The life of Geoffrey Chaucer: a critical biography (review)

220 Reviews Pearsall, Derek, The life of Geoffrey Chaucer: a critical biography (Blackwell critical biographies), Oxford and Cambridge Mass., Blackwell, 1992; cloth; pp. xii, 365; 21 plates, 4 genealogical tables, 2 maps; R.R.P. AUS$59.95 [distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin]. Pearsall's biography inevitably invites comparison with Howard's Chaucer and his world (1987). Howard placed Chaucer, and occasionally lost sight of him, amidst the rich if somewhat time-worn tapestry of late-to-waning medieval hfe. Pearsall's much moretigbtly-focussedaccount identifies four areas of Chaucer's experience that had significance for his poetry: his life at court, his journeys to Italy, his 'ambiguous' social situation, and his familiarity with London when it was a centre of rapid economic change. Howard's Chaucer was practically a West European, almost a Renaissance poet and 'complete man*. Pearsall's Chaucer is English, with an English experience of the plague. There are no flagellants and debauchery here. Critically, he is a Londoner, and it is to medieval London that Pearsall's imagination warms. The impact on Chaucer of the sophisticated secular and humanist culture of Italy, so graphically fictionalized by Howard, is considerably diminished by Pearsall. He argues that Chaucer did not understand, and therefore 'medievalized', the idea of fame as a form of secular immortality, and that he was incapable of responding seriously to Dante's and Petrarch's conception of the noble vocation of the poet. In Pearsall's view the turning point in Chaucer's poetic career was not The House of Fame, but The {Legend of Good Women, which reflects his impatience with the role of court poet. Retiring to Kent, he produced, in The Canterbury Tales, bis fuUest record of the London hfe that had flowed beneath the house he lived in at Aldgate. Pearsall shows that Chaucer's immersion in his troubled times was more intimately expressed in his poetry than has been realized. Although Chaucer makes no direct reference to events such as the Peasant's Revolt, the social and economic changes which gave rise to it are indirectly documented in terms of the personal and dramatic conflicts of his fictions. Obliquely, they bear witness to negotiations opening up within the marriage contract and new ways of interpreting other kinds of vow, oath, and promise. Overall, Pearsall argues that the studied elusiveness and habitual hony of Chaucer's poetry are of a piece with the accommodations and evasions of bis public life. The London of his day was a turbulent and dangerous place in Reviews 221 which commitment could lead to serious consequences. Whereas Usk was among the men executed by Richard's opponents in 1388, Chaucer, notwithstanding bis publicly visible identification with the court, 'reaped the reward for having kept his poetry free from overt political commitment' (p. 209). It was, however, Usk's active engagement in factionalism, not his poetry, that cost him his life. Evidence for the accommodations of Chaucer's public life is itself indirect. During the 1386-89 constitutional crisis, Chaucer was in Kent, having resigned his official position together with the house and annuities attached to it. This, very plausibly, is an instance of the politic circumspection Pearsall regards as characteristic of Chaucer and his descendants. But if Chaucer was seeking to avoid trouble in 1374, his acceptance of the controllership of customs was surely a mistake. Royal appropriation of national revenues was a cause of contention. Far from removing Chaucer from the 'dangerous and unsavoury'financialconnections between the king's circle and the city merchants, the job involved computing the taxes by which the king repaid loans from merchants. Pearsall assumes that Chaucer found his obligatory dealings with powerful and unscrupulous merchants difficult and always needed to turn a blind eye. This assumed response typifies the life-long accommodations engendered by Chaucer's ambiguous social status. But was a member of tbe king's inner household appointed to a government officereally'a mere nobody'? Did the fact that his father was a rich merchant necessarily make his station ambiguous; might it not have given him a foot in both camps? Would he have been sent on the king's business to treat with villains such...