Chaucer's Dead Body

Chaucer’s Dead Body

Chaucer’s Dead Body From Corpse to Corpus

Thomas A.Prendergast

ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Prendergast, Thomas A. (Thomas Augustine) Chaucer’s dead body: from corpse to corpus/by Thomas A. Prendergast. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-415-96678-7 (hardback: alk. paper)—ISBN 0-415-96679-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Criticism and interpretation—History. 2. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Appreciation—Great Britain. 3. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 4. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Death and burial. 5. Authors and readers—Great Britain—History. 6. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Tomb. 7. Criticism—Great Britain—History. 8. Middle Ages in literature. 9. Canon (Literature) I. Title. PR1924.P74 2003 821'.1–dc21 2003007754 ISBN 0-203-49577-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57862-7 (Adobe eReader Format)

Contents

Acknowledgments

v

Introduction

1

Chapter 1

Chaucer’s Death: Two Stories, Three Mourners

16

Chapter 2

Translating Chaucer: Denial and Resistance

40

Chapter 3

Nineteenth- Century Necronationalism and the Chaucerian Uncanny

63

Chapter 4

Beautiful Tomb/Beautiful Text

76

Chapter 5

Chaucer’s Stature

106

Secular and Sacred Pilgrimages: Chaucer’s Corpse and Becket’s Body

128

Chaucer’s Tomb and Nicholas Brigham An unpublished manuscript by Laurence Tanner

134

Notes

137

Index

166

Coda Appendix

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time coming. Indeed, Charles has had to share his father with the dead for his whole life. He would join me, I think, in thanking all of the people who helped bring this project to completion. Chaucer’s Dead Body might still not have a home without Russ Castronovo’s insight, material support and encouragement. Tom Goodman’s, Vance Smith’s, and Stephanie Trigg’s insightful comments on the manuscript transformed it into a much better book. Mike Mays came up with the title after a particularly exhausting day at the Payne Center. Scott Juengel helped me theorize the peculiar place of anthropometry in the Chaucer story. Tony Trowles, Christine Reynolds, and Richard Mortimer made working at the Westminster Abbey Library an enjoyable and productive experience. Steve Arch, Jonathan Barron, Leslie Bow, John Ernest, Michael Salda, Ellen Weinauer and my colleagues at the College of Wooster all provided an environment that not only sustained the project but pushed me to see it to the end. I would like to thank the College of Wooster for the leave that enabled me to finish the penultimate draft of this book. Finally, I would like to thank Terry—intellectual partner, fellow pilgrim, beloved. It is to her that I dedicate this book.

Introduction

The Flesh, like the repressed, will not long allow itself to remain in silence. Thomas Laqueur1 This project began with a question that I was never able to answer. While searching through Caroline Spurgeon’s Chaucer Criticism and Allusion for early modern references to Chaucer’s Complaint to His Purse, I noticed that, at least three times between 1566 and 1577, debtors were ordered to tender money “at the tombe of Jeffrey Chawcer.”2 Intrigued by the apparent connection of cash with corpse I wondered if anyone had ever asked why the tomb of the Father of English Poetry was a legal place of repayment. And indeed, I discovered that Joseph Haselwood had asked precisely this question over a hundred and fifty years ago.3 Haselwood had admitted that he had not looked very hard for an answer, so I thought that a bit of work would unearth, if not the rationale for the connection between money and burial place, then an acknowledgement of the practice that might explain why Chaucer’s tomb was linked with fiscal obligation. Above all I hoped that a bit of research might turn up historical connections between the location of the body of the poet and the transcendent body of money, connections which would advance some interesting theoretical paradigms about corporeal death, poetic life, and exchange value. In other words (to invert Paul Strohm’s argument about counterfeiting), I thought that “the ineffable aura of the deceased” might have been seen to legitimate, vitalize, or sacralize the locus at which an exchange of hitherto “dead metal” was carried out.4 What I found was suggestive, but puzzling. Chaucer’s body had been translated to the purbeck altar tomb (where he apparently still resides) some ten years before the payments began, so the location of Chaucer should have been of some significance at around the time that the payments were made. Yet, if anything, there seemed to be a conscious ignorance of, or even resistance to, the idea of the translation of the body in many sixteenth-century sources. In fact, the first time the word “translation” is actually used to describe the removal of the body to the new tomb is in 1600, when William Camden says that Nicholas

