Chaucer's Epistolary Poetic: The Envoys to Bukton and Scogan

Abstract

For all their distinctions of tone and occasion, Chaucer's short poems consolidate many of the rhetorical strategies that sustain his work overall. Notable among these is an epistolary style that negotiates tensions between oral address and the conditions of writing, a central conflict throughout most of Chaucer's poetry. While longer narrative texts such as the Clerk's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde acquire the nature of epistles through the appendage of envoys that mediate between the completed texts and the circumstances of their reception, the short poems imagine themselves more integrally as letters to an addressee. 1 This epistolary posture determined Chaucer's textual reception in the fifteenth century, shaping images of his authorship while influencing the writing habits of his successors, 2 yet it conditioned his own practices and authorial self-conception no less importantly. The several poems adopting the form of verse letters to historical addressees, including the envoys to Scogan and Bukton along with Lak of Stedfastnesse, the Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse, and even Truth and Adam Scriveyn, have interested readers in showcasing, in R. T. Lenaghan's words, Chaucer's "peculiarly 'social' talent" for fixing "characteristic . . . features in particular literary and social contexts." 3 Insofar as irony rates high on any list of such "characteristic features," it is not surprising, I would argue, that the same details tracing the lineaments of a personal Chaucer in these poems also work against the widespread supposition that they are primarily occasional—that is, that their "playful, mocking, affectionate tone seems genuinely private." 4