The material that surrounds the portrait, by contrast, situates Chaucer in a specific historical moment and represents his historical existence as part of a genealogy that is not at all dependent upon his poetic accomplishments. Although the heading at the top of the frame reads “The Progenie of Geoffrey Chaucer,” it is Chaucer’s father-in-law, “Payne Roet Knight,” who sits atop the family tree. Paon de Roet (or Roelt, Ruet) was a knight from the Low Countries who came to England in the service of Edward III and who was father not only to Chaucer’s wife Philippa (identified here merely as “The Daughter of Payne Roet”) but also to Katherine Swynford, the mistress and later wife of John of Gaunt.61 As the left side of Speed’s engraving illustrates, through this family connection, Chaucer can be linked to several major figures in fifteenth-century history, including both Henry IV and Henry V. The right-hand margin shows Chaucer’s line of descent via his son Thomas, a successful politician in his own right. Thomas Chaucer’s only child, Alice, acquired prodigious amounts of wealth and power through a series of impressive marriages; the third and last, to William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, resulted in a son, John. John was the father of Edmund de la Pole, the Yorkist pretender to the throne executed by Henry VIII in 1513. Speed thus links Chaucer with the houses of both York and Lancaster and, through them, to networks of power and institutions that continued to shape the world in which Speed’s audience lived and read. This is not so much a poetic tribute as a history lesson.
Taken as a whole, Speed’s engraving brings together praise of Chaucer as a posthumous but sacrosanct literary figure with a sense that he is, as Helen Cooper writes, “embedded in the great tradition of the nation in part by his close incorporation into the royal and aristocratic history of England.”62 Importantly, this connection is not limited to Chaucer’s own lifetime, nor does it only look backward to the classical inheritance (a move that ultimately contemporizes Chaucer for later readers who were themselves ardent students of the Greek and Roman past). Instead, as the genealogies remind us, Chaucer’s legacy extends directly to the sixteenth century, which will see “the comparison of him to the great classical authors in the Works, the patronage of Henry VIII, the tussle to claim him for each religion, the triumph of his misidentification as a forerunner of English Protestantism, and the erection of his tomb close to those of England’s monarchs.”63 All these various claims for Chaucer’s lasting import find support in the genealogical framework that Speed provides.
Like the conventions of Chaucer’s literary reception, which venerate him as the author Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales while largely ignoring texts like the Legend of Good Women, both the portrait and the genealogy that surrounds it are selective, and this encodes a series of value judgments: the stemma depicts only those branches of the family tree that afford Chaucer the most impressive and politically significant connections, and while Speed emphasizes the authority of the portrait by associating it with a named author who lived in Chaucer’s time, he calls Hoccleve a “scholar” rather than identifying him as a poet in his own right. In both poetic and historical registers, Chaucer appears sui generis, without any representation of his own poetic influences or (relatively modest) parentage. At each of its many levels, the Speed engraving offers a visual example of the representational choices consistently made when presenting Chaucer to early modern audiences. These choices, in both the engraving and in the larger context of the Works and related commentary, maximize Chaucer’s status and importance not just to literary history but to English nationalism at large.
Antiquarian Readers and the Middle English Past
Although antiquarian readers like Thynne, Stow, and Speght made up only a small part of Chaucer’s early modern readership, they played a disproportionately significant role in defining the medieval poet’s reputation and constructing his canon. As a result of their work with medieval materials, antiquarians were probably among the best-equipped readers of Chaucer’s Middle English in early modern England. The average reader of the Works and other printed copies of Middle English verse must have lacked the linguistic facility of an aficionado like John Stow, but the assumption still seems to have been that she or he could read, admire, and appreciate the language of earlier poetry. Indeed, the increasingly palpable antiquity of Middle English could even be a selling point.
This attitude is not limited to Chaucer. Introducing his 1532 edition of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, the printer Thomas Berthelette praises the poem’s “olde englysshe wordes and vulgars [that] no wyse man / bycause of theyr antiquite / wyll throwe asyde.”64 He juxtaposes Gower’s language with “newe termes” that “wryters of later dayes” borrow from foreign languages. Such unfamiliar terms, he writes, impede readers’ understanding since “they that understode not those langages / from whens these newe vulgars are sette / coude not perceyve theyr wrytynges.” The implication seems to be that Gower’s poetry can provide a suitable alternative to this unnecessary borrowing by offering a stock of novel, but still English, words.65 Robert Braham, in his epistle to the reader in Thomas Marshe’s 1555 edition of Lydgate’s Troy Book, complains at length about the errors in the text introduced by earlier scribes and printers (of Pynson’s 1513 edition, he grumbles that “bothe the prynter and correctour, neyther of them as it shoulde seme [were] eyther learned or understandynge englishe”), but presumes that, once the text has been emended, readers will recognize Lydgate as one who “may worthyly be numbred amongest those that have chefelye deserved of our tynge,” the “verye perfect disciple and imitator of the great Chaucer.”66 Robert Crowley, introducing his 1550 edition of Piers Plowman, faces a more difficult task, since the alliterative vocabulary of Langland’s poem differs much more starkly from sixteenth-century English than Chaucer’s or Lydgate’s language. Yet even he assures readers that “the Englishe is according to the time it was written in, and the sence somewhat darcke, but not so harde, but that it may be understande of suche as will not sticke to breake the shell of the nutte for the kernelles sake.”67 In each case, the commentator acknowledges the difficulty or historical distance of the text he introduces but also articulates a confidence that the sixteenth-century reader will be able to navigate the intricacies of Middle English verse.
This combined sense of connection and distance is also on display in Speght’s 1598 Chaucer, the full title of which is The Workes of Our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, as well as in the revised 1602 edition that follows. Speght’s title marks Chaucer as a specifically English poet, but he is also, for the first time, “antient.” Taken together, “antient,” “learned,” and “English” suggest a native author as sophisticated and rich as Latin and Greek classics. This dynamic finds novel lexicographical expression in the form of the glossary. Glossaries, like genealogies of the sort offered in the Speed engraving, provide a path linking an archaic term (or ancestor) with its contemporary equivalent (or descendant).