Chapter One
of Backgrounds to Chaucer, Peter
G. Beidler, Lehigh University
1. Chaucer's Life
Depending on one's point of view, we know either a lot or
almost nothing about Chaucer. On the one hand we have nearly
500 "life-records"--legal documents, court references,
financial statements, travel itineraries, royal dispensations,
letters of appointment--relating to a civil servant named Geoffrey
Chaucer who lived in London during the last half of the fourteenth
century. On the other hand we have a body of some of the finest
poetry ever written attributed to a poet named Geoffrey Chaucer
who lived in London during the last half of the fourteenth century.
There is no firm documentary evidence that these are one and
the same man. That is, none of these life-records identifies
the Geoffrey Chaucer of London court life as "Geoffrey Chaucer,
poet" or as "Chaucer, author of the tales of Canterbury,"
and no references to the poet refer to him as "the author
of Troilus and Criseyde, just back from a diplomatic trip
to Italy." Still, though there is a remote chance that there
were two men with the name of Geoffrey Chaucer who lived in London
in the second half of the fourteenth century, no one seriously
questions that the man we know from the life-records, if only
sketchily and by indirection, is the author of the Canterbury
Tales and other poetic works. After all, the London of Chaucer's
time had a population of only around 50,000. If there were two
Geoffrey Chaucers living there, it seems likely that chroniclers
and record-keepers would have made some distinction between them.
Besides, the Chaucer of the life-records is in no way incompatible
with the Chaucer of poetic fame. Indeed, the life-records may
help to explain some of what we find in the poetry.
Geoffrey Chaucer was born to a prosperous wine merchant named
John Chaucer and his wife Agnes de Copton in the early 1340s.
We do not know the exact date of Geoffrey's birth, any more than
we can be sure that Chaucer died in October of 1400--the last
date for which there is a life-record. John was not a nobleman,
but his wealth would have given him the ability to purchase for
his son a position as page in the household of a certain Earl
of Ulster. Indeed, the earliest of the life-records relating
to Chaucer, preserved by accident in the binding of another book,
show him to have received small payments for Easter clothes from
the Countess of Ulster in 1357. As a page in the Ulster household
Chaucer would have performed various menial tasks--kitchen work,
serving, whatever--in exchange for learning, mostly by observation,
the customs in the aristocracy and the French language they spoke.
Chaucer would have been perhaps fifteen at the time.
In early 1360 Chaucer accompanied Lionel, the Earl of Ulster,
on a military campaign to France, where he was taken captive.
He was ransomed by Edward III, king of England. By 1367 the young
Chaucer, then around 25, was a valettus--a sort of squire
or yeoman--in the king's court. Chaucer would have had some minor
duties such as serving and running small errands, and he would
have had ample opportunity to observe the doings of the court:
the feasts, the hunting, the music, the visits, the flirtations,
the manners, the entertainments. During this period Chaucer tried
his hand at poetry, imitating the work of French poets such as
Froissart, Machaut, de Meun, Granson, and Deschamps. Those who
like to think of "periods" in a writer's life can think
of this time--up through the early 1370s--as Chaucer's "French
period." Given his French models, it was astonishing that
Chaucer decided to write poetry in his mother-tongue English
rather than in French. To be sure, there was some English poetry
in existence, but it tended to be quite different from what Chaucer
was learning about in a London court that aspired to the language
and customs of France. What little poetry there was in English
tended to be in a different dialect from his own and to be robustly
alliterative rather than delicately end-rhymed, and there is
little evidence that Chaucer knew such poetry or admired it.
Although Chaucer wrote in English rather than in French, it is
fair to say that Chaucer's first poetic efforts tended to be
tentative and imitative rather than original. They can best be
described as Englished French rather than natively English. Indeed,
Chaucer's first long poem was a faithful translation of the French
Roman de la rose.
Chaucer's first important poem that can be called original
in any meaningful sense of the word was The Book of the Duchess,
a consoling lament for the death by plague in 1368 of Blanche,
duchess of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt. Although even this
poem derived its techniques from French poetry, its subject is
native--the death of the wife of a member of the English royal
family. The Book of the Duchess is important in part because
it shows that Chaucer had developed by then an association of
some importance with John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, brother
to the dashing Prince Edward (the Black Prince), and uncle to
the baby who would ten years later become King Richard II. Gaunt
became something like Chaucer's "patron." Gaunt probably
encouraged the poet and provided him with the financial and occupational
security that would free at least some of his time for the writing
of poetry.
In the 1370s Chaucer made two journeys to Italy on behalf
of the king. The journeys were important for Chaucer's poetic
development, if not for English-Italian diplomacy. The first
of those journeys took place in 1372-73, when he went to Genoa
as part of a delegation to discuss the use of seaports in England
for the Genoese merchant trade. Because Italy was a market for
English wool exports, England was eager to encourage trade. Chaucer
would have been a natural member of such a delegation because
he had an unusually good command of Italian, learned mostly through
his father's business associations as an importer of Italian
wines.
