Ñàéò ïîå糿, â³ðø³, ïîçäîðîâëåííÿ ó â³ðøàõ :: Geoffrey Chaucer :: Êðèòèêà

Geoffrey Chaucer :: Êðèòèêà

Chaucer spent most of his life living in and around London, but he was European in outlook. He travelled to France, Italy and Spain for months at a time, both as a soldier and as a diplomat entrusted with the ‘king’s business’. He was certainly fluent in French and probably conversant in Italian and Latin. As such, he was open to the rich literature of fourteenth-century Europe. His early works reflect his wide reading of and admiration for French courtly verse. The leading French author Eustache Deschamps in turn referred to that ‘great translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer’ as praise for his work in making the French favourite Le Roman de la Rose accessible to readers in English. From the 1370s on, Italian poetry became the overriding influence for Chaucer’s work. Obviously familiar with the writings of Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio especially was a major source. Amongst other influences, Troilus and Criseyde is indebted to Il Filostrato, Il Teseida is a source for the Knight’s Tale, and the story of Menedon in Il Filocolo is a model for the Franklin’s Tale. Chaucer, however, never mentions Boccaccio by name, and nor does he quote directly from his most celebrated work, the Decameron, even though The Canterbury Tales’ similarities with it strongly suggests that he had at least some access to a copy of it. Stories from the classics were well known and loved in the medieval period, even though their overt paganism often resulted in Christianised retellings by ‘mythographers’. Chaucer evidently knew the Latin writings of Ovid, Cicero, Virgil, Macrobius, and Boethius, and he probably learned Latin at school. The House of Fame is one example of a poem in which stories from Virgil and Ovid are alluded to and adapted, along with a host of other classical and medieval writers. This writing is so imbued with references to the classics and its mythology that it could be assumed that Chaucer read the original texts widely. However, it is more likely that much of his knowledge came from compilations and anthologies of choice excerpts from the classical authors, as well as via translations. That Chaucer aimed to emulate the great poets of the past in his vernacular writings is quite clear from his line at the end of Troilus and Criseyde where he consciously places himself in the grand line of ‘Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan and Stace’.