The first of Chaucer’s works to be printed appeared from the press of England’s first printer, William Caxton, who published The Canterbury Tales circa 1478. It was, according to some bibliographers, the first book that Caxton printed in England after his return from Bruges in 1476. He reprinted The Canterbury Tales in 1483 and also printed, at about the same time, Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (1478), Troilus and Criseyde, and Chaucer’s dream vision House of Fame (both 1483). Caxton’s successor, Wynken de Worde, a younger man whom Caxton brought to England from Bruges to help him with his press, also printed the Tales, as did, it seems, rival printer Richard Pynson. De Worde’s 1517 edition, “newly corrected,” became the property of Pynson, who after de Worde’s death virtually simultaneously (circa 1526) printed the Tales, House of Fame, and Troilus and Criseyde. The printer John Rastell published the Tales simultaneously with Pynson. Is this evidence of a Chaucer industry? Maybe. Rastell had gotten caught up through marriage (he was married to Sir Thomas More’s sister) and public prominence in debates about the “Great Matter” of King Henry VIII (14911547, r. 1509-47). From Henry’s first attempts (1525) to divorce Catherine of Aragon, his wife of 16 years, claiming that the marriage was incestuous (she was his brother Henry’s widow), to Henry’s final severance of church ties to Rome (1533), a public and private debate raged, the victims of which were not only Catherine and her daughter Mary, declared illegitimate once Henry married Anne Boleyn, mother of Elizabeth I, but also Sir Thomas More, who, like Becket before him, was martyred on the altar of church prerogative. Perhaps Rastell, concerned with the chill his association with More might bring, thought Chaucer’s work and status as national icon could salvage his reputation. But in the greater scheme of things, these editions of Chaucer were a drop in the bucket. Early English printers published many, many titles (de Worde’s output is estimated at 400 titles in 800 editions), and the best seller to roll off the presses, in de Worde’s case, wasn’t Chaucer but a Latin grammar. Still, the rapidity and consistency with which these printers produced early editions of his poetry testify to Chaucer’s continuing iconic status.
Pynson’s edition of The Canterbury Tales provides a nice example of Chaucer as icon for sixteenth-century readers. Woodcut illustrations grace the title pages for various Tales—his pilgrims have also become icons—and his “proheme,” instructing a reader how to understand and appreciate Chaucer, touts the felicity of The Canterbury Tales:
Great thanks, laud, and honor ought to be given unto the clerk, poets, and historiographers that have written many noble books of wisdom of the lives, passions, and miracles of holy saints and histories of noble and famous acts and faits [deeds] and of the chronicles since the beginning of the creation of the world unto this present time by which we are daily informed and have knowledge of many things of whom we should not have known if that had not left to us their monuments written. Among whom and in especial tofore [before] all other[s] we ought to give a singular laud unto the noble and great philosopher Geffrey Chaucer, the which for his ornate writing in our tongue may well have the name of a laureate poet, for tofore that he by his labor embellished, ornated and made fair our English in this realm was had rude speech and incongruous as yet it appeareth by old books, which at this day ought not to have place nor be compared among, nor to his beauteous volumes and ornate writings, of whom he made diverse books and treatises of many a noble history, as well in meter as in rhyme and prose. And them so craftily made that he comprehended his matters in short, quick, and high sentences, eschewing prolixity, casting away the chaff of superfluity, and showing the picked grain of sentence uttered by crafty and sugared eloquence. Of whom among all other of his books I purpose to imprint by the grace of Jesus the book of the tales of Canterbury in which I find many a noble history of every state and degree.
Chaucer’s identity with the English language and England, with poetry, with nobility, with philosophy, as well as with the “old,” uses the frame that fifteenth-century poets and their noble patrons had already provided for Father Chaucer. But perhaps the most noteworthy feature, in this cascade of clauses, is Chaucer’s reputation for “eschewing prolixity” and “eschewing the chaff of superfluity.” These factors remain the centerpiece of English’s best prose style. The value of direct and unaffected prose continues to ring in the modern political sphere’s reliance on simplicity—to a fault, perhaps.
Notice that it is not Chaucer’s ambiguous persona that Pynson lauds: an appreciation for indeterminacy is a trademark of twentieth-century literary studies.
Following the resolution of the Great Matter, the 1530s mark Chaucer’s remarkable entry, in a manner of speaking, into the coffee-table book market of the Tudor court. Beginning with William Thynne’s edition in 1532, printers produced large and expensive black-letter folio editions of Chaucer’s complete works. The handsome and heavy volumes, with illustrations, leather binding, high-quality paper, and voluminous dedications, put together in one book all of Chaucer’s works. Chaucer would have been pleased that a movement begun a bit earlier in Italy to preserve the corpus of famous poets like Dante, whose civic and national identity provided a model, had spread west and caught the English poet in its fashionable hold.
