In some ways Chaucer started off the criticism of his own works, not least by ensuring we would know that he wrote them by including himself in his texts (e g as ’Geffrey’ m House (729) or as one of the Canterbury Pilgrims (Tales, VII 695) [109, 138]) and by listing his works (m the Prologue to Legend [102] and in the Retraction [149]) This self-identification asserts his place m the literary canon as described in The Man of Law’s Prologue (Tales, II 46-56) [118] and at the end of Trotlus [97] In this way Chaucer claims authority through a process by which the identity of the creator of a text (author as we think of it today, as distinct from scribe) and the standing awarded to it (authority) enhance each other and are themselves enhanced by the respect accorded to any quotations cited in the text (authorities, m medieval terms) [72] Modern scholarship reflects the way Chaucer presents himself as both author and authority m two ma]or ways First, the appreciation of his works and the respect accorded to him in ’Lives’ and critical biographies have created and maintained a reverence for him as a great literary figure This reverence is articulated as early as
1412 by Thomas Hoccleve, who describes Chaucer as the ’first fyndere of oure faire langage’ (Furmvall (ed ) 1897 4978) Dryden echoes this praise m the Preface to his Fables of 1700 in which Chaucer is the ’Father of English poetry’(Kinsley (ed ) 1962 528) Such descriptions indicate the importance of Chaucer to linguistic as well as to literary studies, an importance reflected m the sub-sections below Second, critical analysis and scholarly endeavour have taken up Chaucer’s own interest in the origin of stories (evident in House [71] and The Clerk’s Tale [126]), the concepts of authority and authorship (reflected throughout Troilus [89] and in the vexed questions of transmission of manuscripts (’Adam Scnveyn’ [60] reveals Chaucer’s own anxieties on the topic of scribal error) Most recently, the debate surrounding editorial choices and the presentations of text has taken on new life, as electronic editions and hypertexts make their mark The central question for any kind of edition is what does one publish and with what effect^ There is no such thing as a neutral text, even a hypertext has links created by someone Thus text and interpretation are closely linked, and perhaps more closely m the case of the Tales than m many other texts, where the order in which the tales appear and the character to whom they are given are often germame to individual readings [106, 135]
Social trends also affect interpretation, not just in critical approaches, but m the popularity of topics or texts studied For example, describing Chaucer as a master of satire and irony [165-7] has given way to emphasis on the ambiguity and uncertainty within his works [167-
9], while Astrolabe, so highly praised by Dryden, is little read now As
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
with all authors who have been significant figures in English Studies over a protracted period, fashions in literary criticism are reflected in the kinds of critical approach brought to bear on Chaucer and his works. Three main anthologies of Chaucer criticism through the ages allow readers to gain a general sense of the history of critical reactions to Chaucer: Spurgeon (1925) covers 1357 to 1900; Burrow (1969) provides extracts from 1380 to 1968; Brewer (1978) brings the over-view up to the 1970s. Schoek and Taylor (1960) is still a convenient place to discover critical essays from the first half of the twentieth century, while Ellis (ed. 1998) is one of the best collections for reflecting modern critical views of the Tales in general and can be supplemented by Bloom’s volumes on individual Tales (ed. 1988a, b, c). For a sense of trends in criticism since 1900, but not extracts from it, Rooney (1989) is useful and concise. Readers seeking an accessible guide to the various forms of Post-Structuralist criticism in general will find it in Young’s Untying The Text (1995). Regarding individual Chaucer works, The Oxford Guides are invaluable resources for literary study (Minnis 1995 for the shorter poems, Cooper 1996 for the Tales), although they do not offer as much social and historical detail as Brewer (1998). For that, Rigby (1996) is useful, if occasionally disappointing, but is a good counterbalance to the eminently readable Howard (1987). The best places to go for speedy updating are the quarterly journal Chaucer Review and the annual Studies in the Age of Chaucer (now also available on the Internet at http://ncs.rutgers.edu/sac.html). These publications offer not only articles which tend to reflect the current topics of debate, but also book reviews which themselves often provide good starting points for further study or reading of the texts themselves.
There are also many websites now devoted to Chaucer, of these the Chaucer Metapage (http://www.unc.edu/depts/chaucer/index.html) and the homepage of the New Chaucer Society (http://ncs.rutgers.edu) offer excellent places to begin researching both Chaucer and the wider realms of Medieval Studies in general. The CD-ROM Chaucer: Life and Times also offers an impressive range of information. Latterly, the history of Chaucer criticism is becoming a topic of critical debate in itself. A recent and important addition to this area is Dane’s rather sceptical account of the fortunes of Chaucer criticism and scholarship (Dane 1998) which indicates that a more critical tone may finally begin to creep into our view of Chaucer, although in all likelihood he will retain his pre-eminent position in English Studies.
The sub-sections that follow reflect to some extent the various trends of Chaucer criticism, but such divisions threaten to obscure the
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interrelated nature of much critical and scholarly endeavour. In order to retain some sense of connection the order of the sub-sections broadly reflects the stages through which Chaucer criticism has gone as it became established as a major literary industry. Thus it begins with Biography, which both creates its subject and comments upon it, thus asserting its importance. That is followed by a discussion of texts and editions, because as nineteenth-century editors proclaimed the importance of Chaucer to English literary tradition, they also began to decide on a canon of Chaucer texts and sought to arrive at definitive and authoritative editions of those texts. The radically different ways of presenting texts offered by modern electronic means has given such debates a new lease of life.
The next section considers Chaucer’s role in English language studies, because research into the particular spellings, terms or letterforms used by individual scribes, and investigations into when words or phrases used by Chaucer entered into general use in English, remain central to studies of the development of English language and language use. That in turn links to the next section on source study and literary background, which relates to Chaucer’s own interest in language use and in expanding English literary vocabulary by incorporating in his own works words or genres from, for example, French and Italian traditions. From that it is a short step to looking at Chaucer’s distinctive use of narrator figures and poetic personae, as it is often through such figures that he introduces comments on the power of literature, as in Cresseyde’s complaint in Troilus, V: 1058-64, or his self-portrayal in the Prologue to Legend (F: 327-40; G: 253-316).
Readings of Chaucer which focus on his irony and cast him as a social satirist concentrate on his narrator figures, in particular on the . Pilgrims of the Tales, and so discussion of them is to be found in subsection e. Regarding Chaucer as a satirist inevitably involves placing him within a specific historical moment. This kind of historical approach has been recently revisited with the advent of New Historicism, discussed in sub-section f. This school of criticism owes a great deal to the foregrounding by Marxist and Feminist critics of the ideologies underlying social, scholarly and critical ’givens’. These significant views have made their mark on Chaucer studies and have opened the way to fresh readings, especially those focusing on the portrayal of women and more widely on gender, which are outlined in sub-sections g and h. Finally Chaucer’s lasting influence on other authors (as opposed to critics) is considered, since imitation and adaptation are themselves, like biography, forms of critical response.
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
CRITICISM
(a) BIOGRAPHY
Biography and criticism are always closely linked (indeed criticism is a form of autobiography as Jouve (1991) asserts). The earliest biographies of Chaucer are ’Lives’ prefaced to editions of his work, a practice still followed, as for instance in the ’Life’ which forms the introduction to The Riverside Chaucer. This indicates the strength of our inclination to read the works through the author, and vice-versa. Thus Caxton, in the preface to the second, 1484, printed edition of the Tales, refers to Chaucer as ’that nobel & grete philosopher’ (Crotch 1928: 90). The nobility of work soon transfers onto the man, as Puttenham in 1589 ’supposes’ him to be a knight on no basis whatsoever beyond his admiration for Chaucer the writer. Speght confirms this habit of creating a socially privileged Chaucer on slender evidence in his ’Life’ of 1598, the earliest biography as such [5], and it flourished well into the twentieth century, gathering spurious details such as those quoted in Part I here, from the likes of Godwin (1804) [5] and Furnivall (1900) [8].
