Chaucer's Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (review)

This is one of those strangely unclassifiable academic works that draw one down unexpected paths. Thomas Prendergast starts with the actual body and tomb of Chaucer and in a fascinating journey explores how the corpse, and the reception and re-making of Chaucer's body of work, come together over the last seven centuries.

Prendergast avoids entering into a discussion about the editing of Chaucer manuscripts or the continuing debate about the order of The Canterbury Tales, but a summary might have been useful as an illustration of how canon formation occurs and especially since Chaucer has become synonymous with only one portion of his entire corpus, The Canterbury Tales. Of the 84 surviving manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (55 of which are 'complete'), none is in Chaucer's own hand and yet Chaucer's authorship has never been in doubt. However, scribal choices have been made on the 'original' tales and editorial choices have been made on the various manuscripts – either in an attempt to recover the postulated Chaucerian 'original' or to provide structure and sense for the reader who is contemporary to the editor(s). Only two of the extant manuscripts have found favour with editors – Hengwrt and the Ellesmere. The former is the earliest of the surviving manuscripts and may have been produced in the year of Chaucer's death as a result of which it is assumed to be the closest to the author's intentions. Physically, however, it is rather tatty, incomplete and has been rebound several times. The Ellesmere is a much clearer text and is the most famous literary treasure in the Huntington Library's collections. The pages are embellished with floriated borders, illuminated initials, and other decorations, as well as 23 portraits of the pilgrim-storytellers. These illustrations as a whole disappear from every contemporary edition, but Prendergast sticks to his equation of text with body and does not deal with the excision of such matter.

The book really begins in Westminster Abbey with some anecdotes about the location and re-location of Chaucer's body, which had not been allowed to rest in peace after all. It was 'translated' to the altar tomb in the south transept by the mysterious Catholic Nicholas Brigham in 1566. However, a belief arose that the body had never been moved to the tomb built by Brigham and that Dryden had been buried in Chaucer's place. Problems of confused identity came to a head in the nineteenth century, at the same time that a controversy arose over the upkeep of the tomb. Dean Stanley had serious doubts about the location of the body and solved them by having a large stone cut with the inscription, 'NEAR THIS STONE LIE BURIED Geoffrey Chaucer 1400, John Dryden, 1700…' As Chaucer now stood at the head of English poetry his tomb was a sort of secular shrine, which could bind London with Canterbury, nation and religion.

Prendergast follows the twin translations of Chaucer's body and his works – one to the altar tomb and the other, ironically, via Dryden's re-writing of Chaucer into the vernacular. Dryden did not want Chaucer to remain available only to an elite and was criticized then and later (by Hazlitt for instance) for pandering to the taste of the readers of his own time rather than letting them have acquaintance with the original. In subsequent chapters Prendergast looks at nineteenth-century responses to tomb and to text and at the last great 'purification' of Chaucer's legacy. Part of this involved criticising an early 'canon-maker', the antiquarian John Stow who added some 17 works to the Chaucer canon in his 1561 edition. The final chapter brings us up to date with modernist formulations that effectively disembody Chaucer and the paradox that Chaucer, having been selected as the 'father of English poetry', becomes less representative of his age and disconnected from his own poetic tradition. This, however, may...