The Age of Chaucer

 From A Short History of English Literature, 2nd ed., by Robert Barnard (Blackwell, 1994).

 

1. THE AGE OF CHAUCER

England in the mid-fourteenth century, the England in which Chaucer, Langland and the author of Gawain grew up, was to all appearances a country cresting a wave of success. In Edward III it had a glamorous, efficient king, and one who appreciated the value of the outward show of monarchy—pageantry, honours, patronage. His court was a centre of culture and chivalry renowned over Europe. With the French monarchy relatively weak, England was losing its status as a dim little off-shore island and attaining the rank of European power. Its seamen were forging links  all over Europe an North Africa; its merchants were prospering, forming the beginnings of a solid middle-class. It was a confident, exuberant age. The king had just founded the greatest order of English chivalry, the Order of the Garter, basing it on a celebrated act of chivalry performed by the king towards the Countess of Salisbury. 

The reality was rather different—just as the reality behind the garter incident was rather different (according to one account the Countess was wife of the king's best friend, and he raped her). The Black Death of 1348, and subsequent plagues only slightly less terrible, had undermined the whole basis of feudal society, and the Peasant's revolt of 1381 and the civil wars of the next century were evidence of the decline and ultimate collapse of the traditional medieval class structure. Edward's French wars in pursuit of a dubious claim to the French crown over-stretched English resources and proved a chimera which was to delude English kings and impoverish their country for a century. Edward's England, then, was a glorious structure built on dangerously flimsy foundations—a thriving, exciting, fluid age, which finds brilliant expression in the work of its greatest poet. 

Geoffrey Chaucer (?1340-1400) is the first English writer whom we today can read with anything like ease and he is one who sepaks with particular directness to the modern reader. He was a servant of the court and on occasion its emissary abroad, yet he was born into the middle class which was then so rapidly consolidating its position. Thus his contacts ranged from the highest to the lowest in this changing, threatened, feudal society, and with his extraordinary appetite for all manifestations of human aspiration and human folly he was abrle to capture the essence of fourteenth-century life in a way no contemporary in Britain or on the Continent, could rival.

The plan of Chaucer's last and greatest work, The Canterbury Tales, was not original: to gather together a heterogenous collection of people and have them tell a series of stories—moral stories, romantic stories, bawdy stories, fables. It is Chaucer's genius for characterization and his feeling for social relationships, for the personal, moral and class tensions between people, that give his work a warmth and depth that other similar medieval collections lack. The people on his pilgrimage are described in the masterly 'General Prologue.' they frequently sepak for themseves in the prologues to the 'Tales,' they reveal—often unconsciously—further aspects of their natures in their choice of tale and manner of telling it, and in the conversations, disputes and fights that occur between the tales we get a further sense of medieval humanity at its most unzipped and outrageous.

The pictures of the pilgrims in the 'General Prologue' are little masterpieces of characterization in which what seems at first sight to be a mere accumulation of detail, often quite haphazard, turns out on closer reading to be full of sly innuendo and subtle juxtapositions. If the Prioress wears a brooch with the inscription Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Conquers All), is it love of God or of man that is referred to? What exactly does it mean when we are told that the Shipman, if he took prisoners by sea, 'by water he sent them home to every land'? (It means he threw them into the water to drown). What precisely does Chaucer mean to imply when he says that the Wife of Bath (for whom the pilgrimage was a combination of package tour and husband-hunt) was very good at 'wandering by the way'? Two lines, placed together, will illuminate a character and his profession. The excellence of the Cook's creamed chicken is placed next to a description of the foul ulcer on his shin; the description of the worldly monk as a fine prelate comes next to a description of his gourmet taste in food; in the portrait of the Wife of Bath we get this: 

She was a worthy woman all her live:

Husbands at chruche door she hadde five...

Sometimes these characters speak with a naturalness or an intensity that like a trumpet brings down the walls of the centuries between us and them. 'Alas, alas, that ever love was sin!' cries the Wife of Bath—who apart from the five husbands has enjoyed 'other company in youth',' so she clearly hasn't been unduly inhibited. 'Let Austin have his swink to him reserved!' ('Let Saint Augustine do his own bl— work!' expostulates the Monk, when he is reminded that the founder of his religious order included hard work among the daily tasks of the monks. 

In the tales these people tell, too, we have a wonderful picture of all sides of medieval life, but there is also that tang of modernity that makes our heart stop as we relize our kinship with them. The Pardoner tells his story of the riotous group of young men who decide to seek out and kill Death—and we recognize the teenage rowdies in our own streets. The Nun's Priest tells an animal fable about a about a chicken run—about Chauntecleer who with his six wives, his parade of learning, and his overwhelming conceit is the perfect male chauvinist cock—and even in these days we recognize pale shadows of his type. The bawdy tales of the Miller and the Reeve are funny today precisely because of the swift, economical, humane delineation of characters we can recognize: the story of someone getting branded on the bare behind may be funny on first reading, but it is only funny on second reading if you are interested in the man behind the behind.

Every sort of story is here, and every technique of story-telling in its most modern form. The Wife of Bath's Prologue (longer and better than her actual Tale) tells in shameless detail how she gained mastery over one after another of her husbands, and one gropes towards Joyce's Molly Bloom for comparisons; the Reeve's Tale tells a story of complicated changings of bed-partners which reminds us of nothing so much as a modern French farce. At one point in the Nun's Priest's Tale Chauntecleer, who has dreamed he has been seized by a fox, launches into an enormously long disquisition on the theory of dreams, their meaning in history and literature, intended to put down his silly wives who have pooh-poohed the prophetic significance of his dream. so long and rambling is it that we are about to say how medieval and dated this all is when suddenly Chauntecleer end his lecture and is so puffed up with his learning and his debating victory over his wives that he forgets the point of the whole thing, jumps down into the hen-run—and is seized by a fox. The long disquisition has been an example of Chaucer's mastery of one of the gifts of a great story-teller—that of timing.

The Canterbury Tales were unfinished at Chaucer's death. The greatest long poem he completed was the slightly earlier Troilus and Criseyde, a superb re-working of one of the most popular medieval accretions to the legends of Troy. The framework is superficially a courtly love stroy—of how prince Troilus courts the lovely widow Criseyde, how she is ent to join her father in the Grecian camp, and is there unfaithful to him. But Chaucer's treatment of this simple story is wholly modern in tone, particularly in its treatment of the central characters. Criseyde is the first depiction in depth of a woman in our literature, and still one of the finest. She is a widow, contentedin her solitude and independence: 

I am myn owne woman, wll at ease...

Shal noon housbonde seyn to me 'checkmate!'

For whither they ben full of jealousye,

Or masterful, or loven noveltye.    (novelty)

Chaucer's sympathy with Criseyde shows itself in the way he meticulously dtails the considerations that drive her into Troilus's arms: since her father's defection to the Greeks she is alone in a hostile city; flattered by the attentions of a Prince, she feels the stars are ordaining that she fall to him; she is pestered by her cousin Pandarus, who acts as pimp for his friend Troilus. From being the prototype of the faithless woman, as she is in much of medieval literature, Chaucer transforms Criseyde into the tragic symbol of war's efffects on human relationships and fates.

The unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, writing at around the same time as Chaucer, seems at first sight more remote from the present-day reader: his alliterative verse-form was old-fashioned even in his own day; his dialect, that of North-West England, is much more difficult for us; and his subject-matter does not immediately call on us to claim kinship with medieval man, as Chaucer's does in his best tales. Sir Gawain is a story of King Arthur's knights, but the courtly romance is married to archetypal folk myths and to religion: the knights are challenged at Christmas by a green knight—who is beheaded, yet speaks on and issues a challenge for the succeeding Christmas. But there is in fact nothing primitive in this stroy-teller's art: behind the odd mixture of the courtly, the Christian and the mythic is a delicate morality about man's duty—as knight, as lover, as Christian. By involving Sir Gawain in a supernatural challenge the author nullifies mny of his attributes as a perfect knight; and when he has him sexually tempted by his host's wife he involves him in delicate questions of conscience concerning his duty as knight and his duty to his host—questions that can be resolved only by marrying courtly and Christian codes. Through both these plot elements he succeeded in relating the idealized world of Arthur with the real world he knew. If Gawain demands more of us, as readers, than Chaucer does, we are ultimately convinced we are in the presence of as great an artist. This feeling is augmented by the other poems probably by him bound into the same single surviving manuscript—particularly Pearl, a lament for the loss of his daughter that goes some way towards negativing Barbara Tuchman's judgment that medieval man was uninterested in children, and that 'emotion in relation to them rarely appears in art or literature'.

The other major work of the age of Chaucer, The Vision of Piers Plowman, is also written in the alliterative verse style of Gawain, but it displays a very different kind of mind. Its author—William Langland—is a name to us only, but he is usually conjectured to be a rural priest, and one agonized by the social abuses of his time. Using the framework of a dream—a favourite medieval device—the poem covers a wide spectrum from social satire to religious allegory, as the author puts foward his notion of what a truly Christian community would be, and how sadly far the England he knows falls short of it. His hatred of pride, greed and ostentation, his almost 'nonconformist' conscience, ally him with later writers in the puritan tradition such as the Milton of Lycidas and John Bunyan. And like Bunyan he retained his popularity with ordinary readers long after his own time—at least until the Elizabethan age. 

After his inexplicably rich harvest of literary genius in the fifteeenth century is a sad, barren period. The splendour of Edward's court gave way to popular discontent, factional strife and the desolating futility of the Wars of the Roses, with two factions of noble thugs disputing a crown that increasingly seemed not worth the winning. In England, in spite of the establishment of Caxton's printing press, literary activity was at its lowest ebb—at best imitative, uncertain of aim, fleeing from the disagreable present into nostalgia. Even Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur—a collection and retelling of the early French and English legends of King Arthur—while a superb example of the potential of English prose, nevertheless at times seems enervated and lacking in conviction, as if the knightly ideal the author was celebrating seemed even to himself remote and impossible in a country torn apart by its own nobility.

The richest poetic harvest was late in the century in Scotland. This kingdom, enjoying unusual stability under a succession of talented Stuart kings, produced several poets of consequence, notably Robert Henryson (?1430-?1506) and William Dunbar (?1460-1513). Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is a sort of sequel to Chaucer's poem in which the faithless Cressid contracts leprosy. Its dialect (and perhaps its subject) will always prevent its enjoying the wide popularity of Chaucer's poem, yet it can be mentioned in the same breath without bathos, which is more than can be said of most fifteenth-century poems inspired by Chaucer. And Dunbar's famous 'Lament for the Makaris' (or poets), with its haunting, disturbing refrain Timor mortis conturbat me (I am troubled by the fear of death) may be taken as a requiem for a sad, confused, barren century:

The state of man does change and vary

Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary     (sorry)

Now dansand merry, now like to die;

        Timor mortis conturbat me...

He takis the knichtis in to field 

Enarmit under helm and shield, 

Victor he is at all mellie         (battles)

        Timor mortis conturbat me.

 

 

Piers Plowman (In Our Time)

 

—oOo—

 

 

(...)

The 'Pearl' Poet

From A Literary History of England (ed. A. C. Baugh), ch. XIV, "The Alliterative Revival", by Kemp Malone and A. C. Baugh.



In the last few chapters—on the romance, the religious omnibus, the lyric, and the writings of the mystics—we have become increasingly aware of the intense literary activity that marks the whole fourteenth century, and activity that reaches its culmination for most readers today in the great narrative poetry of Chaucer. It is an activity that extends from one end of England to the other, an activity in which London and the court participate to no overwhelming extent but rather share along with many other sections of the country. The widespread distribution of the ferment that was at work is indicated perhaps nowhere more plainly than in the emergence about 1350 of the Old English alliterative tradition after it had lain hidden for nearly two hundred years.

Alliterative verse

Roughly between the years 1350 and 1400 there appeared a score of poems, ranging from a few hundred lines to several thousand, in a metre which had clearly evolved in an unbroken development from the old four-beat alliterative measure of Beowulf and Cynewulf. It is not an antiquarian revival, but the reappearance of a metrical pattern which has undergone considerable change. The line has become in most cases the unit of thought, and the alliteration is therefore not so much structural as decorative. With some poets hunting the letter becomes a passion, and the alliteration falls on three syllables in a half-line or is carried through several consecutive lines. Verse of this sort was obviously associated in Chaucer's mind with the north, as is indicated by the well-known words of the Parson:

But trusteth well, I am a Southern man,
I can not geste—rum, ram, ruf—by lettre.

And most of the poems in the alliterative revival belong to the north and to the northwest Midlands. While one of the most important—Piers Plowman—has its origin in the west Midlands, we may think of the alliterative revival as occurring in the north and more particularly the northwest of England.

Three of the earliest poems in the revival, Alexander A, Alexander B, and William of Palerne, have already been discussed in the chapters on the romance. There we have likewise treated other later romances in alliterative verse, such as The Wars of Alexander, The Destruction of Troy, the Morte Arthure, and the religious romance The Destruction of Jerusalem. It is not practicable to include them again here, where as part of the alliterative movement they would be fully entitled to a place. (NOTE 1)  We shall have to be content with this brief reference, and confine ourselves in this and the following chapter to the other classes of alliterative poetry. In the present chapter we shall treat the works of the Pearl poet and one or two poems in some ways related to his. In the chapter which follows we shall consider a group of poems concerned with social and ethical questions, of which the most important is the great social document Piers Plowman.

NOTE 1: See above, pp. 182 ff. On the later alliterative movement in Scotland see Sir William Craigie, "The Scottish Alliterative Poems," Proc. Brit. Acad. xxviii (1942): 217-236.

The Pearl Poet

Of the many unique manuscripts gathered together in the seventeenth century by the famous antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, among which are the Beowulf codex, the two texts of Layamon's Brut, the Ludus Coventriae and others less famous, one is a modest quarto volume known as Nero A. X. (NOTE 2). The contents consist of four alliterative poems in a hand of the end of the fourteenth century. Acoompanying the text are twelve illustrations of quite crude workmanship depicing episodes in some of the poems. None of the texts is accompanied by any title, but they have been named, in the order of their occurrence in the manuscript, the Pearl, Purity (or Cleanness), Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

NOTE 2. It is reproduced in facsimile in EETS, 162 [Early English Text Society series].

The Pearl (NOTE 3) is not only first in the manuscript but shares with the Gawain the first place in the interest of modern readers. In a hundred stanzas of twelve lines each (NOTE 4), ingeniously linked in groups of five by repetition and a refrain, the poet tells how a lovely pearl, smooth and white, slipped from his hands into the grass and was lost in the ground. In his grief he often visits the spot which covers his pearl, and one August day, lulled by the fragance of herbs and flowers, he falls asleep on the little mound. There as he slumbers he dreams that he is in another world, a world of crystal cliffs, bright woods, and strands pebbled with precious stones. Such sights make him forget his grief, and he wanders about in sheer delight. Finally he comes upon a stream, clear and sparkling, beyond which he thinks must be Paradise. It is backed by a crystal cliff, at the foot of which sits a child—

A gracious maiden full debonaire;
Glistening white was her robe:
I knew her well; I had seen her before.

NOTE 3. Edited by Richard Morris (2ed, 1869; EETS, I). Sir Israel Gollancz (1891; 1921) and Charles C. Osgood (1906; Belles-Lettres Ser.). A translation is included in Gollancz's edition, and there are modern renderings by G. G. Coulton (1907), Osgood (1907), Sophe Jewett (1908), and Stanley P. Chase (1932).

