CHAUCER, GEOFFREY (1340?–I400), English poet, was born, about 134o, of a family which had been settled in Lon don for at least two generations, but probably came from the eastern counties. His father, John Chaucer, lived at one time in Cordwainer street, the quarter of the shoemakers, with which the name Chaucer (a French form of the Latin Calcearius) connects the family. But John Chaucer, his father Robert, and a step father Richard, were vintners, and Robert and John held offices connected with the customs on wine. Geoffrey was probably born at Thames street, where his father is found living somewhat later, with a wife, Agnes, niece of Hamo de Compton, probably the poet's mother. In 1357 Geoffrey is found, apparently as a lad, in the service of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, duke of Clarence. In 1359 he went to the war in France and is heard of at Retters, i.e., Rethel, near Reims, and as being taken prisoner. The king contributed £ 16 to his ransom and it is probable that after his return he was for some time at the Inner Temple, where, at a considerable cost, an education was given likely to help suitable men for civil employment under the Crown. By June 20, 1367, he had been long enough in the king's service to be granted a pension of 20 marks, probably in connec tion with his marriage with a Philippa, one of two daughters of Sir Payne Roet, who in the previous September had been granted a pension of ten marks for her services to the queen as one of her domicellae. Philippa's sister, Katherine, after the death of her husband, Sir Hugh de Swynford, in 1372, became governess to John of Gaunt's children, and subsequently his mistress, and (in 1396) his wife. The marriage with Philippa thus helps to account for the favour subsequently shown to Chaucer by John of Gaunt.
In the grant of his pension Chaucer is called "dilectus vallectus noster," our beloved yeoman; before the end of 1368 he had risen to one of the king's esquires. In September of the following year John of Gaunt's wife, the duchess Blanche, died at the age of 29, and Chaucer wrote in her honour The Book of the Duchesse, a poem of 1,334 lines in octosyllabic couplets. In June 137o he went abroad on the king's service, on an unknown errand, re turning probably some time before Michaelmas. On Dec. 1, 1372, he started, with an advance of loo marks in his pocket, for Italy, as one of three commissioners to treat with the Genoese as to an English port where they might have special facilities for trade. His accounts, delivered on May show that he had also visited Florence on the king's business, and he possibly went also to Padua and there made the acquaintance of Petrarch.
In the second quarter of 1374, Chaucer lived in a whirl of pros perity. On April 23 the king granted him a pitcher of wine daily, subsequently commuted for an annuity of 20 marks. From John of Gaunt, who in Aug. 13 72 had granted Philippa Chaucer £IO a year, he himself now received (June 13) a like annuity. On June 8 he was appointed (with a salary of uio and an annual gratuity of £6 135.4d.) comptroller of the Custom and Subsidy of Wools, Hides and `Voodfells and also of the Petty Customs of Wine in the Port of London. Probably in anticipation of this appoint ment he had taken, on May 10, a lease for life from the city of London of the dwelling-house above the gate of Aldgate, and here he lived for the next 12 years. In 1375-76 two large windfalls came to him, the first being two wardships of Kentish heirs, one of whom paid him £ 104, the second a grant of £71 4s.6d. the value of some confiscated wool. In Dec. 1376 he was sent abroad on the king's service in the retinue of Sir John Burley; in Feb. 1377 he was sent to Paris and Montreuil in connection probably with the peace negotiations between England and France, and at the end of April (after a reward of £20 for his good services) he was again despatched to France. It is generally considered that this diplomatic period of his life was unprolific in poetry.
On the accession of Richard II., Chaucer was confirmed in his offices and pensions. In Jan. 1378 he seems to have been in France in connection with a proposed marriage between Richard and the daughter of the French king; and on May 28 of the same year he was sent (his last diplomatic journey) with Sir Edward de Berke ley to the lord of Milan and Sir John Hawkwood to treat for help in the king's wars, returning on Sept. 19. In April 1382 a new comptrollership, that of the petty customs in the Port of London, was given him, and shortly after he was allowed to exercise it by deputy, a similar licence being given him in Feb. 1385, at the in stance of the earl of Oxford, as regards the comptrollership of wool. In Oct. 1385 he was made a justice of the peace for Kent. In Feb. 1386 we catch a glimpse of his wife, Philippa, being admit ted to the fraternity of Lincoln cathedral in the company of Henry, earl of Derby (afterwards Henry IV.), Sir Thomas de Swynford and other distinguished persons. In Aug. 1386 he was elected one of the two knights of the shire for Kent, and with this dignity (one not much appreciated in those days) his good fortune reached its climax. In December he was superseded in both his comptrollerships, probably as a result of the absence of his patron, John of Gaunt, in Spain, and the supremacy of the duke of Gloucester. In the following year the cessation of Phil ippa's pension suggests that she died between midsummer and Michaelmas. In May 1388 Chaucer surrendered to the king his two pensions of 20 marks each, and they were regranted at his request to one John Scalby, an unusual transaction, pointing to a pressing need for ready money.
