Dating Chaucer

Abstract

Dating Chaucer Kathryn L. Lynch Steve McQueen looks good in this movie. He must have made it before he died. (Yogi Berra) Recently, I completed work on an edition of Chaucer's dream visions and about half of his short lyric poems.1 This work was humbling in many ways--and taught me a variety of lessons. One of the most surprising was just how tenuous are the dates we rely upon in our teaching and writing about most of these poems. The poems I edited were drawn from all periods of Chaucer's life; they included "An ABC," usually placed early in his career, as well as the "Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse," generally identified as his last poem. They also included all four of the dream visions; Chaucer may have begun the first of these, the Book of the Duchess, as early as 1368, and many scholars believe that he was still revising the last of them, the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, as late as 1394. The poems I was working on thus spanned a probable period of over thirty years. Consequently, they raise questions of dating that cover a good part of Chaucer's life and reflect his evolving poetic skills and developing literary preoccupations, as well as the changing language of the English court and government. Although I had already studied and written about the dream visions for some time and was broadly familiar with the problems of establishing a provenance for the individual poems,2 the challenges of dating the poems taken as a group were far greater than I expected them to be. As I will be discussing in this essay, I found not only that virtually every one of the poems offered some quandary in its dating, but that these difficulties were exponentially more troubling to solve when the poems were considered together rather than in isolation or in reference to one or two other poems. Most arguments for dating Chaucer's poems are quite selective in how they establish groupings of poems, while the poems themselves are often related to each other in complex and contradictory ways. There are very few "facts" external to the poems that provide a real check on speculations about their relationships, and these "facts" are useful only for establishing a terminus a quo [End Page 1] for a few selected poems. Chaucer's death constitutes the only certain terminus ad quem. About the dream visions, we know with reasonable certainty only the following: that the Book of the Duchess must have postdated the death of Blanche of Lancaster in 1368, and that the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women was written after the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls, the House of Fame, and Troilus and Criseyde (see F Prologue 417-19, 332). About the lyrics, there are just a few more clues--that Chaucer had written some version of the Wife of Bath's Prologue when he composed the "Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton" (see "Bukton," line 29); that some parts of Troilus and Boece were underway when he wrote his "Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn" (see "Adam," line 2); and that the envoy to the "Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse" must have followed the accession of Henry IV to the throne of England in 1399. None of these clues adds up to much, and all other inferences require some degree of speculation. Speculation about dating is based on a fairly wide range of kinds of evidence, almost all of which is problematic in some way; the evidence includes Chaucer's allusions to or his imitation of the work of contemporaries or their imitation of him (the difference often being difficult to determine); references to the poet's age or youth (which could be taken ironically); mention of astronomical events and configurations (which often apply in multiple years and are not necessarily intended as literal reflections of the year of composition);3 the perceived maturity of the poet's verse or verse form; and the nature of his use of sources--especially his fondness for certain styles and authors--and the accuracy with which he represents them...