On Geoffrey Chaucer

James M. Dean

Geoffrey Chaucer (about 1343–1400) has often been called “the

father of English poetry.” He studied, translated, and imitated
major writers of his era in four languages: Latin, French, Italian,
and English. It is no exaggeration to say that Chaucer was “the
first great English writer.” He was one of those rare authors, like
Dante for the Italians or Twain for Americans, who can, in his
writings, evoke and render forth his culture, its goals, values, and
aesthetics. In its praise of Chaucer, the Poetry Foundation says the
following about Chaucer’s place in the canon of British poetry and
literature: “Author of the immortal Canterbury Tales, GEOFFREY
CHAUCER . . . is the undisputed father of English poetry. His
pitch-perfect, melodic versification demonstrated the riches of the
evolving language’s resources, while his memorable portraits of
many human types glows with warmth and humor” (“Geoffrey
Chaucer”; Ganim 235).

Chaucer the Storyteller

Chaucer, like Shakespeare two hundred years later, was a
preeminent storyteller. Virginia Woolf, in her essay on Chaucer and
the Pastons (a medieval family) in The Common Reader, speaks
of Chaucer’s ability to draw us into the storytelling process: “To
learn the end of the story—Chaucer can still make us wish to do
that. He has pre-eminently that story-teller’s gift, which is almost
the rarest gift among writers at the present day” (Woolf). While
Shakespeare focused especially on drama and narrative and lyric
poetry, Chaucer specialized in various genres of narrative and lyric
poetry, including epic, mythological and historical tales, fabliaux
(comic, ribald stories), medieval romances (tales of warfare and
love), saints’ lives, and other literary kinds. While so many of
his immediate colleagues, Langland and the Gawain-poet for
example, wrote four-beat alliterative satire, Chaucer, in visits
On Geoffrey Chaucer 3
to the Italian peninsula, discovered the Italian humanist writers
and their imitations of classical Latin writers, especially Virgil
and Ovid (Bowers). Chaucer’s genius, in part, was his ability to
exploit European literature for his London audience. As a poet,
he emulated the (Roman) classical authors, including, in a list
he himself assembled and in this order: “Virgile, Ovide, Omer,
Lucan, and Stace” (Benson, Troilus and Criseyde 5. 1792; 584); in
translation, “Virgil and Ovid, Homer, Lucan and Statius” (Krapp
306).
By adapting medieval Latin, French, and Italian writings to
his English vernacular, Chaucer inaugurates what we today call
the British literary tradition, a tradition that profoundly influenced
American as well as English letters. Chaucer helped inspire his
fifteenth-century admirers as well as Shakespeare’s great literary
works (Donaldson); seventeenth-century poets, like John Donne
and John Milton, learned a great deal from the Middle English
author. Chaucer imported the iambic pentameter verse form from
the trecento Italian humanist poets and made those pentameter
lines function in rhyme royal (stanzas rhyming ABABBCC)
and rhyming couplets, the latter adopted by seventeenth and
eighteenth-century satirists, including John Dryden, who retold
many of Chaucer’s stories, and Alexander Pope.
Chaucer contemplated deeply the place and function of
literature. When he declared himself on this subject, he made clear
that literature—which for Chaucer and his contemporaries mostly
meant poetry—should, in Horace’s well known phrase, both
instruct and entertain: utile dulce. Chaucer even builds literary
values into his characters. Some, like the Host of the Canterbury
pilgrimage, Harry Bailly, advocate “mirth” and entertainment,
while others, mostly the clerics on the pilgrimage, emphasize
morality. The Chaucerian narrator of the Canterbury Tales claims
that in his stories, the careful reader will “fynde ynowe, grete
and smale, / Of storial thing that toucheth gentilesse, / And eek
moralitee and holinesse” (Benson I.3177-80). (There’s plenty of
all kinds, to please you all: / True tales that touch on manners and
on morals, / As well as piety and saintliness” [Wright 81].)

