GEOFFREY 

CHAUCER
(1343-1400) 1

Ms. FATIMA SALEEM

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
INTRODUCTION
 An English poet and author
 Born in London.
 Best known for The Canterbury Tales.
 Known as the "Father of English literature".
 Chaucer's works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, 
The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde.
 He is famous for the literary use of the Middle English vernacular when the dominant
literary languages in England were still French and Latin.
 Chaucer is a poet of transition between a conversational colloquial style and a lofty poetic
style.

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 Before Shakespeare, Chaucer was considered the most famous English poet.
 The most significant poet in Middle English (1100-1500) Norman period
 A professional courtier
 He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of
parliament.
 Born into a family of wine traders
 They had considerable inherited property in London
 From the class of the new wealthy city gentleman
 He travelled to Kent, to France, and twice to Italy, where he went through works of the writers
such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
 Fluent in several languages including French, Italian and Latin.
 A passion for reading

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 Chaucer first appears in public records in 1357 as a member of the house of Elizabeth, Countess of
Ulster.
 Two years later, he served in the army under Edward III and was captured during an unsuccessful
offensive at Reims, although he was later ransomed.
 By 1366 Chaucer married Phillipa Pan, who had been in service with the Countess of Ulster.
 Chaucer himself secured an annuity as yeoman of the king and was listed as one of the king’s
esquires.
 He has been acclaimed as:
 the first realist, 
 first humorist,
 the first narrative artist,
 the first great character painter,
 and the first great metrical artist in English literature.

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 WORKS
 Chaucer’s first work, The Book of the Duchess, is a dream poem, an elegy on the death in 1368 of Blanche,
Duchess of Lancaster, the wife of John Gaunt (third son of King Edward III) written in more than 1300 lines.
 It is a poem of consolation, modelled on French examples.
 There is simplicity and directness of the emotion, and the handling of dialogue show Chaucer’s capacity to bring
language, situation and emotion together.
 The House of Fame is another dream poem, a poem of around 2000 lines.
 This time influenced by the Italian of Dante.
 It is the first time that Dante’s epic of a journey to Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell – The Divine Comedy is echoed in
English.
 The subject of love is taken up in Chaucer’s two greatest poems Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good
Women.
 Troilus and Criseyde has been called ‘the first modern novel’.
 Here Chaucer’s descriptive capacity is evident both in terms of character and scene in joys and pains of love.
 His poem The Legend of Good Women is the first English poem to use heroic couplets.

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THE CANTERBURY TALES
 Began writing it around 1387 and the work was uncompleted at his death in 1400.
 Originally 120 tales were planned, with each of thirty pilgrims from Southwark to Canterbury telling two tales on
the way back.
 Canterbury and Southwark bring together the religious and the secular.
 Canterbury Cathedral was the site of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas a’ Beckett in 1170.
 Some critics see a literal ‘falling off’
 Compared to the high but the conventional ideals of the Crusades and the noble intentions of the heroes of
earlier literature, there is certainly a decline.
 This is all part of an underlying reflection on religion and the individual in the modern world, reflected in many
texts.
 The starting point of the journey, the Tabard Inn at Southwark, represents the city, the new focal institution in
the society.
 The inn’s role as a meeting place affirms the importance of drinking in this society.
 There is a new social order here, with people of all levels of modern society, sharing an undertaking which
combines duty and pleasure.

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 CHARACTERS IN THE CANTERBURY TALES
 Chaucer prefers not to take sides and does not overtly judge the characters he presents.
 But he allows the reader a new degree of interpretative freedom, based on the recognition of an ironic gap
between how the characters see themselves and how others see them.
 This is new to English Literature.
 Society divided into three estates:

