Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard
Mary Flannery, Reaktion Books, £16.99

GIVEN that even with the enormous modern research into Shakespeare’s life there is still a paucity of detailed knowledge, Mary Flannery is courageous in taking on a biography of the other icon of English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer, of whose personal life even less is known.

She does have the advantage, however, that medieval records provide revealing evidence of the latter whose active public life as civil servant, diplomat and MP was spent on the fringes of administrative and political power during the tumultuous later years of the 14th century. 

When she comes to what kind of man Chaucer was, her descriptions are necessarily very largely based on suppositions. Her account is prefaced regularly with phrases such as ”it is unclear,” “it may have been,” and “it seems problematic.” Even a description of the construction of a new Custom House including a latrine which, it is “conjectured” Chaucer, customs comptroller (sic) for the Port of London, may have used. 

Nevertheless, the Father of English Poetry emerges as a fascinating figure who lived through times which saw the devastation of the bubonic plague (the Black Death), the social unrest of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the political power struggles leading to the deposition of Richard II and the accession of Henry IV.

Interestingly, even though distantly related by marriage to the powerful kingmaker, John of Gaunt, Chaucer “kept a low profile in the political conflicts of his day, steering clear of potential trouble in his public life and never mentioning anything controversial in his poetry.”   

As a poet influenced by the literary works of the pre-eminent French and Italian cultures of the time, Chaucer produced a range of works covering “a dizzying variety of genre, subjects and forms.”

Mary Bard’s main focus, as her subtitle indicates, is on that aspect of Chaucer’s oeuvre best known today, his bawdy humour, fully on show in The Canterbury Tales which, according to a Guardian article, are “full of good old-fashioned filth.” She does remind the reader that the 24 Tales include “a wide range of genre and forms, from the didactic prose of the Tale of Melibee to the beast fable, short comic texts, classical narratives, saints’ lives,” etc.

Although the work avoids politics, he treats the wide range of character-types on their pilgrimage to a broad satirical treatment. He draws closest to social criticism in his treatment of the clergy – the greed of the Monk and the lechery of the Friar being popular contemporary targets.

Bard also examines Chaucer’s misogyny which was a feature of medieval literature. Possibly the two most famous Tales, that of The Miller (containing “the most famous fart joke in all of English literature”) and the Wife of Bath’s Tale play off women’s traditionally supposedly insatiable sexual natures.

This attractive book, containing many medieval illustrations, makes for an ideal introduction for both the general reader and the student approaching the work of the writer who first gave the English their own literary language.