INTRODUCTION

The major Hollywood movie A Knight’s Tale (2001, written and directed by Brian Helgeland) follows the adventures of William Turner (played by Heath Ledger), a common page to a recently deceased noble. The peasant Turner, disguised in his late master’s armor, seeks the rewards of knighthood, despite the supposed dangers of his impersonation. In addition to Ledger and his motley crew who quest for tournament prizes, the film features a thin, sprightly, bigheaded (in more ways than one) Geoffrey Chaucer (played by Paul Bettany). Chaucer introduces himself with “Geoffrey Chaucer’s the name, writing’s the game.” He’s a down-and-out writer, addicted to gambling and stuck making his living as a scribe. Poetry plays second fiddle to his other interests like wenches and gambling (he suffers from a modern-flavored addiction, without benefit of a 12-step program), but he nevertheless expects his fame to have preceded him. Having lost his clothes in a card game, and standing naked before Turner, Chaucer attempts to jog Turner’s memory: “You’ve probably read my book?” (Beat) “Book of the Duchess?” Turner just looks on, puzzled. The poet’s wit glistens only in comparison to the film’s generally insipid dialogue as Chaucer, like Turner, pulls a number of fast ones in his attempts to score with damsels as well as dice.

A Knight’s Tale is a pretty uninspired movie, but at least it doesn’t try to be more than it is: an entertaining teen flick. It reveals a popular culture that has lost touch with its medieval past as well as the figure of Geoffrey Chaucer, except in the most bowdlerized of forms. The film’s opening tournament shows its grandstands rocking to Queen’s “We Will Rock You”; the film’s villain, Count Adhemar of Anjou (played by Rufus Sewell), loses a polite challenge once Turner and company dance enthusiastically, if not brilliantly, to David Bowie’s “The Golden Years.” It’s clear that Helgeland can’t trust an audience to find humor in an authentic representation of the Middle Ages.

But what Helgeland’s movie reveals is that, in the midst of perhaps the most high-stakes commercial enterprise in the United States—filmmaking—even an audience of teenagers intrigued by things labeled “medieval” will recognize Geoffrey Chaucer as an icon of the Middle Ages. Indeed, a YouTube search for “Chaucer” returns hundreds of hits, primarily videos of high school class projects. There are live-action re-creations, energetic cartoons, and Lego-based narratives. Even the video game World of Warcraft has been used to bring a version of Geoffrey Chaucer to the home computer screen. Some of these amateur productions take authenticity more seriously than does A Knight’s Tale, with occasionally accurate Middle English renditions of one or another of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As for choice of tale, a tally of a sampling of these videos shows that “The Pardoner’s Tale,” with its challenging combination of moral lesson and scurrilous character, wins the popularity contest, hands down.

Evidently Americans aged 15 to 24 have enough familiarity with Geoffrey Chaucer for Hollywood’s money machine, which squarely targets this demographic, to front a major production that features the poet prominently, if not at the film’s center. But what about the real Geoffrey Chaucer and his legacy? What has made him available, some six centuries after his death, as an icon viable for commercial use? Is there more to Chaucer than a simple sound bite or a moniker that says “medieval”? Where does his iconic status come from, and how has it changed? What has kept Geoffrey Chaucer alive?

The following essay will treat Chaucer’s biography, the creation of his iconic status, and the ways his icon has inhabited English literary culture for more than six hundred years. Here you will find some reasons for his durability, continued importance in literary circles, and commercial viability. We will see why Chaucer endures.