English Becomes a Literary Language: Early Drama, Piers Plowman, and Geoffrey Chaucer

English Becomes a Language of Literature

English slowly became a suitable vehicle for literature. The Norman invasion of 1066 halted the evolution of Anglo-Saxon into English, and for a time French became the official language of the country. Gradually new words and expressions arose that were basically Germanic but mixed with French words and rules. The long war with France probably made the English rebel against the linguistic dominance of the enemy.

In 1362 English became the language of the law courts.
In 1363 the chief minister of the realm opened Parliament with a speech in English, which set a precedent that later became law.
Scholars, historians, and philosophers, even down to the time of Francis Bacon, continued to write in Latin so that their works could be understood by different nations.
From this time on, poets and dramatists sang and wrote in English.

The Beginnings of English Drama

The oldest surviving drama in English is a mystery play, a religious story presented as drama, called the Harrowing of Hell. It was performed in the Midlands around 1350, and its story is a verbal dispute between Christ and Satan at the mouth of hell.

The Guild Cycles

In the fourteenth century it was the custom for the town guilds to present a cycle of such mysteries. Each guild prepared a scene from the Bible, carried its equipment and actors on a cart, and staged it at crowded places. On the following days other guilds performed the next scenes of the biblical story. The earliest known cycle is the Chester mystery plays of 1328. By 1400 similar cycles were performed at York, Beverley, Cambridge, Coventry, Wakefield, Towneley, and London.

Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes

Long before this, around 1182, another kind of drama had grown from the Latin mysteries. It was called the miracle play, and its subject was the miracles, wonders, and sufferings of certain saints. Around 1378 a further kind appeared, called the morality play. It put a story on the stage to express a moral point and reached its peak with the drama Everyman around 1480.

The fourteenth century also knew another dramatic form, the interlude, which must by then have existed for a long time. An interlude was not a piece performed between other plays but a play acted by two or more performers. Its subject was not limited to religion or morals and could be secular, comic, irreverent, or even obscene. Minstrels staged interludes in baronial halls, in guildhalls, in town and village squares, and in the yards of busy inns.

The First Theater

In 1348 Exeter built the first known theater in England. After the classical Roman buildings it was the first European building devoted specially and permanently to performance and acting. Comedy grew out of the development of interludes, and the spirited tragedies of the Elizabethan theater grew out of the development of mysteries and moralities.

Piers Plowman and William Langland

The first great English poem, one of the most astonishing and powerful in the language, is called The Vision of Piers Plowman. Nothing is known of its author beyond what the poem itself tells. If the poem is taken as the poet's biography, his name was William Langland, and he was born around 1332. He reached the minor clerical orders but never became a priest. In London he earned a meager living by reciting the Psalms at funeral Masses for the dead.

The Poet and His Poem

He lived a dissolute life, sinning, as he says, with greedy eyes and a lustful body, and he lived in a cottage at Cornhill with a woman who was apparently his wife and a daughter he had by her. He describes himself as a tall and lean man who wore a dark coat to suit his gloomy despairs. He loved his poem and published it three times, in 1362, 1377, and 1394, adding to it each time. Like the Anglo-Saxon poets he did not use rhyme. He used a kind of alliteration of letters and sounds in lines of uneven length.

The Dream Vision

The poem begins with the poet falling asleep on the Malvern Hills. In his dream he sees a field full of people of every kind, rich and poor, good and bad, old and young. Among them is a beautiful, noble woman who stands for Holy Church. William kneels before her and begs her to tell him, not about worldly goods, but how to save his soul. She answers that of all the treasures of the world the best is truth, and that a person who speaks truth, acts truly, and wishes no one ill is like a god to himself and resembles Christ.

In the second vision he sees the seven deadly sins and, in examining each, puts base humanity on trial with powerful satire. For a time he gives himself up to pessimism, sees the future of humankind as ruined, and awaits the end of the world. Then Piers the Plowman enters the story. He is the model farmer: honest, sincere, generous, trustworthy, and hardworking. He lives piously with his wife and children and is a faithful and devout son of the Church.

