Chaucer, Humanism, and Printing: Conditions of Authorship in Fifteenth-Century England

'DAVID R. CARLSON Chaucer, Humanism, and Printing: Conditions of Authorship in Fifteenth-Century England Geoffrey Chaucer was not a professional writer. He could be vain about his literary work (this is called 'authorial self-consciousness'), fretting over the vicissitudes of publication in 'Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, his own Scriveyn/ for example, and listing and classifying his opera repeatedly.) Nevertheless, the 'Father of English Poetry' was occupied most of ,the time with jobs other than literary paternity. He was a royal servant and official, successively a personal attendant on members of Eng1and's royal family, an envoy, Controller of the Wool and Petty Customs, justice of the peace and member of Parliament for Kent, and Clerk of the King's works - increasingly important positions which brought Chaucer increasingly great responsibility and prominence in the affairs of the realm.2 In these circumstances, writing was a spare-time activity for him, to be imagined in the terms his windy Eagle uses for addressing 'Geffrey' in the House of Fame (652-8):3 For when thy labour doon al ys, And hast mad aIle thy rekenynges, In sterle of reste and newe thynges Thou goost hom to thy hOllS anoon, And, also domb as any stoon, Thou sittest at another book Tyl fully daswed ys thy look. Chaucer had time to sit at his books only after his accounts were complete and all his other labours were done. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, not because he was a poet, but because he had been a successful, prominent government servant. 'Poets' Corner' started (at least) with a state functionary.4 Although in the Chaucer life-records the divorce between the government servant and the poet appears absolute, it is difficult to believe that Chaucer's two occupations were in fact so wholly separate, that his officia1 life had no consequence for his writing and no effect on the sort of thing he chose to write. Likewise, it is difficult to imagine that Chaucer's poetry was of no account for the material successes he enjoyed. For example, the documents detailing the various preferments that came UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 64, NUMBER 2. SPRING 1995 CHAUCER, HUMANISM. AND PRINTING 275 to Chaucer by way of his connections of John of Gaunt and his family make no mention of poetry;5 nevertheless, it seems prudent to suppose that writings like An ABC - if it was written for Blanche, as Speght said it was6 - or the Book of the Duchess - which would not have been written if it had not been written for John of Gaunt - must have yielded Chaucer something. Chaucer's official situation and relations with Lancaster informed the conception and execution of these writings, even if Chaucer was not commissioned or directed to write them. Likewise, even though Chaucer may not have been paid outright for the Book of the Duchess, for example, as for piece-work, writing it should have improved his stock with John of Gaunt.' Although none of the life-records makes any reference to poetry, direct or indirect, and although Chaucer can only be thought of as an amateur, part-time poet, it seems safe to make this inference, that writing brought Chaucer benefits, more and less immediately, of one sort or another, if not by way of direct payment, patronly gifts outright, or annuities, then, as seems more likely, by way of an increased esteem that would later be transvalued into payment or office. Whether 'or not this inference is a good one, however, Chaucer's immediate successors in English poetry seem generally ,to have made it. By early in the fifteenth cenhrry possibly even in Chaucer's own lifetime, in the case of Thomas Usk - the beliefs were current: first, that writing had profited Chaucer; second, that if writing had profited Chaucer, it should be able to profit others as well; and third, that the likelihood of poetry being profitable was tied to the poetry being Chaucerian. John Burrow made this point in the 1950s; John Bowers and John Fisher have done so more recently: the esteem Chaucer enjoyed among his immediate literary heirs in the fifteenth century was no simple result of the intrinsic merits...