Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author

Abstract

When Geoffrey Chaucer as Clerk of the King’s Works constructed lists for the 1390 Smithfield tournament, he took part direcuy in the aristocratic spectacle that Richard II staged as part of England’s grand reentry into the European political arena. King Richard’s eager embrace of French culture, especially after his marriage to Isabelle of France in 1396, encouraged the appearance at his court of French chivalric poets such as Oton de Graunson and literary opportunists such as Jean Froissart. After Chaucer’s “Italian period” of the 1380s, the poet was again induced to engage directly with this hegemonic French tradition. In addition to his burlesque of the courtly love vision in ‘The Legend of Good Women, the Canterbury Tales represented his literary response as a postcolonial writer to these cultural challenges and, moreover, provided the materials of a nationalist English tradition ready-made for appropriation by a subsequent imperialist movement.

This chapter examines the development of an English literary tradition in response to the long-standing dominance of French cultural models during the last decade of the fourteenth century. The study suggests ways in which this body of vernacular writing, particularly the Canterbury Tales, was quickly appropriated to the expansionist agenda of the new Lancastrian regime during the first decades of the fifteenth century.

The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth