The reference to the Lyf of Seynt Cecyle in the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women gives external proof that Chaucer included earlier work in the scheme of the Canterbury Tales, and mention has been made of other stories which are indisputably early. In the absence of any such metrical tests as have proved useful in the case of Shakespeare, the dates at which several of the Tales were composed remain doubtful, while in the case of at least two, the Clerk’s tale of Grisilde and the Monk’s tragedies, there is evidence of early work being revised and supplemented. It is fortunately impossible to separate the prologue to the charmingly told story of “yonge Hugh of Lincoln” from the tale itself, and with the “quod sche” in the second line as proof that Chaucer was here writing specially for his Prioress we are forbidden to limit the new stories to any one metre or tone. There can be no doubt, however, that what may be called the Tales of the Churls (Miller, Reeve, Summoner, Friar, &c.), and the conversational outpourings of the Pardoner and Wife of Bath, form, with the immortal Prologue, the most important and distinctive additions to the older work. In these, and in the Pardoner’s story of Death and the Three Revellers, and the Nun’s Priest’s masterly handling of the fable of the Cock and Fox, both of them free from the grossness which marks the others, Chaucer takes stories which could have been told in a short page of prose and elaborates them with all the skill in narration which he had sedulously cultivated. The conjugal reminiscences of the Wife of Bath and the Reeve’s Tale with its abominable climax (lightened a little by Aleyn’s farewell, lines 316-319) are among the great things in Chaucer, as surely as Troilus, and Palamon and Arcyte and the Prologue. They help notably to give him the width of range which may certainly be claimed for him.

In or soon after 1391 Chaucer wrote in prose for an eleven-year-old reader, whom he addresses as “Litel Lowis my son,” a treatise on the use of the Astrolabe, its short prologue being the prettiest specimen of his prose. The wearisome tale of “Melibee and his wyf Prudence,” which was perhaps as much admired in English as it had been in Latin and French, may have been translated at any time. The sermon on Penitence, used as the Parson’s Tale, was probably the work of his old age. “Envoys” to his friends Scogan and Bukton, a translation of some balades by Sir Otes de Granson, and the Compleynt to his Purs complete the record of his minor poetry. We have his own statement that in his youth he had written many Balades, Roundels and Virelayes in honour of Love, and the two songs embedded respectively in the Parlement of Foules and the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women are charming and musical. His extant shorter poems, however, whether early or late, offer no excuse for claiming high rank for him as a lyrist. He had very little sheer singing power, and though there are fine lines in his short poems, witness the famous “Flee fro the prees and dwell with soothfastnesse,” they lack the sustained concentration of great work. From the drama, again, Chaucer was cut off, and it is idle to argue from the innumerable dramatic touches in his poems and his gift of characterization as to what he might have done had he lived two centuries later. His own age delighted in stories, and he gave it the stories it demanded invested with a humanity, a grace and strength which place him among the world’s greatest narrative poets, and which bring the England of his own day, with all the colour and warmth of life, wonderfully near to all his readers.

The part played by Chaucer in the development of the English language has often been overrated. He neither corrupted it, as used to be said, by introducing French words which Influence. it would otherwise have avoided, nor bore any such part in fixing it as was afterwards played by the translators of the Bible. When he was growing up educated society in England was still bilingual, and the changes in vocabulary and pronunciation which took place during his life were the natural results of a society, which had been bilingual with a bias towards French, giving an exclusive preference to English. The practical identity of Chaucer’s language with that of Gower shows that both merely used the best English of their day with the care and slightly conservative tendency which befitted poets. Chaucer’s service to the English language lies in his decisive success having made it impossible for any later English poet to attain fame, as Gower had done, by writing alternatively in Latin and French. The claim which should be made for him is that, at least as regards poetry, he proved that English was “sufficient.”

Chaucer borrowed both his stanza forms and his “decasyllabic” couplets (mostly with an extra syllable at the end of the line) from Guillaume Machault, and his music, like that of his French master and his successors, depends very largely on assigning to every syllable its full value, and more especially on the due pronunciation of the final -e. The slower movement of change in Scotland allowed time for Chaucer to exercise a potent influence on Scottish poetry, but in England this final -e, to which most of the earlier grammatical forms by Chaucer’s time had been reduced, itself fell rapidly into disuse during the 15th century, and a serious barrier was thus raised to the appreciation of the artistic value of his verse. His disciples, Hoccleve and Lydgate, who at first had caught some echoes of his rhythms, gradually yielded to the change in pronunciation, so that there was no living tradition to hand down his secret, while successive copyists reduced his text to a state in which it was only by accident that lines could be scanned correctly. For fully three centuries his reputation was sustained solely by his narrative power, his warmest panegyrists betraying no consciousness that they were praising one of the greatest technical masters of poetry. Even when thus maimed, however, his works found readers and lovers in every generation, and every improvement in his text has set his fame on a surer basis.

