Canterbury Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series), Page 2

  Life and Times

  Chaucer was born in London in the early 1340s, the son of a prosperous vintner (wine merchant). With its population of 50,000 (the largest in England but small compared to Paris, Florence, or Venice), London had recently established itself as the commercial, intellectual, and cultural capital of the English kingdom; its port was a major center of wool exports (England’s most important product) and wine imports, and its close relations with the nearby city of Westminster (the seat of the royal government and its national legal and financial bureaucracy) gave it additional prominence because of its political and economic importance to the monarchy.

  Men such as Chaucer’s father were entrepreneurs who tended to trade in any commodities that offered profits; in London, as in the other major cities of the realm, they formed an oligarchy exercising, through their associations, or guilds, predominant authority in the political life of the city. One of the consequences (and sources) of London merchants’ power was their often close relations with the king, to whose court they were purveyors of victuals and luxury goods (including spices from the East), and to whom they sometimes lent money for use in his prosecution of the war with France (the so-called Hundred Years’ War) over his supposed right to the French throne as well as his own.

  It is presumably as a result of such contacts that John Chaucer, Geoffrey’s father, obtained for his son around 1356 a place, probably as a page (a quite menial servant), in the household of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster and wife of Lionel, second surviving son of King Edward III (1327-1377). Before this, Chaucer was presumably educated in one of London’s many “grammar schools” attached to parish churches or other religious establishments; and perhaps at the Al monry School attached to Saint Paul’s Cathedral (near Chaucer’s presumed home on Thames Street). He did not attend university, al though several of his works make it clear that he knew the town and schools of Oxford and Cambridge well. He also knew Latin, French (both the continental variety and the “insular,” Anglo-French variety, the latter used for legal purposes), and presumably some Italian, which he could have learned from the many Italian merchants with whom his father probably had business dealings.

  In 1359 Chaucer became a valettus (yeoman) in Prince Lionel’s service; in that capacity he fought in the latter’s army in France, where he was captured in battle and ransomed in March 1360. Sometime after the end of 1360 he passed into the King’s household, first as a yeoman but later in the decade attaining the higher rank of esquire, along with a life annuity (a standard reward for services rendered). By 1366 he was married to Philippa, a member of the Queen’s household, and in the following year a son, Thomas, was born. In royal service—to the King, to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and perhaps to Edward III’s eldest son, the Black Prince—Chaucer made repeated trips abroad in the coming years, on public and secret diplomatic missions, to France, Spain, and Italy, while also participating in court life and entertainments in England. He was dispatched to Genoa and Florence on royal business at the end of 1372, and spent several months in Italy, where he is often thought by modern scholars to have met Boccaccio and Petrarch, or at least become familiar with many of their works.

  In 1374 Chaucer was appointed controller of wool customs for the port of London, a civil service position that he held for the next twelve years; at the same time he received a rent-free lifetime lease on spacious quarters above Aldgate, one of London’s seven city gates, and a further annuity from John of Gaunt, in honor of whose dead wife, Blanche, he had written The Book of the Duchess (see below). At the time Chaucer’s wife was a member of the household of John’s new wife, Constance of Castille, a situation in which she continued until her death in 1387.

  Chaucer’s job as controller was to keep an accurate record of wool and other goods being exported, in order to ensure that that accurate duties on them might be charged by the collectors of customs. These worthies tended to be rich and powerful London merchants (many became lord mayors) who obtained their positions as favors from the king, and did not hesitate to use them for personal profit, a situation that put the much less powerful controller in an awkward position. Halfway through his term as controller Chaucer became involved in a court case that has created controversy among modern Chaucerians: In May 1380 Cecily Champain released Chaucer from all legal reprisals concerning her raptus. Other court documents and debts called in by Chaucer at this time suggest an expensive settlement, but the actual details of the rape (for that, not abduction, is what the Latin term means in this legal context) are lost.

