30 Great Myths about Chaucer. Stephanie Trigg

it must be illegible in the twenty‐first century. Even though we are a lot closer to the English of Dryden than Dryden was to the English of Chaucer, as in the eighteenth century, there is a widespread perception that Chaucer’s language is too difficult to read without specialist training. And of course – as we show many times in this book – such myths are often self‐perpetuating. The more Chaucer is perceived as needing expertise and training to make sense of his language, the more reluctant will non‐specialists be to teach Chaucer; while the less he is taught, the more unfamiliar he becomes, and the more obscure become the skills needed to read him. None of this linguistic uncertainty has any bearing on the generally held idea that Chaucer is an important literary figure, but it does affect whether, and how, Chaucer is, or should be, taught in secondary schools, colleges and universities.

      Chaucer scholars participate in a further form of contradiction in relation to Chaucer’s perceived difficulty. When they want to argue that Chaucer’s poetry should be included in every mainstream English syllabus they minimize the linguistic difficulties of reading Middle English, but once they are in the classroom they work hard to correct students’ pronunciation, teach vocabulary and medieval syntax, and draw attention to other Middle English dialects.

      There are certainly some learnable and teachable skills that can make the experience of reading Chaucer easier and more enjoyable for students familiar with the conventions of English poetry. Teaching Chaucer to students for whom English is a second language, or for whom “standard English” bears little relation to their own dialect or spoken English, is a different challenge altogether. When we ask about Chaucer’s “readability” we should also consider the wide range of contexts in which Chaucer might or might not be taught, from secondary schools through to a broad variety of college and university settings, whether in the UK, or in post‐colonial contexts, or in countries where English is increasingly unlikely to be a student’s first language.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of the “real” linguistic differences between Middle and modern English, let us pause to consider some of the cultural and ideological patterns that construct Chaucer as “difficult.” For one thing, poetry itself is increasingly not taught in some school contexts, so students might equally struggle with the highly metaphorical structures of Shakespeare’s language, and the effects of rhyming and stanzaic patterns on everyday syntax. And second, the Middle Ages are conventionally presented through the cultural and ideological lenses of the deep alterity that renders all of the period’s works both culturally alien and difficult to read. Again and again, we read the phrases “medieval” and “Middle Ages” as code for contexts and languages that are irrelevant, outmoded or archaic.

      Some aspects of popular culture tell a different story, however. Even though Chaucer is associated with the structures and practices of cultural elites that might render him unapproachable to many potential readers, he is a regular and familiar feature in many works of the contemporary medievalist imagination that have a broader cultural reach. He appears as a character in numerous historical fictions, especially in medievalist detective fiction; and in cinematic and television adaptations of the Tales or fictions about the Middle Ages. Equally, there is also a growing number of translations or adaptations of his works (especially the Canterbury Tales) into rap poetry or modern creole dialects: part of a growing global movement of adaptations and translations. These adaptations have the effect of bringing Chaucer into a closer relationship with contemporary culture, helping to ease the path of modern students to read and follow his language, though of course there are various linguistic and cultural differences that must be negotiated, while some tales and poems are more readily assimilated into contemporary social contexts.

A final contradiction runs through our best efforts to teach Chaucer. Nearly every critical or teaching edition of his works features a phonetic chart or list that indicates the etymological history and pronunciation of his vowel sounds. Another regular feature of such editions is a typically confusing message about the inconsistency and irregularity of Chaucerian orthography. Equally inhibiting to students who may have little or no experience studying grammar or with inflected languages will be a complicated account of the grammatical forms and structures of Middle English. Yet in spite of all this technical information, it is a common feature of many introductory guides or editions designed for classroom use to say something like, “the best way to learn Chaucer’s language is to find a good teacher and learn from them.”⁴ Even the Harvard website, under its “Teach Yourself to Read Chaucer’s Middle English,” concedes, “The best way to learn to read Chaucer’s Middle English is to enroll in a course with a good and enthusiastic teacher (as most teachers of Chaucer are).”⁵ This is an instruction that sends typically mixed signals to contemporary readers. While we embrace the performative and oral delivery of Chaucer, such advice strains against the growing importance of auto‐didacticism in medieval studies, in a context where the general expectation is that nearly everything can be learned online.

Nevertheless, once readers have accustomed themselves to a few principles – pronounce all the consonants; remember that long “i” and long “a” are pronounced differently; and be aware that the decision of whether or not to pronounce the final ‐e will be contextual and at best uncertain – they can mostly get to the point where they can start to imitate their teacher or the growing number of recordings available online, and perhaps even get a sense of what Middle English might have sounded like. There is also a time‐honored tradition of encouraging students to memorize the famous first eighteen lines of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, as a kind of “rite of passage”: a form of induction into the mysteries of medieval studies that their teachers and professors might also have endured and passed through. Sometimes students are encouraged to come and speak in front of the professor; other teachers orchestrate a “read aloud competition.”

The General Prologue lends itself well to this challenge through its complex syntax and the subordinate clauses leading up to the principal clause. Curiously, this insistence on the efficacy of the spoken word takes us right back to Chaucer’s time, and the reminder that much of his poetry would have been read aloud. Insisting that students read out loud and master Chaucerian pronunciation accelerates their comprehension, but also deepens appreciation of the persistent orality of medieval literature. As we know, medieval texts were not read just in private study; they were shared and recited in small or larger gatherings. Baba Brinkman draws a powerful analogy when he compares the story‐telling competition in the Tales to a competitive rap battle.⁶ It reminds us that later medieval poets fought to keep and retain the attention of their audiences by a range of rhetorical means (direct address, exclamations, etc.), as well as the cultivation of strong authorial or narrative personalities.

That said, there are some impediments to the immediate comprehension of Chaucer’s poetry, in addition to the questions of pronunciation, orthography and inflections. The vocabulary is one example. Nearly all readers of Chaucer (academics, teachers and students) need glosses for words that are completely unfamiliar, or that are drawn from technical vocabulary of various kinds, or those whose semantic connotations vary according to changing contexts, as well as those that have different meanings (the famous “false friends” that appear deceptively similar to modern words). It would be a mistake to underestimate the linguistic alterity of Chaucer, but while his language may be becoming further distanced from the varieties of modern English, there are more and more resources available online, such as the literal line‐by‐line translations of many of the Tales available on sites such as Harvard’s The Geoffrey Chaucer Page. With such aids, the language of Chaucer is no more difficult than the complex metaphorical structures of many passages in Shakespeare, for example. As with so many things, “difficulty” is in the eye of the beholder and can always be trumped by the desire to understand. Nevertheless, in an increasingly global culture, teachers and scholars of Chaucer need to acknowledge that there is no simple, “natural” or even single path to familiarity and ease with Chaucer’s language.

      Notes