Piers as Christ, Peter, and Pope

In later visions William sees the same Piers as the human embodiment of Christ, as the apostle Peter, and as a pope, a pope who disappears in the schism of the Church and the rise of the Antichrist. The poet says that the clergy are no longer the saving elite. Many of them are corrupt and wicked, deceive simple people, and forgive the rich because of what they expect from them. They make sacred things a matter of trade and sell heaven for money. In this flood, what is the duty of a true Christian? William says he must gird himself again, pass beyond the corruptions and customs that block his salvation, and seek Christ himself, who is perfect and eternal.

Influence of the Poem

The poem is as obscure as its own title suggests, and its complex and obscure allusions tire readers who consider clear writing a moral duty of the author. But it is sincere and without hypocrisy. It attacks the base and dishonest without discrimination and depicts the scenes of human life vividly. In beauty and emotional power it reaches so high a place that, among the English literature of the fourteenth century, only Chaucer's Canterbury Tales surpasses it.

Its influence was considerable. For English revolutionaries Piers became the symbol and model of the sturdy, fearless working peasant, and John Ball urged the rebels of Essex in 1381 to take him as their example. Until the Reformation, whenever criticism of the old religious order and the need for a new one came up, his name was remembered. At the end of his dreams the poet returns from Piers the pope to Piers the plowman and concludes that the greatest and last revolution is for all of us to be like simple Piers and Christian in practice. In that case no other revolution is needed.

John Gower

John Gower, another poet of the age, was less romantic than William Langland and less fond of complexity and obscurity. He was a rich landowner of Kent who had gathered much scholastic learning and mastered three languages. He also criticized the vices of the clergy, but he was horrified by the heresies of the Lollards and shocked by the boldness of the peasants, who had once been content with grain and beer and now wanted meat, milk, and cheese. Gower said that three things, once out of control, show mercy to no one and nothing: water, fire, and the mob.

Being a moral man who despised this world and feared the next, Gower retired to a priory in old age and spent the last years of his life blind, saying prayers. His contemporaries admired his morals but regretted his temperament and style, and for relief and variety they turned to Chaucer.

Geoffrey Chaucer: Life and Career

Chaucer was a man full of the blood and ale of merry England in his day. He could stride past the natural difficulties of life with long steps, ignore the sting of the thorns of obstacles with his forgiving nature, and, with a pen as comprehensive as Homer's and a spirit as ardent as Rabelais's, portray the many sides of English life.

His name, like many words of his language, had a French origin. It meant "shoemaker" and was probably pronounced something like "Shoseer". Posterity plays games with our names and remembers us only to make us the material of its own whims. He was the son of a London wine merchant, John Chaucer. He gathered much knowledge from life and books, and his poems are full of knowledge of men and women, literature, and history.

Service, War, and Marriage

In 1357 the name of Geoffrey Chaucer was officially registered among the servants of the household of the Duke of Clarence.
Two years later he went to France to fight, was captured, and was freed by the payment of a ransom to which Edward III contributed.
In 1367 he appears among the valets of the king's chamber with a yearly allowance of about 20 marks ($1,333 in the book's conversion).
Edward traveled a great deal and often took his family along. Chaucer apparently accompanied him and toured England on these journeys.
In 1366 he married Philippa, a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and with little fidelity stayed with her to the end.
Richard II continued to pay his annual pension, and John of Gaunt added 10 pounds a year ($1,000).

He received other aristocratic gifts and rewards as well, which may explain why Chaucer, who saw the ups and downs and details of life so well, did not take the Great Revolt as his subject.

Diplomatic Missions and Italy

In that time it was a respectable custom to send men of letters on political missions abroad in praise of poetry and eloquence. So in 1372 Chaucer was sent with two others to Genoa to negotiate a commercial agreement, and in 1378 he went to Milan with Sir Edward Berkeley. Who knows, perhaps there he met the ailing Boccaccio and the aged Petrarch. In any case the Italian journey was a transforming inspiration for him.

There he met a culture and civilization more brilliant, precise, and literary than England's, and he felt a new respect for classical works, at least the Latin ones. From then on the French influences that had shaped his earliest works gave way to Italian ideas, poetic forms, and subjects. When he finally returned home, he was a fully formed artist and a mature thinker.

