Chaucer, Geoffrey: translation
(ca. 1343–1400)
Geoffrey Chaucer was the most admired and influential writer of the English Middle Ages. Known chiefly as a narrative poet, particularly for his varied collection of CANTERBURY TALES (ca. 1387–1400) and his tragic verse ROMANCE, TROILUS AND CRISEYDE (1385), Chaucer was also an accomplished lyric poet, the author of prose texts, and an admired translator (having rendered the very influential French ALLEGORY the ROMAN DE LA ROSE and BOETHIUS’s popular CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY into MIDDLE ENGLISH).
Chaucer was born in London between 1340 and 1345, son of the wine merchant John Chaucer and his wife, Agnes. As a child, Geoffrey would have heard of England’s great victory at Crécy in the Hundred Years’ War, and he lived through the BLACK DEATH, which killed half of his countrymen. Though a member of the bourgeois class, John Chaucer must have had influential friends, because by 1357, his son Geoffrey was serving as a page in the household of Countess Elizabeth of Ulster,wife of Prince Lionel, second son of King EDWARD III. Three years later, he was in France, perhaps with Prince Lionel, fighting in the war. He was taken prisoner and ransomed,King Edward himself contributing 16 pounds to the ransom—evidence that he was considered a valuable courtier by the royal family. A truce was arranged in 1360 that led to a nine-year hiatus of hostilities between England and France, during which some scholars believe Chaucer may have been studying law at the Inner Temple, one of the Inns of Court. In 1366, Chaucer married Philippa Pan Roet, a minor aristocrat and lady-in-waiting to the queen (and thus Chaucer’s social superior). Their son Thomas (who later became one of the wealthiest and most influential men in England) was born in 1367. Chaucer also traveled to Spain in 1366, and is known to have been on the continent in 1368 as well, in the “king’s service.” In 1367 he was made “valettus,” and later esquire, in the household of the king, who granted him an annual salary of 20 marks.It is possible that Chaucer’s 1368 trip was to meet with Prince Lionel, who was in Milan for his wedding to a daughter of the powerful Visconti family—a marriage whose celebratory feasting across Europe led to Lionel’s death from food poisoning before his return to England.
Chaucer, in the meantime, had apparently become close to Lionel’s brother, JOHN OF GAUNT, who would soon become the most powerful man in England. Chaucer wrote his first important poem, The BOOK OF THE DUCHESS, apparently as an elegy on the death of Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche of Lancaster. This and other early poems indicate a strong French influence, particularly of the poet Guillaume de MACHAUT, on Chaucer’s verse at this time. In 1369 and again in 1370, Chaucer was fighting in France, this time with Gaunt’s army. In 1372, his wife Philippa became lady-in-waiting in the household of Gaunt’s new wife, Constance of Castile. This relationship may have led to Gaunt’s longtime affair with Philippa’s sister, Katherine Swynford. But also in 1372, Chaucer was sent on the first of his diplomatic missions to Italy, to negotiate an English port for Genoese ships. Scholars believe Chaucer also visited Florence, and have speculated that he may have met PETRARCH on this trip, or that he may have witnessed one of BOCCACCIO’s public lectures on the poetry of DANTE begun in 1373. Neither of these conjectures can be proven, and neither is very likely, but it is true that Chaucer’s poetry began increasingly to show the influence of Italian poetry through the 1370s and 1380s.