2 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

Brigham translated the bones (ossa transtulit) of Geoffrey Chaucer to the new tomb.5 More promising was the meaning of the word itself. Literally, of course, “to translate” means “to carry across” to pass over, in other words, some threshold.6 Suggestively enough, Chaucer himself uses the word to convey the idea that money only has value when “it is translated into other folk.”7 And indeed, as Patrick Geary has suggested, in the Middle Ages it was often the translation of a body (or part of a body) from one place to another that made it into a commodity.8 Particularly important in these translations was the act of translation itself, which confirmed the worth of the body. As Geary puts it, “from the perspective of the community in which the remains came to be venerated, the construction of value and the mode of circulation reflected the same assumptions as the production context: acquiring the relic gave it value because it was worth acquiring, and this acquisition…was itself evidence that the relics were genuine. Circulation thus created the commodity being circulated…”9 Chaucer’s translation, then (like the circulation of money), was a factor in the value of Chaucer’s corpse. One might go so far as to argue that the removal of Chaucer’s bones from the South Transept floor into the new tomb made Chaucer’s body worthy of veneration.10 But far from offering any closure to the question of money and the tomb, these connections seemed to suggest that questions of reputation, value, and authenticity (was the body actually translated?) were ultimately wrapped up in the larger idea of the auratic qualities of Chaucer’s corpse. Nowhere did the sacral qualities of the body of the poet become more clear than in the nineteenth century. As I looked to see if anyone had responded to Haselwood’s query about the connection of tomb and money (no one had), I discovered that Haselwood’s interest marked the beginning of a larger cultural phenomenon of corporeal concern in the nineteenth century. In the same year that Haselwood had published his question in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1823), Edward Brayley published a detailed description of Chaucer’s tomb in his magisterial The History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St. Peter, Westminster.11 Indeed, the year before (in the same magazine in which Haselwood published his inquiry), an anonymous visitor to the Abbey had complained about the decayed state of Chaucer’s tomb. Yet these brief descriptions of the tomb were only the prelude to a virtual explosion of interest in the tomb in the middle of the century. Like the conscious ignorance of the tomb in the sixteenth century, this sudden interest was puzzling. The tomb was decaying, it is true, but this concern seemed, if anything, belated, for there were, as early as the seventeenth century, comments about the decomposition of the tomb. I was, at this point, a long way from my original question and even further from an answer. The vocabulary with which I began my search—body, death, corpus, money—seemed less a product of one localized sixteenth-century event and more of an ongoing historical obsession with the Chaucerian body and its

INTRODUCTION • 3

tomb. One might well argue that this “insight” is somewhat behind the theoretical curve. After all, medievalists of all stripes have long understood that the construction of not just “the body” but of a multitude of bodies (the king’s, women’s, Christ’s, the mystical body of the Church) is crucial for any understanding of the Middle Ages.12 Recently, however, cultural critics have, in some sense, undone the body. Psychoanalytic critics, for instance, have argued that the body is completely culturally constructed, and thus can be made transparent by the application of a rigorous theoretical treatment. This kind of impatience with the material body suggests, of course, that there is something beyond the body, something extracorporeal, which promises that we can transcend the body. Yet, as Thomas Laqueur put it, “if not the body, then what?”13 When Laqueur complains that “under the influence of deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism generally, [the body] threatens to disappear entirely,” he is, of course, most concerned about how formulations of the body affect the relationship between gender and sex.14 But this “inevitable” dissolution of the body seems of equal moment for a wider hermeneutic project.15 And indeed, other critics have complained about the loss of the body as well. In her critique of modern treatments of the body, for instance, Caroline Bynum suggests that the site of the body has in some sense been dematerialized by feminist, linguistic, and psychoanalytic theory. She particularly focuses on the extent to which the performativity of bodies (perceived “as becoming what they are by performing what they ‘choose’ or must choose”) transforms them into speech acts or discourse. Hence, she argues, “the lived body seems to disappear.”16 The consequence of this disappearance or dissolution of the body is, as N.Katherine Hayles has argued, the advance of a kind of totalizing hermeneutical paradigm that threatens to overrun historical specificities. As she puts it, ecstatic pronouncements that the body’s materiality is “secondary to the logical or semiotic structures it encodes,” suggest not so much “that the body has disappeared but that a certain kind of subjectivity has emerged.”17 Indeed, as she points out, the traditionalist liberal humanist subject and the humanism which springs from it depend on the idea that the self is not coextensive with the body. The universality which such humanism enables, in other words, depends on the erasure of the body. If, then, what Hayles calls the posthuman, “deconstructs the liberal humanist subject…it [also]…shares with its predecessor an emphasis on cognition rather than embodiment.”18 In many ways, a cybernetic posthumanism or theoretical framework which empties the body of locality and specificity actually continues the liberal tradition rather than disrupts it. How to combat this universalizing tendency? Oddly enough it is the death of the body which has already made this reemergence of the body possible. What I mean to suggest here is that the metaphorical death of the idea of the body (the disembodiment which has occasioned both Hayles’s and Bynum’s work) has led to a recent scholarly preoccupation with the dead body.19 Bynum’s project—to restore “something of the stuffness of the body”—takes as its point of departure