  From time to time, Chaucer was temporarily excused from the obligations of his controller’s position to make further trips abroad on royal business, some in connection with peace negotiations with France and Richard’s search for a suitable wife. On a second (at least) trip to Italy in 1378, he may have spent time in the Visconti library in Milan, and there obtained copies of works by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

  The 1380s were a decade of major political tensions and upheavals in London and in England as a whole. The merchant oligarchy that controlled London politics was challenged (successfully for a time) by an alliance of lesser guilds led by John of Northampton. In 1381 there was the Great Rising (formerly known as the Peasants’ Revolution), a mass and often violent protest by peasants, urban artisans, and minor gentry against the radically unequal distribution of power and resources in English society. In the latter part of the decade, frequent threats of French invasion agitated Londoners. Above all, young King Richard II (Edward III’s grandson, who had inherited the throne at age eleven) was caught up in power struggles with Parliament and with several of the great barons of the realm. The climax came in 1387 and 1388, when Richard was almost deposed by an alliance of his opponents, the so-called Lords Appellant (that is, accusers), who, acting in conjunction with Parliament, managed to have several of the King’s friends and confidants (some of whom were also Chaucer’s friends or associates) executed, and others exiled and stripped of their lands.

  Chaucer’s reputation as a poet grew during the 1380s, both at court and in the London literary circles in which he doubtless also moved (more about this shortly). The French poet Eustache Deschamps praised him as a “grand translateur,” and his London contemporary Thomas Usk called him a “noble philosophical poet.” Concurrently, in what might be seen as the height of his public career, Chaucer was elected to the Commons in the so-called Wonderful Parliament of October—November 1386. In a session that initiated some of the anti-Ricardian legislation mentioned above, Parliament also requested (without success) that controllers of customs appointed for life be removed from office and no further life appointments made; shortly after the session ended, Chaucer resigned his position as controller of customs and vacated his Aldgate residence. It is hard not to see this as a precautionary move, though some scholars regard the timing as coincidental and see the decision as no more than a sign that Chaucer was tired of a time-consuming job and wanted to live in the country. Since 1385 he had been serving as a justice on the commission of the peace for the county of Kent, which investigated and prosecuted minor crimes and offenses.

  In 1388 Chaucer sold the rights to his annuities, perhaps to repay debts (he was sued for debt more than once in this period) or simply because the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388 attacked the practice of granting life annuities as part of its campaign against Richard’s supposed malfeasance. Chaucer’s return to royal service, and a regular stipend, came in May 1389, when he was appointed clerk of the King’s Works, responsible for the building and repair of royal properties, an important and demanding job that involved obtaining building materials and paying contractors, supervisory craftsmen, and laborers. Relieved of this position in June 1391, he retired to Kent, presumably to continue work on The Canterbury Tales, which most scholars believe he had begun in the late 1380s. From 1394 onward his financial situation improved due to grants from the crown (presumably rewards for past service), and in 1398 he may have moved back to London; it is c
ertain that late in 1399, not long after Richard’s deposition by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV), he leased a house on the grounds of Westminster Abbey and had his latest annuity from Richard renewed by Henry (who also gave Chaucer a substantial gift, perhaps, as has been suggested, because he recognized the potential usefulness of a well-known poet to his new and shaky reign). Chaucer died the following year—probably on October 25, 1400—and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In 1556 his remains were moved to their present tomb, and the area surrounding his burial spot became known as Poets’ Corner.

  Audience and Sources

  Chaucer moved in several milieux during his adult life, among them the royal court at Westminster; the mercantile world of the London docks and customs houses; and the literate cohort of court functionaries (household knights and squires, many of whom Chaucer knew well), government clerks (of chancery, the exchequer, and the law courts), scribes, notaries, lawyers, and men of letters that probably formed his most challenging, and preferred, audience. To many such listeners or readers of Chaucer’s poetry, themselves placed peripherally or ambiguously with respect to major centers of power or patronage, the ironies, obliquities, and downright silences that distinguish the Chaucerian narrative voice might strike a familiar, self-preserving, and deferential chord.

