by John Gardner
No doubt Chaucer saw, too, the greatest surviving example of this new humanistic movement in art, Pisano’s chief work, carried out between 1330 and 1336, the magnificent bronze doors for the baptistry. Andrea Pisano’s relief figures—the eight single figures representing the theological and moral virtues, and the numerous figures making up the twenty scenes from the life of St. John—have not only the simplicity and directness of Giotto’s imagery but also a new delight in the free movement of the human body that Giotto, in pursuit of his ideal of static dignity, had avoided. Such “realism”—whatever that elastic term may mean—became the mark of Florentine art in the latter half of the fourteenth century, appearing on carved altars, doors, and windows, in piazza sculptures, and the ornamentation of books. It marked a vision of man that went back to classical times, recalled by Virgil’s parting speech to Dante in the Purgatorio, “Henceforth take your own will as your guide…I make you king and high priest over yourself.” It was the vision being expressed, in the north, in scholastic and post-scholastic pursuits—in the emphasis on “experience” as opposed to “authority,” in the concern of Oxford scientists with the discrete scientific question without relation to metaphysics, and in the independent thought of religious reformers that would ultimately, through Hus, Calvin, and Luther, take Dante’s words “high priest” in earnest, launching the Protestant Reformation. But in Italy, especially in Tuscany, the new focus on human experience was not abstract and intellectual, but palpable art, the kind of humanistic argument one actually might, in the words of the eagle in Chaucer’s House of Fame, “shake by the bills,” because it was concrete and physical, not crepuscular logic; it was such argument as Chaucer would himself advance in his greatest Italian-influenced works, Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales. Wherever he went in Florence, Chaucer saw frescoes, paintings, and sculptures that celebrated humanness: man’s warts, the roughness of his elbows, the distortion of his shoulders when he walked with a Bible clamped under one arm, and also man’s inclination toward nobility and goodness.
“Chè bello,” said Chaucer, no doubt, like all tourists to Italy then and now, and (if he knew no Italian) closed his phrasebook.
Phrasebooks for medieval travelers, I might mention, could be had in all the major languages. They were approximately as ridiculous as the ones we use today, as an example will show—I quote only the English:
“God commend you and guard you from evil, my friend.”
“Sir, you be welcome.”
“What hour of the day is it, prime or tierce, noon or nones?…”
“Between six and seven.”
“How far is it from here to Paris?”
“Twelve leagues and far enough.”
“Is the road good?”
“Yes, so God help me.”
“Of these two, is this the right road?”
“God help me, sweet sir, no.”11
Scholars have debated whether or not Chaucer ever met Italy’s two greatest literary humanists, Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, and have tended to conclude that he probably did not. But at least in the case of Petrarch, we have more to go on than our romantic wish that great poets should know each other. In the Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer’s Oxford Clerk tells the Canterbury pilgrims that he learned his story of patient Griselda from the Italian scholar Petrarch “at Padua.” As it happens, during the very year of Chaucer’s visit, Petrarch had just translated the tale into Latin from the Decameron, and during that same year, a time of war, Petrarch was forced to flee his home in Arqà for refuge inside Padua’s fortifications. Such accurate information about the Italian poet’s whereabouts and poetic occupation strongly argues that Chaucer met him.12 If they did meet and talk, it seems incredible that the name of Petrarch’s brilliant young disciple Boccaccio should not come up, especially since the old man had recently deemed one of his disciple’s works worthy of elevation into Latin.
Nevertheless most scholars believe Chaucer did not meet or, perhaps, even know the name of Boccaccio, even though Chaucer left Florence only a short time before Boccaccio’s first lecture there on Dante. Chaucer borrows from the writings of Boccaccio even more frequently than he borrows from Petrarch, but he never names Boccaccio as his source, and often when he quotes from Boccaccio or acknowledges indebtedness, he gives some name other than Boccaccio’s. Such evidence, of course, hardly closes the case. As a medieval poet, Chaucer is not always careful to give credit. He names his sources only for artistic reasons—to achieve a certain tone, to deny personal responsibility, and so on—never from the modern sense that a literary source is some other writer’s property. For all we know, Chaucer and Boccaccio may have been well acquainted, may have laughed endlessly at each other’s bawdy stories, and may simply not have had occasion to mention their acquaintance in any of their writings. But it seems more likely that the two did not meet and that in borrowing from Boccaccio Chaucer worked from anonymous or pseudonymous manuscripts of the sort more common than not in the late Middle Ages.
