The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  Busy as he was in public affairs between the early 1370’s and the death of King Edward, Chaucer wrote a fair amount of poetry, although just which poetry and just when he wrote it is to some extent uncertain. In the beginning, as we’ve seen—before his first trip to Italy—he favored French masters, poetic techniques, and forms. Aside from his innumerable allusions to the Canticles, he had depended almost entirely, in the Book of the Duchess (probably written in the very early seventies) on French poets like Machault as his base of imitation and allusion. His technique in all these early poems is approximately that generally practiced in France, a complex interweaving of allusions and original material, all in the “high style,” with intense concern about musical effects (echoes, repetitions, various kinds of word play); and his favorite forms are the typically French “dream vision” and “complaint.” Both are restrained, highly intellectual forms which take strong emotion as their subject matter (a death, the anguish of a lover, etc.) and deal with that emotion by freezing it to elegant crystals. It will be useful to pause here for a word about these forms, Chaucer’s point of departure as a literary artist.

  In the complaint, the poem’s speaker is some fictional persona or caricature of the actual poet, commonly some variation of the stock suffering lover more familiar to us, since the Renaissance, as the mournful but ever-optimistic complainer in sonnet sequences. As in the sonnet, what makes a first-class complaint is not necessarily its power but, normally, its cleverness and elegance, its ingenious rhyming (much freer than sonnet form), its effortless intellectual juggling. Chaucer’s early Complaint to His Lady, Complaint Unto Pity, Complaint of Mars, and the complaint which makes up part of his unfinished Anelida and Arcite, to say nothing of the complaints incorporated into the Book of the Duchess, are all models of the form. Biographically, as we’ve said, they tell us nothing, since the form is stock, much like such forms as the “Prelude” or “Suite of Country Dances” to a composer. They do tell us that he had, from very early in his career, an independent, somewhat impish eye (although he could also write serious lyrics), and that he loved invention and poetic complexity. Sometimes the complexity exists at least partly for its decorative value, as in the Complaint of Mars, where a neatly worked out astronomical pattern embellishes the old Mars-Venus-Vulcan story and perhaps also, for the original audience, some courtly liaison—some say an affair between John Holland, the Black Prince’s stepson, and Isabel, duchess of York (as the early Chaucerian Shirley believed), others say an affair between John Holland and Gaunt’s daughter Elizabeth, and one critic imagines the poem has to do with Geoffrey Chaucer, Katherine Swynford, and John of Gaunt.4 But as a rule (and finally this is true even in the relatively slight Complaint of Mars), Chaucer’s ingenious tricks contribute to meaning.

  The dream vision is a longer, more complicated form, symbolically intricate, built in sections or “panels” which may or may not have obvious superficial relationship, but which are enclosed, normally, by a frame story of the kind found in the Book of the Duchess, where Chaucer begins and ends with scenes involving the narrator’s insomnia. The individual sections of the narrator’s dream are linked symbolically, often by subtle forms of verbal repetition and by the kind of thematic punning we do in fact experience in dreams—for instance, the juxtaposition in the Book of the Duchess of a deer hunt (a quest for the hart) and a love quest of sorts (a pursuit of a heart). But since the dream’s connections are obscure (far less obscure for the original audience than for modern readers), individual panels may be filled out in any of a variety of ways, each fairly conventional—a hunt, a courtly lover’s complaint, description of a strange landscape, formal debate between people or animals, and so forth. In this kind of art, needless to say, the reader’s pleasure comes not from original plot, characterization, and so on (though these may occasionally contribute), but from the subtlety and authority of the poet’s manipulation of stock devices, moving them around, presenting them in startling new ways, or juxtaposing them in such a way as to achieve new effects.

  At least in England it seemed that there really were only two kinds of poetry one could write: short poems and long poems made of short poems strung together (panel-structure poetry). Think of the work of John of Massey, that is, the Gawain-poet, in his four-part linked work Pearl, Purity, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or of the Wakefield Second Shepherd’s Play, a three-act pageant in which the three sections have only the feeblest sort of plot connection—certainly nothing of the inevitability Aristotle recommended.5 Or think of such collections, framed and linked, as the Canterbury Tales. In Italy, with huge dramatic poems like his Africa, Petrarch was struggling to overcome this limitation by returning to classical forms; and Boccaccio, working to solve the same problem, provided Chaucer with his source for the Troilus.

  All his life Chaucer would be experimenting with ways of solving the problem of the long, “important” poem, and some of the poems he abandoned unfinished in this early period—possibly the Squire’s Tale is an instance—he may have quit on because he saw that the experiment was failing. With the exception of the Troilus, no experiments he was ever to make would prove more important for his later poetry than those in the Book of the Duchess and the Parliament of Birds.