It appears that on that trip to Genoa, with a side trip to
Florence, Chaucer became acquainted with the work of Dante. The
House of Fame, written shortly after his return from Italy,
is a Dantesque dream-vision about a dreamer seized by an eagle
and transported to the house where reputations are made and lost.
This poem, though by no means Chaucer's best, initiated a kind
of pre-renaissance in England--an early hint of the discoveries
that would breathe so much life into English art and literature
a couple of centuries later.
Chaucer's second trip to Italy, in 1378, was apparently brought
about in part by one of the more bizarre events in Christian
history: the Great Schism. Most popes had been Italian and lived
in Rome, but for much of the fourteenth century the papacy was
based in Avignon, France, and most of the popes were French.
In part to make peace with Italians, Pope Gregory XI moved the
papacy back to Rome in 1376. At his death two years later an
Italian pope, Urban VI, was elected. French Cardinals, angered
by Urban's apparent neglect of the interests of France, promptly
elected another pope, Clement VII, from Geneva. Suddenly--and
then for the next four decades--there were two popes in Europe,
each claiming to be the one true head of Christianity. During
this Great Schism the reputation of the Christian church became
tarnished. What, after all, did it say about Christianity if
those who claimed to speak for God could not themselves agree
on who really spoke for God? Official Protestantism was more
than a century away, but the Great Schism helped to pave the
way for it by showing, for those inclined to notice it, that
Christianity was at least as much a religion of men as a religion
of God. If there could be two popes, why could there not be two
varieties of Christianity?
Furthermore, Christianity became politicized in a way it had
not been before: the Christian nations of Europe had to decide
which pope to support. The Great Schism itself was to end in
1417 with the cardinals agreeing to support a single pope, but
meanwhile the Christian nations had to make a choice. France
early and strongly supported Clement VII in Avignon. England,
having little reason to side with their French antagonists, seemed
inclined to honor the Italian pope. It is likely that Chaucer's
visit to Italy, as part of a small delegation in the summer of
1378, was designed at least in part to indicate that England,
if only quietly and cautiously, was behind Urban VI.
The influence of that second trip on Chaucer as a poet was
profound. If on the first trip to Italy he discovered the work
of Dante, by then long dead, on the second trip he discovered
the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio, both still living. Chaucer
mentions both Dante and Petrarch by name, but never mentions
Boccaccio, the writer to whom he was most indebted. Boccaccio's
prose vernacular narratives particularly inspired Chaucer, whose
writing for the next decade or so shows the influence of this
fine writer. Chaucer almost surely carried back with him to England
Boccaccio's Teseida and Filostrato. The Teseida
inspired several minor works as well as a narrative about two
Theban princes who fall in love with Emily--a narrative that
Chaucer eventually adapted to its place in the Canterbury collection
as the Knight's Tale. The Filostrato was the undisputed
source of Chaucer's great love story--sometimes called the first
English novel--Troilus and Criseyde. With these two poems
Chaucer's "Italian period" entered full swing. But
whereas the French influence had tended to rein Chaucer's natural
talent in, the Italian influence tended more to liberate it.
Chaucer never did much more than translate French poems into
English, but no one can call the Knight's Tale or Troilus
and Criseyde translations. Chaucer followed the general outlines
of Boccaccio's plots, but he quickly moved outside them and beyond
them. Boccaccio can be seen less as a writer who gave Chaucer
some stories to translate, more as a writer who inspired what
was most original in Chaucer.
In any case, Chaucer was soon off and running as a poet. It
might be said that Chaucer entered his "English" phase
by combining what he learned from others into something quite
distinctively his own. Just as his English is a liberating combination
of the harsh robustness of Old English with the lilting smoothness
of French, so his poetry is a liberating combination of the narrative
vividness of Italian story with the gentle grace of French poetic
forms. Above all, though, just as Chaucer did honor to the literature
of the Continent by importing it into England, he also improved
it and made it distinctively English and distinctively Chaucerian.
Chaucer had "sources" in Continental literature for
almost everything he wrote, yet almost everything he wrote is
uniquely his own.
Much of what we know about Chaucer's personal life, even during
his later years, is not very exciting. We know that he was appointed
to be a customs official, a member of Parliament from Kent, clerk
of the King's works, and subforester. We know that he formed
friendships with many important courtiers and with other English
poets--most notably John Gower, his older contemporary. We know
that he was married to a woman named Philippa and that he fathered
two sons, Lewis and Thomas. We know that he translated Boethius's
Consolation of Philosophy from the Latin, and that he
worked at a series of stories called, appropriately, The Legend
of Good Women. We know that he wrote an extended prose scientific
document known as his Treatise on the Astrolabe--still
referred to by scientists who want to know how astronomical reckonings
were made in the Middle Ages. We know that he periodically read
his works aloud to a circle of friends in court and possibly
at other occasions away from the court.
