Chaucer through the Years

As Caroline Spurgeon mentioned, today we prize Chaucer above all because he is a

great artist, we delight in his simplicity, his freshness, his humanity, his humour, but it
is possible that these may not be the only or even the principal reasons why he is liked
three hundred years hence. If, as would seem to be the case, the common
consciousness of a people becomes enriched with time and experience, enabling them
to see ever more and more in the work of a great poet, the lovers of Chaucer three
centuries hence will be capable of seeing more in him and will be able to come
actually nearer to him than can those who love him today.1
John Gower called Chaucer in his Confessio Amantis, his disciple and his poet:
And gret wel Chaucer whan ye mete,
As mi disciple and mi poete:
For in the floures of his youthe
In sondri wise, as he wel couthe,
Of Ditees and of Songes glade,
The whiche he for mi sake made,
The land fulfild is oueral.2

Chaucers contemporaries regarded him as an accomplished poet and hailed him

as master, a term which Lydgate, for instance, was never tired of employing. But
Lydgate, had no monopoly on the word, as Henry Scogan, Thomas Hoccleve, James I
of Scotland, John Metham of Norwich, George Ashby, Stephen Hawes, and others so
refer to him.3
John Lydgate (1370?-1451?), in his The Flower of
Chaucers place in literature in the following eulogistic terms:

Courtesy,

spoke about

Ever as I cam surprise in myn hert

Alway with fear betwixt drede and shame,
Lest out of lose, any word asterte
In this metre, to make it seme lame;
Chaucer is deed that had such a name
Of fayre making that was without wene
Fayrest in our tongue, as the Laurer grene
We may assay forto countrefete
His gay style but it wyl not be;

1 Caroline Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357-1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), cxxix.
2 Gower, Confessio Amantis, Bk VIII, 2941-47 retrived from:
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/varia/life_of_Ch/ch-reput.html, last
accessed on February 4, 2006.
3 Edwin Howard, 190.

The welle is drie, with the lycoure swete

Both of Clyo and of Caliope.4

Lydgates Prologue to The Siege of Thebes was written under Chaucers influence.
Lydgate was especially impressed by Chaucers high style, which he developed into
the elaborate aureate style that characterizes much of his own work.
The anonymous Prologue to the Tale of Beryn likewise deals with the pilgrims
once they have arrived at Canterbury and narrates the Pardoner's unsuccessful
courtship of the barmaid.
By the 1380s Chaucer was highly praised for his poetry; his fame had reached
France, where the poet Eustache Deschamps learned of his works; he sent some of his
poems to Chaucer, whom he considered a great translator, the Ovid of the English
tongue. Thomas Usk emphasized the philosophical side of Chaucers Troilus.
Chaucers friend, John Gower, praised him as a poet of love. The fifteenth-century
critics did not see Chaucers greatness in his Canterbury Tales but in his early poetry.
For C. Lewis, [t]heir Chaucer was the Chaucer of dream and allegory, of loveromance and erotic debate, of high style and profitable doctrine.5
By the turn of the sixteenth century, Chaucer had become the god of a group of
poets, among which we may mention Robert Henryson, Gawain Douglas, William
Dunbar, and Sir David Lindsay, known in literature as the Scottish Chaucerians.
Henryson wrote a continuation of Troilus and Criseyde, called The Testament of
Cresseid, in which Criseyde, a symbol of infidelity, passes from one man to another
and eventually becomes a woman of the streets.
Starting with the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, Chaucers verse
was, with some rare exceptions, completely misread. 6 One of the main reasons why
he was misinterpreted is that there were no Middle English scholars to prepare
glossaries that should have accompanied his texts, and therefore many of his words
were not properly understood. For well over a century after his death, he had usually
been mentioned in connection with Gower and Lydgate, but in the seventeenth century
he was almost always coupled with Spenser, who was not much read at the time either,
and for the same reason: a distaste for the language.7
Sixteenth-century criticism reevaluated Chaucers creation and concluded that he
was a great representative of the Middle Ages because of his learning and morality. As

4 John Lydgate, The Flower of Courtesy, Stanzas 34-35, retrieved from:

http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/varia/life_of_Ch/ch-reput.html, last
accessed on February 6, 2006.
5 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 162.
6 Lewis, 194-195.
7 Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 197.

