LIST OF WORKS

 MAJOR WORKS

·        Translation of Roman de La Rose(the Romance of the Rose)

·        The book of the Duchess

·        The House of Fame

·        Anelida and Arcite

·        Parlament of Foules

·        Translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy as Boece

·        Troilus and Criseyde

·        The Legend of Good Woman

·        The Canterbury Tales

SHORT POEMS

·        An ABC

·        Chaucers Wordess unto Adam,his owne Scriveyn

·        The complaint unto Pity,mars,venus,his lady,Chaucer to his purse

·        The former Age

·        Fortune

·        Gentilesse

·        Proverbs

·        To Rosemounde

·        Truth

·        Womanly Noblesse

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

 

     Eglish poet. The name Chaucer, a shoemaker, is found in London and the eastern countries as early as the second half of the 13th century.

     In 1357 Geoffrey is found.apparenly as lad, in the service of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster, wifw of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, entries in two leaves of her household accounts, accidentally preserved, showing that she paid in April, May and December various small sums for his clothing and expences. In 1359, as we learn from his deposition in the Scrope suit, Chaucer went o the war in France. On the 1st of March 1360 the King( Edward III) conributed  £16 to his ransom, and by a year or two later Chaucer must have entered the royal service.

     John of Gaunt2s wife, the duchess Blanche, died at the age of twenty-nine, and Chaucer wrote in her honour The Book of the Duchesse, a poem of 1334 lines in octosyllabic couplets, the first of his undoubtedly genuine Works which can be connected with a definite date.  In June 1370 he went abroad on the king’s service, thıugh on what errand, or whither it took him, is not known. He was back probably some time before Michaelmas, and seems to have remained in England till the 1st of December 1372, when he started, with an advance of 100 marks in his pocket, for Italy, as one of the three commissioners to treat with the Genoese as to an English port where they might have special facilities for trade. The accounts which he delivered on his return on the 23rd of May 1373 show that he had also visited Florence on  the king’s business, and he probably went also to padua and there made the acquaintance of petrarch.

 

      In the second quarter of 1374 chaucer lived in a whirl of prosperity. In December 1376 he was sent abroad on the king’s service in the retinue of Sir John Burley; in February 1377  he was sent to Paris and Montreuil in connexion probably with the peace negotiatiıons between England and France, and at the end of April(after reward of £20 for his goog services) he was again despatched to France.

 

       On the accession of Richard III Chaucer was confirmed in his offices and pensions. In January 1378 he seems to have been in France in connexion with a proposed marriage between Richard and the daughter of the French king; and on the 28th of May of the same year he was sent twith Sir Edward de Berkeley to the lord ofMilan and Sir John Hawkwood to treat for help in the king’s wars, returning on the 19th of September. This  was his last diplomatic journey,and the close of a period of his life generally considered to have been so unprolific of poetry that little beyond the Clerk’s  “Tale of Grisilde,” one or two other of the stories afterwards included in the CANTERBURY TALES, and a few short poems, are attributted to it, though the poet’s actual absences from England during the eight years amount to little more than eighteen months.

 

       During the next twelve or fifteen years there is no question that Chaucer was constatly engaged in literary work, though fort he first half of them he had no lack of offical employment. In April 1382 a new coptrollership, that of the petty customs in the Port of London, was given him, an shortly after he was allowed to exercise it by deputy, a similar licence being given him in February 1385, at the instance of the earl of Oxford, as regard as the comptrollership of wool.

 

       In October 1385 Chaucer was made a justice of the peace for Kent. In February we catch a glimpse of his wife Philippa being admitted to the fraternity of Lincoln cathedral in the company of Henry, Earl of Derby( afretwards Henry III), Sir Thomas de Swynford and other distingueshed persons. In August 1386 he was elected one of the two knights of the shire for Kent. In May 1388 Chaucer surrendered to the king his two pensions of 20 marks each, they were re-granted at his request to one  John Scalby.

 

       In July 1389, after John of Gaunt had returned to England, and the  king had taken the goverment into his own  hands, Chaucer was appointed clerk of the Works at various royal places at a salary of two shillings a day, or over £31 a year, worth upwards of £500 present value. While  on the king’s business, in September 1390, Chaucer was twicw robbed by highwaymen, losing £20 of the king’s Money. In June 1391 he was superseded in his Office of clerk of the Works, and seems to have suffered in his Office of clerck of the Works, and seems to have suffered another spell of misfortune, of which the first alleviation came in January 1393 whwn the king made him a present of £10.

 

       In February 1394 he was granted a newpension of £20. ıt is possible, also, that about this time, or a little later, he was in the service of the Earl of Derby. In 1397 he received from King Richard a Grant of a butt of wine yearly. In May 1398 he obtained letters of protection against his creditors. On the  24th of December 1399 he leased a tenement in the garden of St Mary’s Chapel, Westminster, and it was probably here that he died, on  the 25th of the following October. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and his tomb became the nucleus of what is now known as Poets’ Corner.

 

       The portrait of  Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, shows him  an old man with white hair; he has  a fresh complexion, grey eyes, a straigh nose, a grey moustache and a small double-pointed beard.

 

    The development of his genius has been attractively summed up as comprised in three stages, French, Italian and English. To be touch throughout his lifewith the best French poets of the  day was much of Chaucer. Even with their stimulus alone he might have developed no small part of his genius.

 

      The most direct example of Chaucer’s French studies is his translation of Le Roman de rose, a poem written in some 4000 lines by Guillaume Lorris about 1237 and extended to over 22,000 by Jean Clonipel, better known as Jean de Meun, forty years later. We know from Chaucer himself that he translated this poem,and the extant English fragment of 7698 lines was generally assigned to him from 1532,when it was first printed, till its authorship was challenged in the  early years of the Chaucer Society.

 

      While Chaucer thus sought to reproduce both the matter and the style of French poetry in England, he found other materials in popular Latin boks. Among his lost Works are rendings of “Origenes upon the Maudeleyne,” and of Pope Innocent III on “The Wreced Engendring of Mankinde”(De miseria conditionis humanae).