1. The military
 The knight
 Squire

2. The clergy
 Prioress
 Her Nun
 The Parson

3. The laity
 Wealthy Franklin
 Poor Plowman
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 CHAUCER AS A HUMORIST (IRONY, HUMOR AND SATIRE)
 Chaucer may be regarded as the first great English humorist.
 Masefield calls him “a great Renaissance gentleman mocking the middle ages”.
 Chaucer is a great humorist because he loves mankind in spite of its or follies and weaknesses.
 There is no malice, spite or animosity in his attitude.
 His attitude is that of benevolence and tolerance. His humor is always sympathetic.
 He exposes the vices of the society in a subtle and gentle manner. 
 Chaucer’s humor leads him to be the poet of man and humanity.
 Chaucer’s humor is spontaneous.
 Tolerance and impartiality is present in Chaucer’s humor.
 A humorist is one who is quick to perceive the funny side of the things and who has the capacity to laugh and makes other
laugh at what is absurd or ridiculous or incongruous.
 He paints all the characters in “The Prologue” in a humorous manner.
 Chaucer’s humour is, of course, satirical but it is sugar coated. Hs purpose is to awake the people against realities of life. His
age is of romantic idealism and people are blind to the realities of life. 
 A dethatched and objective humor characterize his realistic presentation of contemporary society.
 Chaucer was greatly influenced by an Italian humorist Boccaccio and his work Decameron; a collection of tales.
 As a humorist, Chaucer exposed the universal types and the individuals in the prologue.
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 REALISM IN CHAUCER
 Chaucer is essentially a realist.
 Merriam Webster Dictionary defines realism in the following words: “Realism is the tendency to view or represent things as they
really are”.
 Literature gives birth to its own world which always goes parallel with the real world.
 Realism is not reality, it is a collective term for the devices that give that effect of reality.
 Chaucer observes things as they are and looks beneath the surface.
 He apprehends the real significance of the phenomena and then with his delicate artistic sense and gift of expression and genial
humor describes them.
 So realism for Chaucer means a faithful representation of the realities of life by means of art.
 The 14th century England in which Chaucer lived, didn’t know anything yet of the drama and the novel. Drama came to England in
the early 16th century and the novel another 250 years later.
 In The Canterbury Tales, the entire prologue is cast in the dramatic mold. There are also elements of fiction present in the work.
 He was gifted with an acute power of observation.
 His work captures the universal interest.
 Chaucer’s poetry is an embodiment of realism because he describes the traits of his age through different characters.
 Chaucer is called the true chronicler of his age.
 Hazzlit observes: “There is no artificial, pompous display, but a strict parsimony of the poet’s materials like the rude simplicity of
the age in which he lived.”

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 No doubt, Chaucer is a great realist but if we observe minutely, we find two major limitations in his art as a delineator of the
14th century England. First, Chaucer is having silence about historic events the Hundred Year War, the Black Death and the
Peasant’s Revolt.
 The age of Chaucer is the age of transition - transition between the two periods- the medieval and the modern or the
Renaissance.
 The distinctive feature of the medieval mind is its belief in spirituality and abstract ideas, whereas the Renaissance lays
emphasis on the sensuous and the concrete.
 Medieval mind supports communism, whereas the Renaissance advocates individualism.
 Medieval mind does not tolerate free thought, speculation and reason, whereas the right of private judgment was the hall-
mark of the Renaissance.
 was the greatness of Chaucer that he combined both the Medieval and the Renaissance spirit in his poetry, and exhibited the
essential spirit of an age that was passing away and also of that age which was to assert itself in the reign of Elizabeth.
 Thus, Chaucer is praised for his ability to take a fuller scenario of his society and portray a true image of the daily life of the
fourteenth century.
 The British society in transition gave an impetus to the Englishman's intrinsic love of travel, fresh air, good fellowship, gossip,
story telling and music.
 According to him, pilgrims were united in their desire though not in their objectives.
 These pilgrims constituted a heterogeneous group of men and women drawn from different social classes pursuing different
avocations.
 Maintaining a rigid distinction between one class and other had become a thing of the past. The vast canvas
of prologue depicts the changing social system. 
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 CHAUCER’S ART OF CHARACTERIZATION
 Chaucer is the first great painter of character in English literature.
 Geoffrey Chaucer was a keen observer of human nature.
 He looks at his characters objectively with intellect, detachment and penetration.
 Prologue as a picture gallery.
 Characters as types and individuals.
 Chaucer’s faculty of close observation and vivid description.
 Universality of characters.
 He reveals his characters through description.
 He creates realistic characters and paints every character with minute details.
 In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer tried to paint faithfully the body and soul of the fourteenth century life.
 The pilgrims are the epitome of mankind. 
 It is such a veritable picture gallery of the 14 th century as the details of their physical appearance, their social status
and character are so artistically presented that the whole man or woman come alive before our eyes.
 The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales presents a social group of persons, larger and more diversified. Chaucer's group
of pilgrims is not schematically representative of English society, but covers well enough the main social elements. 
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CHAUCER’S NARRATIVE SKILL
 The Prologue is Chaucer's most celebrated and established work in which he uses a narrative style to express
his viewpoint.
 The Canterbury Tales is a story about a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, England. After meeting at
an inn in London, they decide to make the rest of the journey together. The General Prologue to the poem
describes this meeting and its setting. The pilgrims' journey then functions as a frame narrative for the poem. A
frame narrative is a literary technique for setting up a story within a story. For example, The Canterbury Tales'
prologues and epilogues cover the interactions of the pilgrims with each other, while the tales are self-
contained narratives.
 Firstly, Chaucer's style is marked by lucidity of expression, joyous originality and easiness free of ambiguities
and direct philosophical maxims.
 English is linguistically divided into three periods:
 Old English dating from 5th to 14th century
 Middle English from 14 to 18 century
 and the Modern English from 18 century to present day.
 Chaucer was born in what is called the Age of Middle English.
 His style and contribution to the English Language are remarkable. That is why David Daiches avers, “with
Chaucer English language matured”. 

