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Page 55
Chaucer
George D. Economou
While greatly susceptible to the influence of his reading, Geoffrey Chaucer was a poet who rarely wrote without an experimental or innovative purpose or result. Chaucer's intellectual and literary curiosity and receptivity contributed an indispensable source of strength to his performance as a writer. The major achievements of his career, from such early dream visions as
The Book of the Duchess
(1368-1372) and
The Parliament of Fowls
(1380-1382) to the
Troilus
(1382-1386) and
The Canterbury Tales
(1388-1400), as well as unfinished works like
The House of Fame
(1378-1380) and
The Legend of Good Women
(1385-1386), which he appears to have abandoned for new projects of greater promise, all share qualities that reveal the unique nature of the Chaucerian enterprise. These qualities include a magisterial command of poetic line and literary form, a superb sense of mimesis and story telling, and an unrivaled gift for characterization and portraiture. His power as a narrative poet can be matched by a rare lyri-cal intensity, as in the artful introduction of several lyric passages in the
Troilus
at critical moments in its action. A keen ironist with a many-sided sense of humor, Chaucer explores the relationship between art and life as has no other poet before or after him.
Impressed by the energies and inquiries of his predecessor poets, both ancient and medieval, Chaucer moves along a path that at first glance looks familiar but which has actually never before been taken. Whatever may have fueled its beginnings, the Chaucerian poem, even when left unfinished, drives on its own course to its own destination. If the term
avant-garde
denotes the development of new and experimen-
 
Page 56
tal concepts in art, then Chaucer was a kind of one-man avant-garde of fourteenth-century English poetry. What he learned from the poets who interested him gave him the kind of independence we may add to the qualities of variety and comprehensiveness John Dryden included among his reasons for calling Chaucer the "father of English poetry."
Recognized as a poet of stature in his own lifetime, Chaucer began to reach a truly national audience by the early decades of the fifteenth century, and with the first printed edition of
The Canterbury Tales
in 1476 by William Caxton, his reputation was well established and remained so through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, and their contemporaries had read him, but by Dryden's time Chaucer's work was relatively overlooked, accompanied by a corresponding hiatus in printed editions. It was Dryden who restored and critically defined his reputation. Chaucer has since enjoyed an increasingly important place in the literary canon of the English-speaking world; his poetry has been a regular subject of study at European and Asian universities, and critics as well as scholars have produced an impressive body of secondary literature concerning his poetry during this century.
An example of the highest level of critical debate stimulated by Chaucer's work can be seen in two responses to a single detail in the Wife of Bath's portrait. In the older historicist view of the Wife of Bath, informed more by group, moral rather than personal, artistic values, her deafness signifies the spiritual bankruptcy of her irredeemable, fallen nature, which does not hear the Gospel's message of charity, through the applicability of the scriptural admonition, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear" (Matt. 11:15, 13:9, 43; Mark 4:9, 23; Luke 8:8, 14:35), and its patristic commentaries. A New Critical reading of the Wife, although it would not necessarily reject this signification of her deafness, would emphasize the complexity of her unique characterization, her sexual and marital history as developed in her portrait in the General Prologue, and the self-revelations of her prologue and tale. Chaucer's artful narration of the cause of the Wife's deafness, a blow to the ear by her latest late husband, rather than its religious and moral resonances, would make the stronger claim on the reader's attention.
Whatever the issues in critical debate about Chaucer's poetry, the foundations of its study lie in the great tasks of editing the manuscripts, understanding his language, identifying his literary sources and influ-
 
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ences, and defining the canon of his authentic works. Chaucerian textual editing must deal with an unusually large number of manuscripts and early print editions that have been given manuscript status.
The Canterbury Tales
survive in six early print editions and eighty-three complete and fragmentary manuscripts. Second to this exceptionally large number are the sixteen manuscripts and three early print editions of
Troilus and Criseyde.
While some important early poems like
The Book of the Duchess
and
The House of Fame
have each come down in only three manuscripts, and while it is likely that no extant manuscript of Chaucer's work was written during his lifetime, the sheer quantity of surviving manuscripts of his poetry attests to his early eminence. These manuscripts, however, vary greatly in character and completeness, which poses a major challenge to scholars to provide a reasonably reliable body of texts. The great editorial tradition of the last hundred years has classified in one place or another the entire body of extant Chaucer manuscripts and addressed problems raised by their differences. All manuscripts suffer some degree of corruption, and even the best of them, e.g., the base texts for important editions of
The Canterbury Tales
such as the Ellesmere for
The Riverside Chaucer
and the Hengwrt for
The Variorum Chaucer
, have had to be edited in light of variant readings from other manuscripts and early printings. Not surprisingly, the best efforts of textual scholarship to recuperate the "poem" are beset with uncertainties, just as Chaucer himself observed in his single-stanza poem
Chaucer's Wordes unto Adam
,
His Owne Scriveyn
, where the poet complains of having to rub and scrape the parchment in order to correct and rewrite the careless, hasty work of his personal scribe Adam.
If Chaucer and his editors have had to worry about scribal fallibility, the diversity and mutability of language itself have also given cause for concern. As Chaucer poignantly and prophetically remarks near the end of the
Troilus
in the passage that begins, "Go litel bok" (V.1786), the diversity of the English language and its writing in his time was so great he feared his poem might be miscopied or mismetered and, finally, misunderstood. To combat these effects, Chaucer scholars have paid and continue to pay serious attention to both his language and his versification. Concerning the latter, they have come to realize, through linguistic rather than manuscript evidence, that the pronunciation of certain light syllables, such as -
ed
and final -
e
, which belong to the inflectional and grammatical system of his language, enables a fairly regular
 
