Geoffrey Chaucer
The Father of English Literature · c. 1343 CE, London, England - 1400 CE, London, England
Author of The Canterbury Tales, the masterpiece that established English as a legitimate literary language. A diplomat, customs official, and courtier as well as a poet, Chaucer drew on French and Italian literary traditions to create a vivid panorama of medieval English society in all its variety.
Life and legacy
Chaucer was born into a prosperous London wine-merchant family and spent his career in royal service. As a young man he served as a page in the household of the Countess of Ulster, and later became a squire, diplomat, and customs controller for the port of London. His diplomatic missions took him to France, Spain, and, crucially, to Italy in 1372-73 and 1378, where he encountered the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. These Italian masters profoundly influenced his literary development.
Chaucer's early works, including The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls, showed the influence of French dream-vision poetry. His middle period produced Troilus and Criseyde, a sophisticated retelling of a classical love story set against the Trojan War, adapted from Boccaccio's Il Filostrato. It is sometimes called the first great English novel for its psychological depth and narrative complexity. The poem reveals Chaucer's growing mastery of characterization and his ability to blend humor, pathos, and philosophical reflection.
The Canterbury Tales, begun around 1387 and left unfinished at his death, is Chaucer's supreme achievement. The frame story follows a group of pilgrims traveling from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The pilgrims represent a cross-section of medieval English society, from the noble Knight to the bawdy Wife of Bath, from the corrupt Pardoner to the idealized Parson. Each pilgrim tells a tale that reflects their character and station, creating an extraordinary variety of genres: romance, fabliau, sermon, saint's life, and beast fable.
What makes The Canterbury Tales revolutionary is not just its literary range but its humanism. Chaucer observes his characters with an ironic but affectionate eye, giving even the most flawed pilgrims a complexity and humanity that was new in English literature. The Wife of Bath's Prologue, in which she defends her five marriages with a mixture of biblical exegesis and earthy common sense, is one of the great character studies in all of literature. The General Prologue's portraits of the pilgrims remain unsurpassed as social observation.
Chaucer wrote in Middle English at a time when French and Latin were still the prestige languages of England's court and church. By proving that English could sustain the highest literary ambitions, he did for English roughly what Dante did for Italian. He died in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first writer interred in what became Poets' Corner. His influence on subsequent English literature, from Spenser to Shakespeare to the novel tradition, is incalculable.
Key accomplishments
- Wrote The Canterbury Tales, a panoramic masterpiece of medieval English literature
- Composed Troilus and Criseyde, sometimes called the first great English novel
- Established Middle English as a serious literary language, paving the way for all subsequent English literature
- Served as a diplomat, customs controller, and courtier, drawing on wide life experience for his writing
- First writer buried in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey
Quotes
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote.
The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, opening lines (c. 1387)
Time and tide wait for no man.
Attributed, paraphrased from various Chaucer works