제프리 초서 (노튼 영문학 I ) -Geoffrey Chaucer,1343–1400 (The Norton Anthology of English Literature)

Medieval social theory held that society was made up of three “estates”: the nobility, composed of a small hereditary aristocracy, whose mission on earth was to rule over and defend the body politic; the church, whose duty was to look after the spiritual welfare of that body; and everyone else, the large mass of commoners who were supposed to do the work that provided for its physical needs.

By the late fourteenth century, however, these basic categories were layered into complex, interrelated, and unstable social strata among which birth, wealth, profession, and personal ability all played a part in determining one’s status in a world that was rapidly changing economically, politically, and socially.

Chaucer’s life and his works, especially The Canterbury Tales, were profoundly influenced by these forces. A growing and prosperous middle class was beginning to play increasingly important roles in church and state, blurring the traditional class boundaries, and it was into this middle class that Chaucer was born.

Chaucer was the son of a prosperous wine merchant and probably spent his boyhood in the mercantile atmosphere of London’s Vintry, where ships docked with wines from France and Spain.

Here he would have mixed daily with people of all sorts, heard several languages spoken, become fluent in French and received schooling in Latin.

Instead of apprenticing Chaucer to the family business, however, his father was apparently able to place him, in his early teens, as a page in one of the great aristocratic households of England, that of the countess of Ulster who was married to Prince Lionel, the second son of Edward III.

There Chaucer would have acquired the manners and skills required for a career in the service of the ruling class, not only in the role of personal attendant in royal households but in a series of administrative posts.

We can trace Chaucer’s official and personal life in a considerable number of surviving historical documents, beginning with a reference, in Elizabeth of Ulster’s household accounts, to an outfit he received as a page (1357).

He was captured by the French and ransomed in one of Edward III’s campaigns during the Hundred Years War (1359).

He was a member of King Edward’s personal household (1367) and took part in several diplomatic missions to Spain (1366), France (1368), and Italy (1371).

As controller of customs on wool, sheepskins, and leather for the port of London (1374–85), Chaucer audited and kept books on the export taxes, which were one of the Crown’s main sources of revenue.

During this period, he was living in a rent-free apartment over one of the gates in the city wall, probably as a perquisite of the customs job.

He served as a justice of the peace and knight of the shire (the title given to members of Parliament) for the county of Kent (1385–86) where he moved after giving up the controllership.

As clerk of the king’s works (1389–91), Chaucer was responsible for the maintenance of numerous royal residences, parks, and other holdings; his duties included supervision of the construction of the nave of Westminster Abbey and of stands and lists for a celebrated tournament staged by Richard II.

While the reports show Chaucer receiving many grants and annuities in addition to his salary for these services, they also show that at times he was being pressed by creditors and obliged to borrow money.

These activities brought Chaucer into association with the ruling nobility of the kingdom, with Prince Lionel and his younger brother John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, England’s most powerful baron during much of Chaucer’s lifetime; with their father, King Edward; and with Edward’s grandson, who succeeded to the throne as Richard II.

Near the end of his life Chaucer addressed a comic Complaint to His Purse to Henry IV – John of Gaunt’s son, who had usurped the crown from his cousin Richard – as a reminder that the treasury owed Chaucer his annuity.

Chaucer’s wife, Philippa, served in the households of Edward’s queen and of John of Gaunt’s second wife, Constance, daughter of the king of Castile.

A Thomas Chaucer, who was probably Chaucer’s son, was an eminent man in the next generation, and Thomas’s daughter Alice was married successively to the earl of Salisbury and the duke of Suffolk.

The gap between the commoners and the aristocracy would thus have been bridged by Chaucer’s family in the course of three generations.

None of these documents contains any hint that this hardworking civil servant wrote poetry, although poetry would certainly have been among the diversions cultivated at English courts in Chaucer’s youth.

That poetry, however, would have been in French, which still remained the fashionable language and literature of the English aristocracy, whose culture in many ways had more in common with that of the French nobles with whom they warred than with that of their English subjects.

Chaucer’s earliest models, works by Guillaume de Machaut (1300?–1377) and Jean Froissart (1333?–1400?), the leading French poets of the day, were lyrics and narratives about courtly lover, often cast in the form of a dream in which the poet acted as a protagonist or participant in some aristocratic love affair.

The poetry of Machaut and Froissart derives from the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose, a long dream allegory in which the dreamer suffers many agonies and trials from the love of a symbolic rosebud.

Chaucer’s apprentice work may well have been a partial translation of the twenty-one-thousand-line Romance.

His first important original poem is The Book of the Duchess, an elegy in the form of a dream vision commemorating John of Gaunt’s first wife, the young duchess of Lancaster, who died in 1368.