  The poetry that Chaucer created for his varied audiences reveals wide knowledge and keenly honed appropriative skills. He was thoroughly conversant in the lyric and narrative forms of French court poetry; he is the earliest known English poet to have been familiar with, and to adapt, texts written by the three great Tuscan authors, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He translated or paraphrased several Latin texts of classical antiquity, and was also familiar with influential medieval-Latin philosophical poetry. His knowledge of insular literature in English (his own natal tongue) was expectably great if not always respectful: The jogging meters of Middle English popular romances are the butt of the poetic joke in the tedious tale of Sir Thopas,a told by Chaucer’s alter ego, the narrator of The Canterbury Tales. Whatever he borrowed from another language or culture he stamped in his poetry with the unmistakable marks of Chaucerian style: wit, complexity, and what the late E. Talbot Donaldson characterized as a habitual “elusion of clarity.”

  Canon

  That Chaucer wrote almost entirely in English for the audiences I have enumerated above suggests the headway that English (marginalized socially, intellectually, and politically after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066) had made by the later fourteenth century in being accepted as a medium for serious expression in a wide range of cultural situations. French had been considered the language of genteel society for almost three centuries after the Conquest, although even the upper nobility was English-speaking within a few generations of that event, and French (in its insular form, commonly known as Anglo-Norman) was increasingly a language that had to be learned, as opposed to spoken from birth. In Chaucer’s day French continued to be the language of legal and Parliamentary written records, and Latin the language of the Church and higher education, but both tongues were increasingly invaded by the vocabulary and syntax of the language native to everyone born in England.

  Chaucer’s first substantial poetic efforts are innovative versions of an established French literary form, the dream vision, in which a narrator, while dreaming, observes or takes part in discussions or debates about love among characters who may be allegorical abstractions (Youth, Age, Beauty, Pride, etc.) or who may represent, in idealized form, powerful noble folk who are the poet’s patrons and members of their court. The Book of the Duchess, written around 1369 to honor Blanche, the recently deceased duchess of Lancaster, offers stylized sympathy and consolation to her husband, John of Gaunt (who later granted Chaucer a life annuity, possibly in thanks for the poem). The House of Fame, written in the late 1370s, inspired by the poet’s reading of Virgil, Ovid, and Dante, stresses comedy rather than pathos in depicting the arbitrary and amoral judgments handed down by the goddess Fame; it is a cynical commentary on the untrustworthiness of all communication—especially by poets. In The Parliament of Fowls (written around 1381), birds of all kinds meet on Saint Valentine’s day to choose mates, and in their arguments demonstrate the stereotypical ideas that people (here represented as birds) have of each other.

  Abandoning the dream vision, between 1380 and 1386 Chaucer composed Troilus and Criseyde, his most fully realized poetic achievement. Set against the background of the Trojan War, the poem depicts a passionate and ultimately tragic love affair. Chaucer created in Criseyde a woman whose complexity of character and motive has fascinated and disturbed modern readers. She may also have disturbed some of Chaucer’s contemporaries, or at least he pretended that she did, for in The Legend of Good Women—a collection of short tales about women betrayed by men, preceded by a prologue in the form of a dream vision—the poet must defend himself against an angry God of Love (depicted as a king, sharing some traits with Chaucer’s sovereign, Richard II), who accuses him of slandering women by his portrait of Criseyde. After (or while) composing the unfinished Legend, Chaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales.

