Geoffrey Chaucer Biography - Fact, Education & Works

Geoffrey Chaucer, the son of John and Agnes (de Copton) Chaucer, was born between 1340-1345. Chaucer came from two generations of wealthy winners with everything but a title, and Chaucer began to pursue a court role in 1357. As a squire at Elizabeth 's court, Countess Ulster's, Lionel 's wife, Earl of Ulster (later Duke of Clarence), Chaucer would have served as a gentleman — essentially a butler. In this position, a young man would be in service to court aristocrats who required diversions as well as domestic assistance. For Chaucer, who could both tell stories and compose songs, the way must have opened quickly. The countess was French, so French poets like Guillaume de Machaut and Eustache Deschamps provided an early inspiration, and Chaucer 's earliest poems, The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Birds, rested on a heavy base of French. Chaucer made his acquaintance with the man who would most profoundly influence his political career at this time: John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Chaucer and Gaunt married the daughters of the French Knight Sir Paon de Roet — Gaunt in order to legitimize his sons by the daughter of the Roet, who had been his mistress for some time (from this line came all the English kings after Henry VI), and Chaucer to enter the aristocratic world. Of all the pilgrims from Canterbury (and there's a "Chaucer"), the one closest to his situation is the social-climbing Franklin, a man dearly concerned with his son's kindness. Chaucer's own son, Thomas, became one of London's richest men, and his great-grandchild (who died on the battlefield) was named evident heir to England's throne. Though Chaucer was close to Gaunt, he was always on the fringes of this time 's world of courtly political intrigue, a Shakespeare period dramatized in Richard II.

Geoffrey Chaucer As Famous English Writer

Chaucer, known as the first English author, wrote in English at a time when Latin was considered the grammatical, or language that would not change, and most of the English of the upper class spoke French. Chaucer himself often used French translations of Latin texts; using the language of the Saxons of the lower class rather than the aristocracy of Norman has perplexed readers and scholars for centuries. The Saxon language, as Sir Walter Scott has pointed out, can name only barnyard animals on the hoof. They used their Saxon name, sheep, if you fed a domestic animal; but if you ate it, they probably called it by its French name, mouton, which soon became a mutton. In Chaucer 's England, this linguistic distinction was a class distinction: if one raised a farm animal, one was a Saxon and called it by its English name; if one was rich enough to eat it, it was named in French: calf / veau (veal); chicken / poulet (pullet); pig / porc (pork). However, Chaucer did not try to impress his relatives with his French, but began to develop English into a literary language which was highly flexible.

Geoffrey Chaucer Famous Works

Chaucer wrote a lot of works, some of which he never completed like The Canterbury Tales (circa 1375-1400). He has pioneered many recognizably "modern" novel techniques, including psychologically complex characters: many claim that Troilus and Criseyde are the first English novel because of the way in which their main characters always operate on two levels of response, verbal and mental. All works by Chaucer are sophisticated language meditations and artifice. Chaucer moved from a medieval view of the world in which allegory reigned, and developed a model of language and fiction based on concealment rather than communication or theological interpretation. Indeed, in his early works Chaucer misrepresents himself, creating self-portraits in The Book of the Duchess (around 1368-1369) and The House of Fame (around 1378-1381) as an innocent, overweight bookworm far from the canny businessman and social climber he was actually.

The first major work by Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess, is an elegy about the death of Blanche, the first wife of John of Gaunt. Although the poem flourishes with traditional French, its originality develops around the relationship between the narrator, a fictionalized version of the poet, and the mourner, the Man in Black, who represents Gaunt. In both The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame, Chaucer uses a naive narrator, using a comic version of Dante's and Virgil 's relationship with the guide-narrator in the Commedia. The talkative Eagle guides the naive "Chaucer," just as the gossipy Virgil guides the naive Dante. The Eagle brings "Chaucer" to the House of Fame (Rumor), which is the site of the tales even more. Here Chaucer makes a case for the story's preeminence, an idea he explored in The Canterbury Tales to great effect. House of Fame residents are asked if they want to be great lovers or be remembered as great lovers and they all choose the latter: the story is more important than the reality.

Dating Chaucer 's works are complicated, but scholars generally assume that his dream-vision poem The Parliament of Birds (around 1378-1381), which is less clearly tied to the source texts or events, is his third work because it marks a change in form: he starts to use the seven-line pentameter stanza he would use in Troilus and Criseyde (around 1382-1386). The Parliament of Birds is an indictment of courtly love staged as an allegory of birds corresponding to social classes: the hunting birds (eagles, hawks) represent the nobles, the worm eaters (cuckoos) represent the bourgeois, the water-fowl are the merchants, and the seed eaters (turtledoves) are the landed agricultural interests. Every class gets a distinctive voice. In The Parliament of Birds Chaucer explored themes that will pervade his later work: the tension between nature and courtly love will permeate Troilus and Criseyde, and experimenting with different voices presages The Canterbury Tales for all the characters and social classes of birds.

