Chaucer’s diverse literary legacy
CHAUCER HERE AND NOW MARION TURNER, EDITOR
224pp. Bodleian Library Publishing. £30.
THE EXHIBITION Chaucer Here and Now, curated by Marion Turner at the Bodleian in Oxford, closed last month, but this lavishly illustrated book will give everyone the chance to view the exhibits that were on display and learn what they can tell us about Chaucer’s impact on writers and artists from the fifteenth century to the present. The story it tells is not the conventional one, in which Chaucer is (as John Dryden famously put it) the “father of English poetry” who shaped the canon of English literature. Instead it emphasizes the wider reach and diversity of his cultural influence. This explains why there is nothing here about Wordsworth’s modernizations of The Canterbury Tales, and why much is said about Telling Tales (2014) by the Nigerian-British poet Patience Agbabi; why Paul Johnson’s eye-catching pop-up version of the Miller’s Tale, Serenade to Chaucer (2018), is included and Thomas Wyatt is not. The selection of items and topics is of course determined in part by the visual requirements of an exhibition, but Turner’s choices are also part of a wider agenda to present a nonelitist and anti-establishment view of Chaucer.
Chaucer Here and Now sets itself firmly against the myth that Chaucer was a court poet. In its most extreme form this myth was cultivated by William Godwin, who in his Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803) imagined him as Edward III’s close friend, helping the king “to relieve the cares of empire by his conversation”. In his chapter David Matthews discusses Godwin’s biography alongside other attempts to turn Chaucer into a poet laureate of the British Empire. He finds imperialism in unexpected places. If you thought that the Everyman series, which in 1908 published Arthur Burrell’s Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for the Modern Reader, aimed simply to make the poem accessible to every man, think again. According to Matthews, Burrell’s edition was a cog in the colonial machine: “Through such works, exported to colonies and former colonies, colonial subjects learned about Chaucer”.
The myth that Chaucer was an elite court poet has a long history, which emerges clearly in the chapters on fifteenth-century manuscripts (by Turner) and early printed editions (by Jeff Espie and Alexandra Gillespie). The famous frontispiece to Troilus and Criseyde in Cambridge, Corpus Christi, MS 61, which shows Chaucer reading his romance to a gathering of leisured aristocrats, is reproduced with a caption that rightly warns us against taking it at face value: “This is a posthumous depiction of Chaucer – there is no evidence he actually held this kind of ‘court poet’ role”. Thomas Speght’s Workes of our antient and lerned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer (1598), an earl