4 Critical Insights
 Chaucer explores genres of tragedy and comedy in his works,
especially tragedy. When Chaucer defines tragedy, he means
simply the downfall of a prominent man or woman from high
estate to low. This non-Aristotelian form is called de casibus or
casus tragedy—tragedy based on the sudden fall (see Kelly 49-
65). The sequence of “tragedies” in The Monk’s Tale from the
Canterbury Tales all illustrate de casibus tragedies. The case of
comedy is a little different. Chaucer uses the term only once, at
the conclusion of Troilus and Criseyde, his great love tragedy.
Chaucer prays that his book may be well received: “Go, litel bok,
go litel myn tragedie, / Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, /
So sende might to make in som comedye!” (Benson 5. 1786-88).
(Go, little book, my little tragedy! / God grant thy maker, ere his
ending day, / May write some tale of happy poetry! [Krapp 306]).
Krapp’s modern translation of Chaucer’s “comedye” as “happy
poetry” may strike some readers as not quite what Chaucer had in
mind. Rather, they would argue as I do here that “might to make
in som comedye” refers to his turning from the tragic love affair
of Troilus and Criseyde to imagining the comic elements of the
Canterbury Tales (see Howard 30-35).
Today Chaucer’s reputation is based especially on three
things: his natural description of the time when people like to go
on pilgrimage to Canterbury; his comic masterpieces, The Miller’s
Tale and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, both from the Canterbury Tales;
and his scene-stealing, garrulous character, the Wife of Bath.
The Miller’s Tale features a second Noah’s flood, a misplaced
kiss, and a well-timed fart. It is a special kind of story—a French
genre called fabliau that often includes, as The Miller’s Tale
does, a doting old man who foolishly marries a teenage bride and
oversexed young men, including a student. The Miller tells this
particular story because he is trying to “pay back” the Knight for
his utterly unrealistic story of courtly love. The KnT is adapted
from a narrative originally told by Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Teseida,
or The Book of Theseus, a work set in ancient Thebes and Athens.
The Miller’s Tale should have a source text in Old French, but
the chief source seems to be a Middle Dutch work: Heile van

On Geoffrey Chaucer 5
Beersele. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is a mock-heroic story about a
cock and a fox, with the cock compared to Hector of Troy and the
fox compared to the devil in a retelling of the fall of Adam.

Chaucer’s Colorful Characters

Chaucer’s characters, including his storytelling pilgrims, are
memorably presented. Donald Howard has argued that the General
Prologue of the Canterbury Tales offers a memory system, with
particularly remarkable lines, to help us recall each pilgrim when
he or she should tell a story (Howard 139-58). The pilgrim Clerk,
studying Aristotle at Oxford University, is summed up by this
notable couplet: “Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche, / And
gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche” (Benson I.307-08). (Moral
virtue was reflected in his speech, / And gladly would he learn, and
gladly teach [Wright 9].) Of the Squire, son of the pilgrim Knight,
Chaucer says in his final couplet: “Curteis he was, lowely, and
servysable, / And carf biforn his fader at the table” (Benson I.99-
100). (Polite, modest, willing to serve, and able, / He carved before
his father at their table [Wright 3].) This couplet anticipates and
clarifies the later portrait of Friar Huberd, who frequents taverns
while avoiding poor and ill folk: “And over al, ther as profit sholde
arise, / Curteis he was and lowely of servyse” (Benson I.249-
50). / (And anywhere where profit might arise / He’d crawl with
courteous offers of service [Wright 7].) The couplets involving the
Squire and the Friar are very similar. The chief difference, which
makes all the difference, is the word “profit.” When it is profitable
to behave humbly, the Friar is all attention and solicitude.
The pilgrim everyone remembers and studies especially
carefully is the Wife of Bath—Alice, as we come to know her. In an
age when women were often not taken seriously, the Wife speaks
up and challenges male speakers. The Wife of Bath is the only
secular woman on the pilgrimage traveling from Harry Bailly’s
tavern, the Tabard Inn, to the great cathedral in Canterbury. There
are other women on the pilgrimage, but they are church figures:
the Prioress and the Second Nun. Nonetheless, the Wife worries
about her salvation, and in her lengthy Prologue before her tale,

6 Critical Insights
she in effect tells a sermon on the importance of life experience
over clerical authority concerning marriage. Her point is simple
but telling: religious folk cannot know about marriage because
they are clerics: they cannot marry. She, on the other hand, as she
explains at length, has been married five times; she is an expert on
marriage and human relationships. The Wife’s Prologue explains
the differences between her first three husbands (old, rich, and
good) and the last two: a younger man who has a mistress, and a
twenty-year-old who is, or at least was, an Oxford scholar, Jankyn.
Every night, he read to her from a misogynist book of Wicked
Wives. He regularly quarreled with her; eventually, he got into a
memorable slug fest with her. To make things more complicated,
she says she thinks she loved husband number five best even though
he beat her. The abuse of her is both verbal and physical. The Wife,
who sets herself up as the champion of life experience, ironically
becomes an authority on the issues of marriage and women’s place
in society.

