routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Geoffrey
Chaucer
33
genres and subjects of literature, applying them in the context of a
new, highly active and developing society.
Chaucer was a professional courtier, a kind of civil servant. His writing
was a sideline rather than a vocation: the full-time English writer was still
a couple of centuries in the future. Chaucer was born into a family of
wine traders; he was thus from the class of the new wealthy city gentleman.
His work took him to Kent (which he represented in Parliament from
1386), to France, and twice to Italy, where he made the acquaintance of
the works of writers such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
Chaucer’s first work, The Book of the Duchess, is a dream-poem on
the death in 1368 of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, the wife of John of
Gaunt (third son of King Edward III). It is a poem of consolation,
modelled on French examples:
‘She is dead!’ ‘Nay!’ ‘Yes, by my troth!’
‘Is that your loss?’ ‘By God, that is routhe!’ [routhe: pity]
The simplicity and directness of the emotion, and the handling of
dialogue, show Chaucer’s capacity to bring language, situation, and
emotion together effectively.
The House of Fame (c.1374–85) is another dream-poem, this time
influenced by the Italian of Dante. It is the first time that Dante’s epic of a
journey to Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell – The Divine Comedy (c.1310–20)
– is echoed in English. Here Chaucer becomes a participant in his own
writing. He is the ingenuous poet who visits the Latin poet Ovid’s ‘house of
fame’ to learn about love. He brings together aspects of love which will
become the frequent subject matter of poets throughout the ages. Cupid
and Venus, passion and desire, innocence and knowledge, are all invoked,
using the new verse form of the rhyme-royal stanza. (The name derives
from its later use by Scottish King James I in his Kingis Quair, c.1424.)
The subject of love is taken up again in Chaucer’s two greatest
poems before The Canterbury Tales: Troilus and Criseyde and The
Legend of Good Women. The first takes the Italian writer Boccaccio as
its source. It brings together the classical Trojan war story, the Italian
poetic version of that story, and the sixth-century philosophical work
of Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy. Like Layamon, Chaucer