Arsy-versy Argy-bargy

Several years ago, after an ancestry deep-dive, I discovered that Geoffrey Chaucer is my eighteenth great-grandfather. What that means for my congenital particularities is hard to say. There’s a splinter of Chaucer, perhaps, in half of my thumbnail—and in one of yours, too, plausibly. His genes, much like his literary legacy, are widely dispersed. A family tree titled “The Progenie of Geffrey Chaucer” that the cartographer John Speed designed for the 1598 edition of the poet’s Workes pompously and tenuously traces Chaucer to Kings Henry IV and V. Meanwhile, the tomb of Chaucer’s eldest son, who died in 1434, makes zero mention of his father, instead aggrandizing more noble bloodlines. It was a long time after poet Thomas Hoccleve used the phrase “My deere maistir . . . / And fadir” in the prologue to his “The Regiment of Princes” (c.1411) that Chaucer’s literary progeny had fructified impressively enough for his literal progeny to care.

Chaucer’s works are very much of their moment, and perhaps required some distance from their context and coevals for their worth to be apparent. Ezra Pound observed that “Chaucer had a deeper knowledge of life than Shakespeare.” If Chaucer hadn’t played so many roles in the medieval city, he likely couldn’t have written so expansively. He was the son of a vintner and grew up in London’s Vintry Ward, where he was formed and informed from the start by a babel of trades and trade-offs. He became a page in the house of the Countess of Ulster, a squire in the King’s household, a soldier, a controller of customs in the port of London, a justice of the peace, and Clerk of the King’s works. The Canterbury Tales owes some debt to the genre of “estates satire,” which tallies different social classes and professions and elucidates both their importance to the state and their deficiencies. Each Canterbury pilgrim is certainly a nonesuch (“never was such a . . .” Chaucer often writes when introducing them). Yet there is more reality to Chaucer’s characters than that.

Who else could have imagined such a motley ensemble but someone who had jostled with the many flavors of humanity? The medleyed voices of the Miller, who can break down doors by running at them with his head; the “gat-toothed,” half-deaf Wife of Bath, who rides astride in bright red stockings; the Canon alchemist, so sweaty from the ride that his horse is a lather of suds; the “ful vicious” Pardoner with his jar of dubious holy “pigges bones”; and the garlic-loving Summoner, with a face so pimply “children were aferd”—Chaucer knew them all. As Mary Flannery argues in her authoritative and diverting monograph Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard (Reaktion Books, 2024), the mercenary assets of “The Shipman’s Tale,” in which a merchant’s wife offloads a difficult financial situation by insisting she’ll repay her husband with sex (“By God, I wol nat paye yow but abedde!”) must come from Chaucer’s roving through “warehouses, docks and markets.” Works such as The Book of the Duchess (1368)—probably penned on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt (it also circulated under the title “The Deth of Blaunche”)—could only be written by a man who’d worked in “palaces and great houses in England and on the Continent.”

For a writer to be all things to all men, he must know a bit about things, and a lot about men—not to mention a lot about language and literature. Had Chaucer not been born into a mercantile environment and had the opportunity to mingle with Italians by the Thames, he may have struggled with Italian, and had he not spent so much time around nobility, he may not have learned French. His narratives are mostly borrowed from Latin and Romance-language sources (including Boccaccio’s Decameron, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun). His forms and genres almost all derive from French minstrel romances and fabliaux (bawdy medieval stories), and, more granularly, from the verse structures of poets such as Guillaume de Machaut, from whom Chaucer stole the seven-line form now known as “rime royal” or the “Chaucerian stanza.” And he may never have thought about writing in English had he not observed how Dante elevated Florence’s vernacular in his Commedia (1321), a technique Chaucer noticed while in Tuscany for diplomatic work. Based on all of this, some critics, such as Marion Turner, have argued that it is impossible to cut off Chaucer and his legacies from European contexts. Very little in his work is sui generis. He invented in the Latin sense of invenire—to find and discover. “Had he lived in a different time and place,” the scholar Jeremy J. Smith suggests, “he would have ‘invented’ different things.” His work was more conflation than divine afflatus.