On Geoffrey Chaucer 7
 Fig. 1 – The Wife of Bath with a whip MS Cambridge GG.4.27
8 Critical Insights
 Because of her outspokenness, she disturbs some of the male
clerics. When she outlines her remarks toward the beginning of her
Prologue, the Pardoner sarcastically praises her, saying “Ye been a
noble precour in this cas” (Benson III.165.). (You make a splendid
preacher on this theme [Wright 223].) Just before she launches
into her story of the rapist knight who must discover what women
really want or forfeit his head, the Friar and Summoner get into
an altercation, interrupting the Wife. Eventually, they allow the
Wife to continue her storytelling. The Wife’s “sermon” subtopics
of her Prologue include bigamy (how many husbands can she
have?), virginity (did Jesus require or only recommend it?), and
the use of sexual organs (are they just for urinating?). The Wife’s
arguments are for the most part superior to those of the church. As
the Canterbury Tales are structured, the Wife’s Prologue and Tale,
her storytelling, elicits responses from some male clerics and even
some non-clerics. The Clerk, who like the Wife’s fifth husband,
is an Oxford student, fashions his tale as a response to the Wife.
There is a formal “Lenvoy,” a mocking document that sums up the
Clerk’s unhappiness with the Wife’s approach to life and marriage,
but emphasizing the Clerk’s point that marriages work best when the
husband exercise “sovereynetee” or “maistrye”: power. The story
after The Clerk’s Tale—The Merchant’s Tale—does not overtly take
sides on the man/woman issue, but the Wife manages to appear in the
story nonetheless. Justinus, brother of and counselor to old January,
cites the Wife on the issue of power in marriage. A similar appearance
of the Wife as an authority on marriage occurs in Chaucer’s short
poem, Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton (for discussions of these textual
passages see Dean’s essay within this volume).
The Wife of Bath can seem to be a person drawn from “life,” a
character Chaucer or his other pilgrims on the Canterbury pilgrimage
might know, even though we are aware that so many of the Wife’s
details or her description originate in well-known literary figures from
Ovid and Jean de Meun’s portion of The Romance of the Rose. In
Chaucer’s composition of the Wife, he adverts to medieval antifeminist
stereotypes. Jill Mann has explained the dialogue between the reality
of the Wife and her construction as a clerical commonplace:

On Geoffrey Chaucer 9
 The double structure of the Wife’s speech [she speaks to and for
medieval women and Alice of Bath] thus has a meaning of far wider
import than its role in the Wife’s individual experience. And yet
it plays a crucial role in creating our sense of the Wife as a living
individual. For what it demonstrates is her interaction with the
stereotypes of her sex, and it is in this interaction that we feel the
three-dimensional reality of her existence. That is, she does not live
in the insulated laboratory of literature, where she is no more than
a literary object, unconscious of the interpretations foisted upon
her; she is conceived as a woman who lives in the real world, in full
awareness of the antifeminist literature that purports to describe and
criticize her behavior and she has an attitude to it just as it has an
attitude to her. (Mann 64)

The Canterbury Tales begin with the epic style, akin to

tragedy, with The Knight’s Tale, but very quickly, the storytelling
is diverted to comedy with The Miller’s Tale and The Reeve’s Tale.
The nineteen-year-old wife of the old carpenter John, Alysoun,
resembles Alice of Bath, who was first married to an old man when
she was twelve years old (see Benson III.4-7). January’s young wife
May in The Merchant’s Tale also has affinities with the Wife of Bath,
who knows a thing or two about managing husbands. The Wife is a
large, domineering figure in the Canterbury Tales and also outside
of it. In a certain way, the Wife resembles Shakespeare’s popular
and outspoken Sir John Falstaff, who by report was so beloved that
Queen Elizabeth herself asked Shakespeare to write a play featuring
the scheming figure (Shakespeare 252), so we now have The Merry
Wives of Windsor. The Wife, like Falstaff, is a very human, social
character, one who confesses her sins to her fellow pilgrims, as when
she laments, in almost perfect iambic pentameter, “Allas, allas! That
evere love was synne!” (Benson III.614). (Alas, alas, that ever love
was sin [Wright 234].) She likes flirting, dancing, going to plays,
and trying new clothes. She has a close friend and confidant—called
a “gossib”—also named Alice, to whom she reveals all her secrets,
much to the unhappiness of husband five, the sometime Oxford
scholar.