Boccaccio’s influence on Chaucer’s poetry is in any case second only to that of Dante. One sees the Boccaccio influence everywhere, not only in the plot and general approach of major poems like Troilus and Criseyde but also in the easygoing irreverence, the unabashed delight in obscenity that makes the erotic in Chaucer so much more vivid, in fact so much more healthy, than the erotica of our own day. Think, for instance, of his wickedly, deliciously voyeuristic passage, developed from an image by Boccaccio, on Venus reclining on her couch in the temple of Love:
And in a privë corner in disport [secret; in pleasant activity]
Fond I Venus and hirë porter Richessë, [Found; Wealth]
That was ful noble and hautayn of hyrë port. [haughty]
Derk was that placë, but afterward lightnessë
I saw a lyte, unnethe it myghtë be lessë, [not easily]
And on a bed of gold she lay to restë,
Til that the hotë sonne gan to westë.
Hyre gilte herës with a golden thred
Ibounden were, untressëd as she lay,
And naked from the brest unto the hed
Men myghte hire sen; and, sothly for to say,
The remenaunt was wel keverëd to my pay, [delight]
Ryght with a subtyl coverchef of Valencë—
Ther nas no thikkerë cloth of no defensë.
As everywhere in Chaucer, and as in Boccaccio’s best-known tales, the naughtiness is blatant, the narrator creeping up in what at first seems perfect darkness to spy on the lovemaking of Venus and her porter, then his undisguisedly wicked description leading to the transparent cloth which provides “no defense.” We see the same openness in all of Chaucer’s bawdy scenes—when Pandarus throws poor young Troilus, who has just fainted from embarrassment, into bed with Criseyde and hurriedly tears from him everything but his shirt, or when young May, in the Merchant’s Tale, climbs up her blind husband’s back to be swyved by her lover in the pear tree. Such stories were of course not unknown in England. We find bawdy enough in the thirteenth-century debate, The Owl and the Nightingale. But it was in the work of Boccaccio that sex came to be humanized, so that its pleasures might be mentioned in connection not only with fools and country wenches but even with noble and sympathetic characters like Prince Troilus.
It was also during his first diplomatic visit to Italy that Chaucer encountered the poetry of Dante Alighieri. We have no reason to believe that Chaucer was at this moment “going through an intense religious crisis,” or that “Dante’s mysticism may well have carried Chaucer off his feet for a time.”13 But it is certainly true that the influence of Dante on Chaucer’s later style and way of thinking is incalculable. Though Dante was typically medieval in his Thomistic Christianity, one special quality impelled him forward toward the Renaissance: his all-consuming, unsubmergeable personality—what he might himself have called his pride. In a city of factions, where his role was laid down by heredity, he was, as he says, his own party in poli
tics. His minutely accurate observation of individual human characters and events, his eye for the fine details of nature, from rocks to warring lizards—above all his ability to suffuse the allegory of his Commedia with personal emotion, made him the unrivaled master poet of his age and the founder of all modern literature, with its characteristic emphasis on personal vision, that is, art as “a portrait of the artist.” Dante’s genius would cast strange reflections in Chaucer’s poetry—the sublime landscape of the Commedia becoming the burlesque-sublime scenery of the House of Fame, the precise, often tragic characterization in, especially, the Inferno and Purgatorio becoming the comic and satiric portraiture of the Canterbury Tales—but however transformed by Chaucer’s art, Dante’s powerful influence would from now on always be visible.
