CHAUCER By Richard West Constable - 2000 ISBN 0094794103 - HB Nonfiction / History Reviewed by: Rachel Hyde, MyShelf.Com Buy a Copy Chaucer is well known as the author of The Canterbury Tales, but what else do we know about him? This year is the 600th anniversary of his death and many people have compared the times we live in with the 14th century with its great social changes, wars and plagues, the beginnings of the religious divide and peasants revolting at the Poll Tax. Chaucer lived through all this and yet managed to stay cheerful and even define the English character with his witty caricatures, and gave us possibly the earliest example of humor in our own recognizable language. Richard West paints a vivid portrait not only of the man himself but of the times he lived through. And what an eventful life it was - he lived through the plague, worked for John of Gaunt, was at the Siege of Rheims where he was captured and ransomed by Edward III, went on diplomatic missions to Italy, witnessed the Peasants Revolt and was appointed Justice of the Peace in Kent. Interspersed between these
events and those happening around him West also tells of the writers who
influenced him - for example two French poets who were defending Rheims
- and the immortal Roman de la Rose which Chaucertranslated into English.
The themes encountered in Chaucer's work are examined too - was he a misogynist
and a Jew-hater or is this judging him unfairly for being a product of
his times? He wrote of war and chivalry, religion, romance and humor.
In Troilus and Criseyde we see the early gleaming of what will become
the English Novel with plot, character development and the dispensing
of a conventional happy ending for something more realistic and perhaps
satisfying; West even compares the story to Casablanca, the nearest modern
parallel. For we still enjoy today the same type of stories that
Chaucer told, and he was continuing a tradition that looks backwards to
Eleanor of Aquitaine and her Courts of Love where |