Geoffrey Chaucer -- The First Great English Poet [45min]

Geoffrey Chaucer immortalised the medieval pilgrimage and the diversity of fourteenth century English society in his Canterbury Tales. As each pilgrim takes his, or her, turn to tell their tale on the road to Canterbury, Chaucer brings to life the voices of a knight, a miller, a Wife of Bath and many more besides. Chaucer was born the son of a London vintner, yet rose to high office in the court of Richard II. He travelled throughout France and Italy where he came into contact with the works of Dante, Boccaccio, Machaut and Froissart. He translated Boethius, wrote dream poetry, a defence of women and composed the tragic masterpiece Troilus and Criseyde. So what do we know of the man who is called the Father of English Literature? How did he introduce the themes of continental writing to an English speaking audience? And why does his poetry still seem to speak so directly to us today? Presenter Melvyn Bragg moderates a discussion among Carolyne Larrington, Tutor in Medieval English at St John's College, Oxford; Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge; and Ardis Butterfield, Reader in English at University College London. Baron Bragg -- historian, journalist and novelist -- is Controller of Arts for London Weekend Television.

From Bragg's email newsletter: The key moments for me in this morning's programme were the discussions on whether or not Chaucer wrote in English. Helen Cooper, who could easily double as a diplomat, rode to the rescue by saying that Chaucer's words were"becoming English". But another way of looking at The Canterbury Tales, for instance, is to say are they French? -- No. Are they Italian? -- No. Are they Franco-Italian? -- No. Are they Franco-English? -- Well, a bit, but much more English than French and English enough to be built on almost immediately and then dizzyingly for the next five or six hundred years. Yet it's still rather a mystery that Chaucer, who was so fluent in French, should write in English. His friend, Gower, hedged his bets by writing one great book in French, one in English and one in Latin. Chaucer plumped for English and, as Helen Cooper said in the notes that we got from her before the programme,"his commitment to write in such a parochial language, removed from the literary tradition of Europe, was a bit like choosing to write in Welsh today. Chaucer had colossal ambition, yet he chose to write in a language that was quite inaccessible". He may have been putting his money on the success of the vernacular in Italy, or he may simply have wanted to please and entertain the friends to whom he first read the poems. Or he may have had a great love for what was boiling up to be a new language, of which he saw himself as being the chief instigator and font of all. It was strange that we did not get on to the rape accusation. This is something certainly known about Chaucer -- and it is rather troubling. There is a document that he was acquitted totally from an accusation of rape -- this was before most of his poetry was written. It left the scholars rather puzzled and full of reasons away from the obvious, ie: that he could have been involved in some kind of wardship struggle. But, curiously, rape plays a central place in his work. We look forward to further scholarship on this. Another"fact" that did not manage to hit the programme target this week was concerned with Troilus and Criseyde. Trojan history, as Carolyne Larrington pointed out, was a legitimate subject for writers because it was history and not"simply made up" stuff. It had a particular appeal for the British, she said afterwards, because it was considered to be the history of the ancestors of the British. In the 12th century Geoffrey of Monmouth developed the story that Brutus (the legendary founder of Britain) was the grandson of Aeneas (the founder of Rome) who was a refugee from Troy. So the British were, in the Middle Ages, Trojans. Just as in the 19th century there was a sort of assumption that the British were Romans. We're all Greeks to me.