However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.

Readers of Chaucer’s poetry hear in it a distinctive and individual voice. More than any other medieval English poet, Chaucer seems to invite the question ‘what was he like?’. The many official records about him have no occasion to shed light on this question. Though Thomas Hoccleve arranged that a lifelike portrait of his dear master should appear in copies of his Regiment, this does not carry us too far into knowing what the poet was really like. Chaucer, for example, despite apparently always saying the best, seemed to have reserved his true opinions, leaving both contemporaries and readers alike to wonder what he really thought – be it about fellow-writers like Hoccleve and Lydgate, or Criseyde, or about his fictional Merchant. Moreover, not only does he persistently credit others with the best that can be said of them, he also discredits himself. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that the ironic Chaucer should represent himself as a reserved and private sort of person – one conceivably well equipped to cope with the many vicissitudes of his time, as the poet evidently did.

Readers of Chaucer’s poetry hear in it a distinctive and individual voice. More than any other medieval English poet, Chaucer seems to invite the question ‘what was he like?’. The many official records about him have no occasion to shed light on this question. Though Thomas Hoccleve arranged that a lifelike portrait of his dear master should appear in copies of his Regiment, this does not carry us too far into knowing what the poet was really like. Chaucer, for example, despite apparently always saying the best, seemed to have reserved his true opinions, leaving both contemporaries and readers alike to wonder what he really thought – be it about fellow-writers like Hoccleve and Lydgate, or Criseyde, or about his fictional Merchant. Moreover, not only does he persistently credit others with the best that can be said of them, he also discredits himself. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that the ironic Chaucer should represent himself as a reserved and private sort of person – one conceivably well equipped to cope with the many vicissitudes of his time, as the poet evidently did.