THE IMPORTANCE OF THE WORK
A QUESTION OFTEN ASKED about the literature of the Middle Ages, as well as the literature before and just after it, is why we read it at all. Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales six hundred years ago in a form of English that is, when we encounter it for the first time, difficult to understand (although most readers adapt to Middle English with surprising speed). Chaucer also described a world that was, at least on the surface, vastly different from ours. Why should we go to the trouble of reading a text such as the Canterbury Tales?
The answers to this question are many, but particularly with the Canterbury Tales, they can all be distilled to one word: pleasure. It would be difficult to name any other single work that offers the range of pleasures that one may experience while reading the Canterbury Tales. From the aesthetic pleasure of reading (preferably aloud) some of the finest poetry ever written in any language, to the belly laugh of slapstick comedy, the Canterbury Tales is a cornucopia of delights. One may also find pleasure in satisfying a historical curiosity we all have about our biography, and if English is our mother tongue, no matter what our ethnic or racial origin may be, the biography of the English language and people are part of our own biographies.
Linked with this idea of our personal biographies is one of the greatest pleasures we encounter in reading the Canterbury Tales: discovering how people felt and thought about various moral, intellectual, and philosophical topics (they are all interrelated). This can be, at once, a fascinating, instructive, and surprising exercise, because we discover so much about ourselves and our society and how we have come to think the way we think. Our ways of viewing reality develop out of a long continuum of people and culture, and we are often surprised in reading the Canterbury Tales to discover how few of our concerns are fundamentally new and how few of our solutions are original.
In the Canterbury Tales Chaucer shows us the moral struggle of men and women. The characters he created are historically centuries removed, but, through great art, are present here and now. Some of these characters were struggling to balance their personal responsibility with the need for individual liberty; others, their self-interest with their concern for others. Some were responding to the demands of reason and of passion; still others were questioning these demands. Some were looking to nature and science for a guide to life; others were vegetating and marking time. Looking back through six centuries and seeing ourselves can be a dizzying, exhilarating, and humbling experience.
We are also humbled by finding ourselves in the presence of an artistic genius of great skill and vast knowledge. While admiring the artist’s skills in poetics and rhetoric, and while quite happy to enjoy his great comic ability, we still ask to what end Chaucer used them. That he wished to entertain, to give pleasure, is indisputable, but how refined is the entertainment? The detailed answer to this question will demonstrate that Chaucer is a philosophical poet unrivaled in his ability to blend intellectual perception with imaginative creation.
The Canterbury Tales has had an enormous influence on successive writers and audiences because it transmits one of the most brilliant illuminations of human experience—social, intellectual, and spiritual—that we possess. The poem has also maintained an important place in the tradition because in its illumination of the human experience it reflects upon the function of art and language in that experience—a pervasive concern of thinkers and artists for all times.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Unlike some poetic geniuses, Chaucer was a literary hero in his own day and, while still living, was paid the supreme compliment of being imitated. Moreover, while many great literary figures have had their reputations wax and wane as periods of literary taste change, Chaucer’s high reputation has largely remained constant through the centuries.
The very first recorded tribute to Chaucer is by his French contemporary Eustache Deschamps, who, about 1368, pays the English poet an elegant compliment in which he describes Chaucer as a Socrates in philosophy, a Seneca in morals, and an Ovid in poetry. Such descriptions not only help us understand the kind of reputation Chaucer had in his own day but also suggest that by the fourteenth century there existed an international school of poetry very conscious of the importance of art and ready to make bold claims for its theoretical foundation.
In his own time Chaucer’s work was already a model for other artists, and Chaucerian “schools” grew up soon after his death. The Canterbury Tales in particular was imitated, and several poets of the fifteenth century expanded the original work by adding to it tales of their own creation. The so-called Scottish Chaucerians included King James I of Scotland, who, while imprisoned in England, wrote verse influenced by Chaucer.
An important fact not always given sufficient emphasis in discussion of Chaucer is that he is the first native English literary authority, and the extent of his authority is unequaled in English literature. This is due, in part, to Chaucer’s own awareness of the importance of his canon, his entire literary production, in forming a beginning to a larger, ever-growing English literary canon. Again and again Chaucer reflects upon the state of his art and authorship; this conscious tradition making seems to have found a response in later poets.
Chaucer is repeatedly referred to in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as “Master” by aspiring and established writers alike. In his Apology for Poetry (1595), Sir Philip Sidney firmly established Chaucer (along with Gower) as the wellspring of English poetry: “I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk so stumblingly after him.” Edmund Spenser, in The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), finds advantage in describing himself as the literary descendant of Chaucer. Shakespeare, who never mentions Chaucer, was clearly influenced by his predecessor’s work, especially by Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales.
Dryden and Pope in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were quite explicit in their admiration of the master and devoted themselves to modernizing his work and publishing their versions of many of the tales. During the Enlightenment, Chaucer offered, in addition to his artistry, an English poet sufficiently antique to be regarded as a native authority within an ideology based on the authority of the past. This is perhaps most clear in Dryden’s “Preface” to Fables, Ancient and Modern, in which he groups Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with the works of Ovid, while preferring “the Englishman to the Roman.”