NOTE 4. The rime scheme is abababab bcbc. There are 101 stanzas, but one is considered spurious or was canceled by the author.

The longer he looks at her the better he knows her. He has an impulse to call her, but seeing her in so strange a place deters him. She is spotless, and her dress is trimmed profusely with pearls. She wears a crown, from beneath which her hair falls loosely on her shoulders. No tongue could fittingly describe the sight:

So clean was it and clear and pure,
That precious pearl where it was set.

Thus arrayed she comes down to the brink. She was nearer to me, he says, than aunt or niece. Finally she speaks to him and he then addresses her:

O Pearl, quoth I, in pearls bedight,
Art thou my pearl that I have 'plain'd,
Regretted when all alone at night?
Much longing for thee have I restrained
Since into the grass thou didst from me glide.

Grown in stature and in wisdom, she reveals to him her life as spouse of the Heavenly Bridegroom. The dreamer's pearl was not lost when it was put in a coffer so comely as is this gracious garden. Along with thousands of others she shares a most happy lot. When the poet objects that she did nothing to deserve so great a reward, since she "lived not two years in our land" and knew neither her Paternoster nor Creed, she enters upon an elaborate discourse on the part played by merit and grace in salvation and the equality of the saved before God (NOTE 5), illustrating her views at length by biblical parables. The poet is finally granted a view of her abode—the New Jerusalem—vividly adapted from the Apocalypse. His effort in trying to cross the stream and reach the heavenly city wakens him from his dream, and he rises from the mound on which he had slumbered, filled with a new spiritual strength.

NOTE 5. The orthodoxy of the poet's views was questioned by Carleton F. Brown, "The Author of The Pearl Considered in the Light of His Theological Opinions," PMLA, XIX (1904), 115-53, and defended by James Sledd, MLN, LV (1940), 381. While his attitude toward grace has been shown to be good doctrine, equality of reward appears to be stressed beyond medieval orthodoxy.

The Allegory

This beautiful and seemingly transparent allegory has been interpreted in various ways and has led to considerable controversy. The traditional view sees in the poem an elegy in which the poet grieves for the death of a two-year-old daughter and is consoled by her in a vision of a common medieval type. This view was challenged by Schofield in 1904, who denied the autobiographical interpretation and suggested that the poet was merely upholding the virtue of purity under the symbolism of a pearl, with appropriate personification (NOTE 6). While his view has not found much favor (NOTE 7) his example has led others to attempt new explanations and various modifications of the original interpretation. The Pearl has been taken as symbolizing the Eucharist (NOTE 8) and more recently as recording a state of "spiritual dryness" experienced by the poet and not unknown to religious and to mystics (NOTE 9). Still others have sought to reconcile the elegiacal and symbolical interpretations (NOTE 10). There is symbolism, to be sure, in incidental ways in the poem, and the problems of divine grace and the equality of heavenly rewards constitute the major theme for discussion, but there are too many features which are meaningless on any other assumption than that the poet mourns the loss of a real child (NOTE 11). The poem treats certain aspects of salvation in the framework of a personal elegy, employing the medieval conventions of vision and debate.

NOTE 6. W. H. Schofield, "The Nature and Fabric of The Pearl," PMLA, xix (1904). 154-215; "Symbolism, Allegory, and Autobiography in The Pearl," PMLA, xxiv (1909). 585-675.

NOTE 7. Schofield's interpretation was opposed by Coulton in MLR, ii (1907). 39-43.

NOTE 8. R. M. Garrett, The Pearl—An Interpretation (Seattle, 1918; Univ. of Wash. Pub. in English, (Vol. iv., No. 1).

NOTE 9. Sister M. Madeleva, Pearl: A Study in Spiritual Dryness (1925).

NOTE 10. Jefferson B. Fletcher, "The Allegory of the Pearl," JEGP, xx (1921). 1-21., and René Wellek, "The Pearl: An Interpretation of the Middle-English Poem," Studies in English (Charles Univ., Prague), iv (1933). 1-33. Both these papers stress the complex character of the symbolism.

NOTE 11. For an attempt to identify the child, see Oscar Cargill and Margaret Schlauch, "The Pearl and Its Jeweler," PMLA, xliii (1928), 105-123.

A personal elegy

Viewed as a personal elegy the Pearl is a poem of deep feeling, the poet's grief yielding gradually to resignation and spiritual reconciliation. In its sensuous beauty, its artistic restraint, its skilful manipulation of a complex and difficult metrical pattern, and its imaginatively beautiful descriptions of the garden, the pearl-maiden, and the New Jerusalem, it is in its best parts unsurpassed by anything in Middle English poetry.

Purity

In two respects Purity (NOTE 12), the second poem in the manuscript, resembles the Pearl—in its preoccupation with an ethical question and in its predilection for extended paraphrases of biblical incident. For here we have a discourse on purity, showing how impossible it is for one who is unclean to approach God's pure presence, and enforcing the point by the parable of the man without a wedding garment. This and other episodes such as the fall of Lucifer and the Expulsion from Paradise are merely preliminary, however, to the main purpose, which is to tell the stories of the Flood, the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the profanation of the holy vessels in Belshazzar's Feast. The homiletic purpose is plain, and at the end the poet not only reminds us that "upon thrynne wyses" he has showed the sorrow that uncleanness causes our Lord but he closes with a prayer for grace. The stories are vividly told, but the poem suffers by comparison with the Pearl through the lack of any framework or artistic motivation.

NOTE 12.  Edited by Richard Morris (2ed., 1869; EETS, i)., Robert J. Menner (1920; Yale Stud. in English, 61), and Sir Israel Gollancz (1921).

Patience
 
This is also true of its companion piece, Patience (NOTE 13), which devotes all but the first sixty of its 531 lines to the story of Jonah and the whale. But concentration upon a single subjet gives greater unity to the piece, and the poet has allowed his imagination freer rein in embellishing his theme. He shows us the activity in getting under sail, describes vividly the storm at sea, pictures with realistic detail the slimy insides of the whale, and reports dramatically Jonah's conversations with God. God's rebuke of Jonah for his impatience leads the poet to his closing reflection. He who is too hasty in tearing his clothes will often sit sewing them up. Even poverty must be borne with patience, which "is a noble point, though it displease oft." In both Purity and Patience the poet's principal indebtedness is to the Bible, and the Pearl not only draws its parables from the same source but derives its description of the New Jerusalem from the Apocalypse. Other sources in Tertullian, an eclogue of Boccaccio, and even the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry have been suggested but with the possible exception of Boccaccio's eclogue, must be described as very doubtful. The poet refers once to Jean de Meun and his part of the Roman de la Rose, and he has drawn scattered details in Purity from Mandeville's Travels in their French form. But while the author of these poems was apparently well read, we have not been very successful in tracking down the sources of his inspiration outside of the Scriptures.

NOTE 13.  Edited by Richard Morris (as above), Hartley Bateson (Manchester, 191; 2ed., 1918), and Israel Gollancz (1913).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

There seems to be no reason to doubt that the three poems the Pearl, Purity, and Patience are the work of one man. The fourth poem in the transcript is of such a different kind that if it were not found in association with the others we might well hesitate to attribute it to the same authorship, in spite of obvious stylistic resemblances (NOTE 14). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (NOTE 15) is a courtly romance, the finest Arthurian romance in English. Though it exemplifies the knightly virtues of courage and truth, it is in no sense a story told to enforce a moral. It is quite in the spirit of French romance, told for its own sake.

NOTE 14. Apart from the stylistic features common to all four poems, there are noteworthy parallels between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Purity. It should be remembered, however, that the romance also shows many striking parallels in phrases and lines with the Wars of Alexander.