Things change a little as the social climate changes and critics and biographers alike become more interested in Chaucer’s merchant-class origins than his royal connections. Still largely benign (remarkably, Chaucer has attracted no real hostility from his biographers, all having found him to be ’a decent sort of fellow’ (Pearsall 1992: 8)) works such as Howard’s (1987) present an affable but shrewd person whose works likewise betray astute observation tempered with a generally indulgent view of humanity. It seems that we want Chaucer to be one of us, whoever ’we’ may be at the time. Even Strohm’s Social Chaucer (1987) creates a Chaucer who reaches out down the ages precisely because he was not fully of his own time – a fantasy self-presentation for the perceptive critic as much as the creative artist. Pearsall tackles this habit of drawing up a Chaucer to suit ourselves when he addresses the value of critical biography (Pearsall 1992: 1-8), during which he admits:
It is not so much the ’real’ Chaucer that one can go in search of, though that must be the desire that provides the motive for searching, as the manner in which he constructed his poetic self, or had it constructed for him.
It;! (Pearsall 1992: 5)
’i
This is a particularly interesting reaction in the light of the reasonable amount of independent documentation we have pertaining to Chaucer, almost all of which refers to his jobs, his debts, his social duties and
very little indeed to his literary life. Clearly the notion that these documents might represent the ’real’ Chaucer does not appeal.
An excellent appraisal of Chaucer biography in these terms is given by Kennedy (Gould and Staley (eds) 1998: 54-67) whose appraisal, with its final plea for more overt acknowledgement of the transcendent Chaucer, may itself reflect the mood of the late 1990s. Nicole Ward Jouve’s book considers the symbiotic relation between criticism and biography within a modern sphere of reference (Jouve 1991).
(b) TEXT, MANUSCRIPTS AND EDITING
While speculation about what exactly happened to the end of The House
of Fame – was it written and then lost or never composed [71] i – has
fuelled some critical reception of that poem, and although there has
been some question over Chaucer’s authorship of the fragments of
The Romaunt of the Rose [62] and The Eauatone ofPlanetis [88], the main
focus of manuscript debate has been The Canterbury Tales. Ever since
Caxton there has been dissatisfaction with the printed text of the Tales.
Indeed, if we are to believe Caxton, the appearance of the second edition
tin 1484 was entirely due to complaints from ’one gentleman’ who ’said
Ithat this book was not according in many places vnto the book that
IGeffrey chaucer had made’ (Crotch 1928: 91). The debate has continued
Isince then, moving through the first attempt at a Complete Works in
IThynne’s 1532 edition (for which Thynne, at Henry VIIPs behest,
{searched libraries and monasteries for Chaucer manuscripts), to Urry
•in 1721, (who, in common with others before him, included many
Iworks not by Chaucer) to Tyrwhitt’s Tales of 1775 (the first to exclude
jworks and to attempt to recreate an original text through the compari-
Ison of manuscripts; Thynne is credited with being Chaucer’s first
[’modern’ editor) to Skeat’s Oxford Chaucer of 1894, which still stands
as a monument to editorial and textual scholarship. Lately the argument
has given rise to The Variorum Chaucer. Rather than seeking a single
definitive edition which purports to be what Chaucer wrote, based on
principles of ’best’ text and scholarly reconstruction and correction of
sections which are either illegible or incomprehensible, a variorum
edition reproduces all the variants and allows readers to draw their
own conclusions. The difficulty with the single edited ’ideal’ text is
I that it presents a text which quite probably never existed before. The
difficulty with a Variorum, apart from its sheer unwieldiness, is that it
is easy to select readings of individual lines which suit one’s own
inclination, but together result in something that has not existed before:
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
the integrity of the manuscripts is thus destroyed. Moreover, even a Variorum must decide which text to take as the base, around which the variants cluster, and this in itself gives a particular manuscript or version more canonical standing than the others.
Opinion matters not simply because there are some variant readings, but because overall critical appraisal of the Tales assumes a given text, with a given number of Tales and a fairly firm idea of the order of those Tales. The most generally used base text is the Ellesmere Manuscript [106], whose pre-eminent position has most recently been asserted by Frese (1991), who quite remarkably states:
Chaucer, I claim, devised a final plan for the order and number of the Canterbury Tales and inscribed this plan into the poem itself. I i am arguing that Chaucer’s final authorial intentions can be retrieved, reconstructed, and internally verified by readers whose acquaintance with the work-as-a-whole is long-standing and intertextually informed enough to penetrate the author’s ingenious textual systematics. […]
Furthermore, and most importantly, I suggest that these instructions to the reader are retrievable only through the hermeneutics of the Ellesmere text.
(Frese 1991: 2)
This assertion, with its premiss that it is not only possible but desirable to retrieve authorial intent, illustrates why questions of textual tradition, transmission and editing can be classified as critical as well as scholarly endeavour. The force of Frese’s assertion is due in part to the decision of the Variorum Chaucer editors to reproduce the Hengwrt version of the Tales as the base text, adding material from Ellesmere as variants.
Hengwrt [106] is the earliest manuscript, and as such has the claim of priority, which Blake builds upon both in The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales (1985) and for his edition of the Tales (Blake 1980). Taking the fragmentary nature of the poem as a given, Blake dismisses the validity of piecing together an order based on internal references to time or cross-references between Tales. For him ’the question of order is less important than many scholars think’ (Blake 1980: 3). Nevertheless, most critics have to come to some kind of conclusion about where they stand regarding this issue.
The fullest treatment of the topic is given by Owen (1991) who discusses the manuscripts in detail. He also takes into account the fact
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that several of the Tales have autonomous lives, as it were; that is, they were copied and circulated either in smaller groups or independently from the whole Tales series. His work builds on Manly and Rickert (1940) who described all known manuscrips and variants. This area is one that can fascinate, appealing to the detective side of readers who get caught up in the detail of dating, transmission and the truly remarkable ability of some scholars to identify individual scribes from their handwriting and place them in particular regions of the country due to the dialect and spelling conventions they use. Most recently, the topic has been taken up by Dane (1998) who seeks to overthrow the regard in which Tyrwhitt is held, preferring Urry’s more inclusive method. Dane needs to be read with caution here, but deserves consideration.
The aim of all this is to produce a reliable text, one whose history is understood and which scholars are happy to call ’Chaucer’. We take for granted the idea that the text we read will be what the writer wrote, but that was a relatively new idea in the fourteenth century, as Chaucer’s lyric to Adam [60] and his farewell to his text at the end of Trotlus shows. The plea that ’none myswrite the’ (Troilus V.I795) indicates the very real possibility that the poem would be changed, cut and circulated in ways totally beyond the author’s control. The need for a reliable text was again felt strongly in the late nineteenth century and provided Furnivall with the impetus for not only publishing texts of six manuscripts of The Tales, but also founding a Chaucer Society to look after the poet’s interest. Particularly interesting here is what Furnivall’s Temporary Preface reveals about the way Chaucer comes to stand for an ideal of Englishness. Professor Child of Harvard University has been requesting a new edition of Chaucer; Furnivall’s response is as follows:
I am bound to confess that my love for Chaucer – and he comes closer to me than any other poet, except Tennyson – would not by itself have made me give up the time and trouble I can so ill afford to bestow on this task; but when an American, who had done the best bit of his work on Chaucer’s works, asked, and kept on asking, for texts of our great English poet, could an Englishman keep on refusing to produce themi • i ;•’•’,>• \
•, – (Furnivall 1868: 3)
The impetus is more than just literary, however, as Child has been active in the cause of the abolition of slavery. Furnivall’s Chaucer is to be an act of recognition for this:
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
… could one who honoured him for it [his anti-slavery stance] … fail to desire to sacrifice something that he might help to weave again one bond between (at least) the Chaucer-lovers of the Old
,’ Country and the New?- No.
(Furmvall 1868: 3)
1<;
. As the current interest in the history of editing expands, and the debates on the creation of national identity continue, passages such as this will come under increasing scrutiny.
The influence of editions is not to be underestimated: we tend to assume that whichever modern text we are using, we are reading ’Chaucer’, whereas in fact we are reading a carefully and skillfully reconstructed Chaucer, in which abbreviated word-forms have been expanded to make them comprehensible to us and modern punctuation has been brought in. It is not just modern editors who have thus intervened in the text, of course; the scribes also adjusted spelling and sometimes metre and words to render them ’right’ according to their own understanding. As Blake points out a ’modern text represents a version that no medieval reader ever read, for all manuscripts contain at least a few corruptions. A modern edition is a medieval text seen through modern eyes’ (Blake 1977: 55). Blake here links the areas of textual and linguistic study in a highly readable consideration of the interaction between language and literature.
It is clearly a knotty issue, but it is possible to over-emphasise the pitfalls of correction: copyists made mistakes and sometimes it is very clear what the word or phrase ought to have been, or that they have simply missed out a couple of lines through looking between exemplar (the text being copied) and the page on which they write. The prefaces to each volume of The Variorum Chaucer which discuss this topic and the questions that affect that volume in particular, make interesting, if detailed reading.
All these considerations come to bear on the issue of electronic editions and particularly on hyper-text. There the impression is often that we are somehow more directly connected to the original document, complete with the opportunity to compare variants for ourselves or click on aspects we wish to explore further. However, impressive as these editions are, they are still editions, brought about by a team of scholars who have made editorial decisions about what appears on which screen and where links are to be placed.
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(c) CHAUCER’S LANGUAGE
When Hoccleve and Dryden eulogised Chaucer [153] they each did so with reference to his influence on the English language. Caxton, too, contributed powerfully to our view of Chaucer as a significant force in the development of English, praising him in particular for having ’enbelyssheyd, ornated and made faire our englisshe’ which, according to him, was previously ’rude’ as in unpolished, unsophisticated (Crotch
1928: 90). Chaucer is thus regarded as not merely reflecting English in a time of considerable linguistic change, but as directly instrumental in those changes. His visibility, the fact that a corpus of work can be attributed to him with confidence, and his decision to write primarily in English, make him a pre-eminent source of examples of language use and expansion in the fourteenth century: pick up almost any study of the English language and Chaucer features in it.
One recent study serves to illustrate the point. Blake’s ^4 History of the English Language (1996) deliberately rejects a strict chronological study of the language, which divides it into periods (Old, Middle, Early Modern and Modern) but nonetheless awards Chaucer extended consideration. Here Chaucer is taken to illustrate not only the emerging Standard English, which drew on French and to a lesser degree Latin, but also to show the acute awareness of the range of dialects in fourteenth-century England and the beginnings of social snobbery connected to how people speak. Blake’s analysis of the opening of The General Prologue is an excellent example of the first kind of study (Blake
1996:161-8). The clerks’ speech of The Reeve’s Tale, perhaps the earliest example of dialect being used for comic effect, is also discussed by Blake (142-4), while the Parson is careful to distinguish himself, a southern man, from the rough northern alliterative poetry of ’rum, ram ruf (Tales, X: 42-3) [39, 148].
An effect of such studies is that Chaucer can come across as creating the language, or at least of suddenly giving it capablities it did not have before. This view is largely upheld by Robinson in his two studies of 1971 and 1972. Robinson deserves consideration, particularly his
1971 study of Chaucer’s verse form (prosody) which tackles the problem that if we follow to the letter the instructions of how to pronounce Chaucer, as given in most editions, the result is dry and frequently cumbersome. Chaucer is here discussed in the context of poetry and metre in general, with some space given to his immediate inheritors and imitators, Hoccleve and Lydgate. For Robinson, Chaucer’s verse at its best is ’the simulation of speech by a heightening
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
of speech which can yet seem fresh and natural.’ Crucially however, verse is not simply imitating speech: , ”„’ ,
The metre justifies itself by a concentration of expressiveness, a significance not found so consistently in real conversation. The life of Chaucer’s verse is that of the spoken language, but it is a life quite unlike chunks of liveliness.
• ; ; ’, ’ (Robinson 1971: 172)
This view of Chaucer’s language as exceptional or ’new’ is counterbalanced by Cannon’s recent study which instead asserts its ’traditional’ qualities (Cannon 1998: 4-5). Cannon builds on the kind of lexical study offered by Mersand (1937), who focused on Chaucer’s use of words from mainly French sources, and seeks to place Chaucer in a precise historical moment of the language, rather than describe all that his language does. Cannon’s first chapter, ’The Making of English and the English of Chaucer’ (1998: 9-47) is particularly useful to those interested in learning about the ways Chaucer has been regarded over the years or about the various components that make up ’Chaucerian’ English. His focus on individual words (lexis), the influence they have and the contexts in which they occur is all the more apposite when we recall Chaucer giving the Manciple some space to muse on exactly this kind of thing in his Tale:
Ther nys no difference, trewely, Bitwixe a wyf that is of heigh degre, If of hir body dishonest she bee, And a povre wenche, oother than this If it so be they werke bothe amys But that the gentile, in estaat above, She shal be cleped his lady, as in love; And for that oother is a povre womman, She shal be cleped his wenche or his lemman.
(Tales, IX: 212-20)
ok,
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(d) SOURCES, LITERARY BACKGROUND, RHETORIC AND POETICS
Study of verse form naturally links with the study of Chaucer’s ideas about what literary writing should be (poetics) and the kinds of
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language use appropriate for particular themes, ideas or genre (rhetoric), as well as with questions of which previous writers he was imitating or drawing upon. The work of Bryan and Dempster (1941), Benson andAndersson (1971), Miller (1977), Havely (1980) and Windeatt (1982 and 1984) are fundamental here as they provide extracts or whole texts which are either Chaucer’s actual sources or analogues to his works. This allows for a literary contextualising of Chaucer’s writing, revealing what he added and altered not just to the stories, but in the genres he drew upon. It is from this basis that works such as the still influential Muscatine (1957) can spring. Muscatine reveals Chaucer’s debt to the French forms of debate, dream poetry and fabliau as inspirations for his literary world, not just his language. This emphasises Chaucer’s literariness and creates the idea of Chaucer as the writer of allusion and reference that we acknowledge him to be today. Without such work assertions such as Frese’s that Chaucer is a fundamentally intertextual writer (Frese 1991: 2 and chapter 2) would not be possible. The sphere of reference has expanded since Muscatine, with work not just on Italian literature (e.g. Boitani 1977, Havely 1980, Windeatt
1982 and 1984) but also on the Classical inheritance (Minnis 1982) and on scientific texts (Wood 1970 and North 1988). The relations between literature and science and the literature of science is fast becoming an area of critical growth, so one might expect this aspect of Chaucer Studies to expand in the near future. Not all source-based study is quite so specific, however; some of it looks to genres and ideas on how one should write (poetics) rather than at particular authors or texts. One such area is that of rhetoric as it was taught in medieval universities.
The suggestion that Chaucer made use of such forms of writing was first put forward in 1926 by J.M. Manly in an essay now most readily available in Schoeck and Taylor (1960: 268-90). Here Manly points out that many of the features of Chaucer’s style are examples of the rhetorical devices favoured in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Thus the use of a proverb or generalisation is an example of sententia – Manly takes the opening of Parliament as a case in point: The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne’. The love of amplification can be seen in such things as the description of the temples in The Knight’s Tale (Tales, I: 1881-2094) or in the detailing of the kings who come to fight on Arcite’s or Palamoun’s behalf (Tales, I: 2095-189). These passages between them make up half of part three of the Tale and end with an example of occupatw (by which things are described while the narrator protests he will not mention them):
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The mynstraclye, the sevice at the feeste, :
! The grete yiftes to the meeste and leeste, . •>• :••’,’ <i > The riche array of Theseus paleys, > < < , • >>
Ne who sat first ne last upon the deys, ’. i’ ! .»-.<.!:.,<»,’ What ladyes fairest been or best daunsynge, <>,.’’ .