The diplomatic mission that sent Chaucer to Italy in 1372 was in all likelihood a milestone in his literary development.

Although he may have acquired some knowledge of the language and literature from Italian merchants and bankers posted in London, this visit and a subsequent one to Florence (1378) brought him into direct contact with the Italian Renaissance.

Probably he acquired manuscripts of works by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio – the last two still alive at the time of Chaucer’s visit, although he probably did not meet them.

These writers provided him with models of new verse forms, new subject matter, and new modes of representation.

The House of Fame, still a dream vision, takes the poet on a journey in the talons of a gigantic eagle to the celestial palace of the goddess Fame, a trip that at many points affectionally parodies Dante’s journey in the Divine Comedy.

In his dream vision The Parliament of Fowls, all the birds meet on St. Valentine’s Day to choose their mates; their “parliament” humorously depicts the ways in which different classes in human society think and talk about love.

Boccaccio provided sources for two of Chaucer’s finest poems – although Chaucer never mentions his name.

The Knight’s Tale, the first of The Canterbury Tales, is based on Boccaccio’s romance Il Teseida (The Story of Theseus).

His longest completed poem, Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), which tells the story of how Trojan Prince Troilus loved and finally lost Criseyde to the Greek warrior Diomede, is an adaptation of Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato (The Love-Stricken).

Chaucer reworked the latter into one of the greatest love poems in any language.

Even if he had never written The Canterbury Tales, Troilus would have secured Chaucer a place among the major English poets.

A final dream vision provides the frame for Chaucer’s first experiment with a series of tales, the unfinished Legend of Good Women.

In the dream, Chaucer is accused of heresy and antifeminism by Cupid, the god of love himself, and ordered to do penance by writing a series of “legends,” i.e., saints’ lives, of Cupid’s martyrs, women who were betrayed by false men and died for love.

Perhaps a noble patron, possibly Queen Anne, asked the poet to write something to make up for telling about Criseyde’s betrayal of Troilus.

Throughout his life Chaucer also wrote moral and religious works, chiefly translations.

Besides French, which was a second language for him, and Italian, Chaucer also read Latin.

He made a prose translation of the Latin Consolation of Philosophy, written by the sixth-century Roman statesman Boethius while in prison awaiting execution for crimes for which he had been unjustly condemned.

The Consolation became a favorite book for the Middle Ages, providing inspiration and comfort through its lesson that worldly fortune is deceitful and ephemeral and through the Platonic doctrine that the body itself is only a prison house for the soul that aspires to eternal things.

The influence of Boethius is deeply ingrained in The Knight’s Tale and Troilus.

The ballade Truth compresses the Boethian and Christian teaching into three stanzas of homely moral advice.

Thus long before Chaucer conceived of The Canterbury Tales, his writings were many faceted: they embrace prose and poetry; human and divine love; French, Italian, and Latin sources; secular and religious influences; comedy and philosophy.

Moreover, different elements are likely to mix in the same work, often making it difficult to extract from Chaucer simple, direct, and certain meanings. This Chaucerian complexity owes much to the wide range of Chaucer’s learning and his exposure to new literary currents on the Continent but perhaps also to the special social position he occupied as a member of a new class of civil servants.

Born into the urban middle class, Chaucer, through his association with the court and service of the Crown, had attained the rank of “esquire,” roughly equivalent to what would later be termed a “gentleman.”

His career brought him into contact with overlapping bourgeois and aristocratic social worlds, without his being securely anchored in either.

Although he was born a commoner and continued to associate with commoners in his official life, he did not live as a commoner; and although his training and service at court, his wife’s connections, and probably his poetry brought him into contact with the nobility, he must always have been conscious of the fact that he did not really belong to that society of which birth alone could make one a true member.

Situated at the intersection of these social worlds, Chaucer had the gift of being able to view with both sympathy and humor the behaviors, beliefs, and pretensions of the diverse people who comprised the levels of the society.

Chaucer’s art of being at once involved in and detached from a given situation is peculiarly his own, but that art would have been appreciated by a small group of friends close to Chaucer’s social position – men like Sir Philip de la Vache, to whom Chaucer addressed the humorous envoy to Truth.

Chaucer belongs to an age when poetry was read aloud.

A beautiful frontispiece to a manuscript of Troilus pictures the poet’s public performance before a magnificently dressed royal audience, and he may well have been invited at times to read his poems at court.

But besides addressing a listening audience, to whose allegedly superior taste and sensibility the poet often ironically defers (for example, The General Prologue, lines 745–48), Chaucer has in mind discriminating readers whom he might expect to share his sense of humor and his complex attitudes towards the company of “sundry folk” who make the pilgrimage to Canterbury.