10 Critical Insights
Chaucer the Narrator
A discussion of Chaucer’s characters would be incomplete without
exploration of the Chaucerian narrator. To a lesser or greater extent,
the narrator of Chaucer’s more ambitious works makes “himself”
an issue. Some Chaucerians object to understanding the narrator as
somehow different from the author Geoffrey Chaucer or the narrator
as being a separate character. They argue that there is no objective (or
subjective) correlative behind the “I” of a narrative. A. C. Spearing’s
useful terms are to distinguish the “experiencing self,” the “I” who
has the experiences that lead to the poetry, and the “narrating self,”
the “I” who seems to be speaking the story. (See Spearing Chap. 3,
on Troilus and Criseyde.) This said, Chaucer constructs many of
his works, including his most celebrated writings, with the aid of a
narrator who relates the story.
Modern critics of Chaucer have seen Chaucer’s narrators as
important in themselves. A good example is the work generally
regarded as Chaucer’s first important writing, the Book of the
Duchess, the elegy for Blanche of Lancaster. The first word of the
1334 line poem is “I”:

I have gret wonder, be this lyght,

How that I lyve, for day ne nyght
I may nat slepe wel nygh nought. (Benson, BD 1-3)

(I wonder much, by this candle, how I manage to live, for day and
night I can’t sleep at all.)

The Book of the Duchess, like many other Chaucer works, is a

dream vision, a French genre originally, and in the opening lines,
the poet discusses sleep and the narrator’s insomnia, a motif the
narrator will develop over the opening sections of the poem. When
someone brings him a book with old stories, the narrator selects
the tale of Ceyx and Alcione, a classical story from Ovid about a
woman who learns that her husband has drowned. Alcione faints,
and Juno, taking pity on her, asks her messenger to visit the realm
of Morpheus and to bring back the body of Ceyx to show Alcione
the fate of her husband. Chaucer’s narrator is delighted with the
On Geoffrey Chaucer 11
story, and apparently because of it, he is at long last able to fall
asleep himself. But now the dream vision begins and the narrator
miraculously exits his bedroom and finds himself in a natural
setting. He hears the sounds of hunting and comes across a man who
explains that the Roman emperor Octavian is nearby. He follows a
dog, which leads him to a knight dressed all in black who complains
about his lady, White. The narrator asks a number of questions, and
the reader understands that Lady White has died. The black knight
for his part speaks in allegorical terms somewhat, explaining that
he has played a chess game with Fortune and lost. Chaucer critics
discuss the problem of the narrator’s obtuseness; others argue that
the narrator is only feigning obtuseness to draw the man in black out
and help him achieve a measure of consolation in grief. It is certainly
clear that the narrator of The Book of the Duchess and Chaucer the
author are two very different characters. I would remind readers that
the narrative is a dream vision, and happenings can occur in dream
that will not occur in the waking state.
The House of Fame (late 1378s) includes a narrator who is
interested in the various kinds of dreams and who, in his dream, visits
places in the heavens in the talons of a talkative eagle. The eagle
quizzes the narrator, who is a separate and important individual,
on various scientific issues, especially the nature and properties of
sound. The eagle is comic—tedious and repetitive—addressing the
narrator in familiar speech as “Geffrey” (728). The House of Fame
is unfinished; it ends just as we are about to learn the identity and
importance of “a man of greet auctoritee” (2158)
A narrator frames Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls (about 1380),
which concerns dreams, love, and Valentine ’s Day. The narrator
claims to be largely ignorant about love even though he is curious
about the subject. What he knows about love he has gleaned from
old books, particularly Cicero’s On the Republic, book 6. From that
book, he learns about the pagan cosmos and the fate of good and
evil people. That old book helps him get to sleep, and he quickly
meets Scipio Africanus, who also showed up in Cicero’s book. The
cosmic perspective sets up the significance and universal nature of
love. The narrator or Chaucer confesses that he is unsure whether

