"Craig A. Berry" wrote:
> . . . Chaucer's reputation was pretty evenly split; he could be trotted out
> as the paragon of golden-tongued eloquence who practically invented the
> English language or as an icon of backwardness and scurrility. A "canterbury
> tale," after all, was a synonym for a dirty story, and it was easy
> rhetorically to equate moral defects with metrical defects. No wonder
> Chaucer fit so well into a more general Elizabethan anxiety about cultural
> backwardness. One wanted to be as sophisticated as the Italians without
> being as decadent, and one wanted to be an icon of Englishness like Chaucer,
> but without the rough edges.
>
> Enter Spenser, the master integrator, who borrows massively from Ariosto but
> identifies himself with Chaucer and turns Chaucer's roughness, his "warlike
> numbers and heroic sound," into a virtuous source of spiritual Englishness
> that he himself has inherited. . . .
I've recently finished an article on the topic of Chaucer's reception among the
Elizabethans. Most of the article (which I've just submitted for publication
with ELR) is an attempt to refute received opinion about Elizabethan
misreadings of Chaucer, especially as summarized in and by Alice Miskimin in
the 1970s.
I point out, as you do above, that Chaucer had many different reputations in
the Elizabethan period -- some positive and some positively negative. I
believe that Chaucer's prestige as a writer was seriously under attack for the
first time in history in the late sixteenth century, and the attacks came from
essentially two directions -- from those who saw Chaucer as "vain and
scurrulous" (e.g., Greene's Vision) and from those who saw him as primitive and
unpolished (e.g., Ascham, Sidney, and Puttenham).
In response to these attacks, defenders of Chaucer arose. What I find most
interesting is that the vast majority of these Chaucer defenders came from
Cambridge -- e.g., William Webbe, John Leland, Francis Beaumont (father to the
dramatist), Gabriel Harvey, John Whitgift, Edmund Spenser, and Thomas Speght.
Their defenses of Chaucer are various, vigorous, and, in some cases, in direct
opposition to one another.
My article also examines the position of The Shepheardes Calender in relation
to all this conflict over Chaucer's reputation. If I successfully get the
article published soon, it will, I hope, contribute meaningfully to this
ongoing discussion of Chaucer's reception among the Elizabethans.
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