Chaucer was born into a mercantile family with serious aspirations: his father and grandfather had both served the king and the decision to send the boy to St Paul's suggests ambitions for his future. Nonetheless, the family home in the Vintry Ward of the City of London was above an inn, and one can imagine the schoolboy Geoffrey tiptoeing carefully around early morning detritus and recumbent drunks as he left for school in the cold light of dawn. In his later verse he displays an expert familiarity with the liquor available in contemporary inns, the symptoms of drunkenness, and even hints as to which vintages cause the worst hangovers. The Chaucer family had enough clout to get him placed in one of the royal households where he learnt the court etiquette required to ensure his advancement.

Service as a page was logically followed by that as a squire but here the records suggest a less than heroic performance: his military career was a fiasco – once in France he promptly managed to get himself captured and had to be ransomed at the king's expense.

His marriage to the sister of John of Gaunt's mistress (later the duke's second wife) placed him remarkably close to the royal family. A beautiful miniature painting in a luxury manuscript of Troylus and Creseyd depicts Chaucer, standing in a pulpit, surrounded by the court, reading the poem aloud. One biographer has plausibly suggested that the royal family probably looked on Chaucer as 'dear old Uncle Geoffrey'.

St Paul's had taught him Latin, and he spoke and read French (well enough to joke at the expense of a social-climbing prioress who affects French without realising that her cockney accent 'after the school of Stratford-atte-Bow' betrays her origins). His knowledge of Italian led the crown to use him as an intermediary in disputes with Italian merchants at English seaports. He may have picked up the language when visiting Milan as part of an ambassadorial mission.

These three languages gave him access to the most important literary models of the day. French was still the language of chivalry, a must for any aspiring court poet – the most important stories of King Arthur had appeared originally in French. But as a courtly language its literature was conservative. It is possible that Chaucer himself even wrote some of his lyrics in French. In the fourteenth century Italian was the language of the literary avant garde and Chaucer, who had read Dante, drew on the work of his Italian contemporaries Petrarch and Boccaccio.

To the wider reading twenty-first century public, Chaucer is probably notorious as the writer of a handful of short, bawdy tales. In fact the range of his works is remarkable. He was hailed in his own day as a 'great translator' and he produced an English text of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. If he was not actually the translator of the Romance of the Rose (and the style is close to his) several of his greatest creations such as the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath have their origins in his reading of the poem. He was also interested in astronomy and this resulted in his treatise on the astrolabe.

He was fascinated by the nature of dreams and their relation to the conscious world. The preoccupation wasn't innovative in itself - many of his predecessors and contemporaries including Dante and Langland had also written poems in the popular dream vision genre - but Chaucer worked within it to produce strikingly original results.

Of these, the Parlement of Fouls, a debate on the nature of love, is the most conventional though its cast of anthropomorphised talking birds, might remind the modern reader of Disney's creatures but for their lack of saccharine and an unstoppable and very English tendency to hurl class-based insults at each other. His elegy for John of Gaunt's first wife, the Book of the Duchess, does not offer conventional religious consolation but concludes numbly that it is all but impossible to share such a burden of grief.

But the strangest of the dream visions is the experimental, perhaps unfinished House of Fame which reveals an obsession with the kind of world in which reputation is ever subject to slander randomly won by the undeserving and lost by those who merit it. It is a universe presided over by the figure of Fame herself who makes and breaks good names and reputations with the ease of a medieval Max Clifford.

His greatest single poem, Troylus and Creseyde presents a cleared-eyed view of the vulnerability of women in the game of courtly love – by allowing us to share the heroine's thoughts (something Shakespeare largely denies us) and through the involvement of a naive narrator who is sometimes overcome with sentiment at Creseyde's plight. The poem enjoyed immense popularity being read long into the sixteenth century until it was finally replaced by Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis as a source for lovesick young men to pillage and plagiarise for words with which to woo.

    next > Page 1 of 2

Content last updated: 31/01/2006

Comments