Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. John Chaucer was an affluent wine merchant and deputy to the king's butler. Through his father's connections, Geoffrey held several positions early in his life, serving as a noblewoman's page, a courtier, a diplomat, a civil servant, and a collector of scrap metal.
His early life and education were not strictly documented although it can be surmised from his works that he could read French, Latin, and Italian.
In , Chaucer was given a life pension by the king, and began traveling abroad on diplomatic missions. During trips to Italy in and , he discovered the works of Dante , Boccaccio, and Petrarch —each of which greatly influenced Chaucer's own literary endeavors.
Chaucer's early work is heavily influenced by love poetry of the French tradition, including the Romaunt of the Rose c. Chaucer was named Controller of Customs on wools, skins, and hides for the port of London in , and continued in this post for twelve years. Around that time, Chaucer's period of Italian influence began, which includes transitional works such as Anelida and Arcite c. Chaucer established residence in Kent, where he was elected a justice of the peace and a member of Parliament in His wife died the following year.
His period of artistic maturity is considered to begin at this time, marked by the writing of the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales , which Chaucer continued to work on for many years—most likely until his death in Considered a cultural touchstone, if not the very wellspring of literature in the English language, Chaucer's tales gather twenty-nine archetypes of late-medieval English society and present them with insight and humor.
Now considered the "Father of English literature," Chaucer wrote in the English vernacular while court poetry was still being written in Anglo-Norman or Latin. The decasyllabic couplet Chaucer used for most of the Canterbury Tales later evolved into the heroic couplet, commonly used for epic and narrative poetry in English.
Less often noticed, however, are the two radically different views of Chaucer as an author we find in roughly contemporaneous portraiture, although the portraits in which we find them are themselves well known. We have, first, the portrait of Chaucer in the margin of the Ellesmere manuscript, one of the oldest surviving copies of the Canterbury Tales. The image insists on what those of us who teach Chaucer regularly try to tell our students is not true — that the narrator of the Tales is Chaucer himself.
More importantly however, although Chaucer is depicted as a pilgrim on horseback, like the other images of the pilgrims in the margins of Ellesmere, Chaucer is portrayed with some of the tools of his craft. As the self-appointed recorder of the stories comprising the Tales , Chaucer is portrayed, above all, as a writer. A second view of Chaucer as author comes from the frontispiece of one of the best manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde , now held in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Here, Chaucer is standing, and in court rather than on a pilgrimage, although this depiction of Chaucer seems to borrow from the same tradition of portraiture as the Ellesmere image this Chaucer also has a beard, a similarly high forehead, and a head bowed slightly and purposefully.
What this Chaucer does not have, however, is a penner or pen. This Chaucer is not a writer but a declaimer or reciter and, given the location of the picture, as the frontispiece to this deluxe copy of Troilus and Criseyde , what he is almost certainly meant to be reciting is Troilus. Chaucer's high standing continued during the reign of Richard, who became king in Throughout most of and , his public services were performed chiefly in England. Chaucer received various appointments, including justice of the peace in Kent , Clerk of the King's Works , and, after his term as Clerk of the King's Works sometime after , deputy forester of the royal forest of North Petherton in Somerset.
During this time, he was also was elected Knight of the Shire and served in Parliament. Chaucer continued to receive royal gifts, including a new annuity of twenty pounds, a scarlet robe trimmed with fur, and, after , an annual butt of wine gallons. When Henry IV was crowned, he renewed Richard's grants and gave Chaucer an additional annuity of forty marks.
Throughout his public career, Chaucer came into contact with most of the important men of London as well as with many of the great men of the Continent. We have records of his frequent dealings with the chief merchants of the city, with the so-called Lollard knights followers of Wyclif, to whom John of Gaunt gave protection , and with the king's most important ambassadors and officials.
Payments to the poet during the last years of his life were apparently irregular, and his various "begging poems" — "Complaint to his Purse," for instance — together with records of advances which he drew from the royal Exchequer, have sometimes been taken as evidence that Chaucer died poor; but this is by no means certain.
At any event, Geoffrey Chaucer's son Thomas took over Geoffrey Chaucer's new house in the garden of Westminster Abbey and remained in high court favor after Chaucer's death. Chaucer's narrators are, of course, not the "real" Chaucer — except in certain physical respects — but the various caricatures have much in common with one another and certainly reveal, either directly or indirectly, what Chaucer valued in a man.
With the exception of the Troilus narrator, a very complicated and special case, all Chaucer's narrators are bookish, fat, nearsighted, comically pretentious, slightly self-righteous, and apparently — because of a fundamental lack of sensitivity and refinement — thoroughly unsuccessful in the chief art of medieval heroes: love. We may be fairly sure that the spiritual and psychological qualities in these caricatures are not exactly Chaucer's.
Chaucer's actual lack of pretentiousness, self-righteousness, and vulgarity lies at the heart of our response to the comic self-portraits in which he claims for himself these defects.
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