The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare | Chaucer, Geoffrey
Chaucer, Geoffrey(c.1340–1400), poet who played a seminal role in the development of English vernacular poetry. Chaucer's reputation in the Elizabethan age was considerable: he was heralded as the father of English poetry and as ‘our English Homer’ though he was also increasingly criticized for bawdiness, for the roughness of his verse, and for the obscurity of his language, with some critics confessing that they could not always understand him. The extent of Chaucer's direct influence upon Elizabethan and Jacobean literature is often difficult to gauge for he was rarely quoted and maxims that we might recognize from Chaucer were often conventional. Similarly, his plots were often available from another source.
Troilus and Criseyde was the most popular of Chaucer's works in the 16th century. Shakespeare's play follows exactly the order of events of Chaucer's poem (though in a considerably shorter time frame) from...
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