In the nineteenth century, interestingly enough, it is for different reasons that Chaucer maintains his position of prestige within the tradition. Chaucer’s naturalness and freedom from contrivance is what many of the Romantic poets admire in his work. Keats, for example, imitates the poetry and language of the Canterbury Tales to evoke a “medieval” tone in “The Eve of Saint Mark.” William Blake, in his illustration of the Canterbury Tales, provides a kind of visual interpretation of the poem that is typically nineteenth century. Coleridge not only extravagantly praises Chaucer but also explicitly prefers Chaucer to Shakespeare, for reasons of Romantic ideology. “The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakespeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of the imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the in-born kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakespeare!”
In the modern period, Ezra Pound was another poet who preferred Chaucer to Shakespeare (he also preferred Chaucer to Dante), because “Chaucer had a deeper knowledge of life than Shakespeare.”1 It is interesting to note how often the question of relative superiority arises in poets’ discussions of these two literary ancestors. The somewhat provocative statements of preference for Chaucer over Shakespeare seem to have to do with a desire to challenge and rearrange the canon of English literary tradition while at the same time reinforcing its existence.
Probably the best-known use of the Canterbury Tales by a modern author is found in the opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which paraphrases the opening lines of Chaucer’s General Prologue, while inverting their sense. Eliot seems to have here understood and wished to continue in his own work the medieval practice of translatio, in which the artist revives literary monuments of the past by integrating or “translating” them into his own work and culture, giving them new or transformed meanings.
Modern scholarly criticism of the Canterbury Tales may be said to begin with George Lyman Kittredge, who established in the first decade of the twentieth century an interpretive view of Chaucer’s work which, in its general outlines, dominated at least the next forty years of Chaucer scholarship. While the Kittredgian view today seems rather outmoded and old-fashioned in its critical assumptions, it had the virtue of treating Chaucer’s poetry as literature rather than as philology, that is, as historically interesting written records. Briefly, Kittredge perceived two features of the Canterbury Tales. He pointed to the use of certain general themes in the tales around which individual tales were clustered, creating among the pilgrims a form of debate on the given theme. Thus, Kittredge explained, we see certain tales whose subject, generally, is marriage, its woes and joys; they are the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, the Merchant’s Tale, and the Franklin’s Tale. These form for Kittredge the famous “marriage group.” Equally influential for later critics was Kittredge’s view that the Canterbury Tales was an essentially dramatic poem depending, like all conventional drama, on the similarity of the dramatic action of the poem to human life and real human situations. Thus, for Kittredge, Chaucer’s triumph was to be found in his realism, and for his successors the “portraits” of the Canterbury Tales achieve greatness by creating characters who are memorable, psychologically accurate, true to life, or even larger than life. In this school of criticism art imitates life in a simple manner, and Chaucer’s art becomes, for the least imaginative of these critics, accurate reportage of actual events, personally observed. That these portraits seemed to resemble characters based on the cultural assumptions of the twentieth century, far more than those of Chaucer’s own times, eventually raised the suspicion and doubt of later critics. But Kittredge’s great scholarship and sensibilities allowed him to change the course of Chaucer study. Along with C. S. Lewis, who, in the modern period, reintroduced students to the essential question of medieval allegory, Kittredge reclaimed Chaucer from the philologists as a subject for serious literary consideration.
Although several scholars in the forties and fifties contributed important corrective studies that transcended the limitations of Kittredge’s realism,2 the next scholar to define and transform in a fundamental and thorough way, not only Chaucer scholarship but medieval literary study, is D. W. Robertson. With the publication of A Preface to Chaucer in 1962, Robertson created a turmoil in medieval studies that has lasted more than twenty years. It is a measure of his contribution that he transformed our ways of talking about Chaucer and his age either by exciting enthusiastic devotion to his views or ferocious resistance. Robertson’s theory as applied to Chaucer and several other medieval subjects is based on historical criticism and insists on the necessity of placing Chaucer in the context of his own cultural and intellectual milieu. Thus the Robertsonians brought us back to nonliterary, primarily philosophical and theological texts, in order to understand the structure, imagery, and intellectual content of medieval poetry. Robertson’s own massive scholarship described medieval aesthetics as one in which the central intellectual and moral concept was the Christian theory of charity, and he identified that idea as the central theme of Chaucer’s work and all other serious medieval poetry.
Robertson’s critical stance was in its time an important and necessary antidote to what seemed an increasingly impressionistic style of criticism. It was also a somewhat severe form of historicism which insisted that medieval aesthetics, and only medieval aesthetics, was the legitimate critical tool for the study of medieval literature. Perhaps unwittingly, this opening up of the literature of the Middle Ages to other medieval intellectual fields sometimes had the effect of isolating it once again from important new developments in modern literary theory. This is somewhat ironic since in bringing us back and insisting we understand medieval aesthetic theory, it is primarily D. W. Robertson who has helped reveal the particular pertinence of medieval aesthetics to modern critical theory.
The modern critic, with the advantage of possessing the great philological and historical work done by his or her predecessors, is turning more often to contemporary literary theory in an effort to illuminate Chaucer’s texts and to discover further veins of richness in the Canterbury Tales.
From The Canterbury Tales: A Literary Pilgrimage, Twayne Publishers, 1987.
1. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, New York: New Directions, 1960, 99.
2. The most important of these is Ralph Baldwin, The Unity of the Canterbury Tales, New York: AMS Press, 1972.