Figure 1. Title page, The woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed with divers addicions, whiche were never in printe before (1561); STC 5076. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Figure 2. Interior title page for the Canterbury Tales from The woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed with divers addicions, whiche were never in printe before (1561), sig. A1; STC 5076. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
1. His Portraiture and Progenie shewed.
2. His Life collected.
3. Arguments to every Booke gathered.
4. Old and obscure words explaned.
5. Authors by him cited, declared.
6. Difficulties opened.
7. Two Bookes of his, never before Printed.
Notably, neither this list nor the text of the title page as a whole make mention of any of Chaucer’s works by title; Chaucer’s own name is the selling point here. The frontispiece for the revised edition, which appeared just four years later in 1602, has a similar appearance and emphasis. Readers are advised that they will find that “to that which was done in the former Impression,” “much is now added,” including:
1. In the life of Chaucer many things inserted.
2. The whole Worke by old Copies reformed.
3. Sentences and Proverbes noted.
4. The Signification of the old and obscure words proved: also Caracters shewing from what Tongue or Dialect they be derived.
5. The Latine and French, not Englished by Chaucer, translated.
6. The Treatise called Jacke Upland, against Friers: and Chaucers A.B.C. called La Priere de nostre Dame, at this Impression added.
Taken together, these two lists offer would-be buyers and readers a number of reasons that they might turn to this particular edition of Chaucer. Some of the aids listed here, such as the translation of Latin and French phrases and the glossary of “old and obscure” terms, could potentially help any reader. But taken together, these title pages present “our most learned and ancient English poet” as a figure of biographical and genealogical interest, a source of proverbial wisdom, and a multilingual and intertextual writer. These themes are already present in the Thynne preface, but here it is clear that, in assuming these roles, Chaucer has been made into an object of scholarly labor: arguments are “gathered,” words are “explaned,” and difficulties are “opened,” even if, on close examination, the assertion that the “whole worke [is] by old Copies reformed” proves to be somewhat (and somewhat predictably, given the tendency toward hyperbole on early modern title pages) overstated.
Speght’s editions make especially visible the hybrid status that Chaucer acquired over the course of the sixteenth century: on the one hand, as a poet whose works are witty and wise, and who can be read for pleasure or for edification; on the other, as a figure from the increasingly distant English past, someone whose life and works require explanation and interpretation so that later readers can fully understand the importance of his contributions. Chaucer’s Works remain a book to be read, but they are also, increasingly, presented as texts requiring study and careful explication.
Chaucerian Genealogies
A striking, full-page engraving prepared for the 1598 edition of the Works visually demonstrates this dual approach to Chaucer (Figure 3). The artist, historian, and cartographer John Speed was best known for his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine and for the genealogical tables he contributed to the Authorized Version of the Bible, and was well connected in antiquarian circles.50 Speed’s engraving is significant in that it marks the first time a formal author portrait appeared in a printed edition of Chaucer’s writings (early editions of the Canterbury Tales depict the author/narrator on horseback), but it adds to that portrait a number of features that reflect Chaucer’s status as an object of antiquarian fascination. In form and in content, the engraving exemplifies the two distinct, though interrelated, ways of thinking about Chaucer that predominated at the close of the sixteenth century: one literary and laudatory, the other historical. Viewed through the literary lens, Chaucer is a great poet whose poetic achievements are said to transcend his historical moment in ways that allow Renaissance readers to feel particularly close to him. Viewed through the historical lens, Chaucer is of his moment, connected through family and marriage to a range of significant political figures. A tension between historical fixity and literary mobility lies at the heart of claims for Chaucer’s exceptional status, a point that the complex visual rhetoric of the engraving makes clear as it navigates between multiple schemata for periodizing Chaucer.
At the center of the image is a large, full-length portrait of Chaucer, modeled on that found in manuscripts of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes.51 The caption underneath identifies it as “the true portraiture of GEFFREY CHAUCER / the famous English poet, as by THOMAS OCCLEVE is described who lived in his time, and was his Scholar,” touting the picture as an authoritative and authorized image of the poet grounded in firsthand experience.52 In it, a rotund and goateed Chaucer, looking serious in a smock and wide-sleeved garment, holds a penner in his right hand and a string of rosary beads in his left.
Figure 3. “The Progenie of Geffrey Chaucer,” from The Workes of our Ancient and learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly Printed (1602); STC 5080. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
This portrait, which could have easily appeared in a fifteenth-century copy of Hoccleve’s poem, introduces familiar tropes of literary laureation, but it is the least elaborate aspect of Speed’s engraving. Directly below, Speed depicts the double tomb of Thomas and Maude (Matilda) Chaucer, Chaucer’s son and daughter-in-law, shown in situ at the Ewelme parish church. (Notably, Speed does not depict Chaucer’s own modest tomb in Westminster Abbey.)53 The tomb chest features some two dozen shields, representing not only Thomas and Maude’s direct ancestry, but the impressive number of baronial families to which the couple—though not Geoffrey Chaucer himself—was related by blood or marriage (the connections are mostly through Maude’s family or Philippa Chaucer, née Swynford).54 Speed has distorted perspective here to show three sides of the tomb and thus maximize the number of shields that can be illustrated; the arms appearing include those of John of Gaunt and Edward, 2nd Duke of York and the son of Edmund, 1st Duke of York. John of Gaunt and Edmund, Duke of York, are two of the key figures in the woodcut from Hall’s Chronicle used in the 1561 Works.
While the tomb occupies the space below the central portrait, an extensive genealogical diagram fills the space above and to the sides. Its circular medallions recall the medieval armorial roles that would have served as Speed’s sources and anticipate the genealogical tables that Speed would later produce for the Authorized Version of the Bible.55 Like the other elements of the engraving, the genealogy bristles with information, presented in a format widely used in antiquarian contexts.56 These elements not only speak to the new significance that Chaucer and his writings had taken on as objects of historic and antiquarian study by the turn of the seventeenth century but, considered along with the more conventional author portrait, also exemplify the dualism that is central to antiquarian responses to the medieval poet in this period.
This