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XXXIX. The Beginnings of Chaucer's Irony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Earle Birney
Earle Birney*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Chaucer's poetry is generally felt to be distinguished by “an irony so quiet, so delicate, that many readers never notice it is there at all or mistake it for naïveté.”1 Granting, of course, the danger that “naïveté” may in turn be mistaken for irony, we may still suspect, with G. K. Chesterton, that Chaucer “made a good many more jokes than his critics have ever seen.”2 Whatever disputes continue about certain passages, no one is likely to deny today that the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is rich in subtle and satiric ambiguities. A more debatable and more neglected question, and one which I wish to pose here, is: How early did the ironic spirit manifest itself in Chaucer's works?

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , September 1939 , pp. 637 - 655
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1939

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References

1 J. B. Priestley, English Humour (London, 1929), p. 63.

2 Geoffrey Chaucer (New York, 1932), p. 20.

3 The Chaucer Tradition (London, 1925), pp. 429–430.

4 Dramatic Irony in Chaucer (Stanford University Press, 1932), p. 94 ff. Similarly G. H. Cowling lists “Chaucer's love of trickery” among the peculiar results of an Italian influence; Chaucer (New York, 1927), p. 138.

5 Chaucer, Ses Modèles ... (“Mémoires et travaux ... des Facultés catholiques de Lille,” fasc, xxxviii, 1931), 35–36. Cp. the theory of E. K. Kellett that the later adaptations of Dante by Chaucer are burlesques; “Chaucer as a Critic of Dante,” Lond. Merc., iv (1921), 287–291.

6 E.g., C. M. Hathaway, Jr., “Chaucer's Verse-Tags as a Part of his Narrative Machinery,” JEGP, v (1906), 476–484.

7 “English Irony before Chaucer,” University of Toronto Quarterly, vi (1937), 538–557.

8 Literature & Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 1933), p. 229 ff.

9 See E. F. Shannon, Chaucer and the Roman Poets (Harvard University Press, 1929), p. 371 ff.

10 See J. M. Manly, “Chaucer and the Rhetoricians,” British Academy Proceedings (1926), pp. 95–113.

11 See B. J. Whiting, Chaucer's Use of Proverbs (Harvard University Press, 1934), pp. 74–75 and passim.

12 Der Einfluss der mittelalterlichen Rhetorik auf Chaucers Dichtung (Bonn Diss., 1929), pp. 57–60.

13 See F. Tupper, “The Envy Theme in Prologues and Epilogues,” JEGP, xvi (1917), 555–557.

14 Op. cit. pp. 167–168; cf. his “Chaucer et la Dialectique,” RA-A, vii (1930), 199–205.

15 M. H. Shackford, “Sources of Irony in Hamlet,” SR, xxxiv (1926), 20.

16 See F. N. Robinson, Chaucer's Complete Works (Boston, 1933), pp. xxv, 853, 881, 887–888, 969 ff, 981–983. Throughout the present article I follow the text and line references of this edition.

17 Robinson, ibid., compares lines 43–45 with Boece iii. pr. 3; Pity 99 ft; PF 90–91.

18 Line 7; cp. Lady 29. Skeat (Works [Oxford, 1894], i, 566) compares FrankT 1322.

19 Cp. its use in An & Ar 141 and SqT 610.

20 Early English Proverbs (Oxford University Press, 1910), p. 61, no. 147.

21 G. G. Coulton, Chaucer and his England, 4th ed. (London, 1927), p. 68.

22 Aage Brusendorff, op. cit., pp. 439–440; he compares the “pyk” simile with some lines of Hoccleve.

23 See her “Leaf from a Fourteenth-Century Letter Book,” MP xxv (1927), 255, and later articles by the same author.

24 NED, refreid; cp. TC, ii. 1343—NED “1294–5” erroneously—; v. 507; ParsT 341. See Skeat, Works, i, 550.

25 J. L. Lowes compares a line in Froissart; vide his “Illustrations of Chaucer ...,” Rom. Rev. ii (1911), 128.

26 Skeat himself notes a parallel in the unironic Chevalier au Cigne; op. cit. p. 549.

27 Geo. Kitchin, A Survey of Burlesque and Parody in England (Edinburgh, 1931), p. 15 n.

28 E.g., Kitchin, ibid., p. 14 and D. Patrick, “The Satire in Chaucer's Parliament of Birds, PQ, ix (1930), 64 n.

29 J. Koch, “Ausgewählte kleinere Dichtungen Chaucers,” ES, lxix (1934), 80.

30 Kitchin, op. cit., p. 14. Cf. W. G. Dodd, Courtly Love in Chaucer and Gower (Harvard Studies in English, 1913), p. 29; W. L. Renwick, “Chaucer's Triple Roundel...,” MLR xvi (1921), 322–323. Renwick assumes, however, that Chaucer borrowed from Berry.