Bibliography.—The Canterbury Tales have always been Chaucer’s most popular work, and, including fragments, upwards of sixty 15th-century manuscripts of it still survive. Two thin volumes of his minor poems were among the little quartos which Caxton printed by way of advertisement immediately on his return to England; the Canterbury Tales and Boethius followed in 1478, Troilus and a second edition of the Tales in 1483, the Hous of Fame in 1484. The Canterbury Tales were subsequently printed in 1492 (Pynson), 1498 (de Worde) and 1526 (Pynson); Troilus in 1517 (de Worde) and 1526 (Pynson); the Hous of Fame in 1526 (Pynson); the Parlement of Foules in 1526 (Pynson) and 1530 (de Worde), and the Mars, “Venus” and Envoy to Bukton by Julyan Notary about 1500. Pynson’s three issues in 1526 almost amounted to a collected edition, but the first to which the title The Workes of Geffray Chaucer was given was that edited by William Thynne in 1532 for Thomas Godfray. Of this there was a new edition in 1542 for John Reynes and William Bonham, and an undated reprint a few years later for Bonham, Kele, Petit and Toye, each of whom put his name on part of the edition. In 1561 a reprint, with numerous additions, edited by John Stowe, was printed by J. Kyngston for J. Wight, and this was re-edited, with fresh additions by Thomas Speght, in 1598 for G. Bishop and again in 1602 for Adam Islip. In 1687 there was an anonymous reprint, and in 1721 John Urry produced the last and worst of the folios. By this time the paraphrasers were already at work, Dryden rewriting the tales of the Knight, the Nun’s Priest and the Wife of Bath, and Pope the Merchant’s. In 1737 (reprinted in 1740) the Prologue and Knight’s Tale were edited (anonymously) by Thomas Morell “from the most authentic manuscripts,” and here, though by dint of much violence and with many mistakes, Chaucer’s lines were for the first time in print given in a form in which they could be scanned. This promise of better things (Morell still thought it necessary to accompany his text with the paraphrases by Betterton and Dryden) was fulfilled by a fine edition of the Canterbury Tales (1775-1778), in which Thomas Tyrwhitt’s scholarly instincts produced a comparatively good text from second-rate manuscripts and accompanied it with valuable illustrative notes. The next edition of any importance was that edited by Thomas Wright for the Percy Society in 1848-1851, based on the erratic but valuable British Museum manuscript Harley 7334, containing readings which must be either Chaucer’s second thoughts or the emendations of a brilliantly clever scribe. In 1866 Richard Morris re-edited this text in a more scholarly manner for the Aldine edition of the British Poets, and in the following year produced for the Clarendon Press Series a school edition of the Prologue and Tales of the Knight and Nun’s Priest, edited with the fulness and care previously bestowed only on Greek and Latin classics.

In 1868 the foundation of the Chaucer Society, with Dr Furnivall as its director and chief worker, and Henry Bradshaw as a leading spirit, led to the publication of a six-text edition of the Canterbury Tales, and the consequent discovery that a manuscript belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere, though undoubtedly “edited,” contained the best available text. The Chaucer Society also printed the best manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde and of all the minor poems, and thus cleared the way for the “Oxford” Chaucer, edited by Professor Skeat, with a wealth of annotation, for the Clarendon Press in 1894, the text of which was used for the splendid folio printed two years later by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, with illustrations by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. A supplementary volume of the Oxford edition, entitled Chaucerian and other Pieces, issued by Professor Skeat in 1897, contains the prose and verse which his early publishers and editors, from Pynson and Thynne onwards, included among his Works by way of illustration, but which had gradually come to be regarded as forming part of his text. The reasons for their rejection are fully stated by Professor Skeat in the work named and also in The Chaucer Canon (1900). Many of these pieces have now been traced to other authors, and their exclusion has helped to clear not only Chaucer’s text but also his biography, which used (as in the “Life” published by William Godwin in two quarto volumes in 1803) to be encumbered with inferences from works now known not to be Chaucer’s, notably the Testament of Love written by Thomas Usk. All information about Chaucer’s life available in 1900 will be found summarized by Mr R.E.G. Kirk in Life-Records of Chaucer, part iv., published by the Chaucer Society in that year. See also Chaucer; a Bibliographical Manual, by Eleanor P. Hammond (1909).

(A. W. Po.)

[1] The positions of the House of Fame and Palamon and Arcyte are still matters of controversy.

[2] The French influences on this Prologue, its connexion with the Flower and the Leaf controversy, and the priority of what had previously been reckoned as the second or “B” form of the Prologue over the “A,” were demonstrated in papers by Prof. Kittredge on “Chaucer and some of his Friends” in Modern Philology, vol. i. (Chicago, 1903), and by Mr J. L. Lowes on “The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women” in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. xix., December 1904.