John Foxe asserted in his Actes and Monuments (1570), by readyng of Chausers
workes, they were brought to the true knowledge of Religion.8
In the seventeeth century, critics admired Chaucer for his sound philosophical
background. They regarded him as an extremely learned man, as we may gather from
Elias Ashmoles Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652): [b]esides he that reads the
latter part of The Canons Yeomans Tale, will easily perceive him to be a Iudicious
Philosopher, and one that fully knew the Mistery.9 One century later, in 1720, John
Lewis stated the same old tradition that Chaucer was university educated at both
Oxford and Cambridge: He is said to have been educated in Canterbury or Merton
College with John Wicliffe, and thereupon to have commenced an acute Logician, a
sweet Rhetorician, a pleasant Poet, a grave Philosopher, and an ingenious
Mathematician, and an holy Divine.10
In all centuries, criticism considered Chaucer the founder of the English
language, which does not mean at all that Chaucer invented the English language, but
that Chaucer simply used it extremely well. Howard gives Chaucer credit for the fact
that he introduced a large number of French words into English, yet the introduction
of these words did not change the essential character of the language. And certainly
Chaucer was not alone in his use of French words; they had been coming into English
for centuries before his time and were to come in for centuries after his death. 11
In the eighteenth century, John Oldmixon, in Reflections on Dr. Swifts Letter to the
Earl of Oxford about the English Tongue (1712), held the opinion that Chaucer was the
greatest representative of the literature of the Middle Ages: Chaucer will, no doubt,
be admird as long as the English Tongue has a Being; and the changes that have
happend to our Language have not hinderd his Worls out living their Contemporary
Monuments of Brass or Marble.12 The change of the critical opinions was due to the
fact that, starting with John Dryden, the first of the great English neo-classical poets,
who warmly admired Chaucer, regardung him as the founder of English verse, an
equal to the great poets of classical antiquity. Chaucers works began to be modernized
and translated into contemporary English by Dryden. The Knights Tale, The Nun's
Priest's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Tale , as well as The Flower and the Leaf. His Preface to
The Fables represented a highly appreciative criticism of Chaucer. His phrase Here is
God's Plenty has become the ultimate characterisation of Chaucers art.
Just as in the case of many other great writers, in the eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries, there was much opposition to him and his works by highly

8 John Foxe quoted in Edwin Howard, 193.

9 Elias Ashmole quoted in Edwin Howard, 193-194.
10 John Lewis quoted in Edwin Howard, 194.
11 Edwin Howard, 194.
12John Oldmixon quoted in Edwin Howard, 198-199.

esteemed authors and critics, although at the same time there was a growing realisation
on the part of others of his true worth as a poet.13
The nineteenth-century notion of The Canterbury Tales was a simplified one, in
the sense that it was considered nothing else but a mere anthology or collection of
miscellaneous tales.
Twentieth-century criticism made it possible for Chaucers biographers to study
his life more thoroughly. For the first time, critics understood that Chaucers mere
reference to the laureat clerk Petrarch, or to Dante, the great poet of Italy, were not
enough proof of how Chaucer knew their work. The chronology of Chaucers works
was questioned, and the actual delimitation of his work into periods of French and
Italian influence was found too rigid. Twentieth-century critics discovered that much
attention had been paid to Chaucers acquaintance with French and Italian literature, to
the detriment of the English literature that existed at his time. That Chaucer had no
scholastic instruction in English (such as, no doubt, he had in French and, possibly, in
Italian) we know, indeed, for certain, or almost for certain, inasmuch as his
contemporary, Trevisa, informs us that English was not used in schools, even for the
purpose of construing, till later. And it is, of course, certain that he makes little direct
mention of English writers, if any.14 The parody in Sir Thopas makes us understand
that he was familiar with the romances. On the other hand, critics discovered that there
were no well-known named authors for Chaucer to quote; and, if there had been, he
could have gained none of the little halo of reputation for learning which was so
innocently dear to a medieval writer by quoting them. For those who take him as he
has been too seldom taken in the natural evolution of English poetry and English
literature, there is not the slightest need to regard him as a luscus naturae who
developed the practice of English by the study of French, who naturalized by touch of
wand foreign metres and foreign diction into his native tongue, and who evolved gold
dewdrops of English speech and more golden bell-music of English rhythm from Latin
and Italian and French sources.15
Twentieth-century criticism (for instance Donald R. Howard and Rob Pope)
brought the idea that there is some conceptual unity in the variety of Chaucers tales.
He became part of the literary canon, yet, as Sanders suggested in a very challenging
analysis of the Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey, where Chaucers is buried, [t]he
trouble with canons is that they not only become hallowed by tradition, they also
enforce tradition.16
13 Edwin Howard, 200.
14 Ward, Waller (eds), The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18
Volumes (190721), vol. II. The End of the Middle Ages, VII. Chaucer, 15. Chaucers
Learning, retrieved from http://www.bartleby.com/212/0710.html, last accessed on February
7, 2006.
15 Ward, Waller (eds), The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18
Volumes (190721), vol. II. The End of the Middle Ages, VII. Chaucer, 15. Chaucers
Learning, retrieved from http://www.bartleby.com/212/0710.html, last accessed on February
7, 2006.

