Chaucer
Donald R. Howard remarks at the beginning of Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World that one could almost believe there were “two Geoffrey Chaucers” in late fourteenth century England. One was the famous poet, author of well-known and now much-studied works such as The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), Troilus and Criseyde (1382), The Parliament of Fowls (1380) and half a dozen more. The other was the courtier and civil servant, who is known, for example, to have been captured by the French in 1359, to have been employed in later life on a variety of missions in Spain and Italy, often important and sometimes secret, and to have been if not involved, at any rate very much present during such critical events as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 or the long faction struggles which led to the deposition and murder of Richard II at the century’s end. Scores of surviving documents refer to civil-servant Chaucer, telling about his career, income, and connections. None of them, however, says a word about his poetry, which to the royal bureaucrats who made appointments and paid expenses was clearly of no significance. Nor does Chaucer, in his poetry, say anything about his work as a “secret agent,” whatever stimulus it may have given him. Except for a very few tantalizing references in the poetry to daily life and daily duties—vital because they confirm that the two Chaucers really were the same man—the gap between poet and courtier appears total. What Howard’s book tries to do is to bridge the gap, reconstructing Chaucer’s life and suggesting how political and personal crises did in fact affect his writing.
There is certainly an amplitude of provocative and dramatic material in Chaucer’s life. Of all English poets, he was the one who was closest, for the longest, to the political center stage. Although he was the son of a London merchant, he could in the end even claim to be related to the English king, though in a typically strained and uncertain fashion. In 1366, Chaucer married Philippa de Roet, daughter of one of the queen’s retainers. Only a few years later, his wife’s sister Katherine became the mistress of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the son of Edward III, uncle of Richard II, and father of Henry IV. For many years, this liaison was well-known to the entire English court, and after the death of his second wife, Gaunt even went so far as to marry his long-term mistress, the mother of several of his acknowledged children.
Near the end of his life, then, Chaucer could claim to be the king’s uncle’s brother-in-law. This relationship must have been at once useful and embarrassing. In the affecting elegy known as The Book of the Duchess, written to commemorate the death of Gaunt’s first wife in 1368, Chaucer appears to be urging Gaunt to cease mourning and recover from grief. Can he have meant Gaunt to do this by seducing Katherine? Many years later, Chaucer received many marks of favor from Richard II, yet the man who deposed Richard was Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke, whom Chaucer must have known from birth; in addition, the man who, in some accounts, actually murdered the deposed king in 1400 was Henry’s half brother, Sir Thomas Swynford, Gaunt’s illegitimate son by Katherine and Chaucer’s nephew.
Other aspects of Chaucer’s “official” life are as thought-provoking. When the mob stormed London during the Peasants’ Revolt, they entered by the gate over which Chaucer was actually living. They would almost certainly have killed the poet-courtier if they had caught him—he was by then a senior...
(This entire section contains 1946 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
customs officer, almost as bad as a tax collector to the mob—but in some unknown manner he escaped. Earlier Chaucer seems to have been given tasks as varied, difficult, and responsible as persuading English mercenaries not to act against English interests in European wars and negotiating a vital loan from Florentine bankers to pay for royal campaigns. This last assignment must have been especially difficult as the Crown had ruined bankers a generation before by inventing the device of “debt repudiation.”
Closer to home, Chaucer can be seen in other documents giving evidence to a heralds’ court, being robbed by highwaymen twice in one week, and being accused of rape. That accusation is of particular curiosity and danger in that the lady complaining was the stepdaughter of Edward III’s mistress (the notoriously corrupt and influential Alice Perrers). Howard finds this last fact especially hard to square with Chaucer’s poetry, which he sees as the work of a man always sympathetic to the plight of women in a man’s world. The accusation could have been spurious, and Chaucer was never convicted, but rape is a charge on which it is notoriously hard to convict. All round, one may say that Chaucer’s career hung perpetually on the edge of violence, whether it be rape, lynching, war, murder, or death on the block. Could Chaucer have afforded to be the traditionally sensitive poetic soul?
The picture which Howard offers is that of a man of great utility but uncertain status, who had learned above all to fill a role at court without ever venturing beyond it. He was allowed, and may even have been encouraged, to comment on events but not to influence them. Thus, there can be no doubt that the early The Book of the Duchess is a reaction to the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, at once memorial to the dead and consolation to the living. What can be said, though, of The House of Fame (1372-1380), an unfinished poem which many have believed to be the working out of some inner and personal problem? Howard argues that it was left unfinished to commemorate a royal flop, the failure to arrange a marriage between the young King Richard and the Italian heiress Caterina Visconti. This belief is based on the mention of “December the tenth” in the poem, the date on which news appears (in 1379) to have arrived of the termination of negotiations. Howard even describes a scene in which the poem could have been read to an audience “in the know,” breaking off with a mild jibe at the Italian nuncio then present.