NOTE 15. There are older editions by Sir Frederic Madden for the Bannatyne Club (1839) and Richard Morris (1864; EETS, 4); revised by I. Gollancz (1897 and 1912), but the romance is best studied in the edition of J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon (1925) or the new edition of Sir Israel Gollancz with introductory essays by Mabel Day and Mary S. Serjeantson (1940; EETS, 210). Modern renderings by Jessie L. Weston (1898), often reprinted, T. H. Banks (1929), G. H. Gerould (1934), etc. are available separately or in anthologies.

Subject Matter and Treatment

 The plot itself is so well known as to need no retelling. The main adventure is the challenge, which Gawain accepts of an exchange of blows with the Green Knight, in which he beheads the challenger but must submit to the same hazard a year later. With this is combined the adventure at Bertilak's castle, in which Gawain is tempted on three successive mornings by his host's wife and in which his only fault is concealing the magic girdle which she gives him. Both of these stories are found separately either in Celtic or in Old French romances (NOTE 16). They are first found combined in the English poem (NOTE 17), and whether we owe the combination to the English poet or to his source we must grant that it was a happy inspiration which tied the three temptations to the three blows offered Gawain at the Green Chapel and made the wound received from the third blow the result of his concealing the girdle. Accepting the supernatural as a prerogative of medieval story, we have a skilfully contrived plot (NOTE 18), a feature always worthy of remark in medieval romance. But it is only one, and that perhaps the least, of the qualities which give this remarkable poem its high place among English romances. From the beginning almost to the end it proceeds by a succession of scenes and situations full of color and movement and vivid detail. We begin with the New Year's feast, the guests exchanging greetings and gifts, the maidens laughing and making mirth till it is time to eat, then washing and seating themselves at tables. Just as the music ceases and the first course has been served the Gren Knight enters. He is fully described—stature, appearance, dress, armor, horse, trappings—as he rides straight up to the daïs. And so it goes from episode to episode like a succession of tapestries or medieval illuminations. The descriptions of the seasons as they mark the passing of the year and bring Gawain to the time when he must set out to keep his pledge are no mere literary exercises, and the hunting scenes have all the excitement and lifelikeness of first-hand experience or observation. Striking, too, is the poet's mastery of dialogue, always easy and natural, but particularly skilful in the extended conversations between Gawain and the lady of the castle, as she seeks an opening and he adroitly evades and parries each thrust. Finally, one should remark the dexterous way in which the poet keeps the various actions moving forward simultaneously, passing from the dalliance of the lady to the husband's adventures in the chase and back again to the bed chamber until all parties are brought together naturally at the end of the day. But there is no end of things to exclaim over and we can only hint at the enjoyment to be had from reading and rereading this fine romance (NOTE 19).

NOTE 16. The fullest study of the sources of the romance is George L. Kittredge, A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, Mass., 1916). The challenge or beheading game is found in an episode inown as The Champion's Bargain which closes the Irish romance (at least as old as the eleventh century) of Fled Bricrend, or Bricriu's Feast. From there it passed into French where it was embodied independently into four separate romances (the Livre de Caradoc, incorporated in the first continuation of Chrétien's Perceval, the short thirteenth-century romance La Mule sanz Frain, the prose Grail romance known as the Perlesvaus in which the adventure is attributed to Lancelot, and another thirteenth-century romance entitled Gawain et Humbaut in which the ending has been completely changed). Parallels to the temptation motif are not so close, but in one form or another it is found in the Old French Ider, in the late English Carl of Carlisle, and elsewhere.

NOTE 17. There are many theories accounting for this combination. Kittredge believed that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was based on a lost French romance in which the adventures were combined. J. R. Hulbert, "Syr Gawayn and the Grene Knygt," MP, XIII (1915-16). 433-462, 689-730, believes they were originally joined in a Fairy Mistress story as the conditions which the hero must fulfill. Else von Schaubert, "Der englische Ursprung von Syr Gawayn and the Grene Knygt," ESt, LVII (1923). 330-446, maintains that they were first combined by the English poet. This is also the view of Miss Day in the essay noted above. O. Löhmann, Die Sage von Gawain und dem grünen Ritter (Königsberg, 1938), likewise believes in the English origin of the romance, but argues that a Fairy Mistress story has been changed into a test of the hero.

NOTE 18. The idea that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is connected in some way with the Order of the Garter is most fully advocated in Isaac Jackson, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight considered as a 'Garter' Poem," Anglia, XXXVII (1913). 393-423, and opposed by J. R. Hulbert in the article already referred to (MP. XIII, especially pp. 710 ff.).

NOTE 19. In the absence of any objective evidence for determining the order of composition it has seemed best to treat the poems in the order in which they occur in the manuscript. Patience and Purity probably belong together, and since Purity has a number of parallels with the Gawain, it probably stands closer to the latter. On artistic grounds the Pearl and Gawain should follow the homiletic pieces, though this is not a safe criterion for pieces unlike in kind. One could argue for an order which would put the Gawain first, followed by the Pearl, the bereavement in which led the poet to the moral concerns of Purity and Patience. Such an order would have the advantage of putting Patience after Purity, to which it is superior in structure and unity.

The Author

All that we know about the author of these four poems is what can be cautiously inferred from his work, and all attempts to identify him with Huchown, Strode, or any other individual have failed. The dialect of the manuscript, which there is no reason to think differs essentially from that of the author, would indicate that he belonged to the northwest Midlands, probably south Lancashire, and this general locality is supported by the landscape and local allusions in the poems. He need not have been a priest in spite of his preoccupation with theological and moral questions, though a position as chaplain in some nobleman's household would make such an interest natural and account for his familiarity with the ways of courtly life. Naturally, however, such knowledge could be otherwise accounted for. His vocabulary contains a large French element which might result from his social status or his acquaintance with French literature. This was certainly considerable. He impresses us as a man of cosmopolitan taste whose horizon was not bounded by the limits of a provincial neighborhood. That he was at once observant and imaginative is apparent. His literary activity coincides roughly with the earlier part of Chaucer's career, and in the absence of more precise information we cannot do better than to date his work c. 1375.

St Erkenwald

Various other alliterative poems have from time to time been atrributed to the Pearl poet. Among them the one that has found most supporters is St. Erkenwald (NOTE 20), which attributes to the Old English bishop of this name a miracle not otherwise recorded. When St. Paul's in London was being rebuilt a tomb was uncovered in which was the body of a pagan judge. Since he had always been just in his awards, his body and clothing were still as fresh as at the time of his death. At Erkenwald's bidding the corpse reveals its identity, whereupon the bishop's tears fall on the body, constituting baptism and releasing the soul. Bodily decay at once sets in. The story is told in 352 clear and straightforward verses, but the present writer at least cannot accept the attribution to the Pearl poet.

NOTE 20. Edited by Horstmann, Altengliche Legenden (1881), Gollancz (1922), and Henry L. Savage (1926; Yale Stud. in English, 72).

Pistel of Swete Susan

Associated with the poems previously discussed is a short piece of twenty-eight tail-rime stanzas, each with thirteen alliterative lines, called the Pistel of Swete Susan (NOTE 21). It tells the story of Susanna and the Elders from the thirteenth chapter of Daniel (in the Vulgate), with the description of the garden embellished with details drawn from the Roman de la Rose. It is told simply and effectively, at times with the deft touches of an artist. When Susanna, allowed to speak to her husband, has avowed her innocence and fidelity to him,

Thei toke the feteres of hire feete,
And evere he kyssed that swete;
"In other world schal we mete."
     Seide he no mare. (lines 257-60)

A passage in Wyntoun's Orygynale Cronykil (c. 1420) asserts that the author was Huchown of the Awle Ryale (Royal Court), who is there credited also with the Gret Gest off Arthure and the Awyntyre off Gawane (NOTE 22). The attribution cannot be accepted, but the passage has led some to believe that Huchown was not only the Pearl poet but the author of most of the poems in the alliterative revival (NOTE 23).  Naturally such extravagant claims have not met with much favor. While the six poems discussed in the present chapter are linked together by certain features of subject matter and treatment it seems best to hold to the conservative view which limites the work of the Pearl poet to the poems preserved in the famous Cotton manuscript.