4 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

a shift away from issues of gender and sexuality and towards a recuperation of death. The reasons for this shift are clear enough. For if, as she says, “we are all shaped by our many presents and pasts” then she is not alone in noticing “the complex link between body, death, and the past.”20 I am not claiming that the contingent, corruptible, and, frankly, dead body of Chaucer can magically resolve the central paradox which has engaged scholars for the last two centuries —the incompatibility between a humanism which says that the authentic poet is ultimately recoverable, and a historicism that tells us that bodies and texts will always be profoundly fragmentary and irrecoverable. Rather the corpse offers a site for the study of that paradox. One of the things that became clear to me as I wrote this book was that the body is more than “what society designates, or what naming makes it.”21 The dead body, in some sense, has a life of its own. Dominick LaCapra gestures toward the uncanniness of this “afterlife” when he avers that “something of the past always remains, if only as a haunting presence or revenant.”22 I focus on this preternatural leftover in this book, for it is within the context of a vitalized corporeal presence that Chaucerians have carried out what we would call the work of hermeneutics for at least five hundred years. To ignore the way that Chaucer “spoke” to earlier critics, is to elide part of the history of the recuperation of Chaucer and to miss the ways that the specificities of body, death, and representation come together. Book and Body At the heart of this connection is the well known medieval trope of body as book.23 Perhaps the most elemental and striking connection between body and book can be found in the poem known as the “Long Charter” of Christ. In this poem, the “pardon” for mankind (which is itself the poem) is represented as a product of the passion, written on Christ’s body: To a piler I was pight Tuggyd and drawen alle a ny3t and wasshen me myn owen bloode and strayned me strayet on þe rode I-strayned to dethe on a tree as parchemyn owiþe to be here hit now and 3e shull wete how þis Chartre was I-wrette The Iewes fel wiþ grete swynke Of my bloode made þei ynke The pennes þat lettres wreten was schorges þat he was wiþ smyte how many lettres þer-on ben Rede and thou may wete and sene

INTRODUCTION • 5

a þousannd .iiij. c and fyfti and teen wondes on me bothe rede and wan24 The poem’s effect depends on the notion that the reader of the manuscript will meditate on the connection between the preparation of vellum and the stretching of Christ’s body on the “rode,” the making of the letters in the manuscript and the wounding of Christ’s body with scourges. Conflating the manuscript with Christ’s suffering body enables the “wondes… bothe rede and wan” to become the letters that make legible the sacrifice of a body that rescues mankind from sin. Representation here not only becomes implicated in the death of Christ, but also points to both the immortality ensured by Christ’s sacrifice and the immortality ensured by representation itself. There are, of course, differences between this radical conflation of body and book and the connection between corpse and corpus that I pursue in this volume. Christ’s body is not Chaucer’s and the salvific message of the Charter cannot become its medium in quite such an ingenious way. In addition, there are more secular versions of the book/body trope close at hand (like Richard de Bury’s “liborum corpora”) that might seem more appropriate to the pursuit of the Chaucerian corpse/corpus connection, but it is worth remembering that the connection between a legible pardon and Christ’s body was a medieval commonplace which transcended generic boundaries.25 Indeed, Chaucer himself adds a reference to the connection between Christ’s body and “bille” (or pardon) in his translation of a prayer from La pelerinaige de vie humaine.26 The Christological conflation was, of course, enabled by the sacramental connection between salvific body and saving bread that lies at the heart of Christianity. Yet the book/body connection served a related purpose as well. In a loose translation of the Meditationes Vitae Christi the author of a work known as The Privity of Passion uses the book/body connection to highlight the extent to which the presence of the body and the presence of the book are conflated. “And whene he [Christ] was thus sprede o-brode one þe crosse more straite þan any parchemyne-skyne es sprede one þe harowe, so þat mene myghte tell all þe blyssede bones of his body.”27 This bringing together of the “making” of a book and the display of Christ’s body on the cross gestures toward the extent to which the book enacts the presence of he who is absent/present—in this case, the God who died and yet is with us. But the conflation of “authorial” presence and the presence of the book also opens what we would call a secular space in which the voice of the absent author is made present. Indeed, in the House of Fame, Chaucer makes the connection between “voice” and bodily presence of those who rise from earth to Fame’s house. Whan any speche ycomen ys Up to the paleys, anon-ryght