Officeholder and Poet

In England at that time no one could live by poetry alone. His pensions may be thought sufficient to provide lodging, food, and clothing, and after 1378 his total yearly income came to about $10,000 in modern money by the book's estimate. His wife also received a yearly allowance from the king and John of Gaunt. Even so, Chaucer felt the need to add to his income by holding various government posts.

For twelve years (1374-1386) he served as controller of customs and of the government's cash subsidies, and during this time he had the rooms in the Aldgate tower.
In 1380 he paid an unknown sum to Cecilia Chaumpaigne so that she would withdraw a complaint against him accusing him of sexual assault.
Five years later he was appointed justice of the peace for Kent, and in 1386 he suddenly found himself a member of Parliament.

It was in the midst of these jobs and troubles that he wrote his verse. In The House of Fame he describes himself as someone who, when his accounts are finished, hurries home, loses himself among his books, and sits silent as a stone, living like a hermit in every way except that he has no connection with poverty, chastity, or obedience. He devotes his talent to books, songs, and little rhymed pieces. He tells us that in his youth he wrote many lustful and amorous songs.

Chaucer's Early Writings

He translated Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy into fine prose and rendered part of the Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris into excellent verse. He wrote poems that could be called large and small, among them The House of Fame, The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and The Legend of Good Women. He predicted before us that we would not be able to read them from start to finish. These poems were ambitious but small experiments, and in subject and form they were open imitations of the great European models.

Troilus and Criseyde

In Troilus and Criseyde, one of his most beautiful poems, he went on imitating and even translating. Yet to the 2,730 lines he took from Boccaccio's Filostrato he added 5,696 lines, drawn from another source or created by his own lively mind. He did not intend to deceive, since he often names his source and apologizes to readers for not translating the whole text. In that period such transfers from one literature to another were legitimate and useful, because even educated people knew no language but their own.

To the dramatists of Greece and Elizabethan England the subject and plot were common property, and what showed an author's art was his form. Whatever its faults, Chaucer's Troilus is the first great narrative poem in English. Scott found it long and somewhat tedious, and so it is. Rossetti said that it is perhaps the most beautiful long narrative poem in English, and that is also true.

The Virtues and Excesses of the Poem

All long poems, however beautiful, become tiresome. The essence of poetry is emotion, and if an emotion lasts for 8,386 lines, the poem turns into prose as soon as the desire for the ending arrives. A woman needs no such quantity of verse to be led to the marriage bed, and love never needs so many ill-placed speeches, artificial songs, and smooth rhymes in its doubts, reflections, and surrender. Only the Mississippi of Richardson's prose can equal this Nile of verse in breadth for the psychology of love. Even so, not even the harmful prolixity, the endless rhetoric, and the complexity born of the poet's arbitrary display of learning can destroy its value and beauty.

It is also a philosophical tale of how woman was made for love, and how, when one lover is away from her for a while, she plays the game of love with another. One of its characters, Pandarus, is drawn vividly and realistically. In the Iliad, Pandarus is the commander of the Lycian army in the battle of Troy, but here he is a useful, shrewd, and godless go-between who leads lovers to a sin full of pleasure.

The Story of the Lovers

Troilus is a warrior who forgets himself in the defense against the Greeks and scolds men who spend time making love on the soft breasts of women and are slaves to lust and the stomach. Yet at a single glance he falls madly in love with Criseyde and from then on thinks of nothing but her beauty, modesty, nobility, and charm. After a painful wait, it takes 6,000 lines for this shy soldier to confess his love, and Criseyde throws herself into his arms, and Troilus forgets both worlds at once.

After wearing himself out for this ecstasy, Chaucer quickly turns the lovers' happiness into the sorrow of separation, and so rescues his poem from tedium. Since Criseyde's father has fled to the Greeks, the angry Trojans give his daughter to the Greeks in exchange for the freedom of the captured Antenor. The two lovers part, heartbroken, and swear to be faithful forever. When Criseyde reaches the Greeks she falls to Diomedes. His manly beauty captures her so completely that she gives him in one page the jewel she had kept for a whole book. Seeing this, Troilus throws himself into battle looking for Diomedes but is brought down by the spear of Achilles. Chaucer ends his love epic with a pious prayer about the Trinity and then humbly sends it to Gower to correct it out of kindness.