Like Chaucer’s earlier proponents and printers, folio producer William Thynne (d. 1546), the first in a series of Renaissance collectors and publishers presenting a Chaucerian oeuvre, had royal connections. He was educated at Oxford and attained a prominent position, clerk of the kitchen, in Henry VIII ’s court. In his Chaucer folio’s dedication to Henry VIII, Thynne frames his activities on Chaucer’s behalf with the same kind of nationalistic fervor as did Pynson. But his identification of King Henry’s brilliance as poet and historian allies antique Chaucer with Tudor royalty. Again publishers deploy Chaucer’s fatherhood of English poetry to recertify English nationalism. The point isn’t Chaucer’s political leanings; rather, the import is Chaucer’s embodiment of a burgeoning national consciousness that needs its king to be lettered as much as it needs its venerable poet’s Englishness. The folio editions begin their sequential march through the sixteenth century at the same time that Henry, successful in his break with Rome, begins to tangle with challenges from Martin Luther and a diverse Protestant critique, as well as his own problems concerning progeny, legitimacy, inheritance, the crown, and authority. One could suggest that Chaucer’s iconic status as England’s poet is pressed into the service of Henry’s severely challenged court, the survival of which depends on ever more authoritarian methods of retaining control over recalcitrant subjects.
The question of authority, for better or worse, and even to this day, is wrapped up with the presence—or absence—of authors and authenticity. Chaucer’s iconic status served to expand his authority. The strength of Thynne’s attributions allowed his canon of Chaucer’s works to be reproduced in every Chaucer edition for two centuries. But modern scholarship contests some of Thynne’s attribution to Chaucer of a number of the folio’s poems. On the face of it, a larger canon—a weightier canon—suggests a more prolific poet. Moreover, the idea of collecting an author’s works in one large volume imitates the burgeoning idea of “bigger is better” in the first flush of colonial expansionism. Thus Thynne’s folio edition includes a number of poems not previously printed under Chaucer’s name to augment Chaucer’s status, while his gravitational pull as national poet drew recognizably antique texts into his orbit. Piling works on Chaucer’s shoulders augmented his reputation, honored his unique status, and affirmed his iconic position.
Thynne’s successors reprinted his edition during the short reign of Edward VI (1537-1553, r. 1547-53), Henry’s sickly youngest child. Once on the throne, Edward’s youth made him an easy mark for the more rabid Protestant counselors kept under wraps during Henry’s reign. At Edward’s precipitous death, his Catholic sister Mary (1516-1558, r. 1553-58), Henry Vlll’s eldest daughter, assumed the throne, despite some last-minute efforts to name the Protestant Lady Jane Gray (1536-1554), great-great-niece of Henry VIII, as queen. Queen Mary’s successor after her short reign was Henry’s second child, Elizabeth I, daughter of Anne Boleyn, who eventually proved an extraordinarily adroit and gifted leader. In the reigns of all three of Henry VIII’s Tudor progeny, folio editions of Chaucer’s works were printed and reprinted. Chaucer continued to be lauded as England’s primordial poet. Ironically, however, because of language shifts in the sixteenth century, Chaucer’s poetry, though lionized, had become difficult to read. Moreover, the appearance of the poetry itself became iconic: while for “modern” texts the book trade began to use roman typefaces, Chaucer was kept in recognizably antique black letter.
More than Chaucer’s words added to his iconic reputation. In the heat of Queen Mary’s Catholic resurgence, Nicholas Brigham erected a canopied tomb for Chaucer’s remains. The tomb, founded in 1556, became the cornerstone of Westminster Abbey’s eventual “Poet’s Corner.” This tomb both represents, and solidifies, quite literally, Chaucer’s iconic status. The tomb includes a portrait much like that found in the Hoccleve manuscript—could it have been copied?—and verses pertaining to Chaucer’s origination of English poetry. Its position in London’s parliamentary abbey and its laureation of Chaucer as England’s poet parallels the religious iconography affixed in Catholic times to saints and prelates: could it have been an answer to resurgent Catholicism? The similarity of the likeness the tomb displays to those of the Hoccleve and Ellesmere manuscripts demonstrates the durability of Chaucer’s iconic image begun with those fifteenth-century manuscript portraits. By the late sixteenth century, portraits of Chaucer were hanging in noble houses, and this practice continued well into the late seventeenth century. Chaucer’s aspirations to noble status find their reward in these iconographic renderings, his image occupying both secular and sacred spaces, the cultural weight of which was changing in response to modernity’s ascendancy.
