Chaucer and his works with detail

Chaucer and his works with detail's
             The first great English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer lived in a turbulent period of war, plague, social revolt, religious heresy and murdered kings. But this society was also vibrant, creative and increasingly literate, a time of resurgence for the English language as a literary medium. The books and manuscripts of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries give us direct access to this vital culture. Whether workaday or gloriously illuminated, their pages offer fascinating glimpses of the late medieval world from which they came.
          
English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the unfinished work, The Canterbury Tales. It is considered one of the greatest poetic works in English.

His life 

Poet Geoffrey Chaucer was born circa 1340 in London, England. In 1357 he became a public servant to Countess Elizabeth of Ulster and continued in that capacity with the British court throughout his lifetime. The Canterbury Tales became his best known and most acclaimed work. He died October 25, 1400 in London, England, and was the first to be buried in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.

Major Works

The precise dates of many of Chaucer’s written works are difficult to pin down with certainty, but one thing is clear: His major works have retained their relevancy even in the college classroom of today.

Chaucer’s body of best-known works includes the Parliament of Fouls, otherwise known as the Parlement of Foules, in the Middle English spelling. Some historians of Chaucer’s work assert that it was written in 1380, during marriage negotiations between Richard and Anne of Bohemia. Critic J.A.W. Bennet interpreted the Parliament of Fouls as a study of Christian love. It had been identified as peppered with Neo-Platonic ideas inspired by the likes of poets Cicero and Jean De Meun, among others. The poem uses allegory, and incorporates elements of irony and satire as it points to the inauthentic quality of courtly love. Chaucer was well acquainted with the theme firsthand—during his service to the court and his marriage of convenience to a woman whose social standing served to elevate his own.

Chaucer is believed to have written the poem Troilus and Criseyde sometime in the mid-1380s. Troilus and Criseyde is a narrative poem that retells the tragic love story of Troilus and Criseyde in the context of the Trojan War. Chaucer wrote the poem using rime royal, a technique he originated. Rime royal involves rhyming stanzas consisting of seven lines apiece. 

Troilus and Criseyde is broadly considered one of Chaucer’s greatest works, and has a reputation for being more complete and self-contained than most of Chaucer’s writing, his famed The Canterbury Tales being no exception.

The period of time over which Chaucer penned The Legend of Good Women is uncertain, although most scholars do agree that Chaucer seems to have abandoned it before its completion. The queen mentioned in the work is believed to be Richard II’s wife, Anne of Bohemia. Chaucer’s mention of the real-life royal palaces Eltham and Sheen serve to support this theory. In writing The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer played with another new and innovative format: The poem comprises a series of shorter narratives, along with the use of iambic pentameter couplets (seen for the first time in English).

The Canterbury Tales is by far Chaucer’s best known and most acclaimed work. Initially Chaucer had planned for each of his characters to tell four stories a piece. The first two stories would be set as the character was on his/her way to Canterbury, and the second two were to take place as the character was heading home. Apparently, Chaucer’s goal of writing 120 stories was an overly ambitious one. In actuality, The Canterbury Tales is made up of only 24 tales and rather abruptly ends before its characters even make it to Canterbury. The tales are fragmented and varied in order, and scholars continue to debate whether the tales were published in their correct order. Despite its erratic qualities, The Canterbury Tales continues to be acknowledged for the beautiful rhythm of Chaucer’s language and his characteristic use of clever, satirical wit.

A Treatise on the Astrolabe is one of Chaucer’s nonfiction works. It is an essay about the astrolabe, a tool used by astronomers and explorers to locate the positions of the sun, moon and planets. Chaucer planned to write the essay in five parts but ultimately only completed the first two. Today it is one of the oldest surviving works that explain how to use a complex scientific tool, and is thought to do so with admirable clarity.

       Chaucer was not a professional writer, but a courtier and civil servant who successfully served three kings in a long and varied career. Born in about 1342 into a middle-class merchant family, by the age of seventeen he was placed as a page in the household of Prince Lionel, one of the sons of Edward III. In his company he fought in France in a campaign of the Hundred Years’ War. He subsequently served as a squire at court, attached to the household of John of Gaunt, another of Edward’s sons. During this period, he soldiered again in France, and travelled to Spain, France, and Italy. From 1374 to 1386 he was Controller of wool customs, and also involved in diplomatic and secret missions to France and Italy, for both Edward and his successor Richard II. He then served as a Member of Parliament for Kent, managing in 1388 to survive unscathed the undermining attacks on Richard II when many associates of the royal household were executed. Following Richard’s assertion to rule in 1389, Chaucer was appointed Clerk of the King’s Works, a difficult post that gave him responsibility for the construction and upkeep of several royal buildings. He either lost or relinquished this position in 1391, but was later given the sinecure of a subforestership. After years of an increasingly tyrannous rule, Richard II was deposed in 1399. The new king, Henry IV, confirmed and augmented the annuities originally granted to Chaucer by Richard, a great relief at a time when he was beset by money troubles. Chaucer died a year later, at about the age of sixty.

