What is the future of Geoffrey Chaucer? Although in the United States the College Board no longer requires students to recognize Chaucer’s poetry, the number of Canterbury Tales projects on YouTube indicates that Chaucer remains protean, funny, rhymed, and mischievously attractive for the twenty-first century. It’s easy to consider Chaucer’s icon as eternal, having lasted for six hundred years through adaptation, manipulation, and commercial viability. Chaucer became very quickly a totem for Englishness, at once linguistic, national, and personal. His poetry’s ambiguities in voice, character, plot, and interpretation make his work stand the test of time. But Chaucer’s iconic status is not all about Chaucer, nor is it under Chaucer’s control. We see in our icons what we project onto them, even as the icons themselves must have a protean nature to survive that amount of projection. The past speaks to us through these icons, and we can get over our obsession with one kind of authenticity if we can accept an icon’s fame as dynamic, rather than static. Moreover, in Chaucer’s case (and maybe that of other poets too, but not other Fathers of English Poetry, for only one exists), the continuity of his iconic status is assured by the pleasing proliferation of YouTube Chaucers. Icons are more than images, and the ease with which Chaucer has entered the Internet age (how many YouTube William Wordsworths are there?) bodes well for his continued iconic presence as England’s medieval poet par excellence.
World History