Or which of hem kan dauncen best and synge, • ’, , i Ne who moost felyngly speketh of love; What haukes sitten on the perche above, ,’ v .
What houndes liggen on the floor adoun Of al this make I now no mencioun, . >’ ^ ><
But al th’effect; that thynketh me the beste. •.>.,-<
(Tales I: 2196-207) . . • ;
i
Manly goes on to argue that Chaucer tired of such rhetorical devices and held them up for ridicule in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Since Manly, much work has been done in this area, not all of it agreeing with his conclusions. Most influential and still enlightening is Payne (1963), who finds Chaucer altogether more creative in his use of rhetorical arts and devices.
Chaucer’s use of the recommendations of the rhetoricians was not restricted to linguistic devices alone; he also expanded the practice, citing authorities. References to an actual author or saying were intended to affirm the standing of a work, both in terms of its style and its content. Thus an epic would refer back to the Classical writers, Homer and Virgil, while texts dealing with moral topics would cite the Bible or famous commentators such as St. Jerome. This practice is closely linked with the use of sententia (see above), as the words of an authority or author could be deployed to add weight to an argument or a text.
Once deployed, the question is raised of how we are expected to read such references. One way is simply to allow the effect of sententiousness to register, but D.W Robertson (1962) puts forward the claim that Chaucer and his contemporaries (by which he meant his learned contemporaries) would have automatically read these texts in essentially allegorical terms, translating the symbols and events to give a religious moral to every text. Such reading is called ’exegesis’ – which strictly refers to the critical interpretation of any text, but tends to be associated with religious texts. Certainly exegesis flourished, in part reflecting the fact that all philosophical enquiry took place under the heading of theology, in part reflecting a love of categorising and decoding and a habit of intricate and learned discussion. Chaucer clearly parodies this kind of interpretation in the way the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner deal with their texts, and arguably uses it more seriously in the Tales
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of Melibee and the Parson [139, 1487]. Roberston asserts that is the primary tool for understanding all of Chaucer, a view which has faded from popularity, but had important effects at the time. Exegetical readings cannot be dismissed entirely.
However, further research into exactly what Chaucer was doing with his sources has revealed a more creative use of this habit of referring to authorities. Minnis (1988) shows that Chaucer was making use of the role of the compiler (who brought together selections of classical and other influential texts in an anthology) as much as an author, and it is the role, as much as the material, that is of interest:
… Chaucer was indebted to the compilers not only for sourcematerial and technical information but also for a literary role and a literary form. Chaucer seems to have exploited the compilers’ typical justification of their characteristic role as writers, and to have shared, to some extent, the compilers’ sense otordinatiopartiutn [ordering into sections].
(Minnis 1988: 191)
The ’typical justification’ Minnis refers to here is the use of phrases such as ’For as myn auctour seyde, so sey I’ (Troilus II: 18) that Chaucer often uses, in particular throughout Troilus, as if to abdicate responsibility for what he is about to say. This is a significant development and affects how we read Chaucer’s use of narrators as much as his use of handbooks on poetic style.
(e) NARRATORS, IRONY AND SATIRE
Chaucer’s favourite device of imposing between himself and his texts some kind of narrator figure, however shadowy, has naturally attracted a lot of critical attention. Following Minnis, it is possible to regard this as simply a rhetorical device which later centuries have imbued with a presence that would not have occurred to a fourteenth-century audience. That is not to say, however, that Chaucer’s contemporaries would have assumed that the narrator was a straightforward representation of Chaucer himself. Then as now, literary artifice makes it naive to believe that the Dream Poems are faithful records of any dream actually dreamt. The standing of Chaucer’s narrators has nonetheless created debate. E.T. Donaldson treads a fine line between treating Chaucer’s self-presentations as reflections of the real Chaucer and as fictional creations. This treatment extends to the Canterbury Pilgrims,
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
likewise, to the extent that the divide between actual and fictional worlds is often blurred, as here when speaking of the description of the Prioress:
;, <i Undoubtedly Chaucer the man would, like his fictional represen-
’< tative, have found her charming and looked on her with affection.
• ’ … But the third entity, Chaucer the poet, operates in a realm which
i • is above and subsumes those in which Chaucer the man and
Chaucer the pilgrim have their being … In his poem the poet
arranges for the moralist to define austerely what ought to be and
for his fictional representative – who, as the representative of all
i mankind, is not mere fiction, – to go on affirming affectionately
.!.-< what is. The two points of view, in strict moral logic diametrically
.- ’* opposed, are somehow made harmonious in Chaucer’s wonderfully
, – * comic attitude, that double vision that is his ironical essence.
7<V (Donaldson 1970: 11)
The case here is put in terms of the Tales, but it applies also to Troilus and attracts degrees of dissent and agreement in either case, as, for instance, from Leicester, who usefully re-evaluates Donaldson, also using this passage (1990: 384-90). Irony in particular is associated with Chaucer, although thankfully no longer quite as synonymously as it once was; the concept can too easily result in reductive readings in which things are labelled as ’ironic’ and left at that. Moreover, a tendency to cite Chaucer’s personal experiences and position in life as the root cause of his irony leads to such phrases as ’according to his nature, his irony is light rather than dark’ (Rowland in Birney 1985: xxvii) which are better avoided. Nonetheless, irony is a useful concept for readers of Chaucer, and Birney’s essays are lucid in discussing it.
More nuanced treatment of Chaucer’s deployment of poetic personae is to be found in Mehl (1986) and Lawton (1985). Both treat the texts in detail, tracing Chaucer’s development of particular aspects of the narrator, according to the material in hand. Lawton argues that not all narrators are fully-fledged personae, and that where there are several such voices, as in the Tales, ’the fictional nature of the performance is ever more forcefully stressed, but the narratorial voice remains fairly constant, subject to rhetorical, not dramatic or phychological [sic for ’psychological’], decisions’ (Lawton 1985:13). He goes on to develop this idea of ’performative’ texts in which the drama is enacted between audience and text as well as between voices within the text. Mehl also points out the multiple nature of Chaucer’s writing, in particular in his chapter on the relation between the story-teller and
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his material in Troilus (Mehl 1986: 65-97). Mehl characterises the third
book thus: i •,,,’•’• j
The whole course of the third book, with its continual variation of stylized rhetoric, lyrical interludes and dramatic comedy, suggests that Chaucer is very anxious not to give undue prominence to any one of these divergent elements. However vividly the manipulations of Pandarus are described, his disinterested motives are given equal emphasis.
(Mehl 1986: 83)
When it comes to considering the Tales, Mehl makes an important distinction between the thumb-nail sketches of the Pilgrims in the General Prologue, which he terms ’rhetorical portraits’ and the impression of character given by the narrative voice of the tales they tell (1986: 145). This is an added level of subtlety, and significantly the only exceptions he makes to this general principle are the Wife of Bath [120] and the Pardoner [133], both of whose Prologues are in effect self-portraits. The difficulty for Mehl arises when accounting for their Tales. Here the Wife of Bath’s Tale proves intractable and Mehl sidesteps the issue.
