Abstract
Throughout this book we have looked at ‘Chaucer in his time’ without much open acknowledgement of the partial and time-bound nature of such a project. The very process of selection, the attempt to frame history, even intermittently, in narrative form, is, as Chaucer himself knew, a falsification (see chapter 5 above). Narrative, as Hayden White has written in our own time, is not a neutral form of discourse, but a discourse of desire, in the sense that it seeks to find meaning in experience.1 It imposes an illusory shape and significance on events by representing them as possessing the formal coherence of stories and does so, furthermore, from within a perspective that is not universal, but culture-specific. Writing about the past, even where the writing is non-narrative, or takes as its focus works of literature rather than historical events, is constructed by the writer’s own cultural and historical position. There can be no escape from the present in the attempt to focus on the past.
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Notes
See Hayden White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, rpt as chapter 1 in his collection of essays on the subject of narrative and historiography, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1987) pp. 1–25. On Chaucer’s own scepticism concerning historiography see also Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 1991).
Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357–1900, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925) vol. I, p. 8.
I have used this collection throughout on account of its completeness, but many of the same quotations are more easily available in John Burrow (ed.), Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) and
Derek Brewer (ed.), Chaucer: the Critical Heritage, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Quotations from Spurgeon are from vol. I unless otherwise stated, and punctuation and typography have been slightly modernised.
On the perception of Chaucer as the father, see further A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) p. 59 and Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 13ff. Patterson’s assessment of Dryden’s influence on later critical tradition is close to mine on pp. 150–1 below in its emphasis on Dryden’s isolation of Chaucer from his time. Caroline Spurgeon prints eight examples of the ‘well-established formula’ of bracketing Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate together and lists the references (Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism, p. xviii, n. 1. Stephen Hawes, she notes, ‘is in a minority of one in placing Lydgate above Chaucer’.
See P. Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the “Chaucer Tradition”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 4 (1982) pp. 3–32, and pp. 42–3 above.
See Thomas J. Heffernan, ‘Aspects of the Chaucerian Apocrypha: Animadversions on William Thynne’s Edition of the Plowman’s Tale’, in Morse and Windeatt, Chaucer Traditions, pp. 155–67; and two articles by A. N. Wawn: ‘Chaucer, Wyclif and the Court of Apollo’, English Language Notes, vol. 10 (1972) pp. 15–20; and ‘Chaucer, The Plowman’s Tale, and Reformation Propaganda: The Testimonies of Thomas Godfray and I Playne Piers’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 56 (1973–4) pp. 174–92.
Shakespeare’s Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978) p. 3. See also Alice S. Miskimin, The Renaissance Chaucer (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1975).
See II.i.74–80 and E. Talbot Donaldson, The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1985) pp. 34–6.
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© 1993 Janette Dillon
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Dillon, J. (1993). Reputation and Influence. In: Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers in their Time. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22713-6_7
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