CHAUCER, GEOFFREY. — English poet, b. around 1340, d. probably in 1400. He served the court as a soldier in the Hundred Years’ War, during which he was taken prisoner; as a diplomat he travelled several times to France and Italy; as a collector of duties and customs, and finally as superintendent of repair works on the royal palaces, parks, and the banks of the Thames. This practical activity brought him into contact, on the one hand, with the nobility of the realm and, on the other, with the urban and rural bourgeoisie, which he would portray so admirably in his works. Yet his many occupations did not distract him from study; he takes pleasure in citing the books he reads and in providing lengthy summaries of them.
His first original poem, The Boke of the Duchesse, was written on the occasion of the plague death (the one described by Boccaccio) of Blanche of Lancaster, the first wife of his patron, Giovanni di Gand, uncle of Richard II and father of the future usurper of the kingdom, Henry IV. In the form of the vision, then common, C. has the desolate widowed husband recount the praises of his wife. The influences of French poetry can be traced in these verses. A passage of The Mens of Fame (perhaps written on the occasion of Richard’s betrothal to Anne of Bohemia) instead reveals the reading of Dante that C. was undertaking. The poet recounts, still in the form of a dream, his flight among the talons of an eagle to the house of Fame and Rumour, where he is permitted to witness the goddess’s capricious judgments, and where he prepares to contemplate other visions that promise to be interesting, when the poem comes to an incomplete halt. Dante is again the model for some verses of the Parlement of Poules (where Richard’s marriage to Anne seems to be celebrated), which describes St Valentine’s Day (14 February), when all the birds gather around Nature, each to choose his own mate. Literal translations of several stanzas from Boccaccio’s Teseide can also be traced in this poem, an author whom C., although he never names him, counts among his favourites. Instead, he names Dante “the great poet of Italy,” who “knows how to describe everything, point by point,” and Petrarch, “whose sweet rhetoric illumined all Italy with poetry.” The subject of the Teseide (the duel between Palemone and Arcita for the hand of the beautiful Emilia) would later be retold by the knight in the Canterbury Tales. But Boccaccio’s presence is more vivid in the five cantos of the long poem entitled Troilus and Criseyde (the source of Shakespeare’s drama of the same title), which takes up and expands the story of the Filostrato, with significant ethical and aesthetic variations.
The prologue of the Legende of Good Women, of Ovidian inspiration, returns to the fiction of the dream and presents the poet rebuked by the god of love for having dared to speak ill of love, both in Troilus and Criseyde and in translating the Roman de la Rose. The work was not completed, perhaps because the poet felt an urgent inspiration to begin his masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales, to which he devoted himself from 1586–87 until his death. To a group of pilgrims gathered at the Tabard Inn in Southwark to go on pilgrimage to the tomb of the martyr St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, the host proposes that each of them tell two tales on the outward journey and two on the return. Only 24 of the tales are complete. The prologues between the individual tales are noteworthy: there the characters of the narrators and listeners (already admirably portrayed in the general prologue) are completed, together with their various reactions and comments on what has been said or what is intended to be said. The sources of the tales are the usual ones to which all medieval storytellers resorted, and the stories concern love affairs, clever or cruel jokes, terrible vendettas, the devotion of wives, the heroism of virgins, and the courage of lovers. The tales of a religious character are narrated by the Prioress (the legend of the little choirboy, massacred by the Jews for his devotion to the Blessed Virgin) and by the Second Nun (the legend of St Cecilia). In the figure of the country parson, C. delineates a model of evangelical poverty and zeal for souls. Nothing is said of the parson’s actual conduct, who is instead presented solely in his inner life. He was “rich in works and holy thoughts,” “did not rage over tithes,” “did not hurry to London, to St Paul’s, to procure a canonry for his soul,” taught “discreetly and kindly,” and “with grace drew the people toward heaven.”
The religious problem did not impose itself upon C. in its speculative theological aspects, but in those that touch human beings at moments of particular pathos (such as the problem of providence), or when the special relation of one of his characters to religious life would call more insistently for attention to his character, as is precisely the case with the country parson and the Prioress. Hence the predominantly ethical presentation of religion in C.’s poetry.