Ministry of higher and secondary special

4.Geoffrey Chaucer: Impact on English Literature
Chaucer’s primary source of income came from civil service jobs and royal annuities, but he made the biggest impact in his life within the realm of literature. An enormously successful poet in his lifetime, his poetry went on to shape future of English Literature.
In addition to his extensive body of literature, his poetry made three important contributions to English literature: he wrote in the English Vernacular and he is credited with introducing iambic pentameter and the Rhyme Royal to English poetry. He is best known for The Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer is the father of modern day English literature.
While old English had been the language of literature before 1066, French literature took over with the Norman invasion and remained the language of court in Chaucer’s day. The English court in the 14th century spoke primarily in French and wrote primarily in Latin. Like his contemporaries, his early poetry was strongly influenced by the French poetry tradition. He was also inspired by Ovid, his favorite Roman poet. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio influenced his poetry as well, both in style and subject.¹²
Chaucer, however, chose to write his poetry in English instead of either French or Latin. Writing in Middle English, the vernacular as it was spoken in the 14th century, indicated a major shift in British Literature. Chaucer was a master of the language. He managed to create realistic characters and replicate a natural conversational tone within the constraints of formal poetry. While his poetry often addresses serious topics of philosophy and religion, he does so with humor.
Chaucer introduced two poetic conventions, iambic pentameter and the rhyme royal, to English poetry.
Chaucer’s poem “The Legend of Good Women” is the first known English poem to use iambic pentameter. Meter in poetry refers to the rhythm of the spoken words. Iambic Pentameter is a pattern consisting of five repetitions of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Chaucer also used iambic Pentameter in The Canterbury Tales, creating the illusion of an effortless storytelling narrative. Iambic Pentameter remains one of the most popular meters in English poetry. William Shakespeare is one of the most famous poets and playwrights to use Iambic Pentameter.
Chaucer first used the Rhyme Royal rhyming scheme in Parlement of Foules. Rhyme Royal consists of stanzas that are seven lines long, organized in an ABABBCC pattern. Chaucer drew his inspiration for Rhyme Royal from Boccaccio’s Ottava Rima, but uses the seven line variation to mix the normally serious topic of romantic love with humor, with the rigidly structured poem contrasting with the chatting birds. Chaucer went on to use the Rhyme Royal rhyming in scheme in other works, including Troilus and Criseyde and for parts of The Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer’s poetry influenced and inspired many of Great Britain’s authors, poets, and playwrights who followed him, including William Shakespeare. Shakespeare borrowed some of his stories from Chaucer’s poetry. In particular, Shakespeare drew heavily on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde for his play, Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare’s play The Two Noble Kinsmen was similarly drawn from the Knight’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales.Beyond the stories themselves, Shakespeare drew on Chaucer’s poetic techniques, including iambic pentameter and the Rhyme Royal. Perhaps most critically, however, Shakespeare learned from Chaucer’s use of language and narrative framing techniques to create strong characters with distinctive voices. Shakespeare also learned from Chaucer’s poetry to use dialogue to convey actions which translated well on the stage. Shakespeare drew on the lessons he learned from Chaucer’s poetry to push the limits of play manuscripts, making him one of Great Britain’s best playwrights.
Conclusion
The first collected edition of Chaucer’s works to be printed appeared in 1532. It was edited by William Thynne and is regarded as being vital for sustaining interest in Chaucer, ensuring his lasting reputation and influence.
Thynne’s edition is of particular interest to us because it has been demonstrated that he used the University of Glasgow manuscript of The Romaunt of the Rose in its compilation. Sections of text in the manuscript have been carefully marked off in order to make up the pages of print. The page displayed to the left corresponds to folio 58r of the manuscript, shown above. About three quarters of the way down on the right hand page of the manuscript, the annotation ‘coll’ can be found besides the line ‘And seide sir how that yee may’. This mark indicated to the compositor where the second column of text in the corresponding printed page was to begin, as can be seen in the first line of the second column on page shown here: ‘And sayd sir: howe that ye may’. This part of the poem is actually from a section that most scholars have agreed is not by Chaucer, but by an unknown author using a northern dialect. However, Simon Horobin has recently questioned this traditional assertion; he suggests that Chaucer may well have experimented with northern rhymes early in his career and that the language and authorship of the whole text should be reconsidered. Folios 13v and 17v from the manuscript (shown above) are marked by further annotations from the compositor.
The other images displayed below show pages from The Canterbury Tales and the opening title of The Dreame of Chaucer. Thynne primarily reused Caxton's blocks from his second edition of c.1483 in illustrating this work; the woodcuts depicting the Knight and the Squire, however, were newly made for this edition. The Dreame of Chaucer is now more commonly referred to as The Book of the Duchess. Like The Romaunt of the Rose, this was the first time that the poem appeared in print.
This is a fifteenth-century manuscript of Chaucer’s magnum opus, in which a diverse group set off on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. In having the characters tell stories to while away the time en route, Chaucer provides the perfect framework for a series of narratives, told in a wide variety of styles and genres, that together mirror all human life. It has been universally celebrated for its dramatic qualities and inimitable humour. The work, however, was never completed and Chaucer died leaving it unrevised. It survives in ten fragments; there are no explicit connections between these or any real indication of the order in which Chaucer intended that they should be read. Even modern editions today differ in the order in which the tales are presented.
Over eighty complete and fragmentary manuscript copies of the poem survive today. The colophon of this volume supplies the information that it was made by Geoffrey and Thomas Spirleng and completed in January 1476. Written on paper in an ordinary business hand, the manuscript's leaves are generously sized but the layout of the text is economical with no attempt at expensive decoration. Geoffrey Spirleng was a civic official in Norwich. He and his son probably copied the poem out for their own use. Their version is somewhat eccentrically ordered; they originally missed out two tales that then had to be added in at the end. Shown to the left is the page with the original colophon, crossed out by Spirleng after he realized that he had not quite finished after all. It is followed by the first of the appended tales, that of the Clerk (shown below right). As well as inadvertently omitting part of the text, Spirleng furthermore copied out the Shipman's and Prioress's tales twice. Shown below are the beginnings of his two versions of the tale of the Shipman. Such mistakes unwittingly offer us a fascinating glimpse into late medieval scribal practises. Copying the same tales out twice indicates that Spirleng worked on his manuscript over a long period of time, while his problems with ordering have been attributed to the fact that he used two separate (and differently ordered) manuscripts as copy texts for his own book.