And we know that he distributed copies of his works in manuscript--though
none of these in his own hand or copied during his own lifetime
seems to have survived. The surviving Chaucer manuscripts all
were copied after his death, most of them in professional workshops
employing several scribes. The printed book was not to become
a reality until a century later, but when it did, Chaucer was
the first English poet to have his works collected and printed
in book form. We must be careful, incidentally, about what we
mean when we refer to "Chaucer's poems." Presumably
he wrote several drafts of his poems, but the poems we read as
"his" may be something different from what he wrote:
they were copied, perhaps not accurately, by scribes, edited
by workshop hacks, and again by modern editors.
It is difficult to make from the scanty documentary materials
600 years old anything like an exciting novel about Chaucer--though
some of those materials suggest that his life was not without
excitement. We know that at several times in his life Chaucer
was short of money and was sued for debts. We know that in one
unfortunate week in September, 1390, he was robbed at least twice,
possibly three times. We know of a report of a legal record,
now lost, that Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a
Franciscan friar in London's Fleet Street. We would love to know
more about the incident, but the record is gone and we are left
to speculate on whether there is any connection between that
event and Chaucer's negative depiction of friars in the Canterbury
Tales.
More interesting, and more substantial, is a legal record
in of 1380, when Chaucer would have been approaching 40. In this
Latin record a certain Cecelia Chaumpaigne agrees to release
a certain Geoffrey Chaucer from all further legal actions concerning
"de raptu meo." There has been much speculation
about whether this was, indeed, sexual rape. Might it have been
some sort of "abduction"? Was Chaucer merely standing
in for one of his high-born friends in the royal family? Was
Cecilia Chaumpaigne a credible accuser? Anything is possible,
but in fact we simply don't know more than the sparse record
shows, and it shows that Chaucer acknowledges, and eventually
pays, a debt of ten pounds--a sum equal to approximately half
his yearly wage as a customs official. Until we get some evidence
to the contrary, it seems best not to make excuses for Chaucer.
Given the few records that do relate to this incident, it seems
best to assume that Chaucer was probably accused of sexual rape.
The fact that he was willing to pay a substantial sum to settle
out of court suggests that he may have acknowledged some guilt.
We can probably never know for sure about Chaucer's famous rape
case, however, and we are left to speculate about who Cecelia
Chaumpaigne was and what sort of relationship Chaucer had with
her. So little is known about Chaucer's personal life that we
can be sure of almost nothing about his relationship with his
wife, let alone with a woman about whose parentage and situation
in life we know nothing.
Indeed, we know, finally, little about Chaucer himself. We
cannot even be sure what he looked like. Someone who measured
a bone thought to be his when it was dug up from the Poet's Corner
of Westminster Abbey, London, in 1889, estimated that he may
have been around five-and-a-half feet tall, and a crude drawing
in the Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, made
after his death, shows him to be vaguely distinguished-looking.
In the end, however, we have no better record of his looks than
the words that Chaucer himself puts into the mouth of the raucous--and
presumably portly--innkeeper Harry Bailey in the Canterbury
Tales:
"He in the waast is shape as wel as I.
This were a popet in an arm t'enbrace
For any womman, smal and fair of face.
He seemeth elvyssh by his contenaunce. |
(VII, 700-03)
|
We must, of course, make allowances for the fact that Chaucer
was here putting into the mouth of another a probably-satiric
portrait of himself. What matters most, of course, about this
small, round-bellied, fair-faced, elfish doll of a man is his
poetry. We would care nothing about his life or looks if he had
not written great poetry, and that poetry tells us all that we
really need to know about him.
One of Chaucer's most original early poems was the Parliament
of Fowls, a dream vision in which the speaker visits the
Garden of Love on Valentine's Day and observes the various species
of birds attempting to select their mates for the coming year.
Although the Parliament gets off to a slow start and is
not Chaucer's finest work, the second half gives early example
of what was to be his own, distinctively English, stride. The
dramatic interplay of voices from all classes of society prefigures
the work that virtually all scholars recognize as Chaucer's masterpiece,
the Canterbury Tales. Although Boccaccio's wonderful Decameron
probably suggested to Chaucer the idea of a group of travelers
entertaining and enlightening each other while on a journey,
the scheme of the Canterbury Tales is distinctively his
own. Chaucer gives us not ten noblemen and women traveling away
from a horrible death by bubonic plague, but rather 29 men and
women from virtually all English classes traveling toward a chance
to position themselves for a better kind of death. And the links
between the tales are made up not of the author describing, as
Boccaccio does, what the ten travelers do, but of the 29 pilgrims
themselves showing through dialogue and interaction who they
are.
And if the tales themselves, that wonderful double handful
of stories, almost all derive from Continental sources, every
one of them gives evidence of the only indisputably important
fact about Chaucer's life: that he was England's first important
poet and, before Shakespeare, its most influential one. If, about
Chaucer, the rest is silence, that is no real matter.
- Primary source: Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer
(Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1992).
Chapter One of Backgrounds
to Chaucer, Peter G. Beidler, Lehigh University
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