts of it still survive. Two thin volumes of his minor poems
were among the little quartos which Caxton printed by way of
advertisement immediately on his return to England; the _Canterbury
Tales_ and _Boethius_ followed in 1478, _Troilus_ and a second edition
of the _Tales_ in 1483, the _Hous of Fame_ in 1484. The _Canterbury
Tales_ were subsequently printed in 1492 (Pynson), 1498 (de Worde) and
1526 (Pynson); _Troilus_ in 1517 (de Worde) and 1526 (Pynson); the
_Hous of Fame_ in 1526 (Pynson); the _Parlement of Foules_ in 1526
(Pynson) and 1530 (de Worde), and the _Mars_, "_Venus_" and _Envoy to
Bukton_ by Julyan Notary about 1500. Pynson's three issues in 1526
almost amounted to a collected edition, but the first to which the
title _The Workes of Geffray Chaucer_ was given was that edited by
William Thynne in 1532 for Thomas Godfray. Of this there was a new
edition in 1542 for John Reynes and William Bonham, and an undated
reprint a few years later for Bonham, Kele, Petit and Toye, each of
whom put his name on part of the edition. In 1561 a reprint, with
numerous additions, edited by John Stowe, was printed by J. Kyngston
for J. Wight, and this was re-edited, with fresh additions by Thomas
Speght, in 1598 for G. Bishop and again in 1602 for Adam Islip. In
1687 there was an anonymous reprint, and in 1721 John Urry produced
the last and worst of the folios. By this time the paraphrasers were
already at work, Dryden rewriting the tales of the Knight, the Nun's
Priest and the Wife of Bath, and Pope the Merchant's. In 1737
(reprinted in 1740) the Prologue and Knight's Tale were edited
(anonymously) by Thomas Morell "from the most authentic manuscripts,"
and here, though by dint of much violence and with many mistakes,
Chaucer's lines were for the first time in print given in a form in
which they could be scanned. This promise of better things (Morell
still thought it necessary to accompany his text with the paraphrases
by Betterton and Dryden) was fulfilled by a fine edition of the
_Canterbury Tales_ (1775-1778), in which Thomas Tyrwhitt's scholarly
instincts produced a comparatively good text from second-rate
manuscripts and accompanied it with valuable illustrative notes. The
next edition of any importance was that edited by Thomas Wright for
the Percy Society in 1848-1851, based on the erratic but valuable
British Museum manuscript Harley 7334, containing readings which must
be either Chaucer's second thoughts or the emendations of a
brilliantly clever scribe. In 1866 Richard Morris re-edited this text
in a more scholarly manner for the Aldine edition of the British
Poets, and in the following year produced for the Clarendon Press
Series a school edition of the Prologue and Tales of the Knight and
Nun's Priest, edited with the fulness and care previously bestowed
only on Greek and Latin classics.
In 1868 the foundation of the Chaucer Society, with Dr Furnivall as
its director and chief worker, and Henry Bradshaw as a leading spirit,
led to the publication of a six-text edition of the _Canterbury
Tales_, and the consequent discovery that a manuscript belonging to
the Earl of Ellesmere, though undoubtedly "edited," contained the best
available text. The Chaucer Society also printed the best manuscripts
of _Troilus and Criseyde_ and of all the minor poems, and thus cleared
the way for the "Oxford" Chaucer, edited by Professor Skeat, with a
wealth of annotation, for the Clarendon Press in 1894, the text of
which was used for the splendid folio printed two years later by
William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, with illustrations by Sir
Edward Burne-Jones. A supplementary volume of the Oxford edition,
entitled _Chaucerian and other Pieces_, issued by Professor Skeat in
1897, contains the prose and verse which his early publishers and
editors, from Pynson and Thynne onwards, included among his Works by
way of illustration, but which had gradually come to be regarded as
forming part of his text. The reasons for their rejection are fully
stated by Professor Skeat in the work named and also in _The Chaucer
Canon_ (1900). Many of these pieces have now been traced to other
authors, and their exclusion has helped to clear not only Chaucer's
text but also his biography, which used (as in the "Life" published by
William Godwin in two quarto volumes in 1803) to be encumbered with
inferences from works now known not to be Chaucer's, notably the
_Testament of Love_ written by Thomas Usk. All information about
Chaucer's life available in 1900 will be found summarized by Mr R.E.G.
Kirk in _Life-Records of Chaucer_, part iv., published by the Chaucer
Society in that year. See also _Chaucer; a Bibliographical Manual_, by
Eleanor P. Hammond (1909). (A. W. Po.)