CHAUCER, GEOFFREY. - English poet, b. around 1340, d. probably in 1400. He served at court, as a soldier in the Hundred Years' War, during which he was taken prisoner; as a diplomat he traveled several times to France and Italy; as a collector of tolls and customs, and finally as superintendent of the repair works of the royal palaces, the parks and the banks of the Thames. This practical activity put him in contact, on the one hand with the nobility of the realm, on the other with the town and country bourgeoisie, which he would wonderfully portray in his works. Yet his many occupations did not distract him from study; he takes pleasure in citing the books he reads and in giving long 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, John of Gaunt, uncle of Richard II and father of the future usurper of the realm, Henry IV. In the form then common of the vision, C. has the praises of the wife narrated by the desolate widowed husband. The influences of French poetry can be traced in these verses. A passage of The Hous of Fame (written perhaps on the occasion of Richard's betrothal to Anne of Bohemia) reveals instead his reading of Dante, which C. was then doing. The poet narrates, still in the form of a dream, his flight in the claws of an eagle to the house of Fame and of noises, where he is granted to witness the capricious judgments of the goddess, and where he prepares to contemplate other visions that promise to be interesting to him, when the poem stops incomplete. Dante is still the model of some verses of the Parlement of Foules (where the marriage of Richard to Anne seems to be celebrated), which describes St. Valentine's day (Feb. 14), when all the birds gather around Nature, to choose each its own mate. In this poem literal translations of some stanzas from Boccaccio's Teseide can also be traced, an author whom C., though never naming him, holds among his favorites. He does name instead Dante "the great poet of Italy," who "can describe everything, point by point," and Petrarch, "whose sweet rhetoric illuminated all Italy with poetry." The subject of the Teseide (the duel of Palamon and Arcite for the hand of the beautiful Emily) will later be retold by the knight in the Canterbury Tales. But the presence of Boccaccio is more alive in the 5 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 notable 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 finished, perhaps because the poet felt the 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 at Southwark to go on pilgrimage to the tomb of the martyr St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury cathedral, the host proposes that each narrate two tales on the way there and two on the return. Only 24 of the tales are complete. Notable are the prologues, between one tale and another, where the characters of the narrators and listeners are completed (already wonderfully portrayed in the general prologue), with the different reactions and with the comments on what has been said or on what is intended to be said. The sources of the tales are the usual ones from which all medieval storytellers drew, and the tales are love affairs, clever or cruel jests, terrible vengeances, devotions of wives, heroisms of virgins, courage of lovers. The tales of a religious character are narrated by the prioress (the more legendary one of the little schoolboy singer, murdered by the Jews for his devotion to the Most Holy Virgin) and by the second nun (the legend of St. Cecilia). In the figure of the country parson C. outlines a model of evangelical poverty and zeal for souls. Nothing is said of the parson's actual conduct, who is instead presented only in his soul. He was "rich of holy works and holy thoughts," "he did not rage for the tithes," "he did not run to London to St. Paul's, to procure for himself a canonry for souls," he taught "discreet and benign" and drew "the people to heaven with grace."
The religious problem did not impose itself on C. in its speculative theological aspects, but in those that touch men in moments of particular pathos (such as the problem of providence), or when the special relation of one of his characters to the religious life will call with greater insistence attention to his character, as is precisely the case with the country parson and with the prioress. Hence the predominantly ethical presentation of religion in C.'s poetry.
Bibliography5 works
Alberto Castelli