12 Critical Insights
his earlier reading helped shape his dream content; but before long,
Scipio Africanus guides the narrator to a gated garden similar to the
garden of love in The Romance of the Rose but with two Dantesque
inscriptions written above the gates: one a statement about the bliss
of love and the other a warning about love’s hardships. The narrator
cannot decide what to do, so Africanus shoves the indecisive
dreamer through one of the gates. This narrator shares several
characteristics with other Chaucerian narrators: concern with love,
concern with dreams and dream visions, interest in flights through
space, a penchant for old books, and a disposition toward indecision
and deference. These narrators are more acted upon than actors. The
main story occurs after the narrator has wandered around and viewed
many classical gods and allegorical figures, including Priapus, Diana,
Cupid, Venus, and the reigning goddess Dame Nature, who presides
over the birds. Says Chaucer, “For this was on Seynt Valentine’s day,
/ Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make, / Of every kynde
that men thynke may” (309-11). [For this was on Saint Valentine’s
day, when every bird of every kind that men can imagine comes
there to choose its mate.] The narrative focuses on noble eagles and
a court-like setting where birds can debate their choices.
Another important narrator appears in Troilus and Criseyde. In
that poem, the narrator does not experience a dream vision, but he
envisions his role as a partisan for lovers and, as the poem unfolds,
a supporter of the young lovers, especially Criseyde (Donaldson,
“Criseyde”). He describes himself as, like Pandarus, unlucky in love
and as “a servant of the servants of love” (Benson, Troilus 1.15). The
narrator becomes caught up in the story such that E. T. Donaldson
can say that the narrator is considerably enamored of Criseyde—that
he “loves” her in an avuncular way (see Donaldson, “Criseide” 68).
He adds that Criseyde “seems to represent . . . Chaucer’s supreme
achievement in the creation of human character” (see Donaldson,
“Criseyde 68, 67). He devotes considerable space in his important
essay to showing how the narrator finds ways to excuse Criseyde
from blame in abandoning Troilus. The author knows whether
Criseyde gave her heart to Diomede, but the narrator of Troilus
refuses to confirm that act, which he finds painful (see Benson,

On Geoffrey Chaucer 13
Troilus 5. 1050): “Men seyn—I not—that she yaf hym [Diomede]
hire herte” (Benson, Troilus 5.1050). (Men say, men say she gave to
him her heart” [Krapp 280].) The narrator also says:

And yf I myghte excuse hire any wise,

For she so sory was for hire untrouthe,
Ywis, I wolde excuse hire yet for routhe. (5. 1097-99)

(And if I could condone in any wise

Her deed, in pity’s name I would assent,
For of her sin she did at least repent. [Krapp 282])

So the narrator of Troilus allows the story to be told in a way that

respects the lovers and their story while still finally condemning
Criseyde’s faithlessness. The ending calls for a Christian recognition
of worldly meaning, although the narrator also realizes that Troilus
and Criseyde were pagans living for a time in a doomed city.
At the close of the narrative, he intrudes on the progress of the
poem by saying that he fervently hopes that wherever his story is
told it will be presented free of scribal errors:

And for ther is so gret diversite

In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge;
And red wherso thow be, or elles songe,
That thow be understonde, God I biseche! (5. 1793-98)

(And since there is so great diversity

In English, and in writing of our tongue,
I pray to God that no man miswrite thee,
Or get thy meter wrong and all unstrung;
But everywhere that thou art read or sung,
I trust all men will take thee as they should . . . . [Krapp 307])

The narrator of Troilus allows the focus to remain on the pathos of

the relationship between the young lovers.

14 Critical Insights
 The Legend of Good Women (late 1380s?) is an unfinished
narrative of about 2,700 lines with two prologues introducing the
main narrative concerning prominent or virtuous women. It is a
dream vision. The fictional setting includes Cupid’s confrontation
with the narrator. Cupid accuses Chaucer of presenting women in a
bad light. He singles out Chaucer’s translation of The Romance of
the Rose and Troilus and Criseyde.
Finally, the narrator of the Canterbury Tales (about 1387),
the “I” of the Canterbury book allows readers to experience the
pilgrimage through a pilgrim’s understanding—the pilgrim Chaucer.
He describes how he is present at the Tabard Inn, how he wants to set
down every word the storytellers say, the roadside drama and their
conversations, friendly or argumentative; and of course, “Chaucer”
agrees to tell a story but is shut down by the Host, who forces him
to tell another, more artful tale. Chaucer ends up narrating a longish,
allegorical tale in prose. For more see Dean, “Chaucer’s Reality
Fiction,” within this volume.

Chaucer and His Contemporaries

An important truth emerges from a recognition of Chaucer’s sources
and analogues: Chaucer chose to write in his English, the English
of late fourteenth-century London, but his outlook, his stance on
contemporary events, was chiefly international. He looked beyond
his immediate peers to the great classical poets and their Latin
successors. Chaucer’s colleagues, some of them (and probably
including authors unknown to Chaucer), promoted moralistic
writings such as The Prik of Conscience, early fourteenth century.
The Prik, author unknown, consists of about 9500+ rhymed couplets,
depending on the manuscript, in four-beat lines. Speaking of the
pains of hell, the anonymous author describes a scene that could
emerge from Dante’s Inferno canto 19, the simoniacs:

In grounde . . . of helle dongeoun

The hedes of synful shul be turned doun
And here feet fast uppeward knyt
And to strong peyne so be flytte. (Prik 6.725-28)

On Geoffrey Chaucer 15