Chaucer by George Kane (review)

REVIEWS 136.32: For "heuen" read "heuene." 135, 137, 139: Running heads missing from these pages. 210.18: Read "pat is nought wipseide." DAVID C. FOWLER University of Washington GEORGE KANE. Chaucer. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. vi, 122. $12.95. George Kane's Chaucer, one of the Past Masters Series, is a short book with no notes and a brief index. The first chapter is about Chaucer's life, the rest about his works in chronological order with glances at his life and times. It is hard to know for whom the series is intended; sometimes the reader is assumed not to know the text of Chaucer, at other times to know it well. But Chaucer scholars will enjoy it as a sage personal essay by a delightful and intelligent man. The decreed lack of notes leaves unsupported some surprising assertions. For instance, Kane gives the date of Chaucer's birth as "late 1345 or early 1346" (p. 4). This must be based on the records of the Scrope-Grosvenor trial, 1386, which state that he was then "forty years of age etplus." Kane's reckoning (which ignores et plus) would make Chaucer about fourteen when he was made an esquire and about eleven when he went into the Countess of Ulster's service (p. 11). But merchant-class boys were rarely sent away from home before fourteen (when adolescentia began) or sent into battle before sixteen. Again, can one say that "the country was full of those love-songs of [Chaucer's] youth" (p. 36), none of which have sur­ vived? Did Chaucer really make a "decision to write in English" (p. 4)? If so, can we ignore James Wimsatt's argument that his first poems were in French? Would "everyone in the small world of court and London offi­ cialdom" have known Chaucer "since he was a boy" (pp. 36-37)? This spirit of genteel amateurism is an English phenomenon that Ameri­ cans do not always take to. Kane draws no line between his own notions and others', names no scholars or critics, argues with no one; he breezily identifies quotations by page numbers in the Robinson edition-let the reader comb through two long columns if he mustlook something up. The premise is that readers are lost in their private worlds anyway, that distinc209 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tion in such a book depends on panache and prestige, that being "responsi­ ble" is boring-as, alas, it often is. Such writing is not criticism or schol­ arship; it is a form ofautobiography with the 'Ts" left out, but when done well it is interesting. Kane writes with great elegance, and his small book is full ofexpansive thoughts. "Dante's geography, erudite enough," he observes on page 45, "was bookish andtheoretical. Chaucer's had been physically experienced as seasickness, saddle-stiffness, surly natives, fleas in bad inns." He is very perspicacious about Chaucer and Boccaccio, Chaucer's relations with women (including Cecily Champain), his depression in his last years, and much more. Few have written more concretely ofChaucer's development. His earlier work shows "a sense of the bankruptcy of a poetic mode at best declined into frivolity, at worst spurious, and it suggests a contempt for Machaut" (p. 45). The House ofFame was about Chaucer's identity as a poet and about "truth in report and poetry," written in an experimental spirit that produced an ironic relation with his audience. "The self-mockery," Kane says, "began as aprotectivescreen, to hide the excitement ofthe poet about a new kind ofpoetry, and himselfas a new kind ofperson, which he feared might not be understood.... We shall never see Chaucer reveal himself like this again" (pp. 39-40). The Parliament ofFowls, which is about the negotiationsfor Richard II's marriage to AnneofBohemia,was intended as a mirror for princes: in it Chaucer reached a point where poetry and philosophical reflection became one. Kane characterizes Trozlus and Criseyde as Chaucer's magnum opus, a genuinely philosophical work. Of The Canterbury Tales, which he charac­ terizes as a "human tragicomedy," he points up fundamental ethical questions: "Chaucer's speculative intellect penetrated to the deepest philo...