6 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

Hyt wexeth lyk the same wight Which that the word in erthe spak, Be hyt clothed red or blak; And hath so verray hys lyknesse That spak the word, that thou wilt gesse That it the same body be, Man or woman, he or she. (1074–1082) As Mary Carruthers has pointed out, the figures are clothed in red or black “according to the ink in which the letters forming these words were written.”28 These litterae are, thus, signs of voces which represent those no longer immediately present to us. What is most pertinent to my argument is the extent to which these characters are at once corporeally re-presented, and the extent to which their represented bodies defeat attempts to distinguish them from their originals. For, as Chaucer avers, he “hath so verray hys lyknesse/That spak the word, that thou wilt gesse/That it the same body be.” If representation of “man or woman, he or she” led to a confusion between real and represented bodies, then the body of the author himself, represented and representing, lays claim to a kind of double presence. My point about Chaucer here is, then, twofold. First, I would claim that there was an inherent connection between authorship (or the making of the book), the medieval representation of authorship, and the perceived presence of the author in the book. Secondly, I would claim that this metaphorical conjuring of body and book privileged “presence” insofar as the vocabulary of religion and the supernatural were appropriated to perpetu ate the analogy. This elemental conflation of the corporeal with the bibliological in the “Charter of Christ,” gestures toward the deeper and more widespread connection between corpse and corpus that I pursue in this book. My thesis is not only that there was at work a kind of necromancy immediately following Chaucer’s death which defeated oppositions between presence and absence, life and death, but also that this conjuration displayed a literary body which (in its symbolic coherence) was seen to have the power to repair deep fissures in the cultural fabric. At the same time, the ability of this body to provide a quasi-aesthetic solution to the problem of cultural incoherence was threatened by the material side of the metaphoric equation. For it became increasingly clear that (like the biological body) the literary body was liable to what one author called the “rusty tooth of cankered time.”29 As issues of the textual corruption, literary value, and the accessibility of Chaucer’s works became entangled, the body, then, positioned at the intersection of these two axes (the temporal and the cultural), seemed to offer a symbolic constant which enabled synchronic and diachronic cultural coherence. Upper and lower classes could read and enjoy Chaucer and hence celebrate a contemporary national solidarity while also celebrating the historical England

