THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHAUCER

The Chaucer revealed by the last few decades of critical scholarship is much in need of a good popular biography; the cosy trivialities of Marchette Chute's 1946 Geoffrey Chaucer of England have little to do with the joyous solempnitee and vast sophistication we now discern in the works. No one could be more pleasantly qualified for the task than Gardner: poet, novelist, and veteran Middle English scholar and translator. This spirited book (a companion to Gardner's more specialized The Poetry of Chaucer, p. 28) scrubs away some of the more fatuous cliches surrounding our sanest poet. Gardner painstakingly sets the skilled civil servant's professional record against the fortunes of his royal masters and the course of the French and Spanish wars. For England the last decades of the 14th century were an age of glory, rapine, bankruptcy, extortion, and increasingly murderous debate over the limits of royal and parliamentary power. For the London vintner's son, they were a time of ceaseless, sometimes perilous achievement: he was at various times diplomatic negotiator, controller of the important wool customs, knight of the shire for Kent, justice of the peace in the same county, and chief clerk of the king's works with responsibility for overseeing construction and maintenance of various royal buildings. Gardner steers through this crowded career with polish and enthusiasm. But his attempts to fit the poetry into his biographical scheme are often highhanded. It is a pity that he does not explain more about his grapplings with dating problems and other textual matters, for his account of Chaucer's poetic development contains a lot of personal leaps in the dark (e.g., the blithe claim that the Physician's Tale is a late and very sophisticated work) that are not identified as such for the lay reader. Part of the difficulty is Gardner's avowed pursuit of something between "academic history" and "poetic celebration of things unchangeable." The deathbed scene he cooks up for Chaucer is as silly as any 19th-century explanation of the poet's celebrated and baffling Retraction. Against such interpretive oddities one must weigh the sheer joye and lustihede of Gardner's approach and the intellectual unity which he does by hook or by crook manage to impose on the life and the works. Forcefully written, provocative, and filled with a likable spirit of freewheeling evangelism.