The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer most likely began writing the Canterbury Tales in 1387. The plan of the work was brilliant. It brought together a varied group of Britons at the Tabard Inn at Southwark, where Chaucer himself had emptied many mugs of ale, and accompanied them on their pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. It put into their mouths the stories and ideas that had gathered in the poet's well-traveled mind over half a century. Such devices for joining many stories had often been used before, but this was the best of all.

Why It Surpassed Boccaccio

For the Decameron, Boccaccio had chosen only men and women of one class, and because he did not describe and contrast different characters, he did not give them real embodiment. Chaucer created an inn of people so varied and real that they seem more genuine than the lifeless and artificial English people that history shows us. They live, move in the literal sense of the word, love, hate, laugh, and cry. As they go along the rough road, we hear not only their stories but also learn of their troubles, quarrels, and philosophies.

The Opening and the Pilgrims

The famous opening describes April, when the showers of spring pierce the drought of March and bring flowers to life. The west wind stirs the new shoots, the young sun runs its half course in Aries, and small birds that sleep all night with open eyes begin to sing. In that season people long to go on pilgrimage and visit the saints of distant lands. At the Tabard in Southwark, as the poet lay ready to set out for Canterbury, twenty-nine people, each from a different walk of life and all meeting by chance, came into the inn that night. All were pilgrims and intended to go to Canterbury. Chaucer then introduces them one after another in a short and wonderful description.

The Knight is a distinguished man who from his first day on horseback followed only the path of manliness, truth, honor, generosity, and courtesy. He fought in fifteen deadly battles and in single combat at Tramissene for the faith. For all his fame he was wise and as modest as a shy maiden, and he had never in his life spoken a rude word to anyone. He was a true and perfect knight.
His son, the Squire, is a young, amorous, hot-blooded man who, in his passion, sleeps little at night, like a nightingale.
With them travels a Yeoman, and a charming woman is also among the company.
The Prioress, Madame Eglantine, has a sweet and bashful smile, swears by Saint Eloy as her greatest oath, and sings the church service well, with a pleasing nasal tone. She is so tender-hearted that she weeps if she sees a mouse caught in a trap or dead or wounded. She feeds her little dogs roast meat, milk, and white bread, and mourns bitterly if one of them dies. She wears a coral bracelet and a necklace of bright green beads, from which hangs a gold brooch engraved with the letter A and then the words "Love conquers all".
Next come another nun, three priests, a merry monk who loves hunting, and a friar who is skilled at drawing alms from the purses of the faithful. Even if a widow had no shoes, his holy greetings were so pleasing that she gave him her small offering.

Chaucer likes a young student of philosophy best of all. This Clerk of Oxford has studied logic for years. His horse is so thin that its ribs can be counted, and he himself is not fat either, though his look is striking and his gaze fixed. His coat is threadbare, because he gets no income from the Church and is too scholarly to chase worldly wealth. He prefers to have twenty volumes of Aristotle's philosophical works in red and black beside his bed rather than fine clothes and musical instruments. His mind is set only on learning, and he truly says nothing more than needed. His speech is full of moral virtue, and he learns gladly and teaches gladly.

The Rest of the Company

There is also a Wife of Bath, who will soon be described, and a poor Parish Priest full of holy thoughts and deeds, a Plowman, and a Miller who has a wart on the very top of his nose with a tuft of hairs on it like the red bristles in an old sow's ear. There are a Manciple, a Reeve, and a Summoner, a humble and kind servant who, for a bottle of wine, would let any young man keep a concubine for a year and entirely forgive him. With him goes a genial Pardoner with a bag full of pardons fresh from Rome. There are also a Merchant, a Lawyer, a Franklin, a Carpenter, a Weaver, a Dyer, a Tapestry-maker, a Cook, a Shipman, and Chaucer himself, who stands shyly aside and is so "plump" that he is hard to embrace, and who always looks at the ground as if hunting for a hare.