INTRODUCTION • 7

that is, as G.K.Chesterton put it, Chaucer himself. Yet the respite offered by the body was temporary, for it became increasingly clear that as the body was used to suture the temporal discontinuity between medieval and modern, the gap between high and low culture became more pronounced. The hermeneutical problems occasioned by the great temporal distance of Chaucer from early modern and modern readers (resolved only by moving away from the materiality and corruptibility of the body) led to a kind of spiritual or transcendent poetics which increasingly became identified with “high culture.” It would be tempting to claim that the move from a bodily to a discarnate Chaucer in the modern period was matched by a similar move from book to imagined exemplar. But to what extent this metonymical, medieval connection between body and book became “merely” analogical in the later periods is difficult to say. I would argue that even if it did become analogical, it did so only to the extent that later critics engaged in what Slavoj Žižek calls their own “ideological fantasy” which continued to fetishize Chaucer’s dead body.30 That is, they may well have understood that Chaucer’s dead body was merely a corpse and that it is only the fact that it is revered by humans that gave it any mystical qualities. Yet at the same time they acted as if it were something more than a dead body. This special treatment of what is after all merely a heap of bones highlights, I argue, the way that the bones are tied up with the afterlife of the corpus. It is the history of this corpse/corpus connection that provides what one might call the skeleton of this book. One might wish to argue that this history has a trajectory that leads to a gradual disengagement of body from book. But I would argue that even if (in the modern period) it seems that a certain rationality has trumped this connection, that rationality is only a repression of a continuing engagement with the corporeal metaphor that lies within the very image of the body. Image, Text, and Body Given the extensive work that medievalists have done on images, memory, and literacy, it is perhaps unsurprising that part of the relationship between corpse and corpus is determined by something as fundamental as the relationship of image to text.31 From the moment that the poet Thomas Hoccleve reproduced Chaucer’s image “to putte othir men in remembraunce/Of his persone” a dozen years after Chaucer’s death, it was inevitable that text and image would insistently be yoked together in the attempt to recover the presence of the poet. The number of times that some version of Hoccelve’s portrait was used to “call forth” Chaucer either in a text, on Chaucer’s tomb, or in the face of Chaucer’s spiritual heirs (the pre-Raphaelites) demonstrates how the intense nostalgia for the body of the author underwrites the editorial recovery of Chaucer’s text. This nostalgia became so widespread that the great nineteenth-century editor, Frederick Furnivall, seems almost to base his understanding of the chronology of Chaucer’s work on the conjuring of the image of Chaucer, for whom the

8 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

“humourful bright time of [the] merry Tales was preceded by a long sad early manhood of hopeless and disappointed love.”32 Yet if (as I will argue) the image of Chaucer, like the body itself, was fetishized, it is also part of my project to detail the extent to which modern skepticism attempted to separate image from poet and poet from body. The primary stages of this attempt to liberate the poet from his body might be found, oddly enough, in the search for Chaucer’s “genuine” grave. Initially an attempt to elevate his body and final resting place to national prominence—and thus to encode in Chaucer a kind of national poetics— the vexed search for the body and even its authentic image highlighted the anxieties about the loss of the authentic Chaucer. Yet once scholarship had whittled down the multiplicity of images and burial places to one, the body actually seemed to recede into the background as scholars felt the need to demonstrate that Chaucer’s reputation transcended corporeal limits. This attempt to deny the power of the corporeal is, of course, quite old. We see Hoccleve responding to it in the poem in which he reproduces Chaucer’s image, when he asserts that (in Paul Strohm’s interpretation) the religious use of images can internally propagate “by a kind of halo effect …the spiritual aura of the images.”33 With the Reformation and especially after the accession of Elizabeth, these attempts to deny the body intensify as the translation of Chaucer’s body (which took place during the reign of Elizabeth’s Catholic sister) is increasingly looked upon with suspicion. Yet below the surface the image of the body still structured the search for the authentic Chaucer. This becomes especially clear in the anxious attempt to dissociate the translation of Chaucer from the Reformation destruction of tombs that took place, especially during the reign of Edward. In fact, it seems clear that these Protestant attempts to repress the body led to a kind of return of the repressed—a resurgent interest in the body that remained strong well into the latter part of the nineteenth century. In light of this relationship between image, body, and text one might think that early and late modern corporeal images (portraits, statues, and representations of the body) would command a good deal of respect from critics. Yet what is so peculiar is the extent to which medieval studies has separated itself from postmedieval representations of the body. This is not to say that medieval studies does not have a special interest in the visual. As objects of religious devotion, intense spirituality or memorial formation, specifically “medieval” images (especially images of the body) claim a central role for those who call themselves medievalists. Yet the role of post-medieval images in the reception of medieval texts (like “medievalism” itself) has often been treated as quaint or naïve. Even medievalists who have a stake in post-medieval “medievalism” tend to use a vocabulary that, if it does not denigrate post-medieval representations, seems to apologize for them. One need only recall Stephen Knight’s description of Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood illustrations as having “a bracing simplicity and naïve strength” to get some sense of how pervasive this attitude is.34 The reasons for this hesitation have a good deal to do with an institutional distrust of post-