Looking at different entries on The Canterbury Tales in different histories of

literature, we may notice that every single historical account on The Canterbury Tales
mentions it as the best written book belonging to the Middle Ages: It is no
exaggeration or flourish, but a sound and informing critical and historical observation,
to say that The Canterbury Tales supply a miniature or even microcosm, not only of
English poetry up to their date, but of medieval literature, barring the strictly lyrical
element, and admitting a part only of the didactic, but enlarged and enriched by
additional doses, both of the personal element and of that general criticism of life
which, except in Dante, had rarely been present.17
The twentieth century also opened new perspectives on Chaucers work not
limited to purely biographical approaches to his texts. For instance, the psycho-literary
speculations established the links between Chaucers life and the world of his creation
(see the very often quoted in this course Edwin Howard and Rob Pope, who combine
the biographical approach with the psychological one).
Apart from biographical and psychological perspectives, debates appeared around
the question whether Chaucer was a feminist. We are quite certain that Chaucer was a
relatively privileged male in a predominantly male-controlled (patriarchal) society. 18
The discussion on matters of sex/gender issues could be extremely long, and the
limited space in the book precludes engaging in detail with what would be complicated
issues; however, the underlying issue in a feminist approach to Chaucers work is how
far the women and men we encounter in Chaucers oeuvre, be they narrators or
characters, are represented in terms of (a) sexual activity (especially sexual desire,
intercourse and childbearing); and (b) specifically gendered roles and modes of
behaviour (especially dress, occupation, family position, speech/lessness, and
in/action).19 If men were either knights, merchants, crusaders, women were virgins,
wives, mothers, or widows, therefore classified in terms of their sexual status. In her
complex study on medieval women, Henrietta Leyser demonstrates that the main
feminist issue does not consist in sexual intercourse. On the contrary, this was part of
Gods original plan. Although Adam and Eve did not have sex in the garden of Eden,
this was simply because they had not, as things turned out, had time for it; if they had
not sinned by eating the apple a sin of pride they would have necessarily have had
intercourse there would otherwise have been no way they could have obeyed Gods
order to increase and multiply (Genesis 1:27-8). They could not have chosen to be
virgins in paradise or they would have been guilty of thwarting Gods intentions. The
causes of the Fall and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden had,
then, nothing to do with sex.20 It was thus only after the fall of Adam and Eve that sex
16 Sanders, 4.
17 Ward, Waller (eds), The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (190721),
vol. II. The End of the Middle Ages, VII. Chaucer, 15. Chaucers Learning, retrieved from
http://www.bartleby.com/212/0710.html, last accessed on February 7, 2006.

