Letteratura inglese - Geoffrey Chaucer

Life of Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in 1344 under the reign of Edward III. He was the son of a prosperous London wine merchant. In 1357, he entered as a page in the household of Prince Lionel (son of Edward III). Late 1359 to early 1360, he was in France with Lionel as part of the army. During the 100 Years War, he was taken prisoner and ransomed in May 1360. He started to write poetry probably on his return from France.

He may have studied law and traveled to Spain on a mission for John of Gaunt, but this period is pretty obscure. In 1366, Chaucer married Philippa de Roet (sister of Katherine Swynford, who was to become John of Gaunt's mistress and then his third and last wife). Chaucer wrote no poems to her, because it was not in fashion during that period.

From 1367, Chaucer was a member of the royal household with a pension. In 1369, he was in France with the King's army, and in 1372-1373, he was in Italy; there he may have met Petrarch and Boccaccio. Diplomatic missions to Flanders and France followed in 1377, and to Milan in 1378.

In 1386, Chaucer became a member of Parliament. He held various appointments under Richard II, grandson of Edward III, who died in 1377; Richard granted him a large pension of 20 a year. When Henry IV took the throne from Richard II in 1399, Chaucer's pension doubled.

Geoffrey Chaucer died on 25 October 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, starting the Poet's Corner.

The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer's poetry both expresses and embodies a firm sense of order. The question of the social perception conditioned by rank determines the human world that Chaucer delineates in The Canterbury Tales. This is his masterpiece, composed partly during the "Italian Period", which lasted from 1372 to 1386, and partly during the "English Period".

Chaucer has been at work on The Canterbury Tales from 1386 or 1387. If we may trust the "Prologue", Chaucer intended that each of some thirty pilgrims should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. But he never completed this immense project, and what he wrote was not revised.

According to the Prologue, the entire work should make a continuous and consistent narrative of a pilgrimage that seems to have occupied five days, from 16 to 20 April, and that led to the outskirts of Canterbury. The Prologue is the portrait of an entire nation. Apart from the stunning clarity of the characters presented, the most noticeable thing about them is their normality.

The tales these pilgrims tell come from all over Europe, from Chaucer's contemporaries' works, from the ancients, from the Orient. Almost every tale ends with a piece of proverbial or other wisdom derived from it, and