The Importance of Chaucer by John H. Fisher

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER from its primitive form in the church and in the marketplace to the glory that was Shakespeare. Richard Emmerson and his contributors are to be congratulated not only for their practical advice but for the way in which they have conveyed how the changes in our understanding have come about. ALEXANDRA F. JOHNSTON Victoria College, University of Toronto JOHN H. FISHER. The Importance of Chaucer. Carbondale and Ed­ wardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Pp. xi, 198. $22.50. John Fisher's presence in Chaucer studies has been a distinguished one, as editor of a fine text of The Complete Poetry andProse ofGeoffrey Chaucer, as a founding father of the New Chaucer Society (and hence of Studies in the Age of Chaucer), and for many years as Executive Secretary of the Modern Language Association. His first published book, however, was on John Gower's place in fourteenth-century English literature as MoralPhi­ losopherandFriendofChaucer. In this new bookFisherreturns to many of the concerns of that early study, this time focusing on Geoffrey Chaucer himself, although his friends certainly are given their due as part of the social milieu in which Chaucer moved and which in specific ways produced his literary importance. Fisher's audience is the same in this book as in the commentary of his Chaucer edition: American undergraduates and beginning graduate stu­ dents and theirinstructors. He has not produced a new reading ofChaucer, nor has he engaged the theoretical debates current in sessions both at the MLA and the NCS, though he is not hostile to either set of projects. His concern is to show to undergraduates why Chaucer is "important" by way of describing how and by whom he came to be regarded as "important." And Fisher is too much a student of critical fashions himself (perhaps after all those years spent guiding professional organizations) not to be keenly aware of how fashions are shaped and changed over time. This concern is emphasized in several chapters in this book and is, to my mind, its best feature. No undergraduate could come away from this study without a lively (if summary) sense of how Chaucer's position and the role he has 194 REVIEWS played in English literature has changed over 600 years, and how an "Important Poet" is the creation as much ofsocial forces and even political agendas as of talent (let alone genius). Not that Fisher belittles Chaucer's poetic gifts. But in this book they are taken as givens, and relatively little effort is made to reevaluate them from the standard Companion to English Literature judgments: "The Chau­ cerian voice has since the inception of literature in Modern English pro­ vided a touchstone for urbane, sophisticated expression" (p. 105). Later: The ironic voice, the humanistic world view, awareness ofthe individual, awareness of the audience, awareness of a world outside the court and church, a sense of the power of the English language to express "the best that has been thought and said"-these are the qualities that account for the importance of Chaucer. [P. 139] Chaucer's aesthetic values, in this accounting, are "natural," "spon­ taneous," "serious" (opposed to "contrived"), "limpid," "ironic," "psycho­ logical," "colloquial." Little in this literary character of Chaucer has changed, as Fisher says, since Dryden: here is Chaucer the democrat, chronicler of God's plenty; Chaucer the optimistic skeptic (or skeptical optimist, depending on your emphasis); Chaucer the secularizer; and, above all, Chaucer the English poet. Fisher begins with an elegant description of the state of English in the fourteenth century as "the disdained patois of an occupied island" (p. 1), destined for greatness, a process that began when "Chaucer and his con­ temporaries began the transmutation of the profundity and eloquence of Latin into English" (p. 5). It is the credit of this book to situate Chaucer's importance firmly in the fortunes of the English language, an emphasis that Chaucer studies used to have but that has been so long out offashion as to seem fresh, and indeed to be fresh to many American undergraduates. Fisher emphasizes the role ofpatronage and state craft in the "Englishing" of England and the consequent establishing of Chaucer...