Satire would seem to offer a resolution to the difficulty in which Mehl finds himself. Certainly this is a point where the adaptation of form noticed by Minnis meets the use of narrative persona advocated by Donaldson. The best exponent of satire as a trope in Chaucer remains Mann. Her book Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (1973) is a landmark. In it she demonstrates that Chaucer not only imitates, but also revises, the established genre of social satire that depended on dividing society in separate sections (estates) and depicting the particular abuses each typified. The book concentrates on The General Prologue and remains one of the best treatments of it. The main conclusion is that whereas traditional satire leaves the audience in no doubt about where both they and the text stand regarding the object satirised, Chaucer is not so straightforward. We are clear about what Friars, for example, are accused of, but less sure how far the one in front of us as an individual fulfils the stereotype. What are we to make of his twinkling eyes (Tales, I: 267-8)i Do they indicate lechery, or humour1?- Do they predispose us towards this particular friar in spite of the vices he represents-?
There is clearly some common ground between Mann and Donaldson here, although Mann’s arguments are also a case where an awareness of the connotations of individual words in particular
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collocations comes into play. Thus ’worthy’ comes under scrutiny as applied to several of the Pilgrims:
The adjective ’worthy’ is used as the keyword of the Knight’s portrait, where it has a profound and serious significance, indicating not only the Knight’s social status, but also the ethical qualities appropriate to it. In the Friar’s portrait, the word is ironically used to indicate the Friar’s lack of these ethical qualities – but it can also be read non-ironically as a reference to social status… By the time we reach the Franklin’s portrait, the word is used with a vague heartinesss which seems to indicate little beside the narrator’s
approval.
(Mann 1973: 195-6)
The argument goes beyond discussion of what a putative narrator might think and touches on the way the structure of the General Prologue make us more aware of the tension surrounding the word ’worthy’. Mann regards the sequence in which we encounter the word as crucial to our developing understanding of it in Chaucer’s lexis – a view which could be taken to undercut Jones’s distinctive reading of the Knight (Jones 1980) [113]. However, Mann’s reading itself comes under criticism.
The relation of teller to self-portrait is most fully expanded in Leicester’s post-structuralist treatment of the Knight, Wife of Bath and Pardoner. The Disenchanted Self (Leicester 1990) is a rigorous reading of these three figures from the Tales, and a good introduction to poststructural criticism in action (here particularly informed by deconstruction). Leicester highlights the way the portraits of these pilgrims rely on the audience being aware of (or being reminded of) the textual nature of the descriptions and thus open to references not only back and forth within the Tales, but also between the Tales and other texts. This clearly relates to the intertexuality noted by Frese [158], but Leicester also draws on psychoanalytic readings and on the notion that ideas of the Self are social constructs. In general it is far easier to see this kind of criticism performed than to describe it, but Leicester’s own description of the Wife’s Prologue may be useful here. He points out that the Wife only really gets going after being interrupted by the Pardoner:
This shift in tone in reaction to an external stimulus allows us to see the possibility of speaking about the Wife of Bath’s Prologue less as a preplanned theoretical argument that has to move through a
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certain number of points to a conclusion and more as something practical that happens and alters as it goes along in response to a set of more immediate and unstructured contingencies…. the most important practical determinant of the poem’s unfolding is the vagaries of memory as it doubles and redoubles on itself. We, like the Wife, must concern ourselves less with the plot she remembers than with the plot of her remembering in the now of narration.
(Leicester 1990: 83)
The emphasis is on giving the fabric of the text as much attention as the psychology of the invented character.
Just as Leicester re-evaluates Donaldson so he gives some consideration to Mann. The fact that he devotes time to these two critics attests their importance, but his qualifications are also worth considering. His criticism of Donaldson has been mentioned above [166]; that of Mann rests on ’her generally distant and unfocused treatment of the speaker: her inattention to sequence is an effect of her relative disinterest (sic) in the poem as performance’ (Leicester 1990: 393). According to Leicester, Mann sees the strength of use of an established form but overlooks the power of representation figured by Donaldson. For Leicester, Chaucer not only adapts an authoritative genre, but reveals the act of classification in the person of its narrator.
Of course this last stance assumes a degree of self-awareness with which some may take issue. The next step in this line of criticism comes from those who treat the text as an almost autonomous force which is the product of its time as much as of its writer. The various voices detectable within it thus may not be the conscious creation of the author but an inevitable effect of its historicial moment.
(f) HISTORICISM, OLD AND NEW
The way in which a text can speak simultaneously with several viewpoints has latterly been taken up by critics following the narrative theories of Bakhtin, and those interested in pursuing this particular connection further will find a good starting-point in Rigby, who devotes a sizeable chapter to a discussion of Chaucer in Bakhtinian terms (Rigby
1996: 18-77). A useful introduction to Bakhtin’s theories and writings can be found in Dentith (1995), but, put briefly, Bakhtin notes that some institutions, such as the Church, speak with a firm view which they expect their hearers to espouse. Texts which embody such voices are described as monologic: one outlook prevails. Dialogic texts are
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those which support a dialogue between various viewpoints, without feeling the need to resolve the dialogue into consensus. Crucially, voices which at first seem rebellious are shown to be in fact re-affirming the status of the dominant discourse – if it is rebelled against it must be important – and thus integral to it. Dissent is permitted as a form of safety-valve for discontent: ’carnival’ is the term Bakhtin uses here, and the idea of the Tales in particular as carnivalesque has proved appealing. The reason is evident if one reflects on the number of discourses potentially vying for dominance within them.
However, such an approach owes a certain amount to simple historical criticism, which puts a great deal of effort into identifying those various voices, noting which terms came from a background of exegesis, social satire, historical fact, legal terminology and so forth. What has been fully supplanted is a simple realist reading of Chaucer, which allowed us to take Caxton’s description of the Tales at face value as: ’a nobel hystorye of every astate and degre, fyrtst rehercyng the condicions and th’arraye of eche of them as properly as possyble is to be sayde, and after theyr tales’ (Crotch 1928: 90). It is likely that we ought to revisit that term ’as properly as possyble’, but meanwhile reading Chaucer as a realist writer and social satirist who used irony as his central tool has been fully overhauled as New Historicism has come into view.
A primary exponent of New Historicism is Lee Patterson, whose bookNegotiating The Past (1987) advances its claims, while also pointing out that the term ’designates neither a single methodolgy nor a monolithic critical group’ (57). Subtitled The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature’, it makes the case for reading Chaucer as a product of his time, but seeing the reception of his texts in the light of fourteenth-century concerns and those of subsequent ages. Critics of this view regard it as ignoring the power of the individual to critique their own times, and certainly it questions the basis upon which certain authors, like Chaucer, are regarded as pre-eminent. Paradoxically, by focusing upon such questions the status of such ’greats’ remains largely untouched, even if the basis for their greatness is reassessed.
Patterson devotes a chapter to an overview of the history Chaucer Studies, which is well worth reading (1987: 3-40), before going on to discuss the critical reception of particular texts in detail, amongst them Troilus (115-56) which is discussed in terms of recreating how the poem might have been read by a fifteenth-century audience. The central tenet of this view is that ’literary meaning is not an atemporal constant but a historical variable’ (Patterson 1987:115). In this approach the exegetical tools advocated by Robertson are dusted off and reclaimed:
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’Exegetics seeks to recuperate less the meaning of the poem per se than the medieval understanding of that meaning’ (115). What has gone is the idea that a text has a fixed meaning ’per se’ which it is the critic’s job to discover. Instead we reconstruct the likely meanings available to a particular audience and realise how much the reaction a poem generates depends upon the concerns of its readership.
This clearly links to questions of audience and theories about what produces a text, concerns which particularly suit medieval texts, with their overt address to audience and faceted notion of author – that is made up of writer, scribe, authorities and other texts. Paul Strohm addresses the concept of audience in Chaucer, moving on from the observation that references to a solely listening audience in the early poems give way to phrases to do with reading (e.g. Turne over the leef’ (Tales, I: 3177) in the Prologue to the Miller’s Tale) to discuss the changing circle of Chaucer’s actual audience and the ideal audience created by the texts (Strohm 1989: 47-83). Strohm posits a core audience, made up of people who, like Chaucer, were closely involved with the movers and shakers of fourteenth-century England, but were not aristocrats or even large landowners. This educated, ’gentiP group had a literal existence but a shifting membership as friendships grew or lessened and events made direct contact with friends difficult or easy. Although Strohm describes and traces the change in the likely membership of this audience, pointing out links with the kinds of readership the texts seem to address, the more important point as far as he is concerned, is the notion of this circle of readers which ’did not cease to exist for him as an inspiration and an animating ideal’ (Strohm 1989:
83).