In July 1389, after John of Gaunt had returned to England, and the king had taken the government into his own hands, Chaucer was appointed clerk of works at various royal palaces at a salary of two shillings a day. To this post was subsequently added the charge of some repairs at St. George's chapel, Windsor. He was also made a commissioner to maintain the banks of the Thames between Woolwich and Greenwich, and was given by the earl of March (grandson of Lionel, duke of Clarence, his first patron) a sub-forestership at North Petherton, Devon ; obviously a sinecure. While on the king's business, in Sept. 139o, Chaucer was twice robbed by highwaymen, losing £20 of the king's money. In June 1391 he was superseded as clerk of the works, and seems to have suffered another spell of misfortune, of which the first alleviation came in Jan. 1393, when the king made him a gift of La). In Feb. 1394 he was granted a new pension of £20. In he received from King Richard a grant of a butt of wine yearly. For this he appears to have asked in terms that suggested poverty, and in May 1398 he obtained letters of protection against his creditors. On the accession of Henry IV. a new pension of 4o marks was granted him (Oct. and Richard II.'s grants were formally confirmed. Though no instalment of the new pension was paid, on the strength of his expectations (Dec. 24, Chaucer leased a tenement in the garden of St. Mary's chapel, Westminster, and it was probably here that he died on the following Oct. 25. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and his tomb became the nucleus of what is now known as Poets' Corner.
The portrait of Chaucer, which the affection of his disciple, Thomas Hoccleve, caused to be painted in a copy of the latter's Regement of Princes (now Harleian ms. 4,866 in the British Museum), shows him an old man with white hair; he has a fresh complexion, grey eyes, a straight nose, a grey moustache and a small double-pointed beard. His dress and hood are black, and he carries in his hands a string of beads.
The development of Chaucer's genius has been attractively summed up as comprised in three stages, French, Italian and Eng lish, and there is a rough approximation to the truth in this for mula, since his earliest poems are translated from the French or based on French models, and the two great works of his middle period are borrowed from the Italian, while his latest stories have no such obvious and direct originals, and in their humour and freedom anticipate the typically English temper of Henry Field ing. But Chaucer's indebtedness to French poetry was no passing phase. He knew the Roman de la rose as modern English poets know Shakespeare, and the full extent of his debt to his French contemporaries, not merely in 1369, but in 1385, and in (the dates are approximate), has only gradually been discovered. To this continuing French influence it was his good fortune to add lessons in plot and construction derived from Boccaccio's Filos trato and Teseide, as well as some glimpses of the higher art of the Divina Commedia. He shows acquaintance also with one of Petrarch's sonnets. His study of Italian models was thus an episode of unique importance in his literary life, but before it began he had already been making his own artistic experiments, and it is noteworthy that while he learnt much from Boccaccio he improved on his originals as he translated them. Doubtless his busy life in the service of the Crown had taught him self-confi dence, and he uses his Italian models in his own way and with the most triumphant and assured success. When he had no more Italian poems to adapt he had learnt his lesson. In his "English" period we find him taking what might be little more than an anec dote and lending it body and life and colour with a skill never surpassed.
While our knowledge of Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose is in this unsatisfactory state, another translation of his from the French, the Book of the Lyon (alluded to in the "Retraction" found, in some manuscripts, at the end of the Canterbury Tales), which must certainly have been taken from Guillaume Michault's Le Dit du lion, has perished altogether. The strength of French influence on Chaucer's early work may, however, be amply illus trated from the first of his poems with which we are on sure ground, the Book of the Duchesse, or, as it is alternatively called, the Deth of Blaunche. Here not only are individual passages closely imitated from Machault and Froissart, but the dream, the May morning, and the whole machinery of the poem are taken over from contemporary French conventions. But even at this stage, Chaucer could prove his right to borrow by the skill with which he makes his materials serve his own purpose, and some of the lines in the Deth of Blaunche are among the most tender and charming he ever wrote.
