Some critical remarks on Chaucer’s life, Sir Thopas, and Melibee

This prevailing reluctance to imagine Chaucer as factionally committed may be a consequence of having met him primarily on a literary ground. Those who have experienced his broad-mindedness and capacity to entertain alternatives within the compass of his writings have been reluctant to imagine that he could ever commit himself to a single political perspective. But Chaucer's factional alignment need not be considered an embarrassment to his qualities of balance or good sense. As a person of his time and as a professional courtier and civil servant, he had no choice but to participate in factional politics. His particular habits of mind are indeed suggested by the choices he made, but they are revealed less in the avoidance of factional activity than in the particular form of his commitment and in the degree to which he kept the possibility of alternatives alive. As for his initial and enduring act of political choice, however, we can have little doubt: a review of his interactions with the members of the principal camps confirms his predominant connection with the royal faction, first under Edward III and even more emphatically under Richard II.

· Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (“The King’s Affinity”), 26

Chaucer was the police, not in an attenuated or metaphoric sense: in the better part of his mature employments, he was an official of the repressive apparatus of state. Before that, he was a lackey, in domestic personal service. As a poet, he was both, police officer and domestic servant, in differing ratios, in differing poems, at differing times in his literary career. Still, his poetic work complemented and carried through to the realm of culture the other work he did, and this quality of his poetry, being a straightforwardly homologous reflection in the cultural sphere of his practical work in personal and state service, made his place in literary history. Chaucer's jobs determined his literary-historical role, in other words, his work in service and discipline shaping his work in literature, and it in its turn determining his reception. Chaucer was made "the father of English poetry" not because he was a good poet, though he was. There were other good poets. Chaucer was made the father of English poetry because he was servile, doing useful work serving dominant social interests, materially and ideologically, in both his poetic and other employments.

· David Carlson, Chaucer’s Jobs (Palgrave, 2004), 1

As a literary performance, then, The Tale of Sir Thopas stages virtually every criticism that literary orthodoxy could have levelled against the Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales… [it] reveals the poet to be a minstrel-like tale-teller who has abandoned both courtly "makyng" and the responsibilities of a political adviser to indulge instead a penchant for vaguely erotic daydreams, a dabbler who habitually leaves his ambitious projects unfinished, a bourgeois who celebrates a chivalric heroism he is unable to understand, and a ventriloquist who dresses up in other people's identities. He is, in sum, a frivolous player of literary games who, as Harry Bailly says, “’doost noght elles but despendest tyme’.” (132)

If Thopas represents a rejection of the role of courtly “maker,” the rejection can be imagined only in terms of the even less appropriate identity of the minstrel. It is the positive that is missing from this picture, a social identity commensurate with Chaucer's literary practice: he is the originator of a national literature in a culture that lacks both the concept of literature and a social identity for those who produce it. Lacking a recognizable role within the social whole, Chaucer is obliged to locate himself outside it. (135)

Sir Thopas and Melibee offer two different definitions of writing as a social institution; and if Sir Thopas represents at least a parodic version of values central to The Canterbury Tales, as I have argued, in the last analysis neither tale represents a literary practice with which Chaucer can fully identify himself. In one case he is the minstrel who provides the court with entertainment that ratifies its social identity; in another an adviser to princes through whom speaks the traditional discourse of counsel. In neither case is the prescribed role adequate to the kind of poetry Chaucer is engaged in writing, as he himself makes clear. His exasperation with courtly canons of reception is evident in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women and is restaged in the conjunction of the tales told by the Man of Law and the Wife of Bath; and despite the efforts of literalistic interpreters, his poetry can be satisfactorily accommodated to the requirements of neither topicality nor indoctrination. (173)

Chaucer quite self-consciously writes what we have come to call "literature": a discourse that insists upon its autonomy from both ideological programs and social appropriations. Whether such a discourse is ever finally possible is not here at issue; the idea of the literary--of the aesthetic--has played a central role in the articulation of Western civilization, and with Chaucer we witness its entrance into English culture. (173)

· Lee Patterson, "’What Man Artow?': Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989) 117-175

