The Columbia History of British Poetry (15 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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incomplete and frequently contained errors; texts were often heavily glossed between the lines as an aid to translation; and many manuscripts contained titles mistakenly attributed to poets like Virgil and Ovid. Given this situation, and because much of a medieval person's contact with classical poetry came in the form of selected passages in anthologies known as
florilegia
, it is impossible to determine the extent and nature of Chaucer's knowledge of the Latin poets. How thorough, for example, was Chaucer's knowledge of the poetry of Statius, particularly the
Thebaid
? Although its darkly pessimistic, perversely tragic tale haunts Chaucer's descriptive and narrative imagination in several works, and Cassandra provides a twenty-five line account of its action in Book V of the
Troilus
, the ability of many medieval poets to make more of less or much of little challenges any absolute confidence we may have in our suppositions concerning Chaucer's complete familiarity with the
Thebaid.
There is no hard evidence that Chaucer knew Virgil's
Georgics
or
Eclogues.
Nor can we assume he knew the
Aeneid
in its entirety, although the poem's preeminent reputation lends credence to Chaucer's full acquaintance with it, and Chaucer summarizes its action in a 220-line ecphrastic passage in the first book of
The House of Fame.
And when he relates the story of Aeneas's love affair with Dido, in a rather medievalized manner, in
The Legend of Good Women
, we must remember that the
Aeneid
was not the sole ancient source of this longest legend in the unfinished collection of stories about Love's female martyrs. Chaucer frequently drew upon more than one work in constructing his own version of a narrative, and in the Legend of Dido used her letter to Aeneas in Ovid's
Heroides
to close his poem. Even though Ovid was the poet of antiquity whom Chaucer knew best, there is a good chance that he never read the
Ars Amatoria
, the
Remedia Amoris
, or the
Amores.
He did borrow substantially from the
Heroides
, the
Fasti
, and the
Metamorphoses
, the last of which held Chaucer's interest throughout his life. Indeed, more than any other poem or poet with the possible exception of the French
Roman de la Rose
, it is Ovid's
Metamorphoses
that is demonstrably present through borrowing, reference, or allusion in the poems he wrote at every stage of his career. As a young, maturing poet, Chaucer may have learned something about style and tone from Ovid, but it was probably as a school boy in St. Paul's that he first encountered a major poem whose structure could contain many stories and whose narrative voice could contain a series of other narrative voices.
 
Page 62
Chaucer's relationship with other medieval vernacular poets differed from his relationship with the poets of antiquity in at least one significant way. Whether predecessors or contemporaries, the French and Italian writers who interested him were also engaged in one way or another and in various degrees with the legacy of the ancients. Chaucer was an acute analyst of their appropriations from this literatureas he was of all of the elements of their writingand his own stance towards the classics was in part directed by that of Jean de Meun and Dante, Guillaume de Machaut and Boccaccio. The influence of ancient poetry on Chaucer, in other words, is both direct and indirect, and from the time he entered royal service occupies an important although subordinate place in his participation, briefly as a follower and then as a pioneer, in the poetic project of his time and culture.
Chaucer's encounter with the courtly literature of France began in his youth, when he became a royal retainer, and continued as he matured and moved through the international aristocratic and governmental circles that introduced him to the new poetry and to some of its makers. In the course of his career, he met courtier poets like Jean Frois-sart, who, while at the English court during the 1360s with the young Chaucer, introduced him to the work of Guillaume de Machaut, the revered and highly influential poet-musician of the previous generation. The most distinguished follower of Guillaume de Lorris (the author of the first part of the
Roman de la Rose
), the prolific Machaut provided Chaucer with models of style, rhyme, and diction; of form, plot motif, and psychological situation; and with precedents by which to insinuate Ovidian and Boethian elements into the argument and substance of a poem, especially the dream visions. It is also possible that the narrative persona Machaut created for some of his works contributed to Chaucer's conception and development of his own narrator-character, one of the triumphs of his inventiveness.
There is, perhaps, no better epitome of Machaut's inspiration to elegance and musicality upon Chaucer than "Antigone's Song" in Book II of
Troilus and Criseyde
, which is based upon one of the older poet's lays: "O Love, to whom I have and shal / Ben humble subgit, trewe in myn entente, / As I best kan, to yow, lord, yeve ich al / For everemo myn hertes lust to rente" (827-830). It was for this and other transmissions from the French to English that another eminent poet of France composed a ballade in 1385 in praise of that "Grant translateur, noble Gef-froy Chaucier." Eustache Deschamps was certainly familiar enough
 