NOTE 21. Edited by Hans Köster, Huchown's Pistel of Swete Susan (Strassburg, 1895; Quellen und Forschungen, LXXVI).

NOTE 22.

He made the Gret Gest off Arthure
And the Awyntyre off Gawane
The Pystill als off Swete Swsane....

The Gret Gest off Arthure is believed to be the alliterative Morte Arthure, presumably in its fuller form (see ch. X, above). The Awyntyre off Gawane is identified by those who believe Huchown to be the Pearl poet with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by others with the Awyntyrs of Arthur (see p. 190, note 22).

NOTE 23. George Neilson, 'Huchown of the Awle Ryale', the Alliterative Poet (Glasgow, 1902), who argues that Huchown is to be identified with the "gude Sir Hew of Eglintoun" mentioned by Dunbar in his Lament for the Makaris. In spite of the extravagance of his thesis Neilson's book contains much interesting matter.

Nivel avanzado: Chaucer

NIVEL AVANZADO: Chaucer

- Un resumen hablado del prólogo. Y un resumen de Los cuentos de Canterbury.

_____. The Canterbury Tales. Online ed. by ELF (English Literary Foundation). ME and modern English trans.
    http://www.canterburytales.org/canterbury_tales.html
 

 
- Una videolección sobre Chaucer y el prólogo de los cuentos de Canterbury:

Sherman, Ted. "Chaucer General Prologue Lecture 2." YouTube (Ted Sherman) 21 March 2013.*
    http://youtu.be/1lLtctdlJ6g
   


Y otra:

"Sr A, Chaucer 1, Part A." Video lecture. YouTube http://youtu.be/QJsc_gxNTg4




Saintsbury, George. "7. Chaucer." In The End of the Middle Ages. Vol. 2 (English) of The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller. Online at Bartleby.com
    http://www.bartleby.com/212/


- Un audio de la BBC (In Our Time): Chaucer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003hycq
 

 
- Uno de los poemas breves de Chaucer, sobre la verdad (Truth, "trouthe"):
    http://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2010/10/trouthe.html


- Video lecture by Jason Tondro "Eng 2111#8: Chaucer." YouTube (Jason Tondro) 22 Oct. 2012.*
    http://youtu.be/hw3hg8oDkkY

—oOo— 

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer


From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1343-1400), the son of John Chaucer (c.1312-68), a London vintner. The date of his birth has been much argued, all views now placing it between 1339 and 1346. In 1357 he served with Lionel, afterwards duke of Clarence. In 1359 he was in France with Edward III's invading army, was taken prisoner, and ransomed. He married, perhaps in 1366, Philippa, the daughter of Sir Paon Roet of Hainault and the sister of John of Gaunt's third wife Katherine Swynford. Philippa died in 1387 and Chaucer enjoyed Gaunt's patronage throughout his life. He held a number of positions at court and in the king's service, and he travelled abroad on numerous occasions on diplomatic missions; as well as missions to France, he made a journey to Genoa and Florence in 1372-3 in the course of which he could theoretically have met Boccaccio and (slightly more plausibly) Petrarch. He was sent on to France and Lombardy in 1378. In 1374 he was appointed controller of customs in the port of London and leased his house over Aldgate. He  was knight of the shire for Kent in 1386 and probably lived in Kent for most of the rest of his life. His last official position was deputy forester of the King's Forest at Petyherton in Somerset (1391-8 at least) and it is possible that he lived there for some time. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey where a monument was erected to him in 1555. The known facts of his life are well summarized in The Riverside Chaucer (ed. L. D. Benson et al., 1988), pp. xi-xxii. His writings develop through his career from a period of French influence in the late 1360s (of which the culmination was The Book of the Duchess in about 1370), through his middle period of both French and Italian influences (including The House of Fame in the 1370s and the mature Italian-influenced works of which the most important is Troilus and Criseyde, c. 1385), to the last period of most of the Canterbury Tales and his short lyrics, but this chronology is not very enlightening. His prose works include a translation of Boethius (Boece) and the challenging A Treatise on the Astrolabe, written to 'little Lewis', probably the poet's son. Portraits of Chaucer occur in three places: in the Ellesmere MSS (now in the Huntington Library and the basis of most modern editions); in the manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; and in Hoccleve's The Regement of Princes, beside lines 4.995-6 (in several manuscripts: the best is the one dating from Hoccleve's time, British Library Harley 4866, edited by Furnivall for EETS ES 72).

See D. A. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (1992), P. Boitani and J. Mann (eds.), The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (1986); J. D. North, Chaucer's Universe (1988); J. A. Burrow (ed.), Geoffey Chaucer.


The Book of the Duchess, a dream-poem in 1,334 lines by Chaucer, probably written in 1369, in octosyllabic couplets. It is believed, in accordance with a long-standing tradition (which was questioned in the 1950s), to be an allegorical lament on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt, who died in Sept. 1369.

The love-lorn poet falls asleep reading the story of Ceix (Seys) and Alcyone and follows a hunting party. He meets a knight in black who laments the loss of his lady. The knight tells of her virtue and beauty and of their courtship, and in answer to the dreamer's question declares her dead. The hunting party reappears and a bell strikes twelve, awakening the poet, who finds his book still in his hand. The poem is one of Chaucer's earliest works, but it has great charm and accomplishment. It is founded on the French tradition of the dream as a vehicle for love poetry. 'A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe' by Lydgate is based on it. For an account of the poem, see A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry (1976), 49-73, and B. A. Windeatt, Chaucer's Dream-Poetry: Sources and Analogues (1982).

The House of Fame, an unfinished dream poem by Chaucer, composed at some time between 1374 and 1385. There are three books, in 2,158 lines of octosyllabics; it is believed to be Chaucer's last poem in that French form. The poem remains cryptic, and it is uncertain what its purpose or extent would have been (though the poem says that the third book will, in fact, be the final one).

After the prologue on dreams and the invocation to the god of sleep, Bk 1 says the poet fell asleep and dreamt that he was in a Temple of Glass where he saw depicted Aeneas and Dido (based on Aeneid, 4); the dream moves on to deal more briefly with other parts of the Aeneid. At the end of Bk 1 the poet sees an eagle who alights by him and is his guide through the House of Fame in Bk II (initially suggested, perhaps, by Fama, Rumour, in Aeneid, 4, 173 ff.). The eagle explains, philosophically and at length, how Fame works in its arbitrary ways and the book ends with a vision of the world (thought by some to be amongst Chaucer's most inspired writing: 896-1045). The eagle departs and at the beginning of Bk III Chaucer enters the Palace of Fame (Rumour) where he sees the famous of both classical and biblical lore. Eolus blows a trumpet to summon up the various celebrities who introduce themselves in categories reminiscent of the souls in Dante's Divina commedia. Towards the end of the poem comes a vision of bearers of false tidings: shipmen, pilgrims, pardoners, and messengers, whose confusion seems to be about to be resolved by the appearance of 'A man of gret auctorite . . .'; but there the poem ends. The identity of this figure has been much discussed; Boethius seems the most plausible suggestion. Versions of the poem were made by Lydgate (in The Temple of Glas), Douglas, and Skelton.

See J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer's Book of Fame (1968); S. Delaney, Chaucer's House of Fame (1972); P. Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (1984); also The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson et al. (1988).

Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer's longest complete poem, in 8,239 lines of rhyme-royal [ababbcc] probably written in the second half of the 1380s (J. D. North, RES, 1969, has shown that the events of the poem take place in calendar circumstances corresponding on astrological evidence to dates between 1385 and 1388). Chaucer takes his story from Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, adapting its eight books to five and changing the characters of Criseyde and Pandarus. In Boccaccio Troilo falls in love with Criseida whose cousin, Troilo's friend Pandaro, persuades her, not unwillingly, to become Troilo's lover. In the end Criseida has to leave the Trojan camp to join her father who had defected to the Greeks; in the Greek camp she betrays Troilo by falling in love with Diomede. While following the same narrative pattern, Chaucer deepens the sense of seriousness in the story by making Pandaro Criseida's uncle and guardian, by showing her deliberating at more length (this series of exchanges between uncle and niece in Book II is one of the most admired and anthologized parts of the poem), and by introducing deliberative material, principally from Boethius, calling into question the lovers' freedom of action. The poem ends with an adjuration to the young to repair home from worldly vanity and to place their trust, not in an unstable fortune as Troilus did, but in God. Discussion of the poem has centred largely on the appropriateness of the epilogue to the preceding action, on the attitudes to love (courtly love in particular) in the poem, and on the personality of the narrator and his effect on the narrative. The love story has no basis in classical antiquity but is the invention of Benoit de Sainte-Maure in his Roman de Troie, which was based on the pretended histories of Troy by Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis. Boccaccio's intermediate source was Guido delle Colonne (see TROPHEE).  After Chaucer, the story was treated by Henryson in The Testament of Cresseid and by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida.

Ed. B. A. Windeatt (1984). N. R. Havely, Chaucer's Boccaccio (1980); J. D. North, Chaucer's Universe (1988); B. A. Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde (1992); S. A. Barney (ed.), Critical Essays on Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and His Major Early Poems (1991).

—oOo—

NIVEL AVANZADO:



(Geoffrey Chaucer) 
 

From The Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders.

Despite the manifest political and social disruptions of his age, Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry both expresses and embodies a firm sense of order. This is true as much of his twin masterpieces, Troilus and Criseyde (probably written in the mid-1380s) and The Canterbury Tales (planned c.1387), as of his more modestly conceived 'minor' poems and surviving prose works. This sense of order is evident not simply in his reflections on the nature and workings of the cosmos (such as his prose treatise on the use of the astrolabe, written to instruct his little son Lewis) and in his frequent allusions to Boethius's highly esteemed disquisition De consolatione philosophiae (which Chaucer himself translated into English prose in c.1380) but also in his steady affirmations of an orthodox Christian belief in divine involvement in human affairs. In Troilus and Criseyde, at the end of his evocation of incidents supposed to have taken place at the time of the Trojan War, Chaucer turns from his account of 'payens corsed olde rytes' ('the accursed old rites of the pagans') to a vision of Troilus translated from this world to the next and able to laugh serenely at the woe of those who mourn his death. If tragedy is here transformed into a divine comedy, so the 'olde rytes' are effectively blotted out in the pious concluding address to the Holy Trinity. This exultant prayer, in part derived from Dante, sees the Triune God as reigning eternally over all things and setting his mystical seal on human aspiration.
Chaucer (c.1343-1400), in common with most of his European contemporaries, also recognized that the natural and the human worlds could be seen as interrelated in the divine scheme of things, and, like the kingdom of heaven, ordered in hierarchies. In the witty, elegantly formed The Parlement of Foulys, written, it has been argued, to compliment the marriage of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia in 1382, he presents a vision of birds assembled on St Valentine's Day in order to choose their proper mates. The birds have gathered before the goddess of Nature, and, in accordance with 'natural' law, they pay court, dipute, and pair off in a strictly stratified way. The royal eagles, seated in the highest places, take precedence, followed in descending order by other birds of prey until we reach the humblest and smallest seed-eaters. The debate in this avian parliament about how properly to secure a mate may remain unresolved, but it is clear that the nobler the bird the more formal are the rituals of courtship accorded to it. Ducks may prove pragmatic when snubbed by particular drakes ('"Ye queck [quack]!" yit seyde the doke, ful well and feyre, / "There been no sterres [stars], God wot, than a payre!"') but eagles seek for higher things in defining and exploring love and look down on such churlish common sense ('"Thy kynde is of so low a wrechednesse / That what love is, thow canst nat seen ne gesse"').

The question of degree, and of the social perceptions conditioned by rank, also determines the human world that Chaucer variously delineates in The Canterbury Tales. The General Prologue, which sets out the circumstances which bring the pilgrims together at the Tabard Inn before they set off for Canterbury to pray at the tomb of the martyred St Thomas Becket, also presents them to us, as far as it is feasible, according to their estate ('Me thynketh it accordaunt to resoun / To telle yow al the condicioun / Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, / And whiche they weren, and of what degree'). The Knight is naturally placed first, followed by his son the Squire, and by his attendant Yeoman. The Knight is duly succeeded by representatives of the Church: the fastidious Prioress with an accompanying Nun, personal chaplain, and three other priests; the Monk who holds the office of outrider in his monastery (and who therefore appears to enjoy extra-mural luxuries more than the disciplined life of his order); and the equally worldly and mercenary Friar. The third estate is represented by a greater variety of figures, rich, middling, and poor, beginning with a shomewhat shifty Merchant, a bookish Oxford Clerk, a Sergeant of the Law, and a Franklin. We move downwards socially to the urban guildsmen (Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, and Tapicer), to the skilled tradesmen (Cook, Shipman, Doctor of Physic), and to a well-off widow with a trade of her own (the Wife of Bath). Chaucer relegates his Parson, his Ploughman, his Manciple, and his reprobates (the Reeve, the Miller, the Summoner, and the Pardoner) to the end of his troupe (though he also modestly includes himself, a high-ranking royal official, at the end of the list). It is with this last group that he seems to want to surprise his readers by contrasting paragons of virtue with those whose very calling prompts periodic falls from grace (the Reeve strikes fear into his master's tenants while feathering his own nest; the Miller steals corn and overcharges his clients; the lecherous Summoner makes a parade of his limited learning; and the Pardoner trades profitably in patently false relics). Where the Manciple's native wit and acquired administrative skills see to render him worthy of better things, Chaucer's stress on the due humility of the Parson and the Ploughman proclaims their exemplary fitness for their modest but essential social role. If the Knight at the top of the social scale had seemed 'a worthy man', loyal to his knightly vows and embodying the spirit of chivalry, so, in their respective callings, the Parson stands for the true mission of the Church to the poor, and the Ploughman for the blessedness of holy poverty. When Chaucer describes the two as brothers, it is likely that he sees their fraternity as rooted in Christian meekness and closeness to God. Both, in the manner of Langland's Piers, act out the gospel: the Parson by offering a 'noble ensample to his sheep' and the Ploughman by 'lyvynge in pees and parfit charitee'.

Although it has been suggested that the Knight's professional career has been marked by a series of military disasters and that both his portrait and his tale can be read ironically, it would seem likely that the overall scheme of The Canterbury Tales, had it ever been completed, would have served to enhance his dignity rather than to undermine it. The Host of the Tabard proposes that each of the pilgrims should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the return journey. Even in the fragmentary and unfinished form in which the poem has come down to us (only twenty-four tales are told), it is clear that the Knight's taking precedence as the first story-teller is not merely a matter of chance. The narrator comments that although he cannot tell whether it was a matter of 'aventure, or sort, or cas [chance]¡ that the luck of the draw fell to such a natural leader, the fact that it did so both pleases the other pilgrims and satisfies the demands of social decorum. The Knight's Tale, an abbreviated version of Boccaccio's Teseida, is an appropriately high-minded history of the rivalry of two noble cousins for the love of a princess, a history elegantly complemented by accounts of supernatural intervention in human affairs and equally elegant and decisive human ceremonial. If the Ploughman is not allotted a tale, the Parson's with which The Canterbury Tales concludes, is a long prose treatise on the seven deadly sins, less a tale than a careful sermon expressive of devout gravitas and earnest learning. Sandwiched between these two tales Chaucer arranges stories loosely fitted to their tellers' tastes and professions and tailored to fit into the overarching narrative shape by prologues, interjections, or disputes between characters. The Parson's singularly worthy discourse is complemented by that of the otherwise shadowy Nun's Priest who offers a lively story of a wily cock caught by a fox, a story which he rounds off with the clerical insistence that listeners grasp 'the moralite'. The Pardoner too tells a tidy moral tale, though its carefully shaped warning of the mortal dangers of covetousness can be seen reflecting back on the personal avarice to which its teller spiritedly and frankly confesses in his prologue: 'I preche of no thyng but for coveityse / . . . Thus kan I preche agayn that same vice / Which that I use, and that is avarice. / But though myself be gilty in that synne, / Yet kan I maken oother folk to twynne [turn] / From avarice, and soore to repente." The Prioress also tells a short, devotional tale of a pious Christian child whose throat is cut by Jews but who miraculously manages to continue singing a Marian hymn after his death. Its pathos, if not to the taste of more morally squeamish ages, is evidently well received by the devout fourteenth-century hearers.