The Host's Game

Their host, the keeper of the Tabard Inn, is no less colorful. He swears he has never seen a merrier company, decides to go with them and guide them, and proposes that, to pass the ninety kilometers, each pilgrim tell two stories on the way out and two on the way back. The one whose story is the best will, on their return, be given supper at the expense of all. Everyone agrees. The stage for this moving human comedy is set, the pilgrimage begins, and the courteous Knight tells the first story. It is about two friends, Palamon and Arcite, who see a girl gathering flowers in a garden, both fall in love with her, and fight a deadly single combat with lances so that the winner may take the girl as the prize of the contest.

Range of Tone and Subject

Who could believe that so imaginative a pen would, within one line after this grand knightly story, turn to the ribald coarseness of the Miller's Tale? But the Miller is drinking and predicts himself that his mind and tongue will slip into improper matter. On behalf of the Miller and himself, who must tell the stories with complete honesty, Chaucer apologizes to the reader, and he advises modest and chaste readers to read the stories that are full of nobility, morality, holiness, and purity.

The Prioress's Tale begins in a sweet religious tone, then tells the painful legend of a Christian child thought to have been murdered by Jews, a medieval legend of the kind that fed hostility toward Jews. The provost of the town, as his duty, arrests the Jews, and some of them are tortured to death.
In the prologue to the Pardoner's Tale, after this piety, Chaucer turns at once to a sharp satire on the traveling sellers of relics and pardons. When Luther sounded this theme in the trumpet of the Reformation, centuries had passed since it was first raised.
In the prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale, our poet reaches the height of his power and the depth of his morals. It is a riotous protest against celibacy for men and women, spoken by a bawdy woman experienced in marriage. Since the age of twelve she has married five times and buried four husbands, and now she looks forward to the sixth, who will come and quench the fire of her youth. She argues that God told us to be fruitful and multiply but never mentioned the number of marriages, never said to marry twice or eight times. She asks why people call marriage a sin, points to King Solomon, who had a thousand wives or more, and wishes God would let her take half as many husbands. Alas, she says, love has always been counted a sin.

The book does not repeat her physiological confessions or the similar male descriptions in the Summoner's Tale, where Chaucer lowers himself to study the anatomy of pride. When we come to the legend of patient Griselda in the Clerk's Tale, the air turns clear and bright. Neither Boccaccio nor Petrarch told this story, the dream of a man at the end of his patience, so well.

An Unfinished Work and Its Style

Of the fifty-eight tales Chaucer promises us in the prologue, he tells only twenty-three. Perhaps, like his readers, he felt that five hundred pages were enough, and perhaps the spring of his invention had run dry. Even in his flowing verse there are muddy phrases, which a wise and discerning eye will overlook. Even so, the calm and deep current of the verse carries us along lightly and gives us freshness, as if the poet lived on a green and pleasant bank and not at a gate of London, though the Thames was not far from there.

Some of the poems in praise of nature's beauty are monotonous literary exercises. Yet the moving picture the poet gives is alive because of its natural quality and its directness and clarity of feeling and expression. In this way he shows people and their manners in a firsthand observation rarely found on the pages of a book, and only a writer like Shakespeare could again produce such metaphors, similes, and allegories. As an example, the Pardoner climbs into the pulpit and nods his head east and west to the crowd like a dove sitting on the roof of a barn.

The Language of England

The East Midland dialect that Chaucer used in his writings became, through him, the literary language of England. Even at that time its vocabulary had enough words and power to express all the subtleties and delicacies of thought. For the first time the spoken language of the English people became the vehicle of a great art like literature.

Sources, Humor, and Outlook

Like the works of Shakespeare, Chaucer's material is mostly second-hand. He borrowed his stories from wherever he could. The Knight's Tale comes from Boccaccio's Teseida, Griselda from the Decameron, and several tales from French fabliaux. The latter source can explain many of Chaucer's coarse comic tales, but his most biting stories have no source other than the poet's own keen nature.