Chaucer never claims to be inspirited by God or gods, nor does he ever refer to himself as a “poet” or “author.” This may result from his “distinctive self-deprecation,” in Flannery’s terms, though comic exaggerations of the scribbler’s incompetence are found in Machaut too, as the scholar Colin Wilcockson notes. Such modesty was a way of keeping or getting out of trouble with those who might be offended by his bawdy side, or who might chide his literary aspirations—like his efforts to wash his hands of his own writings. In the Miller’s Prologue, for example, he “makes his audience responsible for whether they enjoy his work”:

    And therefore, whoso list it nat yheere, 
Turne over the leef and chese another tale. 
Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys. 
The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this;

In the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (c. 1387), the God of Love and his wife Alceste chastise Chaucer with a list of his works (Chaucer later updated the Prologue to include recent works, assuring the record was correct), and the Man of Law’s Prologue from The Canterbury Tales offhandedly abuses Chaucer’s rhyme before giving another catalogue. The “retraction” at the Tales’ end, in which Chaucer—apocryphally from his deathbed—asks God to forgive him for his “translaciouns and enditynges of worldly vanitees,” fulfils the same role, and it includes one Chaucer work that has been lost to time, “the book of the Leoun.” Clearly, Chaucer feared his writings’ disappearance. As Flannery acutely notes, all this headshaking and recanting, often detailing which works are naughty and which nice, is actually a subtle—as in quiet and cunning—form of “legacy-making-in-advance.”

It's interesting that Chaucer was keen to gather and tie off such lists when he left so many works incomplete. Other than The House of Fame (c. 1374–85) and The Canterbury Tales (within which “The Cook’s Tale” is an unfinished fabliau and “The Squire’s Tale” is lengthy and ornate but interrupted by another character), he also cut short or abandoned Anelida and Arcite (c. 1370s) and The Legend of Good Women, alongside who knows how many lost and minor works. Observing that Chaucer “left more incomplete work behind him than any other great English poet,” John Masefield asked: “Was it some failure of strength, or purpose; want of leisure and opportunity; or lack of encouragement; or all these things acting together?” Toward the end of her eclectic and visually striking Chaucer: Here and Now (Bodleian Library, 2024), Turner offers another suggestion: “Chaucer was supremely comfortable with uncertainty, openness and unfinishedness, or perhaps he was deeply uncomfortable with certainty, closure and conclusion.” This comfort aligns well with his slithering between incongruous contexts as smoothly as a Thameside eel; it also suggests itself as one of many reasons for his lasting legacy. As Edmund Spenser was moved to complete “The Squire’s Tale” in The Faerie Queene (Book IV) and various scribes attempted to finish the Cook’s tale, more recently, Pier Paolo Pasolini saw out the Cook’s tale in his racy 1972 film adaptation and Jonathan Myerson the Squire’s in his animated Canterbury Tales (1998). And so on.

In fact, many of Chaucer’s tales were written to be interrupted. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is interrupted by, at different times, the Pardoner and the Friar, though she soon shuts them up with help from the Summoner; the Squire’s Tale is interrupted by the Franklin; the Monk’s tale is interrupted by the Miller; and Chaucer’s own “Tale of Sir Thopas” is interrupted by the host, Harry Bailly, who says it is “dogerel” and “nat worth a toord.” What’s more, new pilgrims—the Canon and his garrulous Yeoman—join the group toward the end. All readers and rewriters of Chaucer’s works might fruitfully be understood as latter-joining pilgrims. As such, they’re invited to intrude on the existing arsy-versy argy-bargy and to “quit” (requite) the others with responses, as the Reeve quits the Miller for seemingly mocking him and the Summoner quits the Friar. That Chaucer knows he is offering one fraction only of each story, one refraction—his own—of any character is made plainer by a question in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue: “Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?” refers to a depiction of a human gloriously killing a lion—an image which would take another tone, had the lion been holding the brush.

