The Life and Times of Chaucer Read online

  The Life and Times of Chaucer

  John Gardner

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  ONE

  Chaucer’s Ancestry and Some Remarks on Fourteenth-Century English History

  TWO

  Chaucer’s Youth and Early Education—Life and the Specter of Death on the Ringing Isle (c. 1340-1357)

  THREE

  Chaucer as Young Courtier, Soldier, and, in Some Sense, Lover (1357-1360)

  FOUR

  Chaucer’s Further Education, a Summary of Some Fourteenth-Century Ideas of Great Importance to Chaucer, and the Poet’s Marriage to Philippa Roet—Speculations and Scurrilous Gossip (1360-1367)

  FIVE

  Significant Moments and Influences: Pedro the Cruel, Two Deaths, that Shameless Woman and Wanton Harlot Alice Perrers, and Italian Artistic Humanism (1367-1373)

  SIX

  Chaucer’s Adventures as Celebrated Poet, Civil Servant, and Diplomat in the Declining Years of King Edward III (1374-1377), with Some Remarks on Chaucer’s Honesty and Comments on his Art

  SEVEN

  Life During the Minority of Richard II—The Peasants’ Revolt and Its Aftermath (1377-c. 1385), with More Scurrilous Gossip

  EIGHT

  The Rise of Gloucester and Chaucer’s Fortunes as a Royalist in Evil Times (c. 1385-1389)

  NINE

  The Deaths of Gloucester, John of Gaunt, and the Hero of this Book

  APPENDIX

  The Pronunciation of Chaucer’s Middle English

  Notes

  Index

  A Biography of John Gardner

  Acknowledgments

  I HAVE BEEN HELPED BY INNUMERABLE PEOPLE ON THIS BOOK, including all of my Chaucer students over the past twenty years and various university friends and colleagues, especially Donald Howard and Russell Peck, who read versions of this manuscript and helped me avoid many errors. Southern Illinois University at Carbondale has given me grants and time off, year after year, for work on this project, and helped provide research and secretarial assistance, especially Sandra McKimmey, whose long hours helping me on this and other books are beyond the appreciation of words. I also owe thanks to Alan Cohn, Humanities Librarian at Southern Illinois, who has helped me locate and get hold of books and articles I could not have gotten without him; and to E. L. Epstein, who has for ten years patiently listened to my ideas and has sometimes published some of them for me in his magazine Language and Style. And I thank the Houghton Mifflin Company for permission to quote from F. N. Robinson’s second edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. (I have sometimes simplified Robinson’s punctuation and spelling, and I’ve added aids to pronunciation and the interpretation of hard words.) Above all, in a way, I owe thanks to my former teacher John C. McGalliard, in whose Chaucer class, long ago, all this started.

  Introduction

  NO POET IN THE WHOLE English literary tradition, not even Shakespeare, is more appealing, either as a man or as an artist, than Geoffrey Chaucer, or more worthy of biography; and no biography, it seems at first glance, should be easier to write. Despite the complexity of the philosophical systems and social mores that shaped his thought, Chaucer’s general way of looking at things seems clear as an English April day; and since he worked for the government, which kept elaborate records, we have numerous facts to pin his life to. Yet telling his story proves more difficult than one might think. In his poetry, Chaucer does not talk about himself, except jokingly and trivially. He nowhere tells us in explicit fashion what he thought about particular acquaintances, or even how he felt when his wife died. And the official facts of Chaucer’s life, numerous as they are, are frequently lures toward befuddlement, not so much because the poet and his times are mysterious—though they are, and especially so for Americans, to whom the English gentry’s titles are as confusing as the names in War and Peace—as because, like the missing parts of old frescoes, the vital connections—that is, Chaucer’s private feelings and the emotional pressures that gave shape to his age—are for the most part lost utterly, vanished from the world like smoke. However one may pore over the hints and clues in the official records of the fourteenth century, the traditional conjectures about Chaucer’s life nearly all remain conjectures and the facts mere facts.

