The Poet and the Antiquaries. Megan L. Cook

literary works for which its subject is chiefly remembered.⁷⁸ Although the Life’s title page, like the title page of the Works as a whole, identifies its subject as a poet (see Figure 4), only two sections (“His Friends” and “His Books”) explicitly address the production of poetry. When specific works are invoked, it is often as sources for certain biographical details, as is the case with Chaucer’s connection with John of Gaunt, for which the Book of the Duchess is cited as evidence.

      Like Leland, Speght emphasizes Chaucer’s relation to institutions, individuals, and locations recognizable to latter-day readers, especially those with legal, antiquarian, or scholarly backgrounds. While Speght gives more attention than Leland to the linguistic and cultural differences between Chaucer’s day and his own historical moment, he also elaborates on the institutional framework in which Leland situated Chaucer. Now, instead of merely attending Oxford, in Speght’s account Chaucer studied “by all likelihood in Canterburie or in Merton Colledge with John Wyckelife, whose opinions in religion he much affected” a supposition that both derives from and reinforces previous claims for Chaucer’s proto-Protestantism.⁷⁹ (The reasons for and implications of this claim are explored in Chapter 3.) Now, instead of studying and working alongside Gower at the Inns of Court, Chaucer is installed in the Inner Temple where, Speght writes, he was arrested and fined for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street.⁸⁰ This anecdote, conveniently, ascribes to Chaucer both a social and religious disposition in line with that of many of his early modern admirers.

Figure 4. Interior title page for The Life of Our Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer from The Workes of our Antient and Learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly Printed (1598), sig. C1; STC 5079. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

      While both Leland and Speght are eager to connect past and present, Speght, in particular, also takes pains to show that relation as mediated. The Works as a whole makes prominent use of interpretive devices that convey a genealogical relationship between present and past. These include John Speed’s genealogical engraving and a full-page woodcut of Chaucer’s coat of arms, used as a title page in Stow’s 1561 edition and repurposed here as an interior title page.⁸¹ In the Life, Speght’s interest in Chaucer’s “progeny” leads him to take up the successful political career of Chaucer’s son Thomas (apparently unknown to Leland, Bale, and Foxe) and the rather spectacular trio of marriages undertaken by Thomas’s daughter Alice. Chaucer’s descendants are described narratively in the section of the Life entitled “His Progenie and Their Advancement” and in a full-page Latin stemma, accompanying this section, prepared by the herald Robert Glover (Figure 5). Like the John Speed engraving also prepared for this edition, Glover’s stemma is not centered on Chaucer, but rather on Thomas Chaucer and his wife Maude (Matilda), the couple whose tomb, decked with baronial arms, Speed also depicts. The point of the Glover stemma is to illustrate Chaucer’s familial connections to historically significant individuals, and not to celebrate his poetry, but it also provides essential context for a historical reading of that poetry.