18 Pope, 202-203.
19 Pope, 203-204.
20 Leyser, 94.

was tainted by the idea of lust. Post-lapsarian lust, the result of sin, was therefore
what caused sex to be so troublesome; such lust, unless rigorously controlled, could
lead the unwary to eternal damnation. Only one legitimate outlet for sex was possible,
and that was marriage.21 Thus, the medieval church condemned unchristian sexual
practices such as concubinage, adultery or incest. According to canon law, a womans
virginity might be inspected by matrons of good repute (as was the Virgins, after the
birth of Christ, by her midwife Salome in the medieval drama scene of the nativity
based on an apocryphal Gospel); and by custom possibly of English origin, men too
were liable to be inspected.22
Another controversial image was that of the widow. On the one hand, widows
were perceived in biblical terms as objects of respect and charity; on the other hand,
like Chaucers Wife of Bath, they were expected to be avaricious and sexually greedy.
The widow who remarried was not allowed the nuptial blessing that was part of the
liturgy in a first-time wedding; the widow who did not marry again now fulfilled many
traditionally masculine roles.23 When analyzing The Wife of Baths portrait, one may
attempt a feminist analysis on Chaucers work.24
The linguistic and stylistic approach derives from Russian formalism. Two
general principles lie beneath the Formalist study of literature: on the one hand,
literature, or rather those of its features that make it different from other human
activities, must constitute the object of inquiry for literary theory; on the other hand,
literary facts need to prevail over other metaphysical commitments of literary
criticism. In his No Joke: Transcendent Laughter in the Teseida and the Miller's Tale,
Timothy D Arners proposed a linguistic approach on Chaucers work.
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida developed another approach that
extended the insights of Saussures structuralism; his post-structuralist take worked
from the assumption that language bears within itself the necessity of its own
critique.25 The main notion Derrida introduced in his Writing and Difference was that
of diffrance, by which he meant the name we might give to the "active," moving
discord of different forces, and of differences of forces, that Nietzsche sets up against
the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture,
philosophy, and science.26 Diffrance plays on the homonymy between two verbs and
two nouns in French; diffrer: to defer (in the sense of to postpone) and to differ.
What Jacques Derrida meant by diffrance was that words and signs can never
summon forth what they mean, but can only be defined or explained in other words. In
her study For myn entente nys but for to pleye: On the Playground with the Wife of Bath,
21 Leyser, 94-95.
22 Leyser, 115.
23 Leyser, 168.
24 See Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender.
25 Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciencesin Writing and
Difference, trans., with an Introduction and Notes Alan Bass, 358 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

26 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982), 3.

the Clerk of Oxford and Jacques Derrida, Franziska Scheitzeneder took The Wife of Bath
s Tale as a deconstructive momentum. In her (Mis)Reading The "Text" of Criseyde:
Context and Identity in Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde , Victoria Warren started her

deconstructive analysis of one of Troilus thoughts about Criseyde.27

Several studies focused on the intertextuality of Chaucers texts, such as Neuse s
Chaucers Dante, Allegory and Epic Theater in "The Canterbury Tales" or Hindss Allusion
and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. 28 Richard Neuse refuses the
traditional critical directions which clearly point out that The Canterbury Tales is

basically a realistic work and links it to the allegory, as there is the reiterated
"allegorical plot" of tale-telling en route, with its own repeated ddoublement of the
"empirical" pilgrim and his or her dialogic double, the pilgrim-narrator. 29 Admitting
that Chaucers pilgrimage lacks virtually all the features associated with Dantean
allegory,30 since his heroes are flesh-and-blood characters who speak, fight, make
mistakes, feel, and are, in one word, alive, Richard Neuse described the allegorical plot
of The Canterbury Tales as follows: [t]he tales represent recurrent occasions for the
individual pilgrims to define a version or a view of the human image. If the pilgrims
were actual persons, we could say they discover this image in relation to their own
experience and existence. But since they are not, the readers must make the discovery
for them, with the General Prologue portraits to guide them in each instance. In a sense,
the reader becomes the pilgrim whose tale she is reading and finds in the tale
reflections of the fictional identity that as reader she has temporarily adopted,
reflections that clarify and also perhaps modify that identity.31 Indeed, one of
Chaucers tales does qualify, as a veritable example of allegory, The Tale of Sir Thopas.
Sir Thopas is also a perfect fit for the poet leaving his world to conquer another,
textual world so that he may find there the elf-queen of his dream vision. And
ultimately the knight is or stands in for all tale-tellers with the urge to distance
themselves from an everyday reality in order to discover possibilities ordinarily
dismissed as the product of dreams and delusions.32
Reader-response criticism and the reception theory marked the shift of interest
from author to reader. Janet Coleman published a critical study of several medieval
writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer, informed by such a method of analysis. 33 Being
aware of the presence of Boethian sub-texts in Chaucer that may give rise to some
27 Victoria Warren, (Mis)Reading The "Text" of Criseyde: Context and Identity in Chaucer's
Troilus and Criseyde, The Chaucer Review, Penn State Universty Press 36, no. 1( 2001): 1,
retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/
journals/chaucer_review/v036/36.1warren.html, last accessed on January, 10, 2006.
28 Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
29 Neuse, 60.
30 Neuse, 84.
31 Neuse, 87.
32 Neuse, 88.

quite metaphysical debates on freedom and necessity, Brother Anthony of Taiz also
read The Canterbury Tales from this perspective in his article Chaucer and Religion.

33 Janet Coleman, Medieval Readers and Writers, 1350-1400 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981),
54.