Literature of the subjects whose language is studied

2.2 Geoffrey Chaucer is a father of English literature

First of all, we should mention his huge and the most significant contributions that Chaucer made to the English language. It was all owing to his treatment of English language in his poetry that English secured a protuberant position among the languages of the world not only currently but in that time as well. Chaucer favored English language over Latin and French. It was a style and trend of the period to use Latin and French languages in church, courts and in any literary work, but Chaucer declined to adopt these languages for his poetry. Though, the English language was in raw form, yet he volunteered upon using the English Language for his poetry. It was not as sophisticated and full of lexis as Latin and French. Lowell says in this regard that Chaucer found his English a dialect and left it a language.

He altered the East Midland dialect into a developed language of England. Chaucer knew that Latin and French, due to its composite grammar, would lag behind English language. He was pretty sure about the lively future of English language. That is why he approved English language in his poetry. Sir Walter Raleigh comments that he purified the English of his time from its dross! He shaped it into a fit instrument for his use.
Chaucer’s second and protuberant influence to the English language & literature is his contribution to the English poetry. In the age of Chaucer, most of the poets used to comprise allegorical poetry. It was a poetry, which had no relationship with the genuineness of the time. In the beginning, Chaucer also followed his predecessor and wrote poetry in their manner. But later on, he came to know that any piece of literature must deal with real life. That is why; The Canterbury Tales is the product of this change. It deals directly with life as it was in his age. He describes every character in its true colors. He does not overstress or underestimate any character. Relatively, he decorates every character in words as it was before him. Grierson and Smith are of the judgement that Chaucer’s pilgrims are all with today, though some of them have changed their names. The king now commands a line regiment, the squire is in the guards, the shipman was a rum-runner, while prohibition lasted and is active now in the black market, the friar is a jolly sporting publican, the pardoner vends quack medicines or holds séances, and the prioress is the headmistress of a fashionable girl’s school.
In the field of versification, the English poets owe much to Chaucer. He was the first poet, who tried his hands on English poetry. During his time, poetry was in its raw shape. He made several experiments in versification and gave it a new shape. His contemporaries were sued to too much alliteration in their poetry. Chaucer could not withstand with it and brought about drastic changes in alliteration. In the old fashioned alliteration, the number of syllables was irregular. Chaucer discarded this method of alliteration and introduced a new one, which had regular number of syllables, end rhyme and absence of frequent repetition.⁸
In Chaucer’s poetry, we also find that he has used lines of ten syllables and the lines are in couplets. Every line in a couplet rhyme with each other. Chaucer is also famous for his new form of stanza, which is called Chaucerian stanza. He was the first poet, who introduced it into the English literature. It is a stanza of seven lines having octosyllabic meter. Its rhyme scheme is aba bb cc. Chaucer used this type of stanza in The Books of the Duchesse. Chaucer is also regarded as the originator of heroic couplet. Heroic couplet is widely used in The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer and later on by his successors like Pope and Dryden. Pope and Dryden perfected the Heroic Couplet to a great extent.⁹
Chaucer’s another contribution that resulted in the birth of secular drama was his contribution to the drama. His poetry had something that contributed to the development of drama. Characterization in The Canterbury Tales is said to be the first element of drama that gave rise to drama. Drama is a collection of dialogues through the mouths of living characters. Characters in The Canterbury Tales are free to talk about everything and the author has very little intervention in their dialogues. This sort of feature is certainly an important element of drama. In drama, the author does not intervene in the dialogues of characters. A critic asserts in this regard:
“A dramatist in all but the fact if the drama had been known in Chaucer’s time as a branch of living literature, he might have attained as highly an excellence in comedy as any English Continental writer.” Though, there were no signs of novel in the age of Chaucer, yet he was the first poet who augured the era of novel. His poetry is replete with such elements as characterization, plot construction, narration, realism, humour and pictorial qualities that fit into the genera of modern novel. G.K Chesterton asserts in this regard: “If Chaucer is the father of English poetry, he is certainly the grandfather of the English novel.” Like a modern novelist, his description, narration and ways of storytelling are aligned with any novelist. He does not lag behind them at any stage. That is why; The Canterbury Tales is regarded as the prologue to modern fiction. It has almost all the characteristics that we find in any novel. It has vivid characterization, point of view, humour, realism, pictorial quality and much more that may fit into the genera of novel. Chaucer’s Troilus and Cryseyde is considered a novel in verse. It has everything that we associate with novel. It has characterization, plot construction, action, conflict, physiological analysis and setting, which we normally find in any novel. S.D Neill has the opinion that: Had Chaucer written in prose, it is possible that his Troilus and Cryseyde and not Richardson’s Pamela would be celebrated as the first English Novel.
Chaucer’s major contributions also contain his lavish use of humour in his poetry. He may be regarded as the best and first humourist in the history of English literature. His Canterbury Tales reflect his tendency for humour to a great extent. In every characterization, he finds something humourous, which compels him to make fun of him. He makes fun of Fiar, Prioress and other characters in such a manner that the reader cannot help laughing. Aldous Huxley says in this regard:
