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.
No comments:
Post a Comment