  That should hardly surprise us. We can barely understand ourselves, these days; barely piece together our own biographies, though for those we have something like complete information. Since nothing remains of that once wise and gentle, much loved old man (as all his contemporaries were quick to agree)—or nothing but some dry and confusing records, some beautiful, ironic, and ambiguous poetry, two or three pictures, and some bones whose measurements inform us that, if they’re really Chaucer’s, he was five foot six (about average at the time)—we have no choice but to make up Chaucer’s life as if his story were a novel, by the play of fancy on the lost world’s dust and scrapings. So Chaucer himself made up the classical age, dressed up young Troilus in crusader’s armor and decorated legendary Theseus’ Athens with battlemented towers, wide jousting grounds, and sunny English gardens. This does not mean, of course, that a biographer has license to be cavalier about historical detail, or exclude possible interpretations of the facts out of preference for others that make livelier fiction. But while I try in this book to be careful about facts, my purpose is not academic history, but rather something between that and poetic celebration of things unchangeable. Human history, it seems to me, never repeats itself and can never be recaptured; but human emotions endure like granite, for instance the lust of old men for young girls, or the imprisoned wife’s restlessness, or the anger of the scorned homosexual—Chaucer’s subjects. The age-old human emotions live on and on, generation after generation, and the best poets feel them or spy them out in others and cunningly transfix them; and wondering about that, wondering about when and where the poet perhaps experienced the emotion he describes—since no one will ever know the answer for sure—is as much the business of the novelist as that of the historian. For all the history I include in this book, I am no historian but a novelist and poet, a literary disciple come centuries late. I include mere moments of historical background, dull lightning flashes that reveal in frozen gesture events whose development—in comparison to the story of any single human life—were as lumbering and awesome as the shifting of continents on Earth’s vast skin. I make no pretense of explaining or even connecting such movements. I mean only to convey my own impression of how they affect, subtly yet profoundly, one’s subjective image of the hero of this book.

  What kind of man was Geoffrey Chaucer? One begins on the answer with easy confidence, but almost immediately one finds oneself faltering, hunting through the poetry in increasing dismay, and beginning to equivocate, to bluff.

  What Bach and Beethoven are to music, Chaucer and Shakespeare are to English poetry. For all the calm of his familiar portrait, Shakespeare was a towering Romantic genius, a man who, like Beethoven, seemed to know everything about human emotion and to flinch from none of it, building plays not out of dramatic theory but by the impetus inherent in conflicting passions, a poet willing to take any aesthetic risk. Chaucer, on the other hand, was a sort of medieval, well-tempered Bach (Bach himself was, at least on occasion, an inkpot thrower), an artist-philosopher more tranquil and abstract, more conservative and formal than any poet of the Renaissance. Though a “difficult” poet, he presented himself as a naïve and merry storyteller, an avoider of the dark spots in human experience, a sedulous and tactful entertainer of princes. Though a devastating mimic when he turned his acquaintances into characters in poems, he remained, even at his most satiric, a devoted servant and celebrator of the orderly, God-fi
lled universe revealed in the Goldberg Variations.

  The comparison is oversimple, of course. In certain moods Shakespeare was more “classical,” so to speak, than Bach—in the conservative, perfectly shaped Tempest, for instance. But what appeals to us most powerfully in Shakespeare’s plays is the unexpected flight, the glimpse of darkness when Hamlet rambles or Lear rages, the leap into dazzling disquisition on Queen Mab, the Fool’s moment of surreal precision, the gentle, stabilizing loblogic of some well-meaning dunce—in short, the cross-hatch of madness, stupidity, anguish, and confusion that frames and foregrounds those white bolts of sanity that strike when Shakespeare’s characters lay out, simply and beautifully, how it is. And in the same way Chaucer, whose painstaking technique, endless revision, and concern about form would make him, if nothing else did, a model of the classical impulse, was in certain moods as personal, as original, and in his own mild way as eager to shock, as was Beethoven. As Beethoven attacked rococo music, emancipating musicians and their art from “the princely rabble,” as he called them, so Chaucer more gently mocked and brought to ruin, or at times transmuted, those empty, artificial poetic forms so popular in his day with the lesser French and Italian poets—dream visions, stories of love-saints, and so on—forms aimed less at truth and beauty, before Chaucer took hold of them, than at amusing the courtly genteel. What came before Chaucer, in France especially (discounting one masterpiece, the Roman de la Rose) was wine-sippers’ poetry, the poetry of house arrest, that is, verse entertainment designed to help people in remote castles get through the long evening—people in some cases not free to do much else except hear poetry, being prisoners in their own houses or some other great man’s, as was King John of France after his capture by the Black Prince, or mad Isabella of England soon after her affair with Roger Mortimer. What Chaucer introduced was poetry freed of its courtly trappings, freed of philosophical narrowness, and freed of preciousness and deadly sobriety. Again like Beethoven, Chaucer occasionally inclined toward heretical positions—though he was never a man to seize any position with the revolutionary zeal of, say, John Wyclif or, worse, Wat Tyler. And, like Beethoven, or like Shakespeare, Chaucer took great delight in the outrageous and obscene pun, the practical joke, the devastating portrait.

