First, James Shapiro gave us Shakespeare in 1599. That’s when the Bard opened the Globe, wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It, and started in on Hamlet. Then Shapiro gave us Shakespeare in 1606, when he wrote Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. And now Paul Strohm treats us to Chaucer in 1386, when he hit upon the idea and plan of the Canterbury Tales.
An evidence-based study of one artist’s creative circumstance at one key creative moment. It’s a brilliant approach to a practical problem. How to understand or at least attempt to explain an epochal artistic breakthrough, when we know little or nothing about the private thoughts of the artist responsible?
With Chaucer, we have his poetry and plenty of public facts, i.e., official records, about his advantageous marriage to the sister of John of Gaunt’s mistress and then third wife, political ties to both John of Gaunt and Richard II, and appointment as a controller of the wool trade in London and parliamentarian, but almost no facts about him as a poet.
Strohm sees no point in ransacking the poetry for clues as to Chaucer’s experience and motivation. Rather, he looks for “a connection between an author’s immersion in ordinary, everyday activities and the separately imagined world of his literary work…. Intermediary between a writer’s public life on the one hand and fictional and literary creations on the other are those activities comprising what might be called the ‘writing scene’: all those matters of situation and circumstance that permit writing in the first place, the essential preconditions and occasions of literary art…. The connections I will draw between his poetry and his life will involve those life arrangements that hindered or helped his writing, that advanced or retarded his search for an appreciative audience of his poems.”
Beginning with the official records about the marriage, alliances, and patronage positions, Strohm reconstructs Chaucer’s day-to-day activities, and the necessary tensions therein. Chaucer aside, the richly textured picture he draws provides fascinating insights into the workings and alliances of the realm of Richard II, as well as of the smells, sounds and personal interaction of London at that time, particularly around the Wool Wharf and Aldgate, in which gate tower Chaucer lived for 14 years. And in terms of Chaucer, it reveals an accomplished though largely unknown poet and private man, in a web of rather delicate, compromising official relationships.
I especially loved his evocation of aural linkages in ways that we have lost, between sacred and secular realms, through the effect of church bells in the street, and between poet and audience, face to face in a reading circle.
“Paul Strohm’s book provides invaluable insights, exemplary scholarship, and some delightful reading.”
1386 is the focal point, because that autumn Chaucer’s world came crashing down around him. He lost his job, his apartment, his patrons, and not much later his wife. But most of all, Strohm argues, he lost his audience, a small circle of Londoners to whom he read his poetry aloud, and, forced to retreat to Kent, Chaucer made a virtue of necessity.
“The sequence of events unfolding in the autumn of 1386, would have an immense influence on the circumstances of Chaucer’s art: on his writing scene, on his access to an audience, on the importance of audience to his work, on his ambitions for himself as a writer. In the end of it all, these altered circumstances will have an impact on the artwork itself, on its form and it means of presentation, and on what Chaucer hopes to accomplish by writing it. Within the practical details of Chaucer’s ordinary life rests an explanation for his most extraordinary literary departure, the enabling idea of his final masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales.”
“A new art requires a new audience, and Chaucer will seek and find one – first, fictively, through his company of Canterbury Pilgrims, and then concretely, through an expanded and diversified reading public. Forgoing the customary comforts of a familiar audience, and discovering a voice (or, more accurately, a multiplicity of voices) in which to address a broadened constituency, Chaucer will remake himself.”
Whether you’re thinking of giving Chaucer a read for the first time since high school, looking for detail on Richard II’s realm, interested in how people respond to adversity, or fascinated with the art of writing itself, Paul Strohm’s book provides invaluable insights, exemplary scholarship, and some delightful reading.