Page 58
iambic rhythm for his lines. The vexed question of the role of final -
e
in Chaucerian meter has been basically answered: it is generally pronounced at the ends of lines and wherever scansion requires it, but not when it is followed by a word that begins with a vowel or an
h
-, or when it appears in short unstressed words such as
hadde
and
hire.
Ironically, Chaucer's careful handling of sounded final -
e
, a practice uncommon among most fourteenth-century poets, was meaningless to the majority of scribes by the early 1400s. They wrote or suppressed it at will, in part because it gradually ceased to be sounded in Chaucer's Southeast Midland dialect, a silencing process that probably had started even earlier in the other Middle English dialects.
The Southeast Midland dialect, which included the London English of Chaucer's day, was one of five major dialects that developed in England after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Much closer to our own English, which descends directly from it, than to its West Saxon ancestor in Old English, Southeast Midland, by virtue of its currency in the seat of the national government, operated most prominently in the reestablishment of English throughout the country. Since the time of the Conquest, French had been the language of the aristocracy and much of the governmental administration; by the middle of the fourteenth century, English was being used more and more on every level of life. In courtly circles, in official documents, even in grammar schools, English replaced or enjoyed equal status with the Anglo-Norman French that had prevailed for over two centuries. Latin, of course, remained the language of learning, of the Church and university, and of some areas of government, but translations from it as well as from French became increasingly common. When English became once again the predominant vernacular language of the land, it was quite different from what it had been three hundred years earlier. Due partly to the influence of French and partly to the passage of time, Middle English dropped many of the inflected endings that denoted case and number in nouns, tense and person in verbs in Old English, and replaced them with prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and more highly structured syntax. This is not to say that Chaucer's English, notably more inflectional than modern English, did not rely on word endings for some of its meaning (as already indicated by the poet's use of final -
e
) or that its grammar did not preserve conventions that were normal in earlier English. For a useful summary treatment of these matters as well as of idiom, orthography, and pronunciation, one should consult the section
 
Page 59
"Language and Versification" in the introduction to
The Riverside Chaucer.
While it is tempting to think of English, French, and Latin as competing with each other in Chaucer's world, it is more productive to conceive of them as existing in a state of cultural fusion. It is not difficult to imagine that an individual like Chaucer, who grew up and spent his life speaking English and French and was literate in Latin (and who spoke very good Italian and some Flemish and Spanish as well), moved with unselfconscious ease from one language to the other. Still, Chaucer's decision in the early 1370s to begin his career as a courtly poet in English was clearly ahead of its time. Although both the steady reemergence of English as a language capable of meeting the needs of the populace and England's being at war with France intermittently since before Chaucer's birth strongly suggest that political and social conditions were right for his making this choice, there were other factors involved in the poet's determination to start and stay with English for his life's work.
These factors were primarily, if not purely, literary, and they reflect a book-loving nature of extensive dimensions and an intellect as keen on learning about the way poems work and enlighten as on understanding the ways of the world. "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne," Chaucer says in the first line of
The Parliament of Fowls
, writing of "Love," the force that fills both life and literature. From the earliest attempts to identify his sources to the appreciation of his literary appropriations and innovations, and on to the application of theories of inter-textuality to his discourse, from antipodal positions that account for his literary production according to the cult of genius or to the cult of culture (and everything in between), almost all students of Chaucer, whatever their bias or desire, have agreed to place a high priority on defining the significance of his literary and intellectual relations.
Chaucer's Reading
There are no surviving records of Chaucer's formal education, but the traditional belief that as a boy he attended the almonry school of St. Paul's Cathedral and, in what was probably one of the most consequential events of his life, his documented appointment in 1357 as a page in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster and wife of King Edward III's son Lionel, indicate two important sources
 
Page 60
of his "poet's education." At St. Paul's he would have been introduced to most of the Latin authors who appear in his poems. The move from the world of his prosperous London wine merchant family, comfortable and stimulating as it may have been, to the noble and courtly world of the royal family (in ten years he would become attached to the king's household), directly introduced him not only to the poetry and literary culture of France but also to some of the individuals who were foremost in its creation. In addition, many of his duties in the king's service, including diplomatic missions to the continent, provided him with opportunities to enlarge his literary awareness. Whatever and wherever his official assignments brought him, he seems always to have been searching for new poets and poems to read. To these sources of his poet's education he added a well-informed appreciation of the native English tradition and of several accomplished contemporaries and a remarkably wide familiarity with the Latin literature of the Middle Ages.
In the same intensely selfconscious passage near the end of the
Troilus
that begins "Go, litel book," where Chaucer expresses his apprehensions about the stability of language, he admonishes his poem to "kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace" (V.1791-1792). Although he knew Homer only by reputation, Chaucer most likely got his first taste of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius as a student at St. Paul's some three to four decades before he completed the poem that he trusted had earned him, an English "maker," a place among the great poets in Fame's temple. At school, he also would have been exposed to other Latin works such as the
Dis-ticha Catonis
, a fourth-century
A.D.
collection of moral maxims erroneously attributed to Cato, to which Chaucer often refers as an educational staple, but it was the first reading of the poets of ancient Rome that was to act as one of the abiding and deep influences on his poetic thinking.
It is necessary to understand, however, that the medium in which Chaucer encountered this reading matter differed profoundly from the variety of text editions we take for granted. A bound medieval manuscript contained many works, sometimes unrelated to each other and sometimes specifically related, as in the assemblage of classical and medieval antifeminist works known as "Jankyn's Book of Wicked Wives" that Chaucer invented as the favorite reading of the Wife of Bath's fifth husband. Manuscript copies of works were sometimes

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