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with Chaucer's work to witness his good repute in France. In that same ballade Deschamps praised Chaucer generally for his acts of carrying over the poetry of France to England and specifically for his translation of the
Roman de la Rose
, a poem that was of enormous influence upon Chaucer's writing throughout his life.
Begun in the mid-1230s by Guillaume de Lorris, the
Roman de la Rose
is an extraordinary narrative of over 22,000 lines about the subject of love on several levels. The originator, Guillaume, wrote the first 4,058 lines as an allegory of the psychology of love as it was understood in aristocratic and courtly culture. His treatment of
amour courtois
or ''courtly love," a term invented in the nineteenth century, with its dream setting, its idealized springtime garden landscape, and its personifications of human faculties and qualities, established an archetype of "the love story" for the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Guillaume's narrative, which breaks off, possibly when he died, with the lover still far from successfully winning the favors of his beloved, was continued some four decades later by the scholar and translator become poet, Jean de Meun. Jean's continuation, which more than quadruples Guillaume's portion, ends with the lover's victory, but not before the stage for the quest has been expanded to include aspects of thirteenth-century society and its idea of the universe. Mythic and cosmic figures such as Venus, Nature, and Genius join personified characters drawn from Ovid and Boethius, among others, in a great debate about love that combines intellectual, humorous, and realistic modes.
The only extant version of the poem in English,
The Romaunt of the Rose
, containing all of Guillaume's part and nearly four thousand lines of Jean's, consists of three fragments by three different translators, only the first of which could have been by Chaucer. Whether Chaucer was responsible for this fragment or actually did his own, now lost, translation of the
Roman
is not nearly as important as Chaucer's lifelong engagement with the poem. The poem's fortuitous combination of the aristocratic-lyrical Guillaume and the earthy-intellectual Jean has provided a persuasive argument for the theory that one of the most crucial factors in Chaucer's achievement was his successful integration of literary courtliness and realism. The latter, also strongly affected by Chaucer's powerfully individualistic utilization of the French fabliau, reaches its high point in
The Canterbury Tales
. It is no accident that two of that work's greatest characters, the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, were nurtured by their creator's skillful ability to embed in them two of
 
Page 64
Jean's greatest figures, La Vieille, the old serving woman wise in the ways of love, and Faus Semblant, the hypocritical, self-confessing friar.
It may have been through certain French texts that Chaucer first became aware of the works of the three great writers of the Italian trecento, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. It may have been through his contacts with the Italian banking and merchant communities of London that he first heard of Dante's
Commedia
. Or it may not have been until the first of his two diplomatic trips to Italy in 1372-1373 and 1378 that he became aware of these authors' extraordinary blending of classical poetry and mythography with the international scholarly medieval Latin and vernacular lyric and romance traditions of Provence and France into an unmistakably original literature that elevated the status of the poet to a new height. Chaucer's involvement with this literature as an individual artist was clearly advanced both in terms of chronology and appreciation; he must have caught something from it about the dignity of the poet's calling.
Chaucer's major debt is to Boccaccio, of the three Italian writers, although he never mentions him by name; most important are Boccaccio's
Filostrato
(the source of the
Troilus
) and the
Teseida
(source of The Knight's Tale). What Chaucer did with his Boccaccian sources, both the literary works in Italian and the scholarly in Latin, has been much studied and has yielded many important insights into Chaucer's poetic originality as well as the nature of his literary obligations.
In addition to providing a Latin version of the Griselda story, Petrarch, the poet laureate who, in the Clerks words, "Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie" (IV.33), supplied the words for Troilus's first lyric expression of the condition of being in love. The
Canticus Troili
of Book I, "If no love is, O God, what fele I so?" (400) is a translation into three stanzas of rime royal of Petrarch's Sonnet 88 (In Vita), number 132 in the
Canzoniere
, "S'amor non è." No one knows where Chaucer found this poem; it seems very unlikely that he could have known the
Canzoniere
, and if he did, would have limited his use of it to a single poem, and then even failed to recognize the poem's unique but repeated form.
If some Chaucerians suspect the character of Petrarch's influence may have exceeded these specific borrowings, many others have speculated about the nature and extent of Dante's influence on Chaucer. There are over one hundred and fifty passages in Chaucer's works that have been compared either verbally or contextually to passages in the
Commedia
, and about forty more to Dante's unfinished prose work the
 
Page 65
Convivio
, most of them to Tractate IV. Not every one of these comparisons needs to be conclusively proven to demonstrate that Dante had an effect on Chaucer. The passages of unarguable attribution in
The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls
, the
Troilus
, and
The Canterbury Tales
constitute adequate documentation of that, but the full extent of Dante's effect upon Chaucer remains an open question, from the proposition that
The Canterbury Tales
is an answer in the form of a "Human Comedy" to the challenge of Dante's "Divine Comedy" to the more recent proposition that Chaucer's first encounter with Dante destroyed the Anglo-Gallic poet's hard-earned self-confidence.
For the sake of convenience, the Chaucerian canon has long been divided into three periods, the French, the Italian, and the English. The division has never been accepted as completely adequate even by those who insist on observing it, for this perception of Chaucer's career reduces it to a sequence tied to his being inspired and dominated first by blocks of reading and then by a burgeoning of accumulated wisdom about human nature and English society. Just as the four hundred and ninety-three items in his life records, not one of which mentions his being a poet, tell a story about a civil servant, courtier, diplomat, and private citizen with his share of legal and financial problems, Chaucer's reading tells another. However difficult to determine its sway over his thinking and writing, the world of books within Chaucer's world of books was clearly one of the wellsprings of his creativity, perhaps the only one there is a chance of knowing. His recognition of Dante's greatness, for example, must have been accompanied by the recognition that they shared a number of favorite authors and poems like Virgil, Ovid, Statius, Boethius, and the
Roman de la Rose
. When Chaucer was writing the
Troilus
and most of
The Canterbury Tales
, if not earlier, his reaction to almost every poet was a reaction to several. Chaucer was especially interested in how poets managed other poets whose legacy they shared, not only because he understood that management to be one of the highest forms of the poetic enterprise but also because he became increasingly aware of his own ability to engage in it at their level.
Chaucer's Poems
There are three places in his poetry where Chaucer mentions his own works:
The Legend of Good Women
(F.329-334, 417-430; G.255-266, 405-420), the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale (II.57-76), and

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