The Poet and the Antiquaries. Megan L. Cook

at the end of the sixteenth century, it served as the basis for the first full-fledged English-language biography of Chaucer. First published in the 1598 edition of Chaucer’s Works, the Life of Our Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer includes sections on Chaucer’s origins, education, marriage and children, and professional activities, as well as a discussion of his poetic accomplishments and influence.⁶⁸ Written by Thomas Speght, who was also responsible for most of the other explanatory materials added to this edition, the treatise supplements material that originated with Leland with references to popular scholarly works like William Camden’s Britannia and archival materials provided by the antiquarian John Stow who, Speght writes, “helped me in many things.”⁶⁹ Though De Viris Illustribus was not Speght’s only source, it was his main one, and he agrees with his predecessor on all major points.

      Speght appears to have known Leland’s writings through the work of the antiquary’s friend and literary executor John Bale. Although Bale is perhaps best remembered today for his dramatic writings, his activities as a radical Protestant polemicist extended from the stage to the more sedate world of scholarly publishing. His Illustrium Majoris Britanniae Scriptorum (1549, revised 1557) is a massive compendium of biobibliographical data intercalated with accounts of papal and European history. Leland’s De Viris Illustribus forms the nucleus of this Latin work, which Bale initially compiled while in exile during the 1540s and extensively revised and expanded for its second publication in 1557. Bale’s presentation of literary history as salvation history played a crucial role in the reimagination of the medieval past in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction and dispersal of medieval textual culture.⁷⁰ These printed books provided a vehicle through which Leland’s writings on Chaucer might reach a broader audience than that of De Viris Illustribus, although Leland’s manuscripts continued to circulate in antiquarian networks. Bale readily acknowledges his reliance on Leland, and when Speght cites material taken from Illustrium Majoris Britanniae Scriptorum, he names Leland, not Bale, as his ultimate source.⁷¹

      In tone, form, and content, Speght’s Life of Chaucer is a celebration of the medieval poet. It demonstrates how, by the end of the sixteenth century, Chaucer was “established as an important father for English history: a suitable object of veneration and recuperation for a nationalist humanism seeking to rival the Italian discovery of the Latinate past as an antecedent for its contemporary poetics.”⁷² Indeed, it shows that Chaucer had become a father for English history in a general sense, a figure whose importance was not limited to literary discourse but who signified meaningfully in nationalist narratives about the development of English cultural identity on multiple fronts.

      At first glance, Speght’s account, with its use of multiple outside sources, seems markedly more scholarly than Leland’s. Whereas Leland’s assertions about Chaucer’s biography are not backed with any evidential claims, Speght cites a variety of secondary archival and historiographical sources. In the 1598 version of the Life, for example, Speght’s discussion of the source and antiquity of the Chaucer family coat of arms includes references to “the opinion of some Heralds,” historical facts that “as by Chronicles appeareth,” “the Records of the Tower,” “the Records of the Exchequer,” and “the Roll at Battle Abbey.”⁷³ At times throughout the Life, Speght cites specific locations within the patent rolls and quotes from them at length; these are the same sources cited by the modern Chaucer Life-Records.⁷⁴ Bolstered by references like these, Chaucer’s life appears as a matter of historical fact, whose details have been recovered through assiduous archival research.

      In other ways, however, Speght’s biography is much like Leland’s, especially in its willingness to treat Chaucer’s words themselves as a historical source. Like Leland in De Viris Illustribus, Speght takes a dominant idea from the Chaucerian tradition—specifically, the notion that there is something fundamentally English about Chaucer’s language—and expounds on it in a scholarly way. The result is a body of commentary, separate from Chaucer’s writing, that models a specific way of reading and judging the Chaucerian text. In the Life, for example, Speght uses Chaucer’s language to rebut historical sources that (correctly) indicate that Chaucer’s progenitors were comparatively recent arrivals in England. Speght invokes the purity of Chaucer’s language to argue for both the antiquity and status of Chaucer’s family:

      But wheras some are of opinion, that the first coming of the Chaucers in England was, when Queene Isabell wife to Edward the second, and her sonne Prince Edward with Philip his new married wife, returned out of Henault into England, at which time also almost three thousand Straunger came over with them (as by Chronicles appeareth) I can by no meanes consent with them; but rather must thinke, that their name and familie was of farre more auncient antiquitie, although by time decayed, as many more have been of much greater estate: and that the parents of Geffrey Chaucer were meere English, and he himselfe an Englishman borne. For els how could he have come to that perfection in our language, as to be called, The first illuminer of the English tongue, had not both he, and his parents before him, been born & bred among us.⁷⁵

      In this passage, beliefs about Chaucer’s contribution to the English language trump the testimony of the chronicles. If the chronicles place his ancestors on English soil later than Speght feels is appropriate for the progenitors of the “first illuminer of the English tongue,” then the chronicles, not Chaucer’s reputation, must be inaccurate. Chaucer’s words do more than simply ensure his reputation: they become the evidence upon which the Life justifies its claims for Chaucer’s biography. Even though Speght has already noted that Chaucer’s family were vintners, he cannot divorce his assessment of their social standing from his perception of Chaucer as a national poet with a special relationship to the English language.

      For Speght, language can also function as a guarantor of authenticity in Chaucer’s writings. In the “His Bookes” section of the Life, Speght lists the titles of books he believes were written by Chaucer but that are “besides those books of his which he have in print.”⁷⁶ In this same section, Speght writes of poems that “I have seene without any Authours name, which for the invention I would verily judge to be Chaucers, were it not that wordes and phrases carry not every where Chaucers antiquitie.” Here, Speght makes a judgment based not on the apparent age of the manuscript or the contents of the verse, but on “wordes and phrases” that carry (or fail to carry, in this instance) evidence of “Chaucers antiquitie.” As Leland’s emphasis on Chaucer’s lexis reminds us, “wordes and phrases” are exactly what Chaucer’s early modern reputation is based upon. In Speght, as in Leland’s earlier work, the same criteria used in aesthetic valuations of Chaucer are applied to the ostensibly more objective task of assembling an accurate canon.

      Like Leland before him, Speght drew heavily on Chaucer’s own writings when constructing his biography of the poet. Because the Chaucer canon that Speght knew included numerous apocryphal works, this strategy can sometimes backfire. For example, Speght correctly asserts that Chaucer was born in London. He does so, however, based on statements made in the Testament of Love, a Boethian allegory in prose written by Londoner Thomas Usk in the 1380s. The Testament of Love was first printed in the 1532 edition of the Works, and generally accepted as Chaucer’s own until the eighteenth century. The Testament may also be behind Speght’s claim that Chaucer fell into “some daunger & trouble” during the earlier years of the reign of Richard II, “by favoring some rashe attempte of the common people” and that, because “as he was learned, so was he wise,” he “kept himself much out of the way in Holland, Zeland [sic] and France, where he wrote most of his books.”⁷⁷ While the Chaucer Life-Records contains no support for such a claim, the speaker in the Testament of Love writes from prison, in a position of great personal and political distress, such as might necessitate a self-imposed exile (in fact, Usk was executed on March 4, 1388, for his role as an informant in conspiracies concerning the election of the Lord Mayor of London). In the absence of other biographical material, this may have been enough to lead Speght to conjecture that Chaucer left England for a time. In the case of both Chaucer’s London origins and his putative exile, Speght reports traces of what might be construed as biographical disclosure in Chaucer’s canon as though they were