Chaucer's A.B.C., a poem in honour of the Blessed Virgin, of which the stanzas begin with the successive letters of the alpha bet, is another example of French influence. It is taken from the Pelerinage de be vie humaine, written by Guillaume de Deguille ville about 133o. The occurrence of some magnificent lines in Chaucer's version, combined with evidence that he did not yet possess the skill to translate at all literally as soon as rhymes had to be considered, accounts for this poem having been dated some times earlier than the Book of the Duchesse, and sometimes sev eral years later. With it is usually moved up and down, though it should surely be placed in the '7os, the Compleynt to Pity, a fine poem which yet, from its slight obscurity and absence of Chaucer's usual ease, may very well some day prove to be a translation from the French.
Besides these two poems Chaucer about this time produced his most important prose work, the translation of the De Con solatione Philosophiae of Boethius. Reminiscences of this helped to enrich many of his subsequent poems and inspired five of his shorter pieces (The Former Age, Fortune, Truth, Gentilesse and Lak of Stidfastnesse), but the translation itself cannot be counted a success. To borrow Chaucer's own phrase, his "English was insufficient" to reproduce such difficult Latin. The translation is often barely intelligible without the original, and it is only here and there that it flows with any ease or rhythm.
When the Teseide had been used, Chaucer had no more Italian stories to translate and he turned to his Latin materials to compile a lectionary of Cupid's Saints for presentation to the queen. To atone for his portrayal of the disloyalty of Criseyde he accepted as a penance the painting of 19 women faithful to love, with Alcestis as their queen, enriching his scheme with a delightful prologue. (extant in two rather widely differing forms) into which he introduces touches about his worship of the Deity and the controversy between the partisans of the Flower and the Leaf from his French friends, Froissart and Deschamps. Of the stories of constant women, those of Dido and Cleopatra are fully worthy of him. When, however, he had written eight and part of a ninth he wearied of the monotony of his theme, which he was beginning to treat with scant respect, and broke off.
As in the case of the Legende of Good Women, our loss is not so much that of the additional stories as of the completed framework. The wonderful character sketches of the Prologue are carried yet farther by the Talks on the Road which link the different tales, and two of these Talks, in which the Wife of Bath and the Par doner respectively edify the company, have the importance of separate Tales, but between the Tales that have come down to us there are seven links missing, and it was left to a later and weaker hand to narrate, in the "Tale of Beryn," the adventures of the pilgrims at Canterbury.
The reference to the Lyf of Seynt Cecyle in the prologue to the Legende of Good Women gives external proof that Chaucer included earlier work in the scheme of the Canterbury Tales, and mention has been made of other stories which are indisputably early, while in the case of at least two, the Clerk's tale of Grisilde and the Monk's tragedies, there is evidence of early work being revised and supplemented. It is fortunately impossible to separate the prologue to the charmingly told story of "yonge Hugh of Lincoln" from the tale itself, and with the "quod sche" in the sec ond line as proof that Chaucer was here writing specially for his Prioress we are forbidden to limit the new stories to any one metre or tone. There can be no doubt, however, that what may be called the Tales of the Churls (Miller, Reeve, Summoner, Friar, etc.), and the conversational outpourings of the Pardoner and Wife of Bath, form, with the immortal Prologue, the most important and distinctive additions to the older work. In these, and in the Pardoner's story of Death and the Three Revellers, and the Nun's Priest's masterly handling of the fable of the Cock and Fox, both of them free from the grossness which marks the others, Chaucer takes stories which could have been told in a short page of prose and elaborates them with all the skill in narration which he had sedulously cultivated. The conjugal reminiscences of the Wife of Bath and the Reeve's Tale with its abominable climax (lightened a little by Aleyn's farewell, lines 316-319) are among the great things in Chaucer, as surely as Troilus and Palamon and Arcyte and the Prologue. They help notably to give him the width of range which may certainly be claimed for him.
In or soon after 1391 Chaucer wrote in prose for an II-year old reader, whom he addresses as "Litel Lowis my son," a treatise on the use of the Astrolabe, its short prologue being the prettiest specimen of his prose. The wearisome tale of "Melibee and his wyf Prudence," which was perhaps as much admired in English as it had been in Latin and French, may have been translated at any time. The sermon on Penitence, used as the Parson's Tale, was probably the work of his old age. "Envoys" to his friends Scogan and Bukton, a translation of some balades by Sir Otes de Gran son, and the Compleynt to his Purs complete the record of his minor poetry. We have his own statement that in his youth he had written many Balades, Roundels and Virelayes in honour of Love, and the two songs embedded respectively in the Parlement of Foules and the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women are charming and musical. His extant shorter poems, however, whether early or late, offer no excuse for claiming high rank for him as a lyrist. He had very little sheer singing power, and though there are fine lines in his short poems, witness the famous "Flee fro the prees and dwell with soothfastnesse," they lack the sustained concentration of great work. From the drama. again, Chaucer was cut off, and it is idle to argue from the innumerable dramatic touches in his poems and his gift of characterization as to what he might have done had he lived two centuries later. His own age delighted in stories, and he gave it the stories it demanded invested with a humanity, a grace and strength which place him among the world's greatest narrative poets, and which bring the England of his own day, with all the colour and warmth of life, wonderfully near to his readers.