In 1374, Chaucer was given the significant position of controller of customs for wool at the Port of London, and in addition to his £10 salary, received the grant of a daily gallon of wine for the rest of his life (a grant he later converted to 20 marks annually in cash). He also leased a house over Aldgate in London. In his unfinished DREAM VISION poem The HOUSE OF FAME, Chaucer provides a comic caricature of himself, going over his account books all day at work and then going home to bury his face in another book, having no interaction with other people and living like a hermit— but without the abstinence. Still, Chaucer was kept busy as well with diplomatic tasks. He made a number of trips to France in 1376–77, negotiating for peace with France and a marriage for the young Prince Richard, son of Edward, the Black Prince (eldest son of King Edward III), and, upon the death of the Black Prince in 1376, heir to the English throne. In 1377, Edward III died and the 10-year-old prince became King RICHARD II. Chaucer was in Italy once again in 1378, on a diplomatic mission to the Viscontis in Milan, during which he gave his friend, the poet John GOWER, his power of attorney. The Italian influence on Chaucer’s work increased significantly after this second (or possibly third) visit, and is apparent in his PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS (ca. 1381, perhaps written to celebrate Richard’s betrothal to ANNE OF BOHEMIA), his KNIGHT’S TALE (ca. 1382, based on Boccaccio’s TESEIDA), and his Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385, based on Boccaccio’s Il FILOSTRATO). In 1380, a woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne signed a document releasing Chaucer from all legal actions in the case of what she calls “my rape.” This incident has been a matter of some controversy among Chaucer scholars. Since others are also named in her charges, and since “rape” could have meant “abduction” at the time, the precise nature of the charges brought against Chaucer and then dismissed remains a mystery. That same year, Chaucer’s second son Lewis was born, to whom in 1391 Chaucer addressed his Treatise on the Astrolabe, a technical manual on how to use the complicated astronomical device with which he seems to have been fascinated. In the early 1380s, Chaucer also translated Boethius, and concepts and images popularized by the Consolation of Philosophy began to find their way into his poetry, especially Troilus, the Knight’s Tale, and some shorter lyric poems like TRUTH, Gentilesse, and Lak of Stedfastnesse. Perhaps some of the consolation Chaucer sought from Boethius was from the political turmoil of the times: The PEASANTS’ REVOLT shook the aristocracy to its core in 1381. A few years earlier, the Western church had split into two factions (an event called the Great Schism), with a pope in Rome and a rival pope in Avignon. And in England, the doctrine and writings of John WYCLIFFE had been officially condemned in 1380, leading to the emergence of a sect of heretical Wycliffite followers called LOLLARDS.
Besides, the pressures of the controllership seem to have been increasing for Chaucer. He was allowed to appoint a deputy in 1382, and that deputy became permanent in 1385. By this time, Chaucer’s international reputation as a poet seems to have become significant, as he received a complimentary poem from the French poet Eustache DESCHAMPS, who called him the “great translator.” But in 1386, Chaucer lost his position altogether with the ascendancy of Gaunt’s younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, who led a faction that deposed and ultimately executed several of Richard II’s closest advisers. Chaucer gave up his house at Aldgate and moved to Kent, where he was justice of the peace from 1385–89, and also served in Parliament. But without his controllership, he seems to have had time to begin significant new projects. About 1386 he began, and apparently soon abandoned, his LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN, a tribute (in parody of the GOLDEN LEGEND) to martyrs of the God of Love.He also began his greatest and most ambitious work, The Canterbury Tales, around 1387—the year that records indicate his wife, Philippa, died. When Richard reached his majority and, with Gaunt’s support, began to rule in his own right in 1389, Chaucer was appointed to the responsible position of clerk of the king’s works, responsible for maintenance of all the royal estates. But when he was robbed in Surrey in the performance of his duties (it appears he may have been robbed three times in the space of four days), he resigned his post, later becoming deputy royal forester for Petherton in Somerset. In his last decade, as Chaucer continued to work on his Canterbury Tales, Richard continued to favor Chaucer, granting him an annuity of £20 a year in 1394 and a tun of wine a year in 1398, but the king’s own position was growing more and more untenable as his actions, particularly after the death of Anne of Bohemia in 1394, became more and more irrational. In 1399, Gaunt’s son Henry of Derby deposed Richard and became king himself.Meanwhile, apparently in financial straits (most likely as Richard’s government failed to pay his salary), Chaucer leased a home in the garden of Westminster Abbey for a period of 53 years in 1399. Chaucer’s last datable poem, the COMPLAINT TO HIS PURSE, was written to the new king Henry IV, essentially begging for some compensation. Henry confirmed and even increased Chaucer’s royal annuities, but the poet did not live to enjoy them long. He died, according to tradition, on October 25, 1400, and was buried in what was to become Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey. Chaucer has been called the father of English literature— probably an inflated title, but it is certainly true that more than anyone else, Chaucer made English a respected literary language among his own countrymen and throughout Europe. Every subsequent English or Scottish writer for two centuries was directly influenced by Chaucer, and even Shakespeare turned to him for the plots of at least two of his plays. Chaucer’s East Midland dialect became the standard for written English, and the decasyllabic line he popularized became the standard English iambic pentameter line. His influence on English literature is immeasurable, and his contributions, particularly the memorable characters and entertaining variety of genres contained in his Canterbury Tales, continue to engage readers to this day.
Bibliography
■ Benson, Larry D., et al., eds. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987.
■ Chaucer Life-Records. Edited by Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson from materials compiled by John M.Manly and Edith Rickert,with the assistance of Lilian J. Redstone and others. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.
■ Howard, Donald R. Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World. New York: Dutton, 1987.
■ Pearsall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.