Canterbury Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

The last six centuries have seen an incredible number of specific allusions to Chaucer in canonical world literature—and not exclusively in poetry. In Chaucer, the Critical Heritage (1978), Derek Brewer writes, “All the later major poets, and almost all distinguished English and American men of letters up to the first third of the twentieth century have made at least passing allusion to Chaucer.” In his own day, Chaucer found favor with groups as diverse as court society, the general public, and other poets; he inspired a number of verse tributes and imitations during that time and immediately following his death. The first recorded instance came from French poet Eustache Deschamps, whose tribute, in the form of a ballad (c.1386), lauds Chaucer as a Socrates in philosophy, a Seneca in morals, and an Ovid in poetry. High praise of Chaucer surfaces in several of his close descendants’ works, such as Thomas Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principum ( 1412; Regiment of Princes), in which Hoccleve refers to Chaucer as “maister deere and fadir reverent” (“worthy and respected master”), and John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes (c.1431-1438), in which Lydgate calls the poet the “lodesterre” (“lodestar”) of the English language. Two English monarchs sang the praises of Chaucer, including King James I of Scotland, who in The Kingis Quair (1423; The King’s Book), calls Chaucer and John Gower “my maisteris dere” (“my dear masters”), recommending “thair saulis vn-to the blisse of hevin” (“their souls unto the bliss of heaven”). Sir Walter Scott notes in The Monastery (1820) that Queen Elizabeth I, too, was fond of quoting Chaucer’s aphorism from “The Reeve’s Tale” that “the greatest clerks [scholars] are not the wisest men.”

Chaucer earned much admiration among fiction writers, particularly during the nineteenth century, when the novel rose to a respected status. Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell all quote from or allude to Chaucer in their works. In the visual realm, William Blake produced a 54” x 18” tempera painting, The Canterbury Pilgrims, in 1808, and Edward Burne-Jones provided illustrations for the Kelmscott edition of Chaucer’s writings (1896), which was edited by William Morris. Film adaptations of The Canterbury Tales include Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film in 1972 and an animated version in 1998, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. A six-part miniseries also appeared in Britain in 2003.

Chaucer’s greatest legacy, however, has always manifested in verse. The first work of the English literary Renaissance, Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579), reflects a strong Chaucerian influence, and Spenser invokes the author by name in the first books of his greatest work, The Faerie Queene (1590). William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595-1596) most likely had its beginnings in “The Knight’s Tale,” and act 3 of King Lear (c.1605-1606) has the Fool quoting from “The General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales. Indeed, Chaucer’s general influence permeates the works of Shakespeare and of John Milton, who directly alludes to Chaucer in his poem “Il Penseroso” (c.1625-1632; “The Melancholy Man”).

At the turn of the eighteenth century, John Dryden published his Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), which includes a highly regarded modernization of The Canterbury Tales. Several years later, satirist Alexander Pope modernized “The Prologue of the Wife of Bath’s Tale” and likely “The General Prologue” and “The Reeve’s Tale,” both of which were attributed to Thomas Betterton. Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) composed an imitation of Chaucer, now lost, that Sir Walter Scott mentions in his memoir of Swift. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, English scholar Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) considered creating a major annotated edition of Chaucer’s writings similar to his earlier interpretation of Shakespeare, but the project never came to fruition.

As Romanticism dawned at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Chaucer continued to influence writers. William Wordsworth mentions him in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) and the Prelude (1805); he also modernized “The Prioress’s Tale,” praising the original in the sonnet “Edward VI” (1821). Around the same time, John Keats imitated Chaucer in the poem “The Eve of Saint Mark” (1819). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863) is an adaptation of the Canterbury Tales; the first tale in the collection, told by the host of the inn, which still stands in western Massachusetts, is “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” Longfellow also immortalized the Canterbury Tales author in the sonnet “Chaucer” (1825):

An old man in a lodge within a park;

The chamber walls depicted all around

With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound,

And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,

Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark

Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;

He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,

Then writeth in a book like any clerk.

He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote

The Canterbury Tales, and his old age

Made beautiful with song; and as I read

I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note

Of lark and linnet, and from every page

Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.

George Meredith wrote his own poetic appreciation, “The Poetry of Chaucer” (1851):

But the best-known Chaucer-inspired lines in poetry appear in T. S. Eliot’s landmark The Waste Land (1922), the premier poem of the twentieth century. Delineating the horrors of the modern era, Eliot turns on its head the celebration of spring in “The General Prologue.” The poem opens with a lament that a winter of hibernation has ended, declaring, “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” Echoes of Chaucer continue in E. E. Cummings’s “honour corruption villainy holiness” (1950), a poem about Chaucer; Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985); and Spencer Reece’s The Clerk’s Tale (2004), a highly regarded collection of Chaucer-influenced poems.