Like the Elizabethan dramatists, he undoubtedly believed that from time to time the reader should be thrown a morsel of crude and ugly stories to tempt him to keep reading. The men and women of his stories speak according to their rank and station, and, as Chaucer himself says, all are drunk on very cheap ale. Most of his satires and jokes are harmless and belong to the full-blooded English humor of the prosperous people of the time before the dryness and propriety of Puritanism, mixed in a surprising way with modern British wit.

A Writer Who Describes More Than He Condemns

Chaucer was fully aware of the faults, sins, crimes, follies, arrogance, and nonsense of mankind, but with joy he loved life, and he could get along with everyone except those who wanted to sell their nonsense too dear. He rarely accuses or condemns anything or anyone. He only describes.

In the Wife of Bath's Tale he satirizes women of the lower middle class but enjoys their abundant vitality.
He has a sharp and impolite tongue about women, and his stinging allusions are those of a husband who avenges the night-time defeats of his tongue with his pen.
Yet he speaks of love with tenderness and delicacy and sees it as one of the richest gifts and pleasures, and his portraits of good women are enough to fill a gallery.
He rejects greatness and honor based on lineage and considers great only the man who does great deeds.
He does not trust the common people because of their changeable nature, and thinks anyone a fool who ties his fortune and greatness to popularity or mixes with the crowd.

Reason and Skepticism

He was far from much of the superstition of his time. He exposed the tricks of the alchemists, and although some of the storytellers in his book speak of astrology, he himself rejects it. For his son he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe that shows his knowledge of current astronomy. Chaucer was not a very learned man, or he would have revealed it, since he liked to display his knowledge in his poems. He filled the pages of his book with quotations from Boethius, and even the Wife of Bath quotes Seneca. He raises some philosophical and theological problems, but he shrugs his shoulders in despair at them and passes on. Perhaps, like any other worldly-wise person, he knows that a prudent philosopher does not reveal to everyone his private opinions on supernatural matters.

Was He a Believing Christian?

His merciless and savage satires on friars, in the prologue and text of the Summoner's Tale, are not surpassed in English literature, but such attacks were repeatedly made on their religious brothers by devout and pious men. Now and then he doubts some religious principles. Like Luther, he could not reconcile God's foreknowledge of the world's events with human will. He has Troilus interpret the problem of determinism but rejects it at the end of the book. He affirms his belief in heaven and hell, but says in detail that they are lands from which no traveler has yet returned.

He is amazed by evil that obviously does not fit with the absolute goodness of God, and he makes Arcite question the justice of the gods in language as reproachful and bold as the reproaches of Omar Khayyam. The gods, Arcite says, rule the world and have condemned all people to an eternal decree written on the unchangeable tablet of fate. Is man worth more to them than a flock of sheep sleeping in its pen? He too, like the beasts, is killed, captured, thrown into prison, and wasted by disease and great misfortunes, and often, alas, he is innocent. What justice is this, and what foreknowledge, that the torment meant for the guilty falls on the wronged and innocent? Besides, when an animal dies it suffers no more, but a human being must suffer and weep again after death. Chaucer leaves the answer to these questions to the gods.

Later Years and Death

In his last years Chaucer tried to recover the piety and virtue of his youth. To the unfinished Canterbury Tales he added a retraction, asking forgiveness from God and men for the coarse jests and improper words he had spoken, and declaring that to the end of his life he would mourn his sins and seek the salvation of his soul. In these years the joy and vitality of his life gave way to the melancholy thoughts of a man who, in the decline of his health and senses, longs for the reckless passion of youth.

Poverty at the End

Richard II made him clerk of the king's works at Westminster palace and other royal buildings. Some years later, although he was not yet fifty, he seemed utterly broken and feeble. His work was in any case beyond his strength, and he was dismissed from his post, and we do not see him in any other office afterward. His cash was gone, and he asked the king for six shillings and eight pence. In 1394 Richard granted him a yearly pension of twenty pounds to be paid for the rest of his life. But this was not enough, and Chaucer asked the king to add a yearly allowance of casks of wine, and he succeeded in 1398. When he was sued in that same year for a debt of fourteen pounds, he was unable to pay it.

He died on 25 October 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first and greatest of the line of poets who there feel the weight of the slow steps of death upon their breasts.