Leland himself recognizes the mediated nature of these tributes. He writes that he wishes “our language [that is, English] were known to the Latin poets; then they would easily—I say easily—accede to my opinion [of Chaucer]. But since what I want is scarcely possible, I wish at least that having been prevailed upon they would have some faith in me as a lover of Latin literature in this matter.”63 While it is difficult to say whether the Latin poets that Leland has in mind are ancient or his sixteenth-century contemporaries, his comment suggests that both a linguistic gap and a historical gap separate the medieval poet from those best able to appreciate his works.
The first poem presented by Leland, a short epigram, sets three pairs of poet and place in relation to one another:
Praedicat Aligerum merito Florentia Dantem,
Italia et numeros tota Petrarche tuos;
Anglia Chaucerum veneratur nostra poetam,
Cui veneres debet patria lingua suas.
(Florence rightly trumpets Dante Alighieri
And all Italy your verses [numeros], Petrarch;
Our England reveres the poet Chaucer,
To whom our native tongue owes its beauties.)
Here, Leland transposes Chaucer’s achievements in language from the individual to the collective realm. (Chaucer never claims to be a national poet, so later writers must make this connection posthumously, beginning with Lydgate’s interpellation of his predecessor as the “chiefe Poet of Britaine.”) The verb (veneratur) indicates that “our England” (anglia … nostra) the subject, is in the present, but it and Chaucer share a “native tongue” (patria lingua) as do Dante and Florence and Petrarch and Italy. Although Leland’s aim here is to increase Chaucer’s poetic reputation among Latinate readers, he also articulates a significant connection in the form of a language shared between English-speaking collectivities in the present and Chaucer himself, making the poet a focal point not only for England’s literary reputation among readers of Latin, regardless of nationality, but also establishing him as the founding figure of an English-language tradition that carries on into the present.
The second poem opens with an allusion to Virgil’s Eclogues, comparing poetic fame to the natural affinity of animals to their native habitats:
As long as the boar love the mountain ridges, the merry bird the branches,
And the scaly fish the limpid waters,
Homer, the most renowned author of the Greek tongue,
Will always be first in Aonian song.
So, too, will Virgil always be the greatest glory of the Roman muse,
If Apollo himself is the judge.
No less will our Geoffrey Chaucer always be
The fairest ornament of the British lyre.
The former, of course, were born in fortunate times,
Yet the latter, great as he was, was born at a barbarous hour.
If he had lived when the muses flourished,
He would have equaled or surpassed his famous predecessors.64
Like the epigram that proceeds it, this poem links Chaucer with a larger, transhistorical collectivity: comparing the enduring fame of Homer (whom Leland refers to here as Maeonides) and Virgil to these natural affinities, Leland writes that “Nec minus et noster Galfridus summa Britannae / Chaucerus citharae gratia semper erit” (No less will our Geoffrey Chaucer always be / The fairest ornament of the British lyre). Whereas the first poem compares Chaucer with his contemporaries, this poem uses classical writers. This second juxtaposition suggests a kind of translatio imperii that links England with ancient Greece and Rome through the shared greatness of their principal poets, but also reminds readers of Chaucer’s belated historical moment. In a passage that resonates strongly with the preface to the 1532 Works, Leland concedes that Homer and Virgil were, “of course, were born in fortunate times,” yet Chaucer, “great as he was, was born at a barbarous hour.” Had he “lived when the muses flourished,” Leland writes, Chaucer “would have equaled or surpassed his famous predecessors.” As elsewhere in De Viris Illustribus, the temporal infelicity of medieval writing is used to explain away any unfavorable comparisons between Chaucer and his classical antecedents. Chaucer might be a vernacular poet living in Leland’s Latinate world, but, according to the poem, his significance, like Homer’s and Virgil’s, will always endure. Emphasizing this point, each of the three couplets describing the individual poet’s fame ends with the same phrase—semper erit, always will be.
In his third and final poem, Leland articulates more directly the notion of translatio linguae implied in the previous piece.65 Just as translatio studii, the transmission of learning, is linked to translatio imperii, the movement of imperial power from East to West, so too Leland suggests that excellence in learning is naturally accompanied by excellence in language itself. The poem, the longest of the three, describes the development of the Greek language, then that of Latin, before turning to the role of “eloquent Chaucer” who was
The first in proper conciseness
Who cast our native language into such a form,
That it might shine with much beauty and charm,
With much wit and grace,
Like Hesperus among the lesser stars;
And yet did not arrogantly reproach
Any other language for barbarity.66
In the lines before this passage, Leland attributes the improvement of the Greek language to “Atticus” and the Latin tongue to “Quirinius” (another name for Romulus).67 Although both figures are allegorical rather than historical, Leland fits Chaucer into their company as naturally as he does that of Dante and Petrarch. The invocation of Chaucer in their presence puts forth a different view of the poet than that offered by either of the two preceding pieces. In their company, Chaucer assumes a mythic status closer to that of the Druids and Arthurian figures found in the early entries in De Viris Illustribus than to the Italian poets mentioned in the first poem, or even Homer and Virgil in the second. Here, Chaucer’s role is as a founder of language in the most abstract sense. While this contrasts with Leland’s interest in the particulars of Chaucer’s life (his education at Oxford, his burial in Westminster), it is also a logical extension of his claims for Chaucer’s significance as a poet whose work both elevates literature within English and raises the status of the English language in a transhistorical and interlinguistic framework.
All three poems celebrate Chaucer’s poetic and aesthetic value, but that value is always understood in relation to a shared intellectual tradition and national identity. Rather than echo earlier poets who present Chaucer’s writings as the apex of English poetry, Leland’s poems transform him into a foundational figure whose importance is best understood not in terms of individual poetic genius but in terms of his linguistic (and therefore national and even imperial) significance. As a result of this emphasis on Chaucer’s foundational status rather than his ongoing influence, there is a new sense of distance here. In this last poem, in particular, we see a burgeoning sense of Chaucer as a revered ancestor rather than the recently deceased kinsman lamented by Hoccleve and Lydgate.
Thomas Speght’s Life of