Love
In the prologue of The Legend of Good Women, Cupid and his wife reprimand Chaucer for failing to write about the joys of love. They cite the Roman de la Rose and Troilus and Criseyde, both of which parody love. Though both poems are at least partially translations, Chaucer’s choice to render them in English suggests he found this portrayal of love as absurd and tragic to be compelling. His own short poem “To Rosamond” parodies the excesses of love poetry, even comparing the speaker in love to a fish covered in sauce. The Legend of Good Women itself, though ostensibly remedying the absence of positive depictions of love in the Chaucer canon, is actually pretty ambivalent. The book recounts a series of classical myths from the perspective of female characters, most of whom end up betrayed by their male lovers and left to grieve or end their own lives. Though somewhat positive towards these women, the stories depict love as something destructive, and even suggest that it’s foolish to dive into love so completely when it can only end in grief. Chaucer’s skepticism towards love comes to a head in The Canterbury Tales. Many of the tales describe incidents of adultery and trickery. Men who attempt to keep their wives faithful by restricting their movement just make it even more likely that their wives will resent them and seek an affair. Love comes off as a game with winners and losers.
Fortune
Fortune was an important idea in medieval philosophy, and the central focus of The Consolation of Philosophy, which Chaucer translated into English. Boethius, the author, has been imprisoned despite being innocent. He mourns the fickleness of fortune. One day, he was a social and political success; the next, he had fallen to the depths of poverty and imprisonment. Boethius falls asleep and dreams about a personification of Philosophy, who advises him that rather than hoping for better fortune, he should trust in God and believe that things will eventually work out for the best. This is the message of the short poem “Truth.” The “wheel of fortune” was another important idea in the Middle Ages. The image visualized life as a great wheel. Successful people, like wealthy and popular princes or knights, were at the top of the wheel. At the bottom were failures—poor men, unpopular rulers, disgraced knights. But the wheel of fortune could always turn. Eventually, those at the top would find themself at the bottom, and vice versa. The Monk’s tale is a collection of tragedies clearly influenced by the wheel of fortune idea. In the Middle Ages, the term tragedy didn’t have the same dramatic associations we bring. Instead, it referred to any story where someone moves from high status to low status, or in which the wheel of fortune turned. The Monk tells story after story adhering to this framework. Reading so many similar stories in a row removes their emotional impact, encouraging us to adopt a wry and distant attitude towards the ebb and swell of fortune.
Human Pettiness
Chaucer generally seems to have had a frequently cynical view of human nature. We even see this in the short poem “To Rosamond.” At first, we think we’re reading a genuine love poem, but by the end we realize this is really a parody of the excessive passion of romantic poetry, especially when the speaker barely knows the woman he claims to be in love with. The Legend of Good Women is full of tales of people betraying each other. When we read these similar stories in succession, it is hard to see the characters as just bad individuals—they come off more as representative of a fundamental human tendency to be selfish. Finally, human pettiness drives The Canterbury Tales, both within the stories, and between the tellers. Again, there are numerous stories about adultery and faithlessness. Many storytellers are also motivated by a desire to spite one of their companions. For example, the Reeve (a kind of minor administrative figure) and the Miller both resent each other, and their stories depict a member of the other profession being shamed and humiliated.
Construction of the Author
Chaucer is often referred to as the father of English poetry. This is partially due to his extraordinary influence and indisputable talent as a writer. However, it's also a reputation Chaucer himself worked to construct. He often appears as a character in his own fiction—this is true in the dream-vision poems, which claim to recount Geoffrey’s own dreams, as well as in The Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer appears midway through as one of the storytellers. In these depictions, Chaucer emphasizes his own status as an author. In the Prologue of The Legend of Good Women, Cupid and his wife reprimand Chaucer for failing to write about love. This gives Chaucer an opportunity to have them list all of his previous works, encouraging the reader to think about the poem they are reading not as an isolated poem, but as part of a body of work by one of the nation’s most prolific and adaptable authors. Yet he’s also not above making fun of himself. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer appears and offers to tell a tale. His first attempt is the Tale of Sir Thopas. Midway through, the host interrupts Chaucer and tells him that the story is boring and shallow, and he needs to try something else. Chaucer here is parodying the worst parts of romance writing, but he’s also poking fun at himself.
Storytelling
Storytelling is one of the most important ideas in the Chaucer canon. The Legend of Good Women is all about the power of storytelling to change how we interpret history. The House of Fame is partially about the stories we tell about ourselves, and how they change with the passage of time. The Canterbury Tales is, at its heart, a tale about the relationship between people and the stories they tell. Stories are a tool of self-fashioning, or a way of shaping how other people see you. But they’re also a way of escaping the self, of bringing up the kinds of big questions ordinary life doesn’t have space for. The Knight’s Tale is a great example of these two dynamics. The knight is the highest-ranking member of the company, and his tale reinforces his status because it is so well-told. It features allusions to classical philosophy and a complex plot whose ending elegantly ties up all the loose ends. The tale thus showcases the knight’s learning and ability to plan ahead and keep complex ideas straight in his mind. Yet the tale also brings up some big ideas: at one point, the god Saturn, lord of death in Greek mythology, rears up from the deep and announces that he rules everything in the world. The knight himself couldn’t articulate this idea, which goes against the spirit of Christianity and its emphasis on the triumph of life over death and the possibility of redemption. Yet in the story, there’s space to test out an alternate way of speaking about reality.
Christianity
In comparison to many of his contemporaries, Chaucer is a whole lot less concerned with religious ideas. Several of his works, including The Legend of Good Women, are set before Christianity, which allows Chaucer to write pagan characters who worship their own gods. As we discuss in the theme “Storytelling,” The Knight’s Tale uses this framing to propose a non-Christian view of death as the final arbiter of all things. However, Christianity is still an important influence on Chaucer. Many of his translations were of Christian texts, most notably The Consolation of Philosophy. The cast of The Canterbury Tales features many religious figures, including a Parson, a Prioress, and multiple nuns. Many of them tell Christian stories, from miracle stories to dry overviews of the sins. In fact, the Parson’s Tale, an extremely thorough (and pretty dull) overview of possible sins and the rules for repentance, is the last story in The Canterbury Tales. We can see it as Chaucer covering his tracks, repenting for his own bawdiness and encouraging the reader to remember him as a man who is knowledgable about religious matters. Yet the story also feels at odds with the rest of the book—we hear the Parson listing strict standards for behavior, and think that no one we’ve just read about really lives up to his demands. Ultimately, Chaucer seems interested more in Christianity as a social phenomenon than as an inviolable source of truth.
Politics
Chaucer was a diplomat who served multiple missions to Europe. His writing showcases his interest in political negotiation. The Parliament of Fowls parodies parliamentary debate with an argument between a group of birds. Three male eagles are petitioning a female eagle for her hand in marriage. Before they can reach a decision, the “lower house” intervenes and begin a comic debate. The poem suggests that Chaucer’s often-cynical attitude extended toward the political world. However, the Tale of Melibee in The Canterbury Tales showcases a more serious side to Chaucer’s political engagement. The story begins with a king whose house has been broken into by his enemies, who maim his daughter and beat his wife. He responds by promising violence, but his wife slowly and methodically convinces him not to go to war. There might be a parodic edge to this story—the wife’s sensible advice leaves the king looking a bit cold-hearted, as he fails to avenge his daughter’s horrible fate. Yet from another perspective, the tale emphasizes that avoiding war is both necessary and often difficult, and suggests how one might maintain peace even when there are strong motives for going to war. Given Chaucer’s own background as a diplomat, he was no doubt aware of both the pitfalls and the value of diplomacy.