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 CHAUCER’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS CONTEMPORARY CHURCH
 Though in Chaucer’s age, religion had a control over the minds and soul of the people, yet regrettably, its
influence was corrupt.
 The monasteries were promoting corruption, exploiting the innocent folk and were earning money under the
disguise of religion.
 Moralities and ethics were fading. The ecclesiastics had become notorious for their avarice, corruption and
dishonesty.
 They had forgotten their sacred duties and had become degenerated.

In “The Prologue”, Chaucer has drawn some portraits of the clergies of the 14th century England, free from any
personal prejudice.
 These are not exaggerated sketches and they realistically refer to the corruption, and religious and moral
degradation that had crept into the ecclesiastical order of the day.
 His ironic portraits reveal that Chaucer had some idea of a code of conduct for clergies to follow but he is impartial
and realistic and paints both the sides of picture.
 Through the portraits of pleasure-loving Monk, the wanton Friar, the corrupt Pardoner, he exposes the humour of
the typical Church dignitaries.
 He also gives the portrait of a good Parson. Chaucer admires him because the persons like him were becoming
rare in his age.
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 Like many elements in Chaucer's contemporary society, the Catholic Church is both mocked
and respected in The Canterbury Tales. 
 The Knight, Squire and Yeoman are typically read as descending not only in rank but in their
willingness to uphold the basic ideals of chivalry.
 Similarly, the Prioress, the Monk, and the Friar show a decline in "grace."
 The Prioress seems mostly virtuous but too concerned with social rather than spiritual graces.
 The Monk is a man who also seems pleasant enough but is clearly ill-suited to monastic life.
 And the Friar is quite despicable; apparently he is in the habit of impregnating young women
and marrying them to others, he neglects his duty to care for the sick, and he tends to prefer
the company of rich women.
 He satirizes the corrupt and worldly minded clergies and on the other hand he appreciates
the good characters and presents a model picture of him.

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 CHAUCER’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS WOMEN
 Chaucer's attitude towards women is impartial, unprejudiced, realistic and comprehensive. According to Chaucer, a woman is neither
a goddess nor necessarily an evil. She is just a companion of man and as there are gods and devils among men, so there are goddesses
and witches among women.
 In “The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales”, Chaucer tells that there are two kinds of woman in the world in all ages.
 He tells this by depicting two women, The Prioress and The Wife of Bath.
 The Prioress is the embodiment of sweetness, beauty, grace and good manners where as The Wife of Bath is a combination of ugly
features and shrewish qualities.
 Both of them are present in all ages.
 Sometimes, The Prioress predominates and sometimes The Wife of Bath.
 In Chaucer’s time, a woman was regarded as inferior to man.
 A woman who attempted governance was very often beaten by her husband. A woman’s welfare lays in accepting the mastery of her
husband.
 We are told that fifth husband of The Wife of Bath tried to assert his male superiority over her and once struck her about her ear so
violently that she became deaf.
 Thus, women like The Wife of Bath always manage to escape from the life, a humdrum love, gossip, finery, company of men and never
like to stay at home with their husbands.
 The Prioress represents the conventional woman with all those vanities dear to feminine heart. In “The Prologue to the Canterbury
Tales”, her description includes her physical appearance, table manners, affected speech and tender sentimentality. Her name is
“Madame Eglentyne”. One wonders what this wild flower has to do in the convent. She wears fine clothes and on her brooch is
inscribed the motto “Amor Vincit Omnia” (Love conquers all).
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CHAUCER’S CONTRIBUTION TO DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE
 One of the most important contributions that Chaucer made is his contribution to the English language.
 It was all due to his treatment of English language in his poetry that English secured a prominent position
amongst the languages of the world not only today but in that time as well.
 It was Chaucer, who preferred English language over Latin and French. It was a fashion and vogue of the time
to use Latin and French languages in church, courts and in any literary work, but Chaucer refused to adopt
these languages for his poetry.
 Though, the English language was in raw form, yet he ventured upon using the English Language for his
poetry. It was not as polished and full of vocabulary as Latin and French.
 Lowell says in this regard:

“Chaucer found his English a dialect and left it a language.”

 He transformed the East Midland dialect into a full-fledged language of England.
 Chaucer knew that Latin and French, due to its complex grammar, would lag behind English language.
 He was pretty sure about the bright future of English language. That is why; he adopted English language in his
poetry.
 Sir Walter Raleigh remarks that “he purified the English of his time from its dross! He shaped it into a fit
instrument for his use.”

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