All of Chaucer’s open-endedness, or openness and endlessness, may express assent to interpretability. Perhaps his Book of the Leoun was never really lost. Perhaps it has been written since his death, by everyone from Patience Agbabi (Telling Tales, 2014) to Zadie Smith (The Wife of Willesden, 2021)—everyone who noticed a gaping, appealing space where the lion might paint its own face and rushed to fill it. One great countervailing adaptation is Eleonora Louisa Hervey’s poem “Griseldis, with Her Children” (1850), based on “The Clerk’s Tale.” In it, a marquis, Walter, subjects his lower-born wife Grisilde to a series of tests, including pretending to kill her children and marry someone else, before recalling both the children and the marriage; this derives from Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s Clerk, like other commentators of the time, compares it to the Book of Job. Hervey rewrites it from Grisilde’s point of view. Not only does this version grant her more emotional integrity in its first half, it also offers innovative mental realism in its second: when the children are returned, Grisilde does not know how to accept them. As Turner notes in her “Women Reading Chaucer” chapter, “she thinks they blame her, but they are also more generally depicted as victims of abuse who cannot suddenly or easily move on from their trauma.”

The polyvocal pilgrims’ broad adaptability explains the plethora of readings of Chaucer’s work, especially those casting him in a progressive light—as friend to women, workers, and the world. But, as Flannery argues, these projections are unsuitable. If Chaucer was ever a man of the people, he was also a man of the people who ruled over them, hence works such as The Book of the Duchess from 1368 and The Parlement of Foules from 1381, and appropriated low-class fabliaux to entertain his societal superiors. His Wife of Bath, whom the scholar Carolyn Dinshaw called “Chaucer’s favourite character,” tacitly draws on the tracts that Alison (the Wife) describes Jankyn (her fifth housbonde) reading from his “book of wikked wyves” in her Prologue; the antisemitism present in “The Prioress’s Tale,” in which a child is martyred by Jews, is not there to critique, but simply to announce itself. Chaucer was not a liberal moralizer but a peerless observer with an “equal eye for truth of nature and discrimination of character,” as William Hazlitt writes in his Lectures on the English Poets (1818). Chaucer was a clairvoyant if occasionally astigmatic synthesizer of the accidents and accents he encountered, “trying to bring in as much as he could,” as Beckett said of Joyce, and then passing it on. Here Comes Everybody.

In her painstaking biography Chaucer: A European Life (2019), Turner argues that Chaucer’s writings must proceed from some sort of democratic impulse—hence the pilgrims’ meeting at the Southwark social center of the Tabard Inn, whose real-life landlord was also called Harry Bailly. Chaucer’s writing of himself into the Tales bears curious comparison with Dante’s writing of himself into the otherworldly realms of the Commedia as his own Pilgrim; however, Chaucer writes himself into the hither-worldly inn. As Aegeus says to Theseus in “The Knight’s Tale”:

    This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, 
And we been pilgrymes passynge to and fro. 
[. . .] 
To this effect ful wisely to enhorte 
The peple, that they sholde hem reconforte.

This, perhaps, is Chaucer’s great innovation in our literature, surpassing even the invention of the decasyllabic English line that found its way to iambic pentameter: a level narrative playing field, inviting interaction and discussion. His is not a divine but a Balzacian human comedy, intended to describe and chaperone the ambulant, sometimes somnambulant, pilgrims on their way through living, whose journey inevitably ends abruptly. (Honore de Balzac’s Comedie Humaine is also desperately ambitious—and unfinished.) Matthew Arnold wrote that Chaucer “lacked high seriousness.” Chaucerian analects may be relatively hard to come by, but in dialects, sociolects, and idiolects he has no peer. Dramatic writers like Shakespeare couldn’t have done it without him.

While there is no “Chaucer industry” to match Shakespeare’s, there has evidently been significant literary industry, both critical and creative, on his behalf. In the second edition of Chaucer’s Workes (1602), Chaucer’s family tree is supplemented by a poem claiming that “Then Chaucer liue, for still thy verse shall liue, / T’unborne Poets, which life and light will giue.” And Shakespeare drew such light from Chaucer that he was almost blinded: two of Shakespeare’s worst plays, Troilus and Cressida (written around 1602) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (co-written with John Fletcher; performed 1613-14), were based respectively on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380s), itself based on Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, and “The Knight’s Tale,” based on Boccaccio’s Teseida. These Shakespeare plays lack energy in part because the author venerates his source too much: he is uncomfortable dramatizing, or making free with, his material. His single augmentation of “The Knight’s Tale,” the subplot of the wacky jailer’s daughter, is superfluous. The prologue of The Two Noble Kinsmen even visualizes Shakespeare’s fear at causing Chaucer to spin in his grave: “How will it shake the bones of that good man, / And make him cry from under ground.” This is the anxiety of influence turned the influence of anxiety.

