[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Geoffrey Chaucer
One commonplace of Chaucerian criticism is that Chaucer was the most French of medieval English poets. Given the nature of late medieval French poetry, this also makes him the most self-conscious. In recent years, this commonplace has begun to make for wider familiarity on the part of Chaucerians with the French works Chaucer was reading. A more specific observation might be that Chaucer is the most Machaldian and the most Froissardian of the Middle English writers. The reasons are to be found in his deep familiarity with the Roman de la Rose tradition, which is to say, with Machaut above all; in the political events of the day, which brought so many French nobles to the English court; and in his almost certain personal acquaintance with Froissart.
For whatever reasons, Chaucer writes a series of narratives modeled on Machaldian works and which depict a first-person, self-conscious poet figure concerned with the relationship of his life, his writings, and posterity. Robert O. Payne, in the fundamental study The Key of Remembrance, wrote the first and foremost of what is now a plenitude of studies on Chaucer's preoccupation with books and bookishness. Narratives that often flirt with self-identification, thematize the reading process, and associate love and the writer's craft are staples of Chaucer's career. The thesis that The House of Fame, for example, is about its own artistic processes is now canonical. (Laurence De Looze, 1997).
More than one portrait of Chaucer remains to give a general idea of his appearance, though that was the time of the first beginnings of portraiture in paint, at least in this country, as Chaucer himself may be called the beginning of portrait-painting in literature. The pictures we have represent him as he was in later life, when the Host of the Tabard chaffed him on his stoutness.................