That influence is clear as early as Chaucer’s Parliament of Birds, probably written around 1377. Dante’s third canto of the Inferno opens: “Per me si va,” “Through me the way,” or “Through me one goes…” repeated three times, like strokes of doom—the message on hell’s gate warning of the terrible significance of sin, man’s refusal of God and all God is: power, wisdom, love. Dante is “arrested” by the gate’s “dreadful sense” and can for a moment move no further. Chaucer can hardly have missed the power of Dante’s image: the towering portal of hell with its message of “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”; but in his own dream in the Parliament, it is not the gate of hell he stands before but the gate opening into the garden of Love, which can either uplift or destroy, and so Chaucer is arrested not by awe and fear but by confusion, since the gate’s two signs (one on each gatepost) contradict each other:
“Thorgh me men gon into that blysful placë
Of hertës hele and dedly woundës curë;
Thorgh me men gon unto the welle of gracë,
Therë grene and lusty May shal evere endurë.
This is the wey to al good aventurë.
Be glad, thow redere, and thy sorwe of-castë;
Al open am I—passe in, and sped thee fastë!”
“Thorgh me men gon,” than spak that other sidë,
“ Unto the mortal strokës of the sperë
Of which Disdayn and Daunger is the gydë,
Ther neverë tre shal fruyt ne levës berë.
This strem yow ledeth to the sorweful werë [weir]
There as the fish in prysoun is al dryë;
Th’eschewing is only the remedyë!”
Dante is guided out of his dread by Virgil’s sound reasoning; Chaucer is comically dragged into the garden by force. As Dante well understood, Love can lead either to hell, as it led Paolo and Francesca, or to heaven, as Dante’s beloved Beatrice hopes to lead Dante. Dante is therefore a willing and virtuous lover. Chaucer, poor comic clod, has “lost his taste for love,” as his guide tells him. In short, though Chaucer’s poem is comic, not a noble vision but the vision of a clown, it plays with and develops ideas out of Dante. The same might be said of innumerable short passages or whole poems by Chaucer. But Dante’s influence is also visible in ways more fundamental. It is largely Dante’s compassionate view of the sinful that makes possible Chaucer’s similar compassion toward people undone by love, like Troilus. After Dante has seen Paolo and Francesca buffeted through hell to the end of time on the wind of their passion, he falls silent, grieving, thinking how many sweet thoughts brought them to this pass. However one may judge them from a Christian point of view, one cannot help but pity them and partly admire them. In the same way, Chaucer pays beautiful tribute to Troilus’ perhaps excessive but nevertheless sincere and devoted love. In Book V he has, for instance, a magnificent scene in which Troilus finds Criseyde’s house closed and shuttered, and knows she has left Troy. He weeps at sight of the barred doors and cries out to the house as to a body from which the spirit is gone, or a “lanterne of which queynt [quenched] is the light,” and soon after, Chaucer writes,
Fro thennësforth he rideth up and down,
And every thyng com hym to remembrauncë
As he rood forby placës of the town [past]
In which he whilom hadde al his plesauncë.
“Lo, yonder saugh ich last my lady dauncë; [saw]
And in that temple, with hire eyen cleerë,
Me kaughtë first my rightë lady derë.…
“And at that corner, in the yonder hous,
Herde I myn alderlevest lady deerë [most beloved]
So wommanly, with vois melodious,
Syngen so wel, so goodly, and so clerë,
That in my soulë yet me thynketh ich herë
The blisful sown; and in that yonder placë
My lady first me took unto hirë gracë.”
Many a medieval poet before Dante had experienced love, but Dante’s poetry, more than that of any other poet of his time, made the subject legitimate and noble.
Dante’s disciples Petrarch and Boccaccio were of course more openly “modern.” Though it has been argued, in recent times, that Petrarch’s Canzoniere are allegorical as well as literal, it is nevertheless true that the poems are—whatever else—the introspective record of a poet’s moods. It was the same self-conscious individualism, the same self-regarding restlessness, that sent Petrarch wandering over Italy and France and even to Bohemia, like some enthusiastic nineteenth-century impression seeker; and it was the same restlessness, or anxious modern search, that impelled him to study ancient Latin literature and comb the south of Europe for manuscripts of new works and forgotten authors, picking through old libraries, laboriously copying or buying dim, cracked parchments. It was much the same with his Florentine disciple Boccaccio. He too has been accused (not convincingly) of allegorical intentions, even in the Decameron,14 but the Decameron is, whatever else, a collection of tales instinct with humanness precisely and sensually observed, exactly the kind of work Chaucer would repeatedly produce after his first trip to Italy. Like Petrarch, Boccaccio devoted himself to ancient Latin writers, wrote scholarly Latin on eminent lives and ancient mythology, and hunted for old manuscripts. He even housed an apparently repulsive Calabrian, who for Boccaccio’s benefit miserably translated Homer into Latin. Chaucer would follow much the same pattern, collecting books, studying ancient writers, and writing about life for its own sake.