The part played by Chaucer in the development of the English language has often been overrated. He neither corrupted it, as used to be said, by introducing French words which it would other wise have avoided, nor bore any such part in fixing it as was after wards played by the translators of the Bible. The practical iden tity of Chaucer's language with that of Gower shows that both merely used the best English of their day with the care and slightly conservative tendency which befitted poets. Chaucer's service to the English language lies in his decisive success having made it impossible for any later English poet to attain fame, as Gower had done, by writing alternatively in Latin and French.
Chaucer borrowed both his stanza forms and his "deca syllabic" couplets (mostly with an extra syllable at the end of the line) from Guillaume Machault, and his music, like that of his French master and his successors, depends very largely on assign ing to every syllable its full value, and more especially on the due pronunciation of the final -e. The slower Movement of change in Scotland allowed time for Chaucer to exercise a potent in fluence on Scottish poetry, but in England this final -e, to which most of the earlier grammatical forms by Chaucer's time had been reduced, itself fell rapidly into disuse during the 15th century, his disciples, Hoccleve and Lidgate, quickly lost touch with his rhythms and successive copyists reduced his text to a state in which it was only by accident that lines could be scanned correctly. For fully three centuries his reputation was sustained solely by his narrative power, his warmest panegyrists betraying no con sciousness that they were praising one of the greatest technical masters of poetry. Even when thus maimed, however, his works found readers and lovers in every generation, and every improve ment in his text has set his fame on a surer basis.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The Canterbury Tales have always been Chaucer's Bibliography.-The Canterbury Tales have always been Chaucer's most popular work, and, including fragments, upwards of 6o 15th century manuscripts of it still survive. Two thin volumes of his minor poems were among the little quartos which Caxton printed by way of advertisement immediately on his return to England; the Canterbury Tales and Boethius followed in 1478, Troilus and a second edition of the Tales in 1483, the Hous of Fame in 1484. The Canterbury Tales were subsequently printed in 1492 (Pynson), 1498 (de Worde) and 1526 (Pynson) ; Troilus in 1517 (de Worde) and 1526 (Pynson) ; the Hous of Fame in 1526 (Pynson) ; the Parlement of Foules in 1526 (Pynson) and 153o (de Worde), and the Mars, Venus and Envoy to Bukton by Julyan Notary about i5oo. Pynson's three issues in 1526 almost amounted to a collected edition, but the first to which the title The Workes of Geffray Chaucer was given was that edited by William Thynne in 1532 for Thomas Godfray. Of this there was a new edition in 1542 for John Reynes and William Bonham, and an undated reprint a few years later for Bonham, Kele, Petit and Toye, each of whom put his name on part of the edition. In 1561 a reprint, with numerous additions, edited by John Stowe, was printed by J. Kyngston for J. Wight, and this was re-edited, with fresh additions by Thomas Speght, in 1598 for G. Bishop and again in 1602 for Adam Islip. In 1687 there was an anonymous reprint, and in 1721 John Urry produced the last and worst of the folios. By this time the paraphrasers were already at work, Dryden rewriting the tales of the Knight, the Nun's Priest and the Wife of Bath, and Pope the Merchant's. In 1737 (reprinted in 1740) the Prologue and Knight's Tale were edited (anonymously) by Thomas Morell "from the most authentic manuscripts," and here, though by dint of much violence and with many mistakes, Chaucer's lines were for the first time in print given in a form in which they could be scanned. This promise of better things was fulfilled by a fine edition of the Canterbury Tales (1775-78), in which Thomas Tyrwhitt's scholarly instincts produced a compara tively good text from second-rate manuscripts and accompanied it with valuable illustrative notes. The next edition of any importance was that edited by Thomas Wright for the Percy Society in1848-51, based on the erratic but valuable British Museum manuscript Harley 7,334. In 1866 Richard Morris re-edited this text in a more scholarly manner for the Aldine edition of the British Poets.
(A. W. P.)