Geoffrey Chaucer: Life, Works, and The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400)
Chaucer’s Works
It was once customary to divide Chaucer’s literary career into three periods:
- The French period (to 1372)
- The Italian period (to 1385)
- The English period (to 1400)
This categorization should not be taken as watertight; it is valid for didactic purposes. The courtly lyrics Chaucer wrote in the manner of contemporaneous French poets might well be mentioned first, although there is no way of dating most of these little poems. They present to us the familiar figure of the lover complaining of the heartlessness of his beloved. Many of them take the form of the balade – three 8-line stanzas with a refrain in the last line of each stanza.
The two works of Chaucer that show most clearly a French influence are his translation of the Roman de la Rose and The Book of the Duchess (this is not a translation). Concerning the first, it is unlikely that Chaucer translated more than the first 1700 lines. As far as it goes, it is a competent translation, though a fragmentary one.
The Book of the Duchess is an elegy on the death of Blanche, the first wife of John of Gaunt. It may be presumed that the poem was written shortly after the event (1369). The poem tells in octosyllabic couplets of the poet’s dream: On a beautiful May morning, he wandered in the woods until he came upon a man in black. He fell into conversation with this man and discovered that Fortune, playing chess with him, had taken his queen (i.e., his White Lady).
The Parliament of Fowls (dated between 1377 and 1382) describes how all birdkind is assembled to choose mates under the benign eye of the goddess Nature. The House of Fame (dated before 1382) is fragmentary, breaking off before its ultimate purpose is clear to the reader.
Chaucer’s prose translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy was probably completed sometime near 1380. Boethius, together with his arguments about Fortune’s fickle gifts, has a tremendous influence upon Chaucer’s works (wheel of Fortune).
The Legend of Good Women, generally assigned to the late 1380s, is a collection of secular saints’ lives, possibly in imitation of Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus, in which the protagonists are not sainted ladies but rather martyrs to love (against misogynist traditions). It remains to consider Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer’s immediate source for Troilus and Criseyde was Boccaccio’s Filostrato (ca. 1338), from which he took over all the major episodes. But he also added much of his own, not only in respect to incident but also in respect to characterization. Most experts think that the work was finished in 1385 or 1387.
Troilus and Criseyde is the tragedy of Troilus, not of Criseyde: as is made clear in the first line, it is the story of the “double sorrow” of Troilus. It is a chivalric romance, and Troilus is the hero. Hence all the attention to Troilus’s lovesickness, to his absurd fears, to his own good name, to the clandestine nature of his love for Criseyde.
The Canterbury Tales
Plot
The narrator is lodged at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, ready to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury, when a group of twenty-nine pilgrims arrives at the inn. The narrator is admitted to their number and provides portraits of most of the group, each of whom embodies a different aspect of English society. The host of the Tabard, Harry Baily, decides to join the pilgrims and proposes a game to divert them on the road: all will tell stories, and the best tale will be rewarded at journey’s end with a supper at the Tabard. The bulk of the poem consists of the tales of twenty-three pilgrims, interspersed with narrative and dialogue which link their performances to the frame of the pilgrimage journey.
Literary Form
The literary form of the story collection, in which narratives of diverse kinds are organized within a larger framing narrative, had a long history. But neither the Confessio Amantis of Chaucer’s friend John Gower, nor Boccaccio’s Decameron, exhibits anything like the complexity of the Tales. The social diversity of Chaucer’s pilgrims, the range of styles they employ, and the psychological richness of their interaction are a landmark in world literature. In no earlier work do characters so diverse in origin and status as Chaucer’s “churls” and “gentles” meet and engage on equal terms.