“Where Langland’s cries aloud in anger threatening the world with hell fire, Chaucer looks on and smiles.”
Unlike his contemporary poets, Chaucer does not follow the way of didacticism. He wants to bring about smiles on the faces of his readers. That is why; he endeavours to refrain from didacticism in his poetry. Chaucer's foremost major work was The Book of the Duchess, an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster who died in 1368. Two other early works were Anelida and Arcite and The House of Fame. He wrote many of his most important works in a inexhaustible period when he held the job of imposts comptroller for London (1374 to 1386). His Parlement of Foules, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde all date from this time. It is supposed that he started The Canterbury Tales in the 1380s. Besides that, Chaucer also translated Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (extended by Jean de Meun). Eustache Deschamps named himself a "nettle in Chaucer's garden of poetry". In 1385, Thomas Usk made healthy-looking mention of Chaucer, and John Gower also glorified him.
Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe pronounces the method and use of the astrolabe in element and is sometimes cited as the initial illustration of technical writing in the English language, and it indicates that Chaucer was versed in science in addition to his literary talents. The equatorie of the planetis is a scientific work similar to the Treatise and sometimes ascribed to Chaucer because of its language and calligraphy, a proof of identity which scholars no longer deem acceptable. Chaucer wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed in English literature since around the 12th century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the initial English poets to use the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the iambic pentametre, in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him. The arrangement of these five-stress lines into rhyming couplets, initial seen in his The Legend of Good Women, was used in much of his later work and became one of the standard poetic forms in English. His early influence as a satirist is also important, with the common humorous device, the funny accent of a regional dialect, apparently making its initial appearance in The Reeve's Tale.
The poetry of Chaucer, along with other writers of the era, is credited with helping to standardise the London Dialect of the Middle English language from a combination of the Kentish and Midlands dialects. This is probably overstated; the influence of the court, chancery and bureaucracy – of which Chaucer was a part – remains a more probable influence on the development of Standard English.
Modern English is somewhat distanced from the language of Chaucer's poems owing to the effect of the Great Vowel Shift some time after his death. This change in the pronunciation of English, still not fully understood, makes the reading of Chaucer difficult for the modern audience. The status of the final -e in Chaucer's verse is uncertain: it seems similar that during the period of Chaucer's writing the final -e was dropping out of colloquial English and that its use was somewhat irregular. It may have been a vestige of the Old English dative singular suffix -e attached to most nouns. Chaucer's versification suggests that the final -e is sometimes to be articulated, and sometimes to be silent; Although, this remains a point on which there is disagreement. When it is articulated, most researchers utter it as a schwa. Apart from the unbalanced spelling, much of the lexis is decipherable to the modern reader. Chaucer is also recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the initial author to use many common English words in his writings. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time but Chaucer, with his ear for public speech, is the earliest extant manuscript source. Acceptable, alkali, altercation, amble, angrily, annex, annoyance, approaching, arbitration, armless, army, arrogant, arsenic, arc, artillery and aspect are just some of almost two thousand English words initial attested in Chaucer.
Prevalent acquaintance of Chaucer's works is confirmed by the many poets who imitated or answered to his writing. John Lydgate was one of the earliest poets to write perpetuations of Chaucer's unfinished Tales while Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid bring to an end the story of Cressida left unfinished in his Troilus and Criseyde. Many of the manuscripts of Chaucer's works comprehend material from these poets and later gratefulness by the Romantic era poets were shaped by their failure to distinguish the later "additions" from original Chaucer. Writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as John Dryden, admired Chaucer for his levels, but not for his rhythm and rhyme, as few critics could then read Middle English and the text had been slaughtered by printers, leaving a somewhat unadmirable mess. It was not until the late 19th century that the official Chaucerian canon, accepted today, was decided upon, largely as a result of Walter William Skeat's work. Roughly seventy-five years after Chaucer's death, The Canterbury Tales was selected by William Caxton to be one of the initial books to be printed in England. Chaucer is sometimes considered the source of the English vernacular tradition. His achievement for the language can be seen as part of a general historical trend towards the creation of a vernacular literature, after the example of Dante, in many parts of Europe. A parallel trend in Chaucer's own lifetime was underway in Scotland through the work of his slightly earlier contemporary, John Barbour, and was similar to have been even more general, as is evidenced by the example of the Pearl Poet in the north of England. Although Chaucer's language is much nearer to Modern English than the text of Beowulf, such a Modern English-speaker with a large expressions of archaic words may comprehend it, it diverges enough that most publications revolutionize his idiom. The following is a sample from the foreword of The Summoner's Tale that compares Chaucer's text to a modern translation:
The initial recorded association of Valentine's Day with romantic love is supposed to be in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls (1382), a dream vision portraying a parliament for birds to choose their mates. Honouring the initial anniversary of the engagement of fifteen-year-old King Richard II of England to fifteen-year-old Anne of Bohemia.