  But Geoffrey Chaucer was, for all that, no lover of windy crags and tors, no passionate, daemonic individualist. He was concerned about improving the social order. He understood and to some extent sympathized with the oppressed—including, especially, women. But his approach to the evils of his time was not protest or diatribe, the approach of his poetic contemporary, William Langland, in Piers Plowman. Chaucer settled for prayer and for the gentle prod of comedy or, at most, mild satire. However inaccurate in some details, the image of Geoffrey Chaucer largely at peace with the world, dabbling in poetry when not too busy at the customshouse, or in Genoa or Paris on business for the king, or sitting in parliament, or attending to his family, his religious devotions, his country place in Kent—the image of Chaucer as portly courtier dashing off little experiments in form, serenely fathering English poetry with two plump fingers of his left hand closed on a wineglass stem, his emotions as tranquil as the heavenly spheres he and Plato believed in, as Bach would later—is in general outline the image the poet himself liked to foster, for instance in his numerous delightful self-portraits and asides. One thinks, for example, of the comic passage in the House of Fame, where the golden eagle bearing poor terrified “Geffrey” heavenward says of him, tolerantly disparaging, that he writes only love stories he’s found in old books, knowing not even the gossip about

  thy verray neyghëborës

  That duellen almost at thy dorës, [dwell]

  Thou herist neyther that ne this;

  For when thy labour doon al ys,

  And hast mad allë thy rekenyngës,

  In stede of reste and newë thyngës, [reckonings (at the customs office)

  Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon,

  And, also domb as any stoon,

  Thou sittest at another book

  Tyl fully daswed ys thy look.… [dazed]

  Chaucer was, of course, a serious poet; as dedicated a comic poet as has ever lived. The more we learn about his way of working—and lately scholars have been learning a good deal about Chaucer’s technique—the more clearly we see just how serious he was about his “craft so long to lernë.” But Chaucer’s artistic seriousness was tempered, self-effacing, like everything else about the man. Like Shakespeare, he wrote as much for the pit as for the gallery, as much for the young as for sly old philosophers. This is why his poetry has, like Shakespeare’s, immediate appeal, once the stumbling block of his language is removed. At the same time, precisely because Chaucer’s poetry works on many levels, repaying reading after reading, one discovers that the better one knows this poetry, the more difficulty one encounters in trying to explain what it “means” or, indeed, what kind of man Chaucer was.

  Every well-educated English speaker has, or at any rate thinks he has, a fair intuitive understanding of Shakespeare, both the man and at least some of the better known plays. A few years ago one might have claimed that the same held for Chaucer. But for all the lilt of Chaucer’s verse, for all the clarity of his poetic voice, our picture of the man has recently become cloudy, defeatured by contradiction, some scholars finding him one kind of person, and some another, the various camps all armed to the teeth with facts. Essentially the problem is that readers were for a long time fooled by the poet’s seeming openness and have now become wary, suspicious, willing to believe anything about that being who seemed once such a harmless, lovable elf.

