Chaucer

John Lawlor

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000681345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1968. A critical interpretation of Chaucer's narrative poetry which concentrates on three major groupings - the early love-visions, the 'tragedye' of Troilus and Criseyde, and the Canterbury Tales. Emphasis is laid on Chaucer as an oral narrator and on the varying skills which this role encourages and sustains. The quotations are liberal and throughout help is given to the reader unfamiliar with Middle English.

ADVENTURES OF A DREAMER

The Book of the Duchess

The House of Fame

The Parliament of Fowls

Has any major poet opened his career with an undertaking more hazardous than Chaucer’s? The Book of the Duchess is not, of course, his first attempt at poetry: but it is the first completed poem we have from his hand. It attempts consolation of the patron; as such it is expressive of duty and courtesy. But it eschews doctrinaire comfort, and is therefore marked by tenderness. It is ‘a refusal to mourn’; but it faces loss with utter frankness. The poet, even in this hour of darkness, is still an entertainer, one who can only hope to make headway by diverting his patron, drawing a gleam of amusement for his own incomprehension. As such, the task calls for all the resources of maturity. That Chaucer at this earliest stage attempts it at all must be thought marvellous. What makes the attempt possible is less a matter of literary skill, marked as that is, than a delicacy of spirit—an unwillingness to intrude and an entire readiness to be set aside as uncomprehending—which is the epitome of perfect manners, gentillesse. If his training in the ways of a Court had done no more for him, Chaucer’s offering for John of Gaunt, mourning the death of Blanche his Duchess, would remain one of the undoubted achievements of courtesy, a willing subordination of the self in face of the needs of another.

(I)

The modern reader must see Chaucer standing in the circle of a small society, each known to him, and each his feudal superior, as the Corpus Christi MS ‘frontispiece’ shows him to us.¹ His task is hazardous indeed; his first problem therefore to open the range, to gain some distance from his audience. In this he differs most markedly from the author of a printed book, who meets an unknown audience through the silent traffic of the printed page; and who can meet that audience only as ah individual, a solitary reader, in every instance. The traditional problem of the novelist has therefore been to gain intimacy, to establish and sustain a one-to-one relationship between himself and his ‘gentle reader’. The task of the oral narrator is exactly the opposite. He must win a certain detachment (and resourcefully vary it, in tune with the developing needs of the story) away from his small, well-known audience, who are unalterably a group, with a group’s reactions. His working principle is skilful opportunism, based upon a self-characterisation which springs from the literary tradition in which he works—last and therefore decidedly least of those who re-tell the stories adorned by their great predecessors—and from his actual position, the humble servant of those who are his social superiors.

Given this initial characterisation, the narrator can of course spring some surprises on his audience. He can gently deride, often by an exaggerated deference, their too-easy assumptions, and he can vary the tone from quiet humour to outright fun. The form which will above all others sanction a departure from actuality, cushion any shock of self-recognition, and finally allow the ‘I’ of the story to dissolve back into the familiar figure of the poet, is of course the dream-poem. In the three poems that follow, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and The Parliament of Fowls² Chaucer variously exploits the possibilities of a narrator who has to recount what passes his understanding. The skills he deploys are varied; his repertoire ranges from set-piece direct address to skilfully placed ‘aside’, and includes outright mimicry as well as adroitly timed question. But in each instance there is a common situation from which all else springs— the predicament of an ‘I’ who, in the end, must learn from his experience; and, seeing this, the audience begins to gain access to the story, to have it more nearly as a thing of their own possessing. A ruefully inadequate Dreamer has served his purpose when the reality he had ignored or minimised is plain for all to see. There is, then, no question of truths that come through, if they come at all, on the poet’s terms. The entire setting, social and intellectual, of Chaucer’s art, precludes statements ex cathedra. What we hear from the pulpitulum is a confession of all-too-human weakness, that readiness to prejudge all things from the imagined safety of entrenched doctrine which is never so promptly called into play as when the woes are those of another.

(II)

Chaucer begins The Book of the Duchess by establishing two matters of immediate—but unstated—relevance to his present audience. The poet is deep in grief, deprived of sleep, and has

felynge in nothyng,

But, as yt were, a mased thyng. (11‒12)

Such a course, if persisted in, can have only one ending; and already his ‘spirit of quyknesse’ is dead (1‒29). In this opening gambit Chaucer has challenged the grievous indifference to life of the mourning John of Gaunt. The sickness the poet feigns as his own preserves propriety, but the reference none the less comes home. It is immediately followed by a side-step away from the nature of present sorrow, arising from bereavement, into a veiled allusion, which courtly ears are quick to catch, to the cause of the poet’s illness and its long duration:

a sicknesse

That I have suffred this eight yeer,

And yet my boote is never the ner;

For there is phisicien but oon

That may me hele... (36‒40)

No question now of the nature of the poet’s sickness, nor of its hopeless quality. But this time sickness is a matter of delicate absurdity. The poet as hapless lover is an established role, and its humour is self-evident to the audience. Both the first move and the second perfectly exemplify the balance Chaucer is to hold throughout his poem. Sorrow is real, in the patron; in the poet it is touched with absurdity. Death is in the background; Love is now moved into the foreground. One life is all but suspended—

cathedra throne pulpitulum reading-desk mased dazed, bewildered quyknesse life, vitality boote cure hele heal

Alway in poynt to falle a-doun—

the other lingers on, sighing fruitlessly—

Passe we over un till eft;

That will not be mot nede be left (41‒2)

The silence of real suffering set against the volubility of a would-be lover who is fortified by such simple maxims as these—this constitutes the essential strategy of the poem. By line 44 we are launched on the tale of love’s old and unsuccessful campaigner; but the link with the patron’s real predicament is most adroitly placed. If grief allows no rest it is better to read for diversion than to kill time :

me thoughte it beter play

Then play either at ches or tables. (50‒1)

This constitutes both an apology for and an invitation to join the present ‘play’. It reinforces the earlier warning that prolonged grief is ‘agaynes kynde’ (16). How appropriate, then, to turn to stories which exemplify ‘the law of kinde’, stories which ‘clerkes’ and ‘other poets’ have

put in rime

To rede, and for to be in minde,

While men loved the lawe of kinde. (54‒6)

The tale of ‘Seys’ and ‘Alcyone’ is a tale of bereavement: but, again, it keeps a proper distance and perhaps stirs the mourning one to the beginning of a perspective on his grief, by telling of a wife’s sorrow for a dead husband. Here the longing to see again the lost one is powerfully conveyed. We go down into the dark valley where Morpheus dwells:

Ther never yet grew corn ne gras,

Ne tre, ne [nothing] that ought was,

Beste, ne man, ne noght elles,

Save there were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Adventures of a Dreamer: The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls
• 2 The writer as dependant: Troilus and Cristyde (I)
• 3 Tragedye and tragedy: Troilus and Criseyde (II)
• 4 A return to authority: The Legend of Good Women
• 5 Tales and tellers: The Canterbury Tales (I)
• 6 Auctoritee and pref: The Canterbury Tales (II)
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index