Geoffrey Chaucer's Political Careers

By 1374 Chaucer was firmly involved in domestic politics, and the important post of controller of customs taxes on hides, skins and wool was granted. Chaucer had to keep the records himself and supervise the collectors as well. For Chaucer, these were prosperous times; his wife had received a large annuity, and they were living on free rent in a house above Aldgate's city gate. Chaucer developed an interest in Italian language and literature after visits to Genoa and Florence in 1372-1373 and to Lombardy in 1378 which influenced his poem Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer retold the medieval tale of doomed lovers and set his epic poem against the backdrop of Troy's siege. The poem takes its story line from Il Filostrato (1335-1340) by Giovanni Boccaccio, but its inspiration from Dante 's love for Beatrice as narrated in the Convito (1307) and from Petrarch 's love for Laura as manifested in the sonnets.

In the poem, Chaucer presents a case for ennobling passion that fits with the French romances he had read in his youth; this romance only takes a particularly Italian turn in Troilus and Criseyde. The poem analyzes love artifices, as well as lovers' complex motivations. Both Dante and Petrarch begin by seeing love as an artifice and then showing how that artifice breaks free from love. The rime (poems) Petrarch's to Laura are divided into two groups by a simple fact, her death. In "Vita di ma donna Laura," the sonnets are artificial, conventional poems filled with oxymoron, antithesis, hyperbole, and conceit. The style was so conventional, that the French poets had a verb to write like Petrarch, Petrarquizer. After Laura's death the sonnets change radically, as the artifices fall off in his attempt to re-create the true Laura. After Criseyde 's absence the same change occurs in Troilus. Through his trials Troilus learns that loving a real woman is the only true love, just as Dante and Petrarch have before him.

Chaucer's most famous work

Chaucer's most famous work, The Canterbury Tales, also has similarities with Italian literature: the unfinished poem draws on the frame tale technique as practiced by Boccaccio in The Decameron (1349-1351), though it is not clear that Chaucer knew The Decameron as a whole. The pretext for Boccaccio's storytelling is a plague in Florence that sends a group of ten nobles into the country to escape the Black Death. They tell each one a tale for every ten days. Tales of each day are grouped around a common theme or subject of narrative. The tales, all of them one hundred, are finished; the plague ends in Florence; and the nobles return to the town.

The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales innovates on this pattern in major ways. Far from being noble, Chaucer's tale-tellers run the spectrum of the middle class, from the Knight to the Pardoner and the Summoner. And the tales are not told in the expected order — from the highest-ranking pilgrim to the lowest. Instead, each character uses his tale as a weapon or tool to get back at or even with the previous tale-teller. Once the Miller has established the "quitting" principle, each tale generates the next one. The Reeve, who takes offense because “The Miller 's Tale” is about a cuckolded carpenter (the Reeve had been a carpenter in his youth), tells a tale about a cuckolded miller, who also gets beaten up after his daughter is deflowered. As in many of the stories, subtle distinctions of class become the focal point of the plot.

Chaucer 's refusal to let his tale end conventionally is typical of the way he handles familiar stories. He likes both sides and he constantly reminds the reader of that.

What Arthur Miller Was Known For

Arthur Miller, one of the greatest playwrights in America who died at the age of 89, has been a prolific and popular writer for 7 decades. In Death Of A Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), he created two of the most enduring tragic myths of the century, and in Timebends (1987), one of its outstanding autobiographies. When he married Marilyn Monroe at the height of her fame in 1956, he had walked his own life into the glare of living myth.

Arthur Miller Early Life

Initially Miller was born in Harlem , New York. Both Jewish grandfathers came from the same Polish hamlet; at the age of six, his father, Isidore-lzzie-was sent by himself from Radomizi to New York relatives and became a manhattan rag trade prince. He had the good sense to marry in the depression destroyed the sassy and stunning Augusta Barnett (Gussie), who was far smarter than him.

Arthur was closer to his mother but tender to the memory of both parents and in most of the works their spirit, determination, and deceit are evident. He once said that everything he 'd written was based on someone he'd seen or met and while Death Of A Salesman isn't purely autobiographical, it's hard to imagine without the lives of Izzie and Gussie Miller.

The Millers had left Harlem in the early 1920s for Brooklyn. Usually Arthur, their second son and middle child, proceeded to crash through a suburban American boyhood baseball, biking, crooning, football-until Wall Street. He is 14 years old. Much of his work influences the first major discord of the American century. Unlike Dickens and Ibsen, he drew from his father's financial tragedy the lifelong convictions that catastrophe could hit without notice, and that the crust of civilized order was becoming ever thinner. Earlier, Miller would ridicule the nostalgic notion of American poverty as a golden age of good neighborliness- "Was everyone your friend? Horseshit!

