Chaucer’s primacy is bolstered by the fact that his language still seems at least recognizable to modern readers, though this familiarity is a result of the happy accident that the Southeast Midlands dialect spoken by Chaucer was the same language as that of the court’s administration. The stability of London as the capital city meant that modern English has most in common with this dialect of Middle English, rendering Chaucer’s language relatively familiar. The language of the Gawain poet, by contrast, seems far more alien, with different dialectal inflectional forms and a far more specialized and regional vocabulary. Chaucer’s own consciousness of dialect variation (in the Reeve’s Tale) and differences in regional poetic styles (in the Parson’s Prologue) play no small part in this sense that his language represents a kind of “norm” for English.
Nevertheless, Simon Horobin advises us not to make too many assumptions about the similarities and continuities between Chaucer’s language and our own: in syntax, semantics and vocabulary there are still many important structural differences.8 On the question of whether Chaucer invented poetic language in English, he did introduce a number of new words (according to J.D. Burnley, Chaucer’s vocabulary was approximately twice as large as Gower’s),9 though Horobin advises caution here, too: “it is important that we do not treat all French words used by Chaucer as of equivalent status.”10 For example, one of Chaucer’s linguistic traits involved moving words from legal or political discourse into other contexts, so while the word may not be “new,” it appears so in this unfamiliar setting. This is particularly the case in what is termed Chaucer’s “high style,” which is characterized by words that stand out stylistically and draw attention to themselves.11
This is one of the areas in which Chaucer’s poetic language was more distinctive, and indeed when his successors praised his innovations, it was often in terms of this more elevated, “laureate” and adorned style, though now we would prefer to praise the subtle and fluid movements between different styles in his work.
Recent work on the linguistic context of fourteenth‐century England also emphasizes its multicultural nature, and many of these words would still have been experienced as borrowings. For Butterfield, for example, there were two vernacular languages in late medieval England: English and French. She also reminds us of the distinction between continental French and Anglo‐French,12 which was still the dominant language of the English court in the fourteenth century. There is only limited evidence to suggest that the Ricardian court embraced this new English poetic tradition; and indeed, Christopher Cannon suggests that in Chaucer’s time, “the use of English in literature remained rebellious, even if not politically charged,” through its associations with the Wycliffite movement promoting English religious literacy, and the use of English in some political and legal contexts.13 Moreover, it has been suggested that poetry in English was really taken up in even a semi‐official way only by the Lancastrians under Henry IV, and more particularly by Henry V, well after the death of Chaucer in 1400.14
We can confidently “bust” this myth, then. Chaucer was far from the first English poet, and while his own poetic followers were quick to applaud and praise his originality, his apparent primacy in this regard is the effect of much larger historical forces and critical desires.
Notes
1 1 Bede, An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume A: The Middle Ages, ed. James Simpson and Alfred David, 9th edn. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 30–31.
2 2 Christopher Cannon , Middle English Literature: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 39.
3 3 James Wimsatt, Chaucer and the Poems of “Ch” (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), 12–14.
4 4 Marion Turner , Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 128.
5 5 Ibid., 129.
6 6 Ardis Butterfield , The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in The Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11.
7 7 Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, 330.
8 8 Simon Horobin , Chaucer’s Language , 2nd edn. (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2.
9 9 David Burnley, A Guide to Chaucer’s Language (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1983), 133.
10 10 Horobin, Chaucer’s Language, 83.
11 11 Ibid., 128.
12 12 Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy, 11.
13 13 Cannon, Middle English Literature, 70.
14 14 John H. Fisher , “A Language Policy for Lancastrian England,” PMLA 107, no. 5 (1992), 1168–80.
Myth 3
CHAUCER SUFFERED AN UNREQUITED LOVE
The idea that youthful poets should be inspired by love, and preferably the unrequited love of a beautiful, unavailable noblewoman, is of very long standing in the West. It is a tradition that goes back to Catullus and it features in the poetry of Dante, and the sonnet cycles of Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare. Chaucer certainly presents himself as unlucky or unhappy in love, especially early in his career, in dream‐vision poems such as The Book of the Duchess and The Parlement of Foules.1 In the mid‐career Troilus and Criseyde, the fiction of personal unhappiness has been displaced by a general sense of his “unlikynesse” in love (I. 16). If he is an unsuitable candidate for love, he argues, he may nevertheless serve love’s devotees by writing their stories and providing a vocabulary and narratives for love. In this poem, Chaucer passes the role of slightly comical unrequited lover on to Criseyde’s uncle Pandarus, whose own desire seems to be displaced onto the sexual union of the younger lovers.
These poems about love voiced through the misery and self‐deprecating humor of the unhappy, unrequited lover give psychological depth and dramatic tension to the idea of desire in the psychoanalytic sense: desire that desires nothing more than to perpetuate its own state. As Chaucer writes mockingly in the poem “To Rosamounde,” “I brenne ay in an amorous pleasance” (l.22). The continuation of such pleasant desire comes to constitute an argument for