  Problems: Unity, Coherence, Authenticity

  The twenty-first-century reader of The Canterbury Tales experiences Chaucer’s tale collection in a manner very different from any the poet could have imagined. What we read today in carefully prepared printed editions may not correspond to what Chaucer wanted his poem to look like; indeed, it seems doubtful that he even had a final plan for its contents and order. He probably began to compose a collection of tales quite different from the monothematic, classically oriented stories comprising The Legend of Good Women—but like it, a collection headed by a considerable prologue—sometime in the late 1380s, before or after he left London for Kent. How long he worked on The Canterbury Tales is unknown—perhaps until illness or death interrupted his labors, but he may have abandoned the project much earlier. Other unanswerable questions: Did he ever really contemplate writing 120 tales, as is implied by the Host’s suggestion to the Canterbury-bound pilgrims that each of the thirty travelers tell two tales on the road to the shrine and two more on the way back to the celebratory dinner at his inn, the Tabard? (Elsewhere in the framing fiction there are suggestions that one tale will suffice from each pilgrim.) And how many of the tales had been written and either circulated in writing or performed orally before the poet had the idea of incorporating them within a frame? (A list of his works included by Chaucer in the prologue to the Legend suggests that “The Knight’s Tale” and “The Second Nun’s Tale of Saint Cecilia”* preex isted the Canterbury collection, and various scholars have conjectured an earlier composition for a number of others.)

  What modern presentations of The Canterbury Tales hide behind their neatness and precision is the state in which Chaucer’s Canterbury project actually comes down to us. More than eighty extant manuscripts contain all or part of the text; each has variants and errors because, as with all textual reproduction before the invention of printing, manuscripts were copied one at a time by scribes in differing states of attentiveness or fatigue. Scholars have been unable to work out a system that organizes the manuscripts in such a way as to discover, behind all the variant readings, exactly what Chaucer wrote.

  Only one manuscript of The Canterbury Tales (the so-called Hengwrt manuscript, now in the National Library of Wales) may date from Chaucer’s lifetime; it contains a highly accurate text but lacks a tale (that of the Canon’s Yeoman) and several passages linking tales that appear in other manuscripts written within a decade of Chaucer’s death. The most famous manuscript, and until recently the one accorded highest authority because of its completeness and illustrations of all the pilgrims, is the Ellesmere manuscript, now in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. What emerges from these and other manuscripts is that Chaucer gathered many of the tales into groups, or fragments, by means of interstitial dialogue between the pilgrims. There is no agreed order for these fragments, and some manuscripts omit genuine link
ing dialogues, while others contain obviously spurious links. So except for the first fragment (containing the so-called “General Prologue,” the Knight‘s, Miller’s, and Reeve’s tales, and the Cook’s unfinished tale*—which comes first in all manuscripts that contain it), we cannot be absolutely sure about how Chaucer intended to order his stories—if indeed he ever settled on an order or, for that matter, on a text. All the evidence suggests that when he died, or abandoned work on The Canterbury Tales, he left behind piles of papers containing versions of the tales, but that he had also, during his years of composing them, circulated individual stories among his readership that he may later have revised, leaving different versions in circulation to be copied after his death into the manuscripts we now possess. It follows that a cloud of uncertainty, varying in extent and density, must hang over all critical judgments about the meaning and effect of this radically incomplete, but still quite brilliant, collection of tales within their framing fiction.

  Analysis

  The Canterbury Tales as we possess it contains twenty-four tales—some incomplete—gathered into ten fragments (at least according to the Ellesmere text), headed by a prologue that establishes the pilgrimage to Canterbury as the occasion for a tale-telling contest, and offers the narrator’s more or less detailed descriptions of almost all the pilgrims. The tales themselves fall into a wider variety of story types than is characteristic of other European tale collections Chaucer may have known, including Boccaccio’s Decameron: saints’ lives, miracle stories, romances of various types, pathetic tales of victimized women, fortune tragedies, fabliaux (brief, irreverent, and often sexually explicit tales mocking marriage, the Church, and all social ranks), even an animal fable. There are two long prose tales: one an allegory opposing anger and prudence as bases for political action, the other (not really a tale at all) a concluding exercise in the dominant late-medieval discourse of penance and confession, attributed to one of the priests on the pilgrimage, but considered by some scholars a separate Chaucerian text that accidentally became attached to The Canterbury Tales after the poet’s death. Appended to “The Parson’s Tale”* is a statement of retraction in which Chaucer, speaking in some version of his own voice, expresses regret for the irreligious nature of much of his poetry and prays for forgiveness; it too has been judged by some a mistaken addition.