Chaucer’s first ambassadorial mission to Italy, in short, was a turning point in his poetic career. He would immediately begin writing short lives (preserved as the Monk’s Tale) of the sort Petrarch and Boccaccio were writing, and he would turn more and more from new on to themes and techniques out of Dante.
The trip to Italy also seems to have boosted his career as servant to the king. Within three months of his return from Italy he was sent on a related journey, escorting an arrested ship from the port of Dartmouth to her master, a merchant of Genoa. (It was while he was at Dartmouth, presumably, that he found suggestions for his portrait of the Dartmouth Shipman in the Canterbury Tales.) Life was soon to improve still further for Chaucer: in recompense for arduous but important journeys, and other business for the crown, he would be rewarded with a fine house, lucrative opportunities, and, above all, time to write.
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
IN 1374, IMMEDIATELY AFTER JOHN OF Gaunt’s return to England from abroad, honors began falling to the poet thick and fast. On St. George’s Day, the great time of religious and chivalric celebration for the Order of the Garter, the king granted him a pitcher of wine for life, a gift commuted in 1378 to cash. On May 10, Chaucer was given a lifetime rent-free lease on a fine house built over Aldgate on the London city wall, probably in connection with a government post he’d already been granted informally and was officially awarded on June 8, the office of controller of customs and subsidies, with the obligation of regular attendance at his office in the port of London, and of writing the rolls with his own hand. On the 13th of June, five days after his ap
pointment to the controllership, Chaucer received yet another prize, an annual pension of £10 ($2,400) from John of Gaunt.
From these records and others we can deduce a good deal about how Chaucer occupied himself in the last years of the reign of King Edward III. The pitcher of wine for life, granted on the day of the Festival of St. George, patron saint of Edward’s Order of the Garter, was probably—as were similar prizes to later poets—an award to Chaucer for his reading of some poem at court. Judging from other medieval English poems probably associated with St. George’s Day—the alliterative Winner and Waster, which makes explicit reference to the Order of the Garter, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which has the motto of the Order tacked on at the end (though not by the same scribal hand that had copied out the poem)—we may assume that Chaucer’s poem for the court was a long one, an assumption we would make in any case, recalling how luxurious and lengthy these Garter festivities were in the fourteenth century. Garter knights were wealthy men and came, as did their ladies and servants, dressed in their finest, all the nobility adazzle in jewels, wrapped in splendid cloaks and capes trimmed with silver and gold or with costly furs.
As star poet of the occasion, Chaucer too came dressed to the nines. He was not, after all, some poor traveling minstrel who would be ushered into the dining hall for one quick performance, paid a few pennies, and whisked away by the royal marshal. (It was because of the marshal’s absolute sway over visiting poets, some critics think, that Sir Kay, the marshal in King Arthur’s court, is regularly presented in the Arthurian legends as a philistine, dimwit, and scoundrel.) Like Froissart, or like Deschamps and Machault in France, Chaucer was an intellectual ornament of the court, one of those government treasures, so to speak, that proved the court’s worth and class. We have a record from much later of his receiving from the king a fine scarlet robe. He no doubt received similar, though perhaps less spectacular, gifts earlier, though no records survive. At any rate, we may be sure Chaucer’s performance that day was a central event, second only, perhaps, to the closing masque—the play and magic show that led to general dancing of the guests and closed the festivities. His performance of his poem probably took place not inside the castle but outdoors, perhaps at the entrance of a gorgeous pavilion as large as a small circus tent but infinitely more costly, decorated all around with flowers, huge battle shields, and heraldic flags and banners. As he read he may have been flanked, like the speakers in Winner and Waster, by knights in odd costumes, some wearing the heads of symbolic beasts. It was now early spring in Chaucer’s England, and the mysterious connections between the physical and the spiritual were always a central element in celebrations of the festival of St. George.