The attitude towards history evinced by New Historicist thus differs from traditional Historicism not only in what is included under the term ’history’, but also in the way events, and in particular documents describing events, are regarded. Strohm declares his hand in his Preface:
I will approach the complex and shifting structure of social relations in Chaucer’s lifetime through a variety of contemporary texts, including statutes, poll taxes, and political treatises as well as fictional narratives. Some of these texts look so much like raw data that they have been treated as if they were repositories of unmediated fact. I will, however, treat all these texts as attempts at self-understanding, as imaginary constructions of social reality in their own right. Rather than viewing Chaucer’s poetry in relation to a separate body of information, I will place his imaginary depictions of social relations in a larger field of such depictions.
(Strohm 1989: ix)
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This is a complete inversion of the view of Chaucer as a realist writer who faithfully presented us with a picture of fourteenth-century life, which could be read almost as a historical document. Where that habit of interpretation (long since refined) placed Chaucer’s creative texts on a par with factual documentation, this later one regards historical documents as being as much creative works as poetical fiction. The concept of ’fact’ has been unpicked to raise questions of why certain events are recorded in particular ways and regarded as worthy of mention where others are not.
This school of criticism (Strohm is by no means the only critic to advance these views) is clearly indebted to deconstruction, psychoanalytic and perhaps above all to Marxist and feminist criticism as well as to historical study.
4 (g) POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY
Arguably part of the loose New Historicist collective, and certainly drawn upon by the New Historicists, are the more overtly politically engaged approaches such as Marxism and, to both a lesser and wider degree, feminism. Readings of Chaucer have been reinvigorated by pointing out the dominant ideologies within his work and the places where such dominance is questioned by the text, if not by Chaucer. Areas of tension, unease, lack of resolution and omission are central for this kind of interpretation.
One critic whose reading is informed by Marxism is Aers, whose book Chaucer is an accessible and excellent starting point for any critical study of Chaucer. This is not to say that his conclusions must be accepted without question, rather that they must be taken account of in any conclusion one wishes to draw, and may themselves both pose questions and be open to question. Thus his appraisal of The Clerk’s Tale explores the creation of power and acquiesence in it exemplified by Walter’s despotism and Griselde’s passivity: ’the poem is thus a powerful dramatisation of the effects of absolutism on both the ruled and the ruler’ (Aers 1986: 34). Aers links this directly with the political position in England in the late 1390s with its growing concern about despotism. For him, although Griselde’s ability to rule well offers a radical alternative to monarchical rule, Chaucer does not endorse it:
here we meet one of the horizons of Chaucer’s social imagination, for … it tends to abandon all ideas of fraternity, social justice and the social embodiment of charity, foreshadowing an ideological
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position that would become commonplace with the triumph of bourgois individualism in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
(Aers 1986: 35-6)
This assertion is endorsed by Tuttle Hansen’s persuasive essay ’The Powers of Silence: The Case of the Clerk’s Griselda’ (reprinted in Hansen
1992: 188-207) which explores the Tale in feminist terms.
Hansen summarizes the Tale thus:
The Tale suggests on one hand that Griselda is not really empowered by her acceptable behavior, because the feminine virtue she embodies in welcoming her subordination is by definition both punitive and self-destructive. On the other hand, the Tale reveals that the perfectly good woman is powerful, or at least potentially so, insofar as her suffering and submission are fundamentally insubordinate and deeply threatening to men and to the concepts of power and gender identity upon which patriarchal culture is premised.
(Hansen 1992: 190)
The meeting ground of feminism and Marxism is most clearly seen when Hansen describes the crux of the problem: ’If a peasant woman can so easily rule as well as a noble man – or even better – then Walter’s birthright and the whole feudal system on which it depends are seriously threatened’ (Hansen 1992: 191). For both Aers and Hansen, the Tale dramatises the dangers of the political system: in order to maintain his own identity Walter must have an Other against which to define himself. Griselde, initially apparently the embodiment of social and gender Otherness, eludes definition through constantly proving her ability to be whatever is required of her. The urge to dominate is thus thwarted even as it is apparently fulfilled. For Griselde, on the other hand, the paradox is that her power resides in the suffering that proves her exceptional quality: when the trials stop she is silenced and her virtue ends. For Hansen, Griselde at the end of the Tale is not returned to a position of power and prestige, but finally forced ’to awaken into the reality of her material, gendered powerlessness’ (Hansen 1992: 194).
Delany also shakes her readers out of too complacent a reading of Chaucer. She gives extended consideration to Legend in her book The Naked Text (Delany 1994), but a more widespread application of her view of medieval literature (which is informed by both Marxisim and
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feminism) is to be found in Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (1990). Over half this book is given over to Chaucer, while the rest usefully provides a way into his literary context. As the title suggests, Delany looks at not only the systems of rules, laws and expectations which create a society (ie. the politics) but also the belief systems and concepts of what it means to be, for example, a woman, or a king, what the moral basis is and how it is created and sustained (ideology). She also pays great attention to individual words and the language of texts in general, relating texts to other texts of a similar kind, highlighting differences in expression, additions or omissions and interpreting their cause. Her discussion of The Physician’s Tale [132] is a case in point (Delany 1990:130-40). By comparing the story of Virginia as it is found in Livy (its ultimate Roman source) and in Chaucer’s contemporaries, Delany illustrates Chaucer’s silent reworking which markedly alters the significance of the story. By making Virginius a knight, not the common soldier of the original, and by removing much of the action from public to private settings, the revolutionary possibilities of the Tale are markedly reduced. The theme becomes one of personal response, not public reaction. Delany’s confident explanation for such alteration is that the glorification of popular rebellion, which the original version of the story espouses, ’is utterly alien to Chaucer’s world-view: our poet is a prosperous, socially conservative, prudent courtier and civil servant, directly dependent for his living upon the good will of kings and dukes’ (Delany 1990: 137). While her confidence and her readings are in many ways persuasive they are also, as the above quotation shows, based on very strong opinions about Chaucer himself. These extend to provocative speculations on artistic development: ’if the project [telling Virginia’s story] taught him something as an artist, it was the importance of choosing material more suitable to his own temper. For us it suggests that poetic failure may be as instructive as poetic success, as productive a field for criticism’ (140). Delany’s comments here illustrate the interaction between biography and criticism.
(h) FEMINISM AND GENDER
ij
As with feminist criticism in general, the earlier feminist readings of Chaucer tend to concentrate on the representation of women in the texts. Thus the Wife of Bath, Alison in The Miller’s Tale and Griselde all receive due attention, as does White in The Book of the Duchess. The value of such study should not be underestimated, books such as
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Power ’^Medieval Women (1975) remain useful and their groundwork is still being built upon, as for instance by Martin’s Chaucer’s Women: Nuns, Wives and Amazons (1990). Also central to any study of Chaucer’s women is Blamires’ collection of source texts dealing with concepts of and attitudes towards women throughout the Middle Ages (Blamires
1992). Anyone interested in discovering the kinds of literature written for, by and about women will find Barratt’s collection Women’s Writing in Middle English (1992) useful, especially in conjunction with Blamires (1992), while Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987) is a detailed discussion of women in relation to religion and food, which can be seen to underpin figures such as Custance, St. Cecile, Alison of the Miller’s Tale and the Prioress. For those wishing to discover more about actual women in medieval society to compare with Chaucer’s fictional presentations, Goldberg (ed. 1992) is a handy collection of essays, while Erler and Kowaleski (eds 1988) bridges the historical and theoretical study of women and is a good basis for any discussion of women and power.