In brief, [Chaucer’s “New Men”—Man of Law, Franklin, Clerk, Monk] agree that the pleasure and the use of literature are one thing, and are realized in worldly performance. The good of a story lies not only in the exemplary virtues it depicts, the kernel of content, but in the virtues required to derive pleasure from it: the capacity for wonder, sympathy, and thoughtful speculation-in short, in sensitivity to style and its expressive values. Their views represent literary theories and ideals that had had little coherent vernacular expression in England before Chaucer, but closely resemble central ideals of early Renaissance literary culture. In these figures, Chaucer presents not only satiric portraits of social types as they act in the common world, but speculative portraits, the most complex of his career, of the literary values of his most devoted audience.

It is a common array of narrative and rhetorical strategies, and a set of ethical assumptions about literature these imply, that unites this group and defines their modernity. Of all the pilgrims, they have the most to say about style and manner: it seems to be where they locate the human use and value, as well as the pleasure, of their stories. For these men, to perform well as a teller or hearer of a story is to display as well as to inculcate virtue: the ethical claims of literature are for them inseparable from its status as a mode of social performance.

For Chaucer, the idea of "enditing" was one that reconciled two contrasted aspects of literature and the writer's role he had considered repeatedly in his earlier work: on the one hand, the mode of existence of the "maker" as participant-entertainer and celebrant of the cult values of love, and, on the other, that of the "poete," who was absent in his own person from the world of the living, but endured as it were in petrified form, through books. The problematic absence of those he called "poetes" from the world of social performance and public action troubled him repeatedly, as his most notable metaphors for their status suggest. They are the soil of "olde feldes," the pillars that bear up chivalry; their substance is the icy rock on which Fame has built: the implicit challenge these figures present to the living seems to be to work these intractable substances, in order to shape or "make" something of present human use and fruitfulness.. . . .In reconciling "making" and "poetry," "enditing" offered a middle way through which vernacular writing could attain both high style and broad public rather than coterie standing. Both the form of the problem as Chaucer conceives it, and his solution closely parallel those achieved, though with simpler formal means, by his two London contemporaries, Gower and Langland.

· Anne Middleton, “Chaucer’s ‘New Men’ and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales,” 15-16, 20, 24-25 in Literature and Society, ed. Edward W. Said (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 15-16, 20, 24-25

This observation about the “common social location” of Knight and Monk harks back appropriately enough to “The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman”; for Anne Middleton the lay and clerical readers of Piers also formed a single audience, one devoted to the pursuit of “those tasks and offices where spiritual and temporal governance meet.” Piers addresses the needs of that audience in a form that, whatever its own dead ends and aporias, manages largely to avoid the double bind of de casibus writing. Not so the Monk and the Knight, who are caught in the snare and are inevitably of two minds about it. The Monk’s Tale may say “no no” to the value of earthly activity, but his portrait says “yes yes,” and tells a story of attachment rather than ascesis: “of hunting for the hare / Was al his lust.” And when the Knight expresses a dislike of stories that end with a sodeyn fall, he’s implicitly disavowing his own tale, which, while it contains within itself multiple iterations of his preferred plot—the wretched Arcite certainly waxes fortunate, and his cousin Palamon ultimately abides in prosperity—also features the sudden, mortal fall of someone who had risen from a certain kind of misery up to solas. One need not fully subscribe to the “crisis of chivalry” reading of the Knight’s Tale (though I do) to admit that the Knight here resembles not the Neoplatonist Theseus of the end of his tale, making virtue of necessity, but the devastated Theseus of a few dozen lines earlier, who can only be consoled by his elderly father Egeus, and his sunny observation that “This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo.” Indeed, at the end of the Monk’s Tale the Knight seems to reject the philosophical perspective altogether, articulating instead an affective preference for one genre over another. This is characteristically Chaucerian; as the Miller’s Prologue indicates, questions of genre and form are where questions of class typically go to hide in the Canterbury Tales.

· Frank Grady, “Seigneurial Poetics, or The Poacher, the Prikasour, the Hunt and Its Oeuvre,” in Answerable Style: Form and History in Medieval English Literature, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Ohio State University Press, 2013),211