  For the elegy and the Parliament, some critics have suggested, Chaucer brought together fragments or whole poems already written, added new material, then shuffled and patched, working toward a total, panoramic canvas, a unity. The theory must be rejected in the end, I think, but the unity problem which gives rise to the theory is an interesting one. In both these poems, the unity Chaucer finally achieved was typically medieval, more intellectual than “dramatic.” By playing idea against idea, image against image, genre against genre (this last was common practice in the fourteenth century—think of, for instance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where elegant romance and earthy fabliau interpenetrate), Chaucer had learned to make poetry philosophical. It would be a while yet before he would achieve anything approaching full emotional coherence, and in my view—though most Chaucerians think otherwise—that coherence would remain to the end of Chaucer’s career not a product of his whole soul’s conviction (like the coherence in the poetry of Dante or Goethe) but dramatization with the poet’s judgment mostly suspended. Chaucer takes, that is, exactly the nominalist stance of philosophers like Roger Bacon, for whom truth is, outside doctrine, finally unknowable. When the Italian influence had deepened in him, strengthening his confidence in realism, Chaucer would create characters like the Wife of Bath, the Nun’s Priest, and the Canon’s Yeoman, who could so infuse their own personalities into the stories they told us as to create what Poe would call unity of impression. But for all the brilliance of his characterizations—his mimickry, if you like—Chaucer was never a man like Shakespeare, or like his own less philosophical contemporary, the Gawain-poet, who “saw life whole.” Anything and anyone he saw, Geoffrey Chaucer could mock or defend at will; he could tell you the opinions of dogs, cats, carpenters, or the Man in the Moon, and he could set against that the orthodox Real Truth—the great universe “set all on sevens” which he reflects numerologically in the Parliament. But never, even in his old age, could Chaucer firmly make up his mind, at least in his poetry. If that was a fault, a problem in his character (surely it was not!), no one was more concerned about it than he was. Every major poem he wrote is a philosophical search, a careful, intelligent balancing of alternatives, an attempt to see clearly, state plainly, and above all feel emotionally what he believes; an attempt, to put it another way, to harmonize the two “Chaucers” of his standard technique—Christian master poet, and comic, myopic narrator caught up in sympathy with the things (and people) of this world. As in the work of all great modern writers, for whom Melville may stand as representative, every attempt fails, or rather, struggles to a draw. Thus for example in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer-the-narrator shows by every conceivable sign that he understands and sympathizes with his characters and that he believes that t
heir problems—universal problems—are desperately important, yet at odd moments throughout, and more forcefully at the end, he remembers, as if suddenly—or Chaucer-the-controlling-artist reminds him—that on the other hand…One can of course “explain” the ending of Troilus and Criseyde, where Chaucer turns more or less unexpectedly to Christian moralizing, condemning human love, at least in comparison with the love of God. One can justify the abrupt shift both aesthetically and philosophically, and numerous critics have done so, very well; but philosophical justification does not change the fact of the sudden shift of tone: what Chaucer believed about adultery was flatly unorthodox. He saw it all around him in the court of King Edward and later Richard; he admired John of Gaunt, for whom adultery was a way of life; yet Christian doctrine on the matter was firm. With daring like that of the bold religious reformer Wyclif, Chaucer faced the problem and tried to resolve it. Philosophically, he succeeded, but on the emotional level he failed—as perhaps we all do. It would be the same still later in the Canterbury Tales, where the Knight’s secular, philosophical vision stands balanced with the Parson’s sermon on withdrawal from this life: and it was no doubt the same in Chaucer’s real-life experience. It was in his first two dream visions, the Book of the Duchess and the Parliament of Birds, where opposite positions struggle to a draw, that Chaucer worked out his method.

  How these two poems work, philosophically and aesthetically, need not detain us here; but two lighter matters do need mention, the dating of the poems and what they tell us, in the most general terms, about Chaucer’s personality and opinions.

  Though critics have often done so, no one can say with any confidence when either poem was written. Since the Book of the Duchess is an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster, who died in 1369, and since it seemed to early critics a fairly simple, even mindless poem, it was once common to date it 1369. More recent critics, recognizing the poem’s complexity—and remembering that Gaunt held a solemn and costly annual memorial ceremony for Blanche every year until his death, a ceremony Chaucer’s poem might well have graced—have favored a later date. We know now that the poem contains both French and Italian influence (though mainly French) and draws heavily from Boethius, so it may have been composed as late as Chaucer’s first diplomatic trip to Italy, 1373.