Elsewhere in The Canterbury Tales tellers seem to have far less inclination to wear their hearts and consciences on their sleeves. The Merchant, prompted by the Clerk's adaptation of Boccaccio's story of the trials of patient Griselda, offers the salutary tale of an old husband (January) and his 'fresshe' young bride (May), an impatiently frisky wife who, exploiting her husband's sudden blindness, is seduced in a pear tree by her lover. When January's sight is mischievously restored by the god Pluto, Proserpine equally mischievously inspires May to claim that she was acting in her husband's best interests: 'Up peril of my soule, I shal not lyen, / As me was taught, to heele with youre eyes, / Was no thyng bet, to make yow see, / Than strugle with a man upon a tree / God woot, I dide it in ful good entente.' At the lower end of the social, and perhaps moral, scale Chaucer allots still earthier stories to the Miller, the Reeve, the Friar, and the Summoner. When the Host proposes that the Knight's 'noble storie' should be succeeded by something equally decorous from the Monk, the Miller drunkenly intrudes himself and, somewhat improbably, tells the beautifully plotted tale of a dull-witted carpenter, his tricksy wife, and her two suitors. The Miller's Tale presents a diametrically opposed view of courtship to that offered by the Knight. It also serves to provoke the Reeve (who is a carpenter by profession) into recounting an anecdote about a cuckolded miller. In like manner, the Friar tells a story about an extortionate summoner who is carried off to hell by the Devil, and the enraged Summoner ('lyk an aspen leef he quoke for ire') responds with the history of an ingenious friar obliged to share out the unexpected legacy of 'the rumblynge of a fart' amongst his brethren.

The Chaucer who so modestly places himself last in the list of the pilgrims also casts himself in the role of an incompetent story-teller. His irony is nowhere more pointed than in this cleverly extended and self-deprecatory ruse which opens with a direct challenge to his assumed shyness from the Host. 'What man artow [art thou]?', 'Chaucer' is asked, 'Thou lookest as thou woldest find an hare, / For evere on the ground I see thee stare'. The response is the tale of Sir Thopas, a parody of contemporary romance told in awkward, singsong, six-line stanzas. The parody may always have served to amuse sophisticated readers, but the Host, who rudely interrupts its progress, claims that its teller's evident ineptness is boring the company. The pilgrim 'Chaucer' is therefore obliged to begin another tale, this time a long and weighty prose homily which retells the story of imprudent Melibeus and his wife, the aptly named Prudence. At its conclusion the Host somewhat over-politely compensates for his earlier rudeness by unenthusiastically confessing that he would have liked his own wife to have heard the tale ('for she nys no thyng of swich pacience'). Despite such soothing politeness, Chaucer's pretence of incompetence in the company of such accomplished story-tellers as his fellow-pilgrims is a highly effective device. He had indirectly prepared for this device by insisting on the virtues of 'truthful' narrative representation at the end of the General Prologue. He had also attempted to justify his realism by citing the highest authorities:

Whoso shal telle a tale after a man,
He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan
Everich a word, if it be in his charge,
Al speke he never so rudeliche and large,
Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe,
Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe.
He may nat spare, althogh he were his brother;
He moot as wel seye o [one] word as another.
Crist spak hymself ful brode plainly in hooly writ,
And wel ye woot no vileynye is it,
Eek Plato seith, whoso that kan hym rede,
The wordes moote be cosyn [akin] to the dede.
Also I prey yow to foryeve [forgive] it me.
Al have I nat set folk in hir degree
Heere in this tale, as that they sholde stonde.
My wit is short, ye may wel understonde.

Here is the pretence of modesty and incompetence, but here too is the insistence on frankness and proper representation, albeit justified with reference to Christ and to Plato (beyond whose authority few medieval readers would feel the need to refer), Chaucer neutralizes and diminishes himself as a narrator in order that his narrative representation of others' words and narratives might shine with a greater 'truth' to God's nature. In a way that his theologically minded contemporaries might readily understand, he is posing as the servant of the servants of Christ, having become, like St Paul before him, 'all things to all men' ('omnibus factus sum omnia'). The Christian poet of The Canterbury Tales, one variously influenced by both Boccaccio and Dante, endeavours to show us a broad spectrum of sinful humanity on an earthly journey, a journey which original readers would readily have recognized as a prevision of, and a preparation for, a heavenly one.

Despite his intellectual delight in the concept of cosmic, natural, and human order, Chaucer the poet and the truth-teller of necessity subverts certain received ideas of degree. Most crucially, he effectively undermines the commonly held medieval idea of the natural inferiority of women to men by representing articulate and intelligent women at the centre of human affairs rather than on the periphery. If the well-born ladies of antiquity are allowed to become norms against which human behaviour can be measured in The Legend of Good Women (c.1372-86), Troilus and Criseyde, and certain of The Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath asserts a distinctly ungenteel opposition to anti-feminist stereotypes. Although some readers may have interpreted the Wife's 856-line prologue as evidence of a woman protesting too much (and therefore confirming, or at the very least endorsing, many of the male prejudices against which she loudly complains), Chaucer's adoption of a strident woman's voice ought also to be seen as opening up an alternative polemic. Her very stridency, we also realize, is a direct consequence of over-rigid patriarchal ways of thinking and acting. The Wife of Bath is certainly no model of meekness, patience, and chastity. She opens her discourse with the word 'experience', and from that experience of living with five husbands (three of them good men, she observes, because they were 'riche, and olde') she builds up a spirited case against conventional, theoretical, clerically inspired anti-feminism. Celibacy and virginity are all very well, she insists, but Christ's stricter demands were addressed 'to hem that wolde lyve parfitly', and, as she adds for the benefit of her male listeners, 'lordynges, by youre leve, that am nat I'. Moreover, if God gave her her sexuality, she has been determined to enjoy it, albeit within the bounds of marriage ('In wyfhod I wol use myn instrument / As frely as my Makere hath it sent'). Having learned by experience and native with how to manage her first partners ('Atte ende I hadde the bettre in ech degree, / By sleighte, or force, or by som maner thyng, / As by continueel murmur or grucchyng') she seems to have met her match in the clerk Jankyn, her junior by twenty years. Jankyn had the particularly irritating habit of reading learned tracts against women in her presence, quoting choice items aloud in order to demonstrate the superiority of his own sex. Provoked into decisive action, she ripped three pages out of the book and dealt Jankyn a blow with her fist, only to be floored herself by a retaliatory blow. Nevertheless, her consequent unconsciousness (perhaps feigned) has worked its proper effect: the shocked Jankyn is brought to sudden repentance and thereafter she has ruled the domestic roost ('He yaf [gave] me al the bridel in my hond, / To han the governance of hous and lond, / And of his tonge, and of his hond also; / And made hym brenne [burn] his book anon right tho').