  Unostentatious, fond of hiding the layered complexity of his poetic structures—fond, as all master craftsmen are, of making the enormously difficult seem simple, the laboriously achieved seem obvious and all-of-a-piece as a pudding—Chaucer managed to trick most of his critics since the sixteenth century into thinking his poetry and character as naïve as they seemed. Poems as tortuously reasoned and meticulously crafted as John Donne’s, but much longer than Donne’s, he gave the appearance of flowing from his inkhorn as lightly and merrily as water from a spring. And the result of his deceptive simplicity has been that, except for ill-grounded Victorian searchings for amorous scandal or political intrigue, most readers, from the late sixteenth century until the early twentieth, no more felt inclined to ask what deeper possibilities lay hidden in the purling of Chaucer’s verse than they would ask the shadow of a trout the time of day.

  That now has changed; or, to put it in a way more favorable to earlier Chaucerian scholars, centuries of text collecting, collating and editing, philological study, and historical research have put us in a position to see that Chaucer was considerably more learned, more firmly committed in his philosophy and religion, and in some respects sterner in his judgment of man’s follies, than we formerly supposed. In the past quarter century, Chaucer’s manipulation of rhetorical devices, symbols, and various kinds of allusion, his sexual, religious, and mathematical punning, his poetic use of alchemy, physics, and dream psychology, have made his poetry a scholar’s gold mine—which is to say, an endless source of mostly dreary but occasionally distinguished scholarly books and articles. With not many exceptions this activity has been specialized (the Advent tradition in patristic exegesis and scholastic thought, and its relevance to Chaucer’s House of Fame), too elaborate and, in the usual case, too pedantic, too stuffed with snippets of Latin and the dry agonals of schismatic popes, to be accessible or useful to the non-specialist. But the picture of Chaucer which seems to be emerging—the sketch I will try to give color in this book—is among the most interesting discoveries being made by literary scholars of this century.

  Most of what earlier scholars believed about Chaucer’s personality remains true and obvious, undisputed except by the lunatic fringe. He was gentle, sensible; a shrewd and for the most part compassionate observer of humanity; as sane a man as ever walked in England. But he was doing far more with those queer d
ream-vision poems, tales, and lyrics than anybody guessed; and at least since publication of the complete Life-Records in 1966, it has come to be understood that in his daily life he was doing rather more, and in some cases rather different, things than his earlier biographers imagined. Not that recently discovered information has drastically changed the basic outlines of Chaucer’s biography as it has been understood for the past fifty years. The insights and new interpretations which have come, one by one, from those who have sifted and resifted the facts, have for the most part simply confirmed older theories, filled out the picture, corrected small errors or, here and there, made old puzzles more confusing. But if few new tidings of Chaucer’s whereabouts, honors, or expenses have been brought to light, our picture of everything around him has changed—his friends and patrons, his familiar landscape, his milieu. More and more, social, literary, and political historians are revising their ideas about the fourteenth century. King Richard II, once regularly viewed as England’s silliest king (as Shakespeare pictured him), has lately been held up as one of the period’s more imaginative monarchs, a man of clear vision and intelligent policy, doomed partly by forces beyond his control and partly by his character as an obstinate idealist in an age of wolves. (The wolves, too, have begun to be rehabilitated.) New historical research has revised our understanding of the economics of farm and city life; the role of the so-called but in fact nonexistent “party of Gaunt” (Chaucer’s friend, patron, and brother-in-law, John of Gaunt) in the struggle of king and parliament; the precise effects of the plagues and riots which repeatedly battered medieval England; and the larger significance of trade agreements and treaties of the kind Geoffrey Chaucer himself, as an ambassador to France and Italy, helped to frame.

  Oddly enough, despite these revisions of once standard opinion, despite the changed picture, the added information, no one has so far tried piecing together an accurate, complete biography reflecting our new knowledge. For one of England’s two finest poets, we have, at the present time—discounting pleasant, outdated books—only books for specialists, for the most part studies of the poetry in isolation from the poet’s life and times. One can easily understand why biographical study has grown unfashionable, of course. Almost nothing in Chaucer’s poetry is occasional; in fact, we can rarely be certain of a given poem’s date of composition. Nevertheless, knowing what kind of man he was, the kinds of friends he had, and the kind of world he lived in should help us understand why he fashioned his poetry as he did.