In general, feminist terminology is marked by references to opposition, hierarchy (in particular patriarchy), determinism and gender divides. However, different branches of feminism have moved on in various ways: to address women’s political position in society and hence their position in texts; to draw on psychoanalytic theories, on deconstruction and philosophy; to investigate the construction of gender, male as well as female. While some approaches point out where some or all of these concepts operate in texts, others focus on points where the expected divisions are broken down, or blurred. This broad range means that many prefer to speak of ’feminisms’, to avoid implying that all femininst criticism is the same. More importantly, it is not true to say that any study of women in text is necessarily feminist.
Douglas’ assertion in his 1513 prologue to Book 1 of his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid that Chaucer was ’all womanis frend’ (Kinghorn 1970:
163) and the Wife of Bath’s declaration ’Experience, though noon auctorite’ (Tales, in: 1) have often been the starting points for feminist investigations of Chaucer’s texts. A good example is Diamond’s essay ’Chaucer’s Women and Women’s Chaucer’ (Diamond and Edwards
1988: 60-83) which discusses Chaucer’s presentation of women, good and ill, finally concluding that, despite reservations, we should endorse Douglas’ description.
Chaucer seems no more able to portray a female who is both virtuous and three-dimensional than he is able to portray a cleric who ,,. is both good and human…. He means to be women’s friend insofar
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’, as he can be, and it is this painfully honest effort, this unwillingness
• to be satisfied with the fomulas of his age, which we as feminists , • can honor in him.
(Diamond and Edwards (eds) 1977: 82-3)
The essay plays an important part in later twentieth-century appraisals of Chaucer and is joined in general outlook by Mann’s volume in Harvester’s Feminist Readings series (Mann 1991). Although not as explicitly feminist as the series title suggests, this is nonetheless a valuable, accessible and reasoned assessment of Chaucer in general feminist tones, which usefully identifies various literary forms and conventions associated with women which Chaucer uses. Central to Mann’s reading is detailed exploration of Chaucer’s use of passivity and suffering as it moves from the idealised women to the suffering hero. Despite the reservations some more rigorous feminists have about this book, it is nonetheless recommended reading for anyone interested in Chaucer’s writing.
Of the more rigorously feminist critics Carolyn Dinshaw is one of the most influential. Her Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics is a landmark text which thoroughly overhauls our understanding of Chaucer’s literary models. Dinshaw focuses on the way specific activities have been gendered or have gender relations built into them. The movement of stories or ideas across texts is a case in point. This is shown to be a form of translation, where the source text is described in terms of a captive woman, who must be cleansed of her connections with her origins, before being absorbed into the new culture (Dinshaw 1989: 22-5). Reading practices are also scrutinised, as Dinshaw develops her case from the common habit of ’reading like a man’ in the first chapter (focusing on Troilus) to the possibilities of interpreting in a less sexually or gender-determined fashion – the ’eunuch hermeneutics’ of her last chapter (focusing on the Pardoner). When criticism returns to the familiar stamping ground of the representation of women in certain texts and genres after the more stringent feminism of critics such as Dinshaw, the effects are immediately apparent. Thus Crane’s study, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s ’Canterbury Tales’ (1994) is a far cry from Muscatine’s study of Chaucer’s use of romance traditions [41,
162]. For Crane, Chaucer’s interest in the romance genre led to his interest in the concepts of gender, of how masculinity and feminity are created and sustained.
The world of romance is a basically homosocial one in which the bonds between men are strengthened by placing woman in a position of distant and separate Other. The female role is to be the object of
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lament and desire, and also to be absent. White in Duchess [68] quintessentially fulfils this role by being both loved and dead. In discussing and describing her, the Dreamer and the Man in Black are brought together and the male, homosocial (as distinct from homosexual) bond is cemented. Simultaneously, heterosexual masculinity is confirmed in the desire for the absent woman. Crane takes this understanding of romance genre as her starting point and develops a reading of Chaucer which offers many insights into his texts. For example, the brotherhood between Arcite and Palamoun of The Knight’s Tale is seen with fresh eyes when the focus is on the use of the lyrical address (apostrophe) commonly used by lovers to lament their position. The effect of such apostrophes is to isolate the speaker, while also purporting to address the love object, who, crucially, cannot hear the lyric. Crane points out that the two cousins use exactly this form when referring to each other when Arcite is released from prison:
Although Arcite’s lament addresses ’O deere cosyn Palamon’ and Palamon’s addresses Arcita, cosyn myn,’ each speaks inconsolably to himself rather than to his brother, as the closing lines of each monologue indicate: Arcite ends his lament with a second apostrophe not to Palamon but to the similarly absent beloved (’Syn that I may nat seen you, Emelye, / I nam but deed, ther nys no remedye’), and Palamon ends his lament with the third-person notation that he is dying ’For jalousie and fere of hym Arcite’ (I:
1234, 1273-4,1281,1333). Romantic love has set each young man in lyric isolation from his brother as well as from his beloved.
(Crane 1994: 51-52)
This extract illustrates how feminist criticism moves beyond the simple bounds of the study of female characters into the area of gender identity in general. Palamon and Arcite cast each other in the female, oppositional role to themselves and then confirm that placing through reference to their relation to Emelye.
Masculinity thus becomes a subject for feminist debate, out of which gender criticism is born, which also draws on queer theory. A convenient collection of essays, Masculinities in Chaucer (Beidler (ed.) 1998) offers a fair introduction to this relatively new area of literary criticism and its impact on Chaucer studies. In it Ingham’s piece on The Knight’s Tale builds directly on Crane’s work and is a useful place to start. Ingham points out that Emelye is used to define more than just the relation between Palamon and Arcite: her weeping at the end of the Tale, which echoes that of the widows at the beginning, helps to bolster
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the image of Theseus as wise, moderate, compassionate even sensitive, but above all, manly. This manliness, however, seeks to differentiate itself from the destructive masculinity of Creon. Ingham thus presents a Theseus who strategically borrows feminine attributes in order to create the type of masculinity the situation requires: ’Emily’s uncontrollable mourning is useful to Theseus’s masculinity because he can again merge gender difference with gender similarity. He is thus marked as both sensitive and manly, neither overrun by the lethal excesses to which mourning women like Emily are subject, nor coldly immune to their pleas’ (Beidler (ed.) 1998: 33).
The notion of gender identity being a performance rather than a fixed state, put forward by Judith Butler (1990 and 1993) has been taken up by gay criticism, which is beginning to lead to re-readings of Chaucer’s creation of male identities in terms of troubling the boundaries between the sexes. Much of this kind of criticism is also deliberately self-aware, as the critic’s own standing is regarded as central to their reading. This, too, is a habit formed by feminists, who sought to debunk the concept of the critic’s objectivity. Readers interested in following this line might find Burger’s essay a useful example of how such approaches can be adapted for a medieval text (Beidler (ed.) 1998:117-
30).
More traditional feminism continues to have its effect, as arguments are reiterated over how positive Chaucer’s female characters actually are (although this is naturally dependent on the critic’s understanding of ’positive’). The general feminist debate about the uses of male language also continues. A fairly recent addition here comes from Cox, who argues, amongst other things, for a Wife of Bath who enters the competition for authority by using male language and thus is better described as ’quasi-feminist’ than feminist (Cox 1997). Also related is the re-evaluation of topics whose interest to Chaucer has already been established. A case in point here would be the study of Chaucer’s use of landscape, and in particular the literary theme of gardens, which Lewis began (Lewis 1936). The theme has recently been continued by Howes (1997), whose study is primarily historical, not feminist, as she studies the various uses of the garden topos in Chaucer’s work. However, when considering the Knight’s, Merchant’s and Franklin’s Tales she takes up the link between women and nature which has been established by feminist theorists and recently expanded by Ecofeminism.
