By the eighteenth century, the winds of taste blew away the ostensible messes Chaucer (and Shakespeare) had made of English literature in order to install a new English classicism. As already noted, “classicism” as both concept and word took off in the eighteenth century. Enlightenment poets concentrated on reviving not English classics but Greek and Latin classics translated into English. Chaucer’s legacy eventually fell into the hands of Alexander Pope and other poets of England’s Enlightenment era. These Augustan poets professed disdain for the quaint relics of the past. They nevertheless paid obeisance to Chaucer’s Ghost, as one work (1672) termed it. But that reverence did not include new editions, only reprints of his work. Speght’s edition was reprinted in 1672, and no new Chaucer edition appeared, nor were old ones reprinted again, before two decades of the eighteenth century had already passed. The seventeenth century transformed Chaucer from an important and original antique voice whose poetry was little read, and even then with difficulty, to a quaint curiosity unenlightened and unadmired but for his (accidental) Englishness. In his God’s Plenty (1700), John Dryden labels Chaucer “a rough diamond” who “mingles trivial things with those of greater moment.” The icon kept standing almost as a curiosity.
Still, Pope admired Chaucer’s storytelling ability despite the contemporary taste for Latin - and Greek-sounding poetry. Perhaps it was Pope’s Catholicism that allowed him to admire Chaucer’s works. The historical Chaucer was, of course, Catholic insofar as any fourteenth-century Christian was “catholic.” Perhaps Chaucer’s sixteenth-century Protestant editors had amplified the non-Chaucerian works in their editions in order to remove the poet’s Catholic taint. Certainly their addition of anti-Catholic polemics under Chaucer’s name was meant to recoup Chaucer as an English Protestant avant la lettre. But despite the need to recreate Chaucer as English Protestant, and also to situate him in the thick of English literary history, not very many readers were doing more than handling Chaucer’s texts in old editions. While Chaucer continued to be referred to as the “father of English poetry,” as he had been for quite some time, his works themselves had little purchase on the reading classes of eighteenth-century England. Schooling may have been slightly more available in the eighteenth century, but higher education concentrated on the Greek and Roman classics and left English literature out in the cold. And, beside the near unreadability of Chaucer’s texts, self-professed English writers like Daniel Defoe thought Chaucer’s lewdness explained the justifiable burial of his works.
Support for Chaucer’s poetry and iconic status in spite of his supposed scurrility and difficult language found one interested party at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and a new edition of Chaucer’s works finally caught up with this new appreciation. Unlike Speght, who merely included a glossary of “hard words explained,” John Urry in his 1721 edition modernized Chaucer’s language and made his verse widely readable. At least now Chaucer’s metrics had been codified and the pronunciation of his verse was better understood. Not that Urry neglects a glossary, a feature included in all Chaucer editions to this day. Urry’s readable Chaucer still retains the poet’s original flavor and touts his paternity of English letters. The edition’s biography calls Chaucer “a great scholar, a pleasant wit, a candid critic, a sociable companion, a steadfast friend, a grave philosopher, a temperate economist [!] and a pious Christian.” A witty economist Chaucer given to friendship and conviviality reflects the values of eighteenth-century society: protean Chaucer, retaining his iconic status, acquires an eighteenth-century impress that makes him simultaneously venerably revered and contemporarily recognizable. The impulse, if not the exact fashion, of modernization persists in YouTube productions of Chaucer.
Even when his poetry was little read, Chaucer’s iconic status is verified by the fact that admirers and detractors alike had to reckon with his reputation as Father of English Poetry. Even those who lament his lack of decorum—a signal eighteenth-century literary value—still recognized his poetic virtuosity or, as one critic labeled it (Joseph Warton, 1782), “a mine of gold.” Surely eighteenth-century England’s ambivalent attitude toward its poetic icon comes from efforts of poets like Pope not only to find their poetic voices in classical antecedents but to denigrate as “barbarous” the inescapable Middle English in which Chaucer wrote. But the attraction of Chaucer’s “barbarous” voice and his identity with England’s Celtic and Saxon past gained a foothold in the mid-eighteenth century. A Gothic impulse, still familiar today in the television horror series Tales from the Crypt (1989-96) gave new inspiration to English novels like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. An antiquarian interest in and general revival of Scots bards and Welsh poets, even in patent forgeries like the Ossian poems, makes Chaucer look downright modern even as burgeoning Romantic attitudes began to celebrate the awesome and antique as essential and authentic.
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