Although Chaucer’s official career is fairly easy to trace, little is known of him as a person and poet. His early lyrics and translations, such as The Romaunt of the Rose and the ABC, were grounded in the culture of the court. One of the expected accomplishments of any young courtier would have been an ability to produce love songs and poems for the amusement of an aristocratic audience. Medieval literary works were often composed for specific court patrons, and Chaucer’s first important poem, The Book of the Duchess, was written for John of Gaunt as a memorial for his wife. Many of Chaucer’s mature works would have been similarly written for and read out to a courtly audience. The poems themselves reveal more of Chaucer’s character than the official records. Hints such as the description of the author in The House of Fame, who sits at a book, ‘domb as any stoon’ and writes in his study until his head aches after he comes home from work, indicate something of his dedication to literature. That he was a keen observer of men is obvious from his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. A vivid microcosm of fourteenth-century society, its wide range of characters are so realistically drawn that they were surely inspired in part by Chaucer’s many varied experiences, his exposure to continental cultures and contact with different people from all levels of society throughout his career. Even if we feel ignorant as to what motivated him as an author, his surviving work is testament to the fact that he managed to write some of the greatest and most original poetry in the English language in spite of such a busy life.

Chaucer’s great achievement was to establish English as a major literary language, and his poetry has been loved for generations for its humanity and humour. But very few manuscripts of his works actually survive from the Fourteenth Century, and there are none that are in his hand or known to have been definitively corrected or authorised by him. Most of the texts we know today as being by Chaucer are based on posthumous copies of his work, and these may well have been subject to scribal editing and errors in their transmission from copy to copy. Many years of painstaking research by scholars in collating all the different versions of the early manuscripts results in the poems published in modern editions. We know from one poem to his scribe, Adam, that Chaucer was, in fact, anxious that his texts should be preserved as he wrote them and not corrupted by careless copying: he chides Adam for his ‘negligence’ and complains that he then has to ‘rub and scrape’ out his words to correct his mistakes.

Chaucer interesting facts...........

Geoffrey Chaucer traveled through France with the Royal Service in the early to mid-1360s.

King Edward Gave Geoffrey a pension of 20 marks for his service with the Royal Service.

Geoffrey married Philippa Roet in 1366. She was the daughter of Sir Payne Roet. The marriage helped Geoffrey's career.

In 1368 Geoffrey Chaucer became one of King Edward III's esquires. His position sent him on diplomatic missions, also giving him time to familiarize himself with the work of poets such as Petrarch and Dante.

Geoffrey Chaucer's passion for poetry grew as his career advanced. In 1385 he asked for a temporary leave. He lived in Kent for four years but still found little time to write as a Parliament member.

In 1387 Philippa died, and Geoffrey's financial situation became dire. It was Philippa's royal annuities that kept them living so well, and those annuities disappeared when she died. This meant Geoffrey had to work and could not devote himself to writing.

It is believed that Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fouls was written in 1380. It was a poem about courtly love and its inauthentic quality.

It is believed that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote Troilus and Criseyde in the mid-1830s, a poem about his character's tragic love story. This poem is considered by many to be one of his greatest works.

It is not known when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Legend of Good Women, a poem that was left unfinished.

Geoffrey Chaucer's work The Canterbury Tales was originally meant to be 120 stories long. It was only completed to 24 stories, and his characters did not make it to Canterbury at all. The work was never finished but is highly regarded in literature.

While working as Clerk of the Works Geoffrey was robbed twice, and he eventually gave up his position to work as the gardener in Somersetshire in the King's park.

Geoffrey Chaucer's major works include Roman de la Rose, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, Anelida and Arcite, Parliament of Foules, Boece, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, The Canterbury Tales, and A Treatise on the Astrolabe.

Geoffrey Chaucer died on October 25th, 1400 in London, at the age of 60. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Geoffrey Chaucer's gravestone became the first of what would be called Poet's Corner in the abbey. Thanks regards http://literaturegroup4u.blogspot.com