A couple of centuries later, meanwhile, poets set about “correcting” Chaucer’s works to re-assert their place in the canon. Alexander Pope found the English language a House and left it a Temple. His rewriting of Chaucer’s The House of Fame as The Temple of Fame (1715), which manifests said edifice in radiant pentameter instead of Chaucer’s burgeoning tetrameter, is an effective metaphor for the translations and transferals of artistic fame. In the original, Chaucer’s narrator, Geffrey, is dreaming, roaming a temple of glass filled with riches and a tablet from which he reads hammy summations of Virgil (“I wol now singen, yif I kan, / The armes, and also the man . . .”). When he leaves, a sermonizing eagle lifts him to the House of Fame. This House is built on “feeble” ice, inscribed with a glissade of names that melt away in sun but remain if left in the shade. Geffrey sees Fame, whose mercurial flightiness is told by her winged heels. He ends up at the House of Rumour, a huge rotating wicker cage preoccupied by tumults of voices, “syghtes and tydynges,” which he skillfully anaphorizes: “Of faire wyndes, and of tempestes, / Of qwalm of folk, and eke of bestes; / Of dyvers transmutacions / Of estats, and eke of regions . . .” Geffrey, asked if he’s in search of Fame, has said, “Sufficeth me, as I were ded, / That no wight have my name in honde. / I wot myself best how I stonde” (i.e., I know my standing, and don’t need tomorrow’s approval). Pope expands these lines:

    Or if no basis bear my rising Name, 
But the fall’n Ruins of Another’s Fame: 
Then teach me, Heaven! to scorn the guilty Bays; 
Drive from my Breast that wretched Lust of Praise . . .

In his insightful chapter on translation in Chaucer: Here and Now, the scholar Adam Rounce understands this to mean “I won’t profit at others’ expense,” where “others” are Pope’s contemporaries and ancestors—but this interpretation is a little unlikely, given Pope’s tendency to slip emetics into Grub Street rivals’ drinks and the fact that one object on show at the Weston Library’s glass temple earlier this year, in an exhibition also titled “Chaucer: Here and Now,” was Pope’s severely bowdlerized “translation” of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. I see Pope’s expansion more as a comment on inheritance: for “Another’s Fame” read “Chaucer’s House of Fame,” whose puddled ruin Pope builds over in his poem. “[Chaucer’s] contexts gave him all kinds of building blocks” (emphasis mine), as Turner notes elsewhere. We are architects in castellated rubble, always building over what’s been passed down by our forebears; it is bravest to admit that and invite our future inhumation. The Martian Colony of Fame will bury us all.

So much for English poetry. What of the greater claim that Chaucer is the father of the English language? Languages, too, have their family trees. The progenitors of Chaucer’s English, like those of the narratives and manners of his poetry, are mostly Romance languages—as the aristocracy in England at the time were mostly Norman and the Church expressed itself in Latin—with more distant, dialectic influence from Scandinavia. Chaucer appeared to sense the ineluctable vicissitudes of Language Past and Language Future. In Troilus and Criseyde (Book II), he writes that “forms of speech is change / Withinne a thousand yeare.” G. K. Chesterton claims in the introduction to his Chaucer (1934) that we would all be writing in French “if Chaucer had not chosen to write in English”: “He made a national language . . . Chaucer made not only a new nation but a new world.”

True, the barmy archipelago I write from was considered, by the Continent in Chaucer’s time, the hic sunt leones of the written world, only rising in their estimations later on; and yes, he is the third most-quoted author in the Oxford English Dictionary, after Shakespeare and Walter Scott. But though he wrote in English (with much casual use of French expressions such as “par compaignye” and “paraventure”), “51 per cent of his vocabulary is of Romance origin and 1,102 of his Romance words are new in the English language,” as David Burnley has neatly noted. Au contraire, Mr. Chesterton: it is because the Francophile Chaucer chose to write in English that we still write so much in French. It is all quite genetically complex.