II.

Early Works

Chaucer wrote for and may have read his works aloud to a select audience of fellow courtiers and officials, which doubtless sometimes included members of the royal family. The culture of the English upper class was still predominantly French, and Chaucer's earliest works were influenced by the fashionable French poets Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart and by the great 13th-century dream allegory Le Roman de la Rose, by the French poets Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The common theme of these works is courtly love.

Chaucer claimed to have translated Le Roman de la Rose, but if he did, all that survives is a fragment. His first important original work, The Book of the Duchess, is an elegy for John of Gaunt's first wife, Blanche, who died in 1369. In a dream the poet encounters a grieving knight in black (Gaunt) who movingly recounts his love and loss of “good fair White” (Blanche). The House of Fame and The Parlement of Foules, also dream poems, show the influence of Dante and of Giovanni Boccaccio, whose works Chaucer probably encountered on his first journey to Italy. The unfinished House of Fame gives a humorous account of the poet's frustrating journey in the claws of a giant golden eagle (the idea is from Dante) to the palace of the goddess Fame. In The Parlement he witnesses an inconclusive debate about love among the different classes of birds. All three dream visions, written from about 1373 to about 1385, contain a mixture of comedy and serious speculation about the puzzling nature of love.

In this period, Chaucer also translated and adapted religious, historical, and philosophical works: a life of Saint Cecilia; a series of medieval “tragedies,” brief lives of famous men cast down by adverse fortune; a translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), written by the Roman philosopher Anicius Boethius to proclaim his faith in divine justice and providence. The latter work profoundly influenced Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (1385?) and The Knight's Tale, both adapted from romances by Boccaccio.

Troilus, a poem of more than 8000 lines, is Chaucer's major work besides The Canterbury Tales. It is the tragic love story of the Trojan prince Troilus, who wins Criseyde (Cressida), aided by the machinations of his close friend, her uncle Pandarus, and then loses her to the Greek warrior Diomede. The love story turns into a deeply felt medieval tragedy, the human pursuit of transitory earthly ideals that pale into insignificance beside the eternal love of God. The poem ends with the narrator's solemn advice to young people to flee vain loves and turn their hearts to Christ. Chaucer's characters are psychologically so complex that the work has also been called the first modern novel.

In the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (1386?), another dream vision, the god of love accuses Chaucer of heresy for writing of Criseyde's unfaithfulness and assigns him the penance of writing the lives of Cupid's martyrs—faithful women who died for love. After completing eight of these legends, Chaucer probably abandoned the work and by 1387 was engaged on his masterpiece.