Arthur Miller Education

He went to Michigan University in 1934, Ann Arbor, where he became a student journalist, wrote his first novel, No Villain, and three other titles representing the gathering of the global melodrama of the time: They Too Arise, Honors At Dawn, and The Great Disobedience. He received a $1,250 award from New Plays Bureau operated by New York producers The Theater Guild.

Miller's graduation in 1938 coincided with a rare moment of generous U.S. government funding for the arts, and he joined the Federal Theater Project (FTP) at $22.77 a week. Created in 1935 by Roosevelt 's work-creation program, the FTP 's aim was to provide employment for the theater industry's unemployed. Congress killed it in 1939, believing it had become too left-wing; but in its short li, the FTP 's aim was to provide employment for those who were unemployed.

What Was Arthur Miller Known For

In 1940, Miller ended The Golden Years, a confrontational drama between Cortez and Montezuma. The script, mislaid by the Theater Guild, appeared at the University of Texas several years later and was premiered on Radio Three at the BBC in 1987. Today, it reads like a cross between an epic Hollywood costume and an opera libretto in translation; but the subject of genocide in Mexico in the 16th century set a pattern in Miller 's career, often choosing to write about the horrors of the 20th century at one point. The real stories behind The Golden Years were the Guernica bombing and the fascist appeasement.

In the Second World War a college football injury forced him out of active service. He worked on a training film for the army, wrote for the radio, drove a truck, published an anti-semitism novel and became a fitter at the Brooklyn navy yard. Miller was the type of writer to whom no experience was wasted: just as the navy yard appeared years later in A View From The Bridge (1955), so a nightmare visit to see Václav Havel in 1969, in the wake of the Prague Spring, inspired one of Miller's most tensely wounded later plays, The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977).

Finally in 1944 he made Broadway, with The Man Who Had All The Luck, a hubristically named fable that closed after four performances. However, the play is significant, because it is the first attempt by Miller to mix the disciplines of suburban tragedy, folk realism and ironic farce. It draws on a beautiful heritage of family and neighborhood stories from Brooklyn and flags up a theme that resurfaces throughout his work: personal honor.

Arthur Miller in Authorship Journey

Arthur Miller had written many kinds of theater out of his system by the end of the Second World War and was able to figure out the mood of the time for some purpose. What will it be like for America? His response has been a play that can still deliver an emotional knock-out, and has become his first hit. Opening at the Coronet Theatre on January 29, 1947, directed by Elia Kazan and featuring Ed Begley, Beth Merrill, Karl Malden and Arthur Kennedy, All My Sons ran for 328 performances-a good length for an unfamiliar playwright, and one that he rarely surpassed.

Arthur Miller in Broadway Theater

That was a new Broadway and it was a watershed show for All My Sons. Eighteen months after the V-J Day euphoria, the audience was ready for what would be a back-from-the-war match. It exploded in the pause between victory and the attempted press-ganging of show business for the cold war in Washington, a family tale of corrupt profiteering at home which led to the death of US pilots abroad. From this point on, the best scenes of Miller show a conversational mastery, a knack for sketching dynamic characters on the margins of a story, and a dramatic talent for catching the attention of the viewer from the outset.

The 1940s and 1950s Broadway Theater, in which Miller and Tennessee Williams made their name, was a public tribune led by spectacular performers, directors, artists and writers: Kazan, Eugene O'Neill, William Inge, designer Jo Mielziner, actors like Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, and Lee J Cobb. The tribune was graced by the American musical's golden age which ran alongside it, and a highly attentive press attended. Subtitled Certain Private Conversations In Two Acts And A Requiem, Death Of A Salesman opened at the Morosco Theater on February 10, 1949, playing for 742 performances: it was Miller's greatest success in his career and has recently enjoyed a revival on Broadway, due to be transferred to London in May.

Jane Austen Childhood - Facts about Her Early Life

In novels like 'Sense and Sensitivity,' 'Pride and Prime' and 'Emma,' Jane Austen was a Georgian author. Jane Austen was known for her social commentary.

Jane Austen's comical love novels among the landscape were not widely known in her own period but became very popular in 1869 and her popularity grew in the twentieth century. Her novels – Pride & Pride & Sensibility, Sense & Sensibility – are literary classics that bridge the gap between romance and realism.

Jane Austen Childhood 

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire in England; she was the seventh and second daughter of Cassandra and George Austen. The parents of Austen were beloved members of the community. Her dad served for the local Anglican parish as the rector of Oxford. In an environment that stressed learning and creative thought the family was close, the children grew up. When Austen was young, she was encouraged to read from the extensive library of her father with her siblings. The kids have written and performed theaters and plays.

Over the course of her life, Austen was closer to her dad and elderly sister, Cassandra. She would one day participate in a published work together with Cassandra.

Austen and Cassandra were sent to boarding classes during their pre-adolescence in order to acquire a more formal education. Austen and her sister caught typhus during that time, with Austen almost succumbing to the disease. They returned home and have lived with the family from this point on after a short period of formal education cut by financial constraints.