31 See W. O. Sypherd, “Chaucer's Eight Years' Sickness,” MLN xx (1905), 240–243.

32 Machaut, from whom Froissart was borrowing, also made clear the love-motif. See Kittredge, “Chaucer and Froissart,” ES, xxvi (1899), 336, and Froissart, Œuvres; Poésies, ed. Scheler, i, 1 ff.

33 See Lang, History of English Literature (London, 1921), p. 84, and Robinson, op. cit., p. 881.

34 Godwin's influence may be seen in the comments of Skeat, i, 463; Coulton, pp. 23–29; V. Langhans, Untersuchungen zu Chaucer (Halle, 1918), p. 280 ff. See also Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer (New York, 1892), i, 211 and Robinson, p. 881.

35 E. Deschamps, Œures, ed. Q. dé Saint-Hilaire (Paris, 1887), v, 93–94.

36 Conf. Amantis viii, 3106–37, Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford, 1901), iii, 474–476. Though Gower does not specify his illness he links it with old age and uses it as a plea for the favorable reception of his book.

37 Op. cit., p. 15 n.—Miss Galway's suggestion that Chaucer's “sovereign lady” was Joan of Kent does not affect the argument here; see MLR, xxxiii (1938), 145–199.

38 See Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1915), pp. 53, 70, and passim.

39 See W. O. Sypherd, Studies in Chaucer's ‘Hous of Fame,’ CSP ser. 2. no. 39 (1907), pp. 1–11.—On the other hand, C. S. Lewis says that the dreamer is a ‘fool’ only because Chaucer is ‘clumsy.’ I believe Mr. Lewis overlooks here both the traditional basis and the functional necessity for a ‘daswed’ Dreamer. See his Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936), p. 170.

40 See Dempster, op. cit., p. 14 n.

41 The functional purpose of the lines is of course to introduce an indirect acknowledgement to the Rom. de Rose from which Chaucer is about to borrow at length; vide Robinson's note to 291.

42 By Kitchin, op. cit., p. 16; he compares KT 2925–26, etc.

43 Op. cit. pp. 3–12; vide also Lowes, Geoffrey Chaucer (Boston, 1934), p. 120, and Skeat's note to 184.

44 Ibid., p. 121.

45 Op. cit., p. 95.

46 See Skeat's note to 62.

47 See Robinson's note to 617, and Skeat's note to 634.

48 Cp. TC i. 491–497.

49 For the latter interpretation vide Kittredge, op. cit., pp. 53–54; for the view that the poem is “an out and out bid” for Gaunt's literary patronage vide F. C. Riedel, “The Meaning of Chaucer's House of Fame,” JEGP, xxvii (1928), 456–458.

50 See Langhans, op. cit., p. 300.

51 Op. cit., pp. 91–93.

52 Line 7; for an example of the sardonic question vide ParsT. ¶196.

53 ¶858. I have preserved the word beaulees, rejected since Tyrwhitt, because it seems to me to make excellent sense in the context, in addition to being the reading of all the MSS. A somewhat similar contemptuous figure occurs in ¶897–898.

54 ¶11042. Robinson notes the similarity here with ¶956–957 but adds that the parson would not include himself among the ‘maistres.‘ The point is that even the humblest priest was expected not only to know but to expound the paternoster.

55 Op. cit., p. 86.—W. E. Farnham similarly underestimates the tale after assuming the “main theme is ... causeless misfortune”; see his Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley, 1936), p. 136.

56 Boece ii. pr. 2.80; cp. Mo. Pr. 1973–77.

57 Line 2092; cp. 2052–54.

58 E.g., lines 2285–94.

59 Lines 2370–74. The idea of the distaff is from Boccaccio but not apparently the still mysterious ‘vitremyte.‘ For the effect of the passage cp. the lines on Lucifer, 2004–06.

60 Lines 2531–32. There is a touch of dramatic irony, inherent in the material, of course, when the glittering dream of proud Cresus is rightly interpreted by his daughter to mean the exact opposite of what he believes (2740–56). Cp. the ironic use of ‘gerdoun’ in 2630.

61 Lines 2521–26; cp. 2556–58.

62 Lines 2413–14; cp. 2395.

63 Der Humor in Chaucer s Canterbury Erzählungen (Halle, 1911), p. 94; he compares CT. iv. 456 ff.

64 So Ewald, ibid., p. 54, finds “tragikomischer Emphase” where Chaucer is actually softening the usual medieval moralizings upon Samson's fall, lines 2052–54. See Hedwig Korsch, Chaucer als Kritiker (Berlin, 1916), pp. 85–87 and passim.

65 Ibid., pp. 91–92.

66 Op. cit., p. 52.