  The date of the Parliament is equally uncertain. Some critics have insisted that like the elegy for Blanche, it is built of sections not originally intended as part of one large work. There are various indications of this, they say, mostly too complicated to mention here. One part of the vision takes place in “grene and lusty May” (I. 130), while another part of the same vision takes place in February, on “seynt Valentynes day” (I. 309}. (But it is clear that time slides in the poem, and that the idea of Time’s swift passage is a major motif.) Again, in some sections of the poem Chaucer uses Boccaccio and Dante as his sources, as he did in poems written after his Italian journey; other sections look like work of the so-called French period; and much of the poem’s third section has the “realistic” quality of his later work. (It is of course not truly realistic, having more to do with the richly colored cartoon-like miniatures being done in Italian books at this time: people with comically big hats, warts on their noses, bedpans in the corners of their rooms. If Chaucer’s first period is one of “French influence”—this may be an optical illusion—and his second, one of Italian influence, in that he quotes or imitates specific Italian poets, his final period is not one of native realism but of Italian influence fully assimilated and usually exerted on native English subject matter.) But the whole argument that the poem was made of old material reshuffled comes crashing down when we notice that the plan of the poem is numerologically tight, a tour-de-force application to poetry of musical principles drawn from Boethius’ De musica and going back to Pythagoras and Plato; that is to say, briefly, that for symbolic reasons the poem is written in seven-line stanzas to the number of 699 lines—intentionally one line short of 700—divided into sections numerologically significant, and thematically controlled by seven kinds of music.6

  Another approach to the dating of the poem has been the assumption of some scholars that it must have been written to some specific occasion. That was standard opinion for many years, such early Chaucerians as Tyrwhitt and Godwin arguing that the courtship of the female eagle to be married off in the poem refers to the marriage of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia7 or the proposed marriage of Richard and Marie of France (or some other French princess).8 Lately the search for an occasion for the poem has been abandoned, mainly for unsound reasons.

  It is true that no occasion has been found that neatly explains everything in the poem. For instance, the twentieth-century theory9 that the poem deals with Anne of Bohemia fails to account for the lady eagle’s reluctance to get married and her wish to think it over for a year before deciding, whereas Anne of Bohemia herself instigated negotiations with Richard. Again, the theory that the poem concerns Marie of France claims that, since three eagles sue for the lady eagle’s hand, three separate suitors, not just Richard, must have competed for Marie—which is doubtful. And the older Tyrwhitt-Godwin theory, recently revived—a theory that would date the poem as early as 1358 and claims that the poem’s three eagles represent three of King Edward’s sons, the Black Prince, Gaunt, and Edmund Langley, all still marriageable in 1358—fails in that it makes the poem unflattering (if we read the suitor-eagles’ lines at all carefully) to Edward’s two younger sons. A second reason the search for an occasion for the poem has been abandoned is that the poem makes good sense as, simply, an entertainment.

  All these objections are easily answered. The year’s wait before giving consent to a suitor is standard in courtly-love procedure (we see the same thing in the Book of the Duchess) and even if applied to Anne of Bohemia would give no one in the audience pause. Besides, of course, a poem which alludes to real people and events need not be exact in every detail. Except in the work of Alexander Pope, point-for-point topicality makes for dreary art. As for the argument that the poem deals with Marie, the disparity in the number of suitors is of no importance. The three suant eagles present the three traditional positions on love: (1) That the lady should consent out of mercy, (2) that she should consent because she owes it to her lover, and (3) that she should consent out of self-interest—in other words, the arguments descend from selfless to selfish. This debate is so stock in the poetry of courtly love (it goes back to the idea of the tripartite soul, on which we will have more to say in due time) that Chaucer had hardly any choice but to present it, whatever the situation in France. On the other hand, since in this commonplace of love debate it seems highly improbable that Chaucer would associate his friend Gaunt with one of the baser love positions, we may safely rule out identification of the three male eagles as the Black Prince, Gaunt, and Langley. (The date 1358 is of course much too early for any section of the poem, especially the comic final section. In 1358, Chaucer was eighteen.) As for the notion that the poem works aesthetically as a conventional love debate, a philosophical statement, or whatever, and therefore cannot be a topical poem as well, we need only observe that the Book of the Duchess is obviously both at once, that topical allusion is common in the poetry of Chaucer’s age, and that as we have known since Manly’s Some New Light on Chaucer, even the Canterbury Tales is sometimes topical.

  Though most scholars have inclined to the persuasion that the Parliament refers to the marriage of Richard and Anne of Bohemia, the stronger likelihood is that the poem was composed in the year 1377, when Chaucer and his fellow negotiators were convinced that they’d finally achieved a marriage treaty between young Prince Richard and Marie. By all the theories thus far advanced, the correspondence between suitors and sued in the poems and suitors and sued in actual history is slight if not invisible; all the theories are equally well supported by the poem’s one supposed astronomical reference, wherein Venus is seen in the north-northwest (but this may be, as some have argued, a joke, since the north-northwest is often associa
ted, as is love, with insanity or confusion); but only the theory that the lady is Marie can account for the poem’s chief feature, the parliament of foules (fowls or, by a foul pun, fools) itself. For Dame Nature, in Chaucer’s poem, it is imperative that the beautiful formal eagle be married; but the debate on that great question by the assembled parliament of birds leads to comic madness and inefficiency, each of the lower species of birds slightly crazier than the last. It seems to me impossible to read the poem without at least suspecting that the crazy bird-parliament has something to do with the obstreperous Commons of England.