30 Great Myths about Chaucer. Stephanie Trigg

There seem to be a few reasons for this. First, there is the delicious irony that the father of English literature (see Myth 1) might not have fathered his own child. Second, Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetic autonomy is reinforced. Any patronage flowing to Chaucer from Gaunt or his sons becomes a matter of reparation for a decidedly non‐literary injury. The poet’s art remains (seemingly) pure and unsullied by the ministrations of Mammon. Finally, it fits into a romantic notion of the suffering poet. Poor Geoffrey is betrayed by Gaunt, abandoned by Philippa and in old age, in serious debt (Myth 26), unable even to get his annuity from his “son’s” brother.

      Notes

      1 1 Thomas Speght, ed., The Workes of our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly Printed (London, 1598), b5r.

      2 2 Ibid., b5r.

      3 3 Thomas Tyrwhitt, ed., The Canterbury tales of Chaucer: to which are added, an essay on his language and versification; an introductory discourse; and notes (London, 1775–78), 1:xxxiii.

      4 4 F.J. Furnivall, “Thomas Chaucer, Not the Poet Geoffrey’s Son,” Notes and Queries, 4th Series 9 (1872), 381–3, here 381.

      5 5 Mary Elizabeth Haweis, “More News of Chaucer, Part I,” Belgravia: A London Magazine 48 (1882), 34–46, here 43.

      6 6 Especially as she references the Glover pedigree contained in Speght’s edition.

      7 7 Mary Flowers Braswell, The Forgotten Chaucer Scholarship of Mary Eliza Haweis (New York: Routledge, 2016), 17.

      8 8 Russell Krauss , Haldeen Braddy and C. Robert Kase , Three Chaucer Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932).

      9 9 Ibid., 169.

      10 10 Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson , eds., Chaucer Life‐Records (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 80, 85, 88–91.

      11 11 Martin B. Ruud , Thomas Chaucer (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1926), 4–67; Krauss, Braddy and Kase, Three Chaucer Studies, 161.

      12 12 Peter Ackroyd, Chaucer, Brief Lives (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004), 28.

      13 13 Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life‐Records, 272.

      14 14 Ibid., 273.

      15 15 Alison Weir , Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009), 94, 332.

      16 16 Krauss, Braddy and Kase, Three Chaucer Studies, 143. Furnivall goes even further, claiming that the scribe who copied the poem (John Shirley) would have been sure to mention Thomas’s connection to Geoffrey if there had been one (“Thomas Chaucer,” 381).

      17 17 Jacquelyn Fernholz and Jenni Nuttall, “Lydgate’s Poem to Thomas Chaucer: A Reassessment of Its Diplomatic and Literary Contexts,” in Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Linda Clark, The Fifteenth Century 6 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 123–44, here 132.

      18 18 Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life‐Records, 341.

      19 19 Quoted in Míc&c.dotab;eál Vaughan , “Personal Politics and Thomas Gascoigne’s Account of Chaucer’s Death,” Medium Aevum 75 (2006), 103–22 , here 115. See Myth 27.

      20 20 Ibid., 109.

      21 21 H. Ansgar Kelly , “Shades of Incest and Cuckoldry: Pandarus and John of Gaunt,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991), 121–40 , here 137.

      22 22 Ibid, 137.

      23 23 See, for instance, Sheila Delany , Writing Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature Medieval to Modern (New York: Schoken Books, 1983), 58; John H . Fisher, The Importance of Chaucer (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1992), 19–23; R. Allen Shoaf , Chaucer’s Body: The Anxiety of Circulation in the Canterbury Tales (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2001), 100–1; and its persistence as a recurring theme in contemporary historical fiction featuring Chaucer, for example Garry O’Connor , Chaucer’s Triumph (Lancaster: Petrak Press, 2007).

      Myth 6

      CHAUCER’S LANGUAGE IS TOO DIFFICULT FOR MODERN READERS

Evidence that Chaucer’s language was perceived as difficult appears quite early. Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer, for instance, contains a glossary entitled “the old and obscure words of Chaucer explaned.” At least two translations of Chaucer’s works into modern English were attempted in the early seventeenth century (though only in manuscript), and in 1668 the poet/politician Edmund Waller claimed about the poet that the “years have defac’d his matchless strain.”¹ Things had gotten so bad some twenty‐five years later that the poet and essayist Joseph Addison maintained: “But age has rusted what the poet writ, / Worn out his language, and obscur’d his wit; / In vain he jests in his unpolish’d strain / And tries to make his readers laugh in vain.”² It was perhaps to be expected that admirers of Chaucer would attempt to remedy this situation by publishing versions of the poet’s work that would be accessible to the larger reading public.

Most famously, the poet John Dryden undertook to translate three of Chaucer’s tales (and another work that he thought was by the poet) in his Fables, Ancient and Modern. Dryden acknowledges that some readers prefer to read Chaucer in the original and that to translate the poet is to sully his poetry. His response to these naysayers encapsulates the ongoing argument for translation: “Yet I think I have just Occasion to complain of them [those who can read Chaucer in the original], who because they understand Chaucer, would deprive the greater part of their Countrymen of the same Advantage, and hoord him up, as Misers do their Grandam Gold, only to look on it themselves, and hinder others from making use of it.”³ Chaucer’s poetry, so Dryden argues, should not be the province of the learned few, but belonged to all those who made England their home.

      The central question about translation – whether it is possible to capture the effect of the original – really depends on another question that Dryden elides: Is Chaucer’s