The best introduction to the various theoretical viewpoints within general feminist criticism remains Moi (1985). There are also several anthologies of feminist readings of medieval literature in general (in addition to the books cited above) of which Evans and Johnson (1994)
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is especially recommended and contains a very useful further reading section, offering a brief over-view of feminist readings. Diamond and Edwards (1977) collect feminist essays on a variety of topics and usefully place feminist readings of Chaucer in a framework of general feminist critical activity.
(i) IMITATION, MODERNISATION, ALLUSION
Like biography, imitation bestows status on its subject: it says a great deal for Chaucer’s standing that there is a group of late-medieval poets known as ’The Scottish Chaucerians’. They include Henryson (£1424-
1506), Dunbar (£1456-1513) and Douglas (c.1475-1522), all of whom openly acknowledged their debt to Chaucer. Those interested in exploring them will find Kinghorn (1970) a good starting place. Since then, imitation of and allusion to Chaucer has continued, thus securing Chaucer’s standing as ’presiding genius of English poetry’, to use Krier ’s phrase (Krier (ed.) 1998: 1). One use to which imitation was put was to complete Chaucer’s texts. The unfinished Tales within the Canterbury sequence, such as The Cook’s Tale, were prime candidates for this treatment and indeed the open structure of the Tales as a whole invites additions. Cooper gives this area due consideration (Cooper 1996:413-
29), in which she also considers the afterlives of certain of the stories. Most interesting amongst these is the life of Catherine of Aragon by William Forrest, which is closely modelled on The Clerk’s Tale to the point of including an explicit comparison between Catherine and Griselde, in which Catherine receives the greater praise as her trials were actual (Cooper 1996: 423).
In additon to conferring prestige, imitation and allusion act as a form of critical as well as creative response to the original text. Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid is a case in point [98]. In it Henryson takes up Cresseyde’s story with the provocative question ’Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew£’ (Testament 64 in Kinghorn 1970: 103). By asking who knows if everything that Chaucer wrote was true, Henryson refers directly to the kind of debate about authority and authenticity which pervades Chaucer’s works, and also clears the way for his own, rather different, take on Cresseyde’s story. His witty, skillful and far shorter poem continues Chaucer’s tradition of combining different genres within one work. Cresseid’s ’complyent’, which is frequently quoted on its own, sits within the narrative in much the same way as the Man in Black’s lyric does in Chaucer’s Duchess (475-86).
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Henryson’s humour is perhaps a little more sardonic than Chaucer’s, but the self-conscious consideration with which he treats Chaucer echoes Chaucer’s own treatment of his authors and sources. It is this attitude to poetry and habit of aesthetic self-examination that Chaucer’s imitators emulate, rather than simply parroting his verse form, and it is this which makes their imitations a form of criticism. Critical comparison of Chaucer’s immediate successors and his own works can be found in the collection Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry (Boffey and Cowen (eds) 1991), elsewhere C. Martin offers an interesting consideration of the effect of Chaucer’s poetics in her piece on The House of Fame (Krier 1998: 40-65).
Looking over the responses to Chaucer from his immediate inheritors, a noticeable cluster of terms becomes apparent, all describing Chaucer as one who brightened up English poetry with the freshness of his language and verse forms. Hoccleve’s phrase ’ornat endytyng … enlumynyng’ (Furnivall 1897:1973-4) is echoed by Lydgate, in Caxton’s ’enbelysshyd, ornated and made faire’ and Dunbar’s ’fresch anamalit termes celicall’( all cited in Burrow 1969). Things change in 1700 with Dryden’s Preface to his Fables, where Chaucer’s achievements are admired despite the severe handicap of living ’in the dawning of our language’, which meant the range of English terms and poetic forms was, in Dryden’s view, necessarily restricted: ’the words are given up as a post not to be defended in our poet, because he wanted the modern art of fortifying’ (Kinsley (ed.) 1962: 527). For Dryden, poetic skill demands elaborate phrasing, but even here the motif of Chaucer as one who brightens the English poetic scene is evident, albeit that he needs a little help: ’Chaucer, I confess, is a rough diamond, and must first be polished ere he shines’. Dryden proceeds to administer the required polish in his translations of a selection of the Tales: ’I have … added somewhat of my own where I thought my author was deficient’ (Kinsey (ed.) 1962: 532-3). The phrase could describe Chaucer’s handling of his own sources.
The tradition of translation was notably continued by Pope, whose rendition of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue (a section Dryden omitted archly as too coarse) deserves critical attention of its own. Dryden and Pope were not working in isolation, there is a noticeable cluster of modernisations of individual Tales in the eighteenth century, some of which have been recently collected together (Bowden 1991). Translation, adaptation and recasting continue in the twentieth century. In 1946 the BBC commissioned for radio broadcast a new verse translation of The Canterbury Tales from Neville Coghill, which brought Chaucer popularity. This translation was published by Penguin in 1951
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and has not been out of print since. Andrea Newman’s ’A Sense of Guilt’ is a version of Troilus in which the Pandarus figure is a lecturer engaged in a new translation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Newman is clearly expecting her audience to have some kind of reaction to the idea of Chaucer, even if they do not know his text. The same is true of Margaret Atwood’s title for her science-fiction novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. This text too addresses a listening audience and invites speculation about the ordering of its chapters, as the narrative supposedly comes from a set of unmarked audio cassette tapes. More obviously, Griselda in Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls is explicitly introduced as being drawn from Chaucer as well as Boccaccio (Churchill 1982), while Joanna Russ overtly, if somewhat wryly, alludes to Chaucer at the end of her feminist science fiction novel, The Female Man:
Go, little book, trot through Texas and Vermont and Alaska and Mayland and Washington and Florida and Canada and England and France; bob a curtsey at the shrines of Friedan, Miller, Greer, Firestone and all the rest…
(Russ 1985: 213)
Churchill, Newman and Russ all take Chaucer as the starting point for their own inspiration in much the same way as Hoccleve did. Spenser, too, developed a new text from the basis of a single phrase: his great poem, The Fairie Queene, opens with a direct quotation from Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas: A gentile knight was pricking on the plain’. However, after that Spenser draws almost entirely on other medieval texts, primarily those relating to the stories of Arthur, thus ensuring that comparisons are rarely drawn between him and Chaucer.
If Frese is right that Chaucer is essentially an intertextual writer [158], it is only fitting that his own works have become integral to latterday intertexuality. Certainly the persistence of Chaucerian allusion is a testament to his standing in our view of English literary heritage. From a critical point of view, research in this area marks a continued interest in the reception of Chaucer across time, rather than an insistence on asserting a single, unchanging, correct interpretation of his works.
A testament to the wide appeal and range of inspiration provided by Chaucer’s works is the remarkable and beautiful edition of The Canterbury Tales illustrated by Burne-Jones and published by William Morris’ Kelmscott Press in 1896. The text itself is carefully presented in a font designed to evoke our latter-day notions of the medieval world. Its clear, thick letters suggest elaborate handwriting and the quality of
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the paper is likewise thick and expensive The illustrations are imaginative responses to Chaucer’s text, but the decoration is not limited to simple pictures Taking its cue from medieval illuminated manuscripts, the margins of the text are elaborately and appropriately decorated, for instance, the borders of The Romance of the Rose are full of cabbage roses Both illustration and decoration thus reflect the priorities of the Arts and Crafts movement, in which Morris was a central figure That movement sought to assert the value of handcrafted skills at a time of increasing mechanisation hence its interest in things medieval and in particular in suggesting the look of books created before the age of printing By selecting Chaucer’s Tales for this luxurious treat ment Morris and Burne-Jones were acknowledging the continuing influence this text has on the imagination of writers, designers, artists and readers alike ^
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