The Wife of Bath achieves mastery in what can be seen as an essentially bourgeois domestic comedy, albeit one informed with partially disgraced academic theories about women's limited marital and social roles. Elsewhere in his work, Chaucer stresses a distinctive self-assurance and dignity in women of the ancient and modern ruling classes, qualities which are more vital than the special honour accorded to the sex by the male-defined code of chivalry. In the early dream-poem, The Book of the Duchess (probably written c.1369 as an allegorical lament on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt), the narrator encounters a desolate knight, clad in black. The knight is mourning the death of a wife not, as in so much contemporary love-poetry, the absence, the fickleness, or the coldness of a mistress. Theirs has been more than a courtly liaison and more than the amorous vassalage of him to her. Mutual respect has made for a marriage of minds, and as far as was possible, a partnership in love. She was, the knight confesses, 'that swete wif / My suffisaunce, my lust, my lyf, / Myn hap, myn hele, and al my blesse'. The knight's therapeutic account of his long courtship, happy marriage, and unhappy bereavement is prefaced by a retelling of Ovid's story of the widowed Queen Alcyone, who, faithful to the memory of the dead King Ceys, is granted a vision of him. The pattern, re-exploring classical instances and Ovidian exempla is repeated on far grander scale in the unfinished The Legend of Good Women. Here ancient history is ransacked for appropriate subjects because, Chaucer's narrator insists, it had traditionally provided his predecessors with 'approved' stories 'of holynesse, of regnes, of victoryies, / of love, of hate'. It is on women's holiness and steadfastness in love that the narrator dwells, he having been rebuked in a dream by the god of Love for the former 'heresies' of speaking ill of women in The Romaunt of the Rose and Troilus and Criseyde. The nine legends he retells as a penance speak of heroines who suffered, and sometimes died, as a consequence of their devout love for faithless men. Instances of male violence and treachery are monotonously heaped one on another as Antony abandons Cleopatra, Aeneas Dido, Tarquin Lucrece, and Theseus Ariadne. By frequently appealing to sources, to named authors, and to what was commonly acknowledged to be the authority of 'olde bokes', Chaucer attempts to turn an equally derivative clerical tradition of unrelenting misogyny on its head. He also shapes the legends to emphasize what he sees as the feminine virtue of 'pitee'. It is pity which renders women susceptible to male deceit, but it is also seen as an aspect of the highly eseemed human quality of generosity of spirit. As the legends demonstrate, this same aspect of generosity, to which men seem to be impervious, allows women to respond so fully to love, to grow in love and, through tragedy, to find the emotional strength which enables them to explore the depths of suffering.
In the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women the dapper god of Love seems to disparage Chaucer's most carefully wrought and self-consciously achieved single poem by referring to it simply as the story of 'how that Crisseyde Troylus forsok'. The god appears to have been persuaded that Troilus and Criseyde had taken up the traditional misogynist theme that throughout history 'wemen han dun mis' in their dealings with men. The god may not have been alone in his prejudiced reading of the story, but to many latter-day readers it seems to be a narrow and ungenerous one. The poem is less the story of a man betrayed by a woman than the account of how a woman, having been pressured into responding to a man's over enthusiastic love for her, is driven from one relationship to another. Instead of being portrayed as contrasted representatives of faith and betrayal, both Troilus and Criseyde are observed as victims of circumstances, at once humanly and divinely contrived, and beyond their direct control. Although Chaucer drew heavily on Boethius for his consolatory explorations of the ideas of free will, predestination, mutability, and fortune throughout Troilus and Criseyde, his immediate and principal source for the poem was contemporary. In no sense, however, was Chaucer merely translating Boccaccio's familiar and admired Trojan story, Il Filostrato, into English. His distinctive shifts in emphasis, narrative shape, and characterization clearly indicate that this is more a deliberate reinterpretation than a translation. Boccaccio's Criseida is, for example, willingly persuaded by her cousin Pandaro into accepting Troilo as a lover. In Chaucer's version the characters of Criseyde and Pandarus possess both a new dramatic energy and a new blood-relationship. Pandarus is transformed into Criseyde's sensible, sentimental, but none the less manipulative uncle, one who acts as her guardian and counsellor in the absence of her father. His task of persuading his niece to look favourably on Troilus's love is rendered one of subtle negotiation, mediation, suggestion, and emotional conditioning. She, rather than being fickle by nature, is seen as tender, sensitive, ingenuous, and open to change. Chaucer's narrative carefully balances the length of the process by which she is persuaded to accept Troilus against the time she takes over agonizing about abandoning him. When the lovers are forced apart by her removal to join her father in the Greek camp outside Troy, Criseyde's grief is intense. Her avowals are as extravagant as they are agonized:

'And Troilus, my clothes everychon
Shul blake ben in tokenyng, herte swete,
That I am as out of this world agon,
That wont was yow to setten in quiete;
And of myn ordre, ay til deth me mete,
The observance evere, in youre absence,
Shal sorwe ben, compleynt and abstinence.

'Myn herte and ek the woful goost therinne
Byquethe I, with youre spirit to compleyne
Eternaly, for they shal nevere twynne.
For though in erthe ytwynned be we tweyne,
Yet in the feld of pite, out of peyne,
That highte Elisos [Elysium], shal we ben yfeere [together],
As Orpheus with Euridice, his fere [companion, wife].

Her ambiguously optimistic interpretation of the Orpheus/Eurydice story may well lead us to perceive how uneasily tragic are the undertones of her avowal. For Criseyde, lovers  symbolically pass through Hades to reach Elysium, or, in medieval Christian terms, they suffer penitentially in Purgatory as a preparation for Paradise. Criseyde's descent to Hades/Purgatory, a place where the only certainty is uncertainty, will be metaphoric. Separated from Troilus, a new element of ambiguity enters the narrative. The narrator himself purports to consult his source to find an exaggeratedly clear statement of her treachery. Criseyde, however, is painfully conscious that hers is indeed a world-without-end decision, one which will render her infamous in subsequent human annals:

But trewely, the storie telleth us,
Ther made nevere woman moore wo
Than she, whan that she falsed Troilus.
She seyde, 'Allas! for now is clene ago [gone]
My name of trouthe in love, for everemo!
For I have falsed oon the gentileste
That evere was, and oon the worthieste!
'Alas! of me, unto the worldes ende,
Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge
No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende [reproach].
O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge!
Thorughout the world my belle shal be ronge!
And wommen moost wol haten me of alle.
Allas, that swich a cas me sholde falle!'

Faced with such agonized self-awareness, the narrator retreats into pity, reluctant to blame her more than his historic predecessors have done but willingly to concede that her penitence impresses him ('For she so sory was for hire untrouthe, / Iwis, I wolde excuse hire yet for routhe [pity]').
If the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde is neither the gentle incompent 'Chaucer' of The Canterbury Tales nor the incomprehending innocent of the dream-poems, he nevertheless shares something of their generous susceptibility. Like them, he suggests a tense, shifting relationship between the poet and his persona, and consequently between the poet and his poem. He moves around his characters, allowing them to express their respective points of view, at times ruminating on the iron laws of fate and divinely imposed predestination, at others both suggesting and withdrawing from judgement. He allows the story a certain autonomy while varying his commentary by deferring both to his sources and to his audience. In Troilus and Criseyde at least, he seems to insist that history is steady and needs to be retold, while allowing that his story is reshaped in the very act of retelling it. Essentially, he remains ambivalent, or, perhaps, given his evident sympathy with women and his admiration for what he seems to have identified as feminine generosity of spirit, he assumes a deliberate androgyny. He is certainly the least egocentric of poets. Although Chaucer is in every sense a writer of his time, he was also the first poet in English both to display and to make a particular narrative issue of the quality which John Keats later so memorably defined as 'negative capability'.

Trouthe

 —oOo—