Chaucer’s next editor, John Stow (ca. 1525-1605), produced not only a fat folio Chaucer edition (1561, over 600 pages) but also a series of history books compiled from his extensive personal collection and exhaustive labors in private archives. Finding unused archives and reestablishing them for antiquarian research were new pastimes for writers and publishers engaged in the process of modernization, which also meant putting the past in its place. After his Chaucer edition, Stow published a Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles (1565, over 1200 pages), Chronicles from Brute to unto the present year (1560; later Annales, 1592, over 1300 pages), and a comprehensive and best-selling Survey of London (1598, about 500 pages) that continued to be printed, used, and revised by others into the eighteenth century. In its attachment to English history and archival research, Stow’s work exemplifies antiquarian re-creation of “Englishness,” verifying its pedigree in a remote, classical (not medieval) past identified with Troy and, later, Rome, while simultaneously creating its English moment as “new.” One anonymous 1518 history, printed by Richard Pynson, Caxton’s rival and early printer of Chaucer, locates England’s ancient history in relation not only to Greece and Rome, but also to Israel: “Brute came after the making of the world into the land of Albion in the time that Eli the priest of the law was in the land of Israel. New Troy (that is now called London) was founded by the making of Brute after the making of the world. Rome was founded by Remus and Romulus. Jesus Christ was conceived by the holy ghost in the maid Mary on a Friday.” Chaucer is thus one point on an iconic scale begun with the ancient Brutus. But Chaucer’s icon, identified specifically with English’s original poetic language, shimmers with “Englishness.” Chaucer is, for Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), “the well of English undefil’d.”
Unlike their successors intent on defining modernity and cordoning off the past, people in the “Middle Ages” (a term introduced in 1616) did not see themselves as between eras, bounded on either side by the classical era and the Renaissance. Rather, their self-image was one of continuity with a Trojan and Roman past (even Charlemagne, crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800, wore a toga to the ceremony) and of membership in a universal Christian church. The social, political, and economic changes for which we use the term “Renaissance” reflect the term’s coinage in the mid-sixteenth century by the Italian artist George Vasari (1511-1574) to break with an ostensibly stultifying past. “Classic,” which entered the English language in the seventeenth century, in its original use meant only “best”; its application to Greece and Rome, and to literature, became exclusive only in the eighteenth century. The popular vigor of the term “Renaissance” rises in the nineteenth century, spurred by the work of German historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) and responding to the pressure of modernity—in science, art, medicine, technology, and Western expansion—to reassert divisions between eras and deny other than quaint antiquarian interest in a medieval past. Like the term “Enlightenment,” “Renaissance” paints its own era positively and its medieval antecedent negatively. The use of words like “Renaissance” and “classics” creates that break between epochs because it serves the “new” era’s need to make itself distinct. Such a need was not a feature of medieval thought: instead, an era’s diminution in light of a Golden Past, and a recognition that there was “nothing new under the sun,” epitomizes what we would call medieval ideology. For Karl Marx, modernity’s rage for the new supports a capital economy. Asserting modernity’s superiority over the past assures capitalism’s success.
Nevertheless, individuals like Stow and his work in literature (Chaucer), history (annals), and geography (London) enabled adoration of the ancient and remote in England’s language and politics. Those who identified, gathered, and then made available antiquarian researches on English history produced editions of Chaucer’s works that were keen to solidify an economically, politically, and literarily apt identity for the English nation. The same antiquari-anism and obsessive scholarship characterize the next edition of Chaucer’s works, produced at the end of the sixteenth century during the reign of Elizabeth I. The folio Thomas Speght published in 1598 and amplified in 1602 ratifies Chaucer’s iconic status in a fashion especially sympathetic to modern tastes: Speght provides a biography for Chaucer with the help of antiquarian records and manuscript documents, since personal knowledge like Hoccleve’s was no longer available.
Biography did not have the cultural weight in the medieval era that it began to have in the Renaissance. Medieval manuscript books frequently list no authors’ names, let alone any information about them. Much that we know about named authors comes from research into legal documents rather than by consulting autobiographies, which essentially did not exist as a specific genre until later. Chaucer’s first readers who encountered his name and work in Hoccleve or even Stow expressed no need for biographical information about the poet, perhaps because it was assumed they already knew him: at least, that’s how Chaucer’s contemporary Hoccleve expresses it. The original assumption of personal knowledge isn’t so far-fetched: considering the limited literate audience and scarce production of manuscripts, an early fifteenth-century lay reader would likely move in court circles.
To identify text with biography in post-medieval books shapes the taste of a readership newly broadened by the printing press. Modern readers take for granted the way a life informs a work, and vice versa. In the opening years of the seventeenth century, the expectations of authorship changed, and the habits of print that include biography certify firmer identity between an individual’s creative work and life story. Perhaps Chaucer’s biography was thought to make up for his poor readability. Through the seventeenth century, the disused rules of the English language that governed pronunciation of Chaucer’s over 200-year-old verse continued to fade from collective memory. Thus, while the volumes gather hundreds of pages of English poetry, they were little read. Chaucer’s iconic status rested on affirmation of his ancient English character and reputation rather than on appreciation of his verse.
World History