Yet there are many doubts as to this interpretation. The poem may not have been written in 1379, and December 10 may have had some other significance. The poem’s main concern is fame, not marriage. Chaucer may in other words have written it solely for himself, not for the court. Much the same could be said of Howard’s analysis of The Parliament of Fowls, clearly a Valentine’s Day poem, but one set in the spring, while February 14 in England is still quite definitely midwinter. Howard suggests that Chaucer had learned in Genoa of the Genoese Saint Valentine, whose feast day is May 3, and had in consequence introduced a new spring festivity to the English court. May 3 is mentioned several times by Chaucer in different poems. It is also the date on which Richard II was eventually betrothed to Anne of Bohemia. Was The Parliament of Fowls then written for that betrothal and the betrothal arranged to fall on that day? This conclusion would give Chaucer a major role at court. Nevertheless, one could object that in Chaucer’s poem there is no betrothal, making it an odd compliment to a prospective bride. Some of Howard’s further suggestions, such as that the translation of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy (523) was for the young king and commissioned by his tutor, rest on no evidence at all.
The problem is, once again, one of status. Was Chaucer a professional, writing always to order? Or did he just write in his spare time, circulating his poems only to such friends as he thought would appreciate them? Either view is plausible. Howard prefers the former, which does admittedly place Chaucer near the center of events. The latter is indicated simply by the fact that no court document ever mentions that Geoffrey Chaucer was a poet.
There is also the problem of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s major work, one in many ways singularly uncourtly. Howard explains this discrepancy by date, and by the modern theory of “age-crises,” mentioned several times in this book. He points out that in later life Chaucer seems to have drifted away from major affairs, resigning his posts and accepting smaller payments. This withdrawal may have been a sensible reaction to the dangerous faction-fighting in which several of Chaucer’s acquaintances were executed, but it can be seen also as a typical reaction of the fifties, a period when men are alleged often to go through attacks of unfulfillment and despair. In this view, Chaucer is seen as having been left alone by the death of his wife, and demoralized by English politics and the violent deaths of colleagues, turning in reaction to a style of comic and detached writing which had not been present before. These conjectures are made to dovetail well with a central problem of Chaucer’s career, namely the fact that Chaucer never at any time mentioned his contemporary, the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, though they had almost certainly met and though Chaucer used Boccaccio’s works as the basis for his two longest and most ambitious poems and arguably also for the entire concept and framework of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer admired Boccaccio as a poetic technician, Howard suggests, but despised him for his uncourtliness on the one occasion when they could have met. Chaucer reacted to Boccaccio both as imitator and as rival; it was thus an especially significant moment when Chaucer moved away from his normal courtly environment and on (or, he might have thought, back) to the relatively bourgeois milieu of the Italian writer.
Donald Howard’s achievement in this biography is significant, as was posthumously acknowledged when Chaucer received the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography/Autobiography. Howard has presented a deep and well-based account of Chaucer’s background, very strong on dates, documents, and literary coincidences. (For the general reader, the text is supplemented by a chronology, a discussion of Chaucer’s pronunciation, a guide to further reading, and brief discussions of the order of The Canterbury Tales and the evolution of Chaucer’s reputation; the scholar will find almost one hundred pages of notes.) Howard has also given Chaucer’s life a shape which modern readers can recognize and to which they can relate their own experiences. It is no disservice to Howard to add that the book contains flaws which he surely would have corrected had he lived to see it through to publication. A number of passages of historical background and narrative substantially repeat information given in earlier sections, often with similar wording.
Given the scope of his attention to Chaucer’s life and times, Howard makes no attempt here to provide full or close readings of the major Chaucerian works such as he undertook in The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (1976) and other studies. In his concentration on Chaucer-the-courtier, Howard has furthermore had to leave aside, not Chaucer-the-poet (for the author thinks that this poet’s job was usually to be a courtier), but Chaucer-the-private-individual—even though most twentieth century Chaucer critics have stressed the private humor of Chaucer’s writing. Did Chaucer never mean to be fully understood? Or has the key to his intentions been lost, a key plain to the inner circle of his own day? If the latter is true (and it may not be), then Howard’s book comes closest to the key’s rediscovery.
