Geoffrey Chaucer.

another mission for the king again, during this time he was a squire. The name Chaucer comes from the French word Chaucer, which means a shoemaker. This name describes a common trade. Chaucer started writing poetry when he first entered the life of the court as a page. He also did translations, notably for the long allegorical poem The Romance of the Rose. In 1366 he married Philippa, a lady-in-waiting to the queen. He had two sons and a daughter. In 1367 he was awarded a pension for life in reward for his services as a member of the king’s household. When Lionel died in 1368, Chaucer joined the household of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. On a mission to Italy in 1372-73, Chaucer probably met Boccaccio and Petrarch. Of course he read some work from him and other people. Chaucer went out on other missions in Flanders, France, and Lombardy. He returned to London in 1374 he was appointed to the government position of Comptroller of Customs monitoring sales of wools and hides. Geoffrey Chaucer led a busy official life, and an esquire or the royal court, the comptroller of the customs for the port of London, a participant in important diplomatic missions and a lot of other official duties. Chaucer also got pensions from king and John of Gaunt. Chaucer was elected to Parliament as a member from Kent in 1386. He went through financial difficulties while John of Gaunt was abroad from 1386 to 1389. During this time Chaucer lost his comptrollership and his pensions. When Chaucer was made comptroller on the petty customs of the port of London he really didn’t like the job. He always complained about the problems he was having in his life (www.librarius.com). Through the influence of the new queen, Anne of Bohemia, he was enabled by 1385 to secure a permanent deputy. During this time he gave up housekeeping in Aldgate, and settled in the country, at Greenwich, where he had a garden and arbour. The grants made to Philippa, his wife stopped in 1387 that was after she died. During the spring of 1388 Chaucer sold two of his pensions. In 1390 he was robbed o the king’s money twice in one day, but he was excused from repaying it. Until King Richard recovered power Chaucer had a couple of year’s to get his life straight. In four days after his accession King IV, the son of Chaucer’s first benefactor, increased Chaucer’s remaining income by forty marks per annum. He then released a pleasant house in the monastery garden at Wesminster.  In 1389 Chaucer’s finances started improving when Richard II appointed him Clerk of the King’s Works to oversee the maintenance of public buildings and parks. During the late 1380’s Chaucer started writing The Canterbury Tale. When he wrote the Canterbury tales he had every one from different social levels of society with sympathy and humor that made his character’s seem like real people, instead of people that didn’t even exist (Payne50). The tales marked Chaucer’s highest achievement as a creative writer. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales had a dramatic effect on the development of English literature. In this unfinished masterpiece Chaucer used English as a literary language rather than a spoken one, giving it a greater poetic vocabulary as well as new meter system. He was the first English poet to use the iambic pentameter used from about 1100 to 1485. This new system was made up of a seven-line stanza called rhyme royal, and the couplet termed a heroic. Geoffrey Chaucer is a fantastic English poet, the first of England and in the middle Ages no other man could compare. Only second to William Shakespeare, Chaucer is the best-loved poet for his humor and wisdom. Chaucer never seems to talk about the Decameron, maybe it’s because he never actually took the time to read it word for word. The Decameron consists of a group of people leaving Florence because everyone is dying from the plague and the people that are leaving tell their little stories. Chaucer claimed to have translated Le Roman de la Rose, but if he did, all that survives is a fragment. His first important original work, The Book of the Duchess, is an elegy for John of Gaunt's first wife, Blanche, who died in 1369( Clark 30). The Tales is a collection of stories set within a framing story of a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket. The poet joins a band of pilgrims, vividly described in the General Prologue, who assemble at the Tabard Inn outside London for the journey to Canterbury. Ranging in status from a Knight to a humble Plowman, they are a microcosm of 14th-century English society. Boccaccio in his prologue and frame made his ten young ladies and gentlemen examples of perfect decorum, and permitted the carnival world of buffoonery and grotesquerie to appear only in the stories, where we get wild images of an abbess throwing her lover's trousers over her head thinking they're her wimple, or of a lecherous monk led into the public square on a chain disguised as a wild man and there recognized and apprehended, images of popular medieval folk comedy, mocking and overblown(“Brice” 75). In Chaucer such images, though they appear in the stories too, are associated with the pilgrims themselves, whose behavior on the pilgrimage is itself carnivalesque. Chaucer's writing developed from a period of French influence in the late 1360s, through his 'middle period' of both French and Italian Influences, to the last period. Chaucer did not begin working on the Canterbury Tales until he was in his early 40s. When Dante's journey in The Divine Comedy ended in spiritual purification, Chaucer's pilgrims learned about the weakness of human nature, women's mastery over men, and how a canon cheated a priest. Among the band of pilgrims are a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath. Chaucer's innovation was to use such a diverse assembly of narrators, whose stories are interlinked with interludes in which the characters talk with each other, revealing much about themselves. Among Chaucer's sources were Boccaccio's Teseida, The Wedding of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. The rhyming verse was written in what is called Middle English, an old form of the language that differs from the English used today. Chaucer's style and techniques have been imitated through centuries. Shakespeare borrowed his plot for the drama Troilus and Cressida, John Dryen and Alexander Pope modernized some of his tales. It has been said of The Canterbury Tales that all of humanity moves through its pages. The stories are full of an inimitable humor, at once friendly and shrewd. The points are often made casually, often with bludgeon strokes, but they are always human and illuminating. The work was originally illustrated and decorated on a grand scale. There are traces of at least one full-page illustration and the surviving pictures indicate a unique program of illustration in Chaucer manuscripts. The manuscript was messed with during the sixteenth century; pictures and borders were taken off. The manuscript contains 23 illustrations, one appearing for each pilgrim who tells a tale. The artists' representation of the pilgrims closely follows Chaucer's description of them. These are among the earliest examples of English portrait paintings. The illustration shown is a depiction of Chaucer himself most likely made from a bust. It is the earliest known portrait of Chaucer. The text was carefully edited immediately after Chaucer's death, because of the unfinished state of several of the tales. The scribes for this manuscript left space in two tales, the Cook's and the Squire's, in the hope that the remaining text would be discovered and could be inserted at a later time. In 1394 Chaucer was granted a pension by Richard II. In 1399 John of Gaunt’s son Henry became king, and he increased Chaucer’s pension (Bloom 88). Less than a year later Chaucer died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the section that became the “Poets’ Cornner”. Chaucer was and will always be known for his wonderful poetry.