INTRODUCTION • 9

medieval representations of the medieval world. Derek Pearsall, at the end of his discussion of the Chaucer portraits, perhaps best captures this distrust when he says, “but we are a long way now from Chaucer.”35 The empirical task of the twentieth-century critic or scholar seems to have been to throw off the intensely romantic notions of characters like Frederick Furnivall in order to get to the “authentic” Chaucer. Indeed, medievalists are particularly sensitive to the way that images communicate a “false” Middle Ages. Part of this sensitivity, I believe, has to do with an almost Lollard-like distrust of images. To look at images qua images is to fall prey to their seductive power and to imagine, as some of our students do, that they reveal that which they hide. One way to disable the seductiveness of the image is to read images against themselves, to explain, for instance, that almost all of the Chaucer portraits were produced much too late to represent an authentic Chaucer. Barbara Stafford has argued against this insistent distrust of images, writing that “the facile complaint that images are merely and always trumping reproductions drowns any memory of their originality and plentitude.”36 What we might keep in mind is that whatever our attitudes toward images, it is patently unhistorical to read them only as deceiving illusions. One may argue that medieval images were often stylized, or that images that were not taken from life fail to represent what the fourteenth-century poet looked like, but that does not mean that images do not tell us something about the history of the history of Chaucer. One need only remember what Walter Pater supposedly said about the frontispiece to Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer: “This portrait [of Chaucer], dight with heraldry, had as much within it as a vast number of the so-called commentaries of the Bible.”37 This comment suggests the extent to which, for the nineteenth century, the image of the body not only supplemented and explained the text, but was a kind of exegetical tool which reflected both text and author. If Stafford’s complaint about the distrust of images seems eerily familiar to medievalists, it is, as I suggest above, because it rehearses medieval (and late antique) arguments about sensuality vs. reason, the material vs. the immaterial, and the carnal vs. the incorporeal. These oppositions, far from being solely medieval, were also the product of a modernism that attempted to read Chaucer as transcending temporal bounds. Increasingly faced with a Chaucer who seems to have “succumbed to time’s ravages,” early twentieth-century critics no longer read the poet as material Father at the head of a poetic tradition. Instead, critics made Chaucer “relevant” by more or less dematerializing him—focusing on those incorporeal and ahistorical qualities, such as “genius.” Yet like the “denial” of the body in the early modern period, this dematerialization, this repression of the body only ensured the return of the body. This return to the body—in the form of “body criticism”—suggests not only a generalized return of the repressed, but also the extent to which the body itself enables the departure from and return to itself. We might, in other words, find within the idea of the body the explanation for why, just as the body recedes from view, it comes back into focus. As we saw above, Thomas Laqueur puts this

10 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

fascination with the body in terms of a question—if not the body, then what? I would reformulate the question as: Why the body? I would argue that it is the body’s ability to be a kind of primal text that leads us to return to the body. The bodily symptom, after all, is merely a sign that needs to be read and interpreted. The logic, then, that underlies the connection of body and text is deeply embedded in the very act of interpretation itself. Further, encompassing as it does, the oppositions life/death and presence/absence, the body disables any permanent departure from itself because it always leads back to itself. Classically, this corporeal “ambivalence” (which always ensures that questions of life/presence turn on questions of death/absence) is analogous (at least) to the “ambivalence” of writing. Writing, as Jacques Derrida avers, “is ‘ambivalent’ because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other.”38 So, too, the isomorphism between body and writing becomes apparent in Derrida’s invocation of the pharmakon, that “drug” which hovers “between magic charm, healing potion and poison.”39 Writing and the body (especially the dead body) at once offer remedies to the profound absence which results from loss and point to that absence. They both speak to the ultimate recoverability of the person and the text and demonstrate the irrecoverable nature of person and writing. Hence the absence of Chaucer enables a poet like Thomas Hoccleve to recollect Chaucer and reproduce his likeness even while recalling his absence. What Derrida says of the pharmakon, then, applies both to writing and to the body: “it cannot simply be assigned a site within which it situates, cannot be subsumed under concepts whose contours it draws, leaves only its ghost to a logic that can only seek to govern it insofar as logic arises from it—one would then have to bend [plier] into strange contortions what could no longer even simply be called logic or discourse. All the more so if what we have just imprudently called a ghost can no longer be distinguished, with the same assurance from truth, reality, living flesh….”40 What writing and the body resist is a kind of transcendent rational discourse which can situate them once and for all because they are the producers of the very logic that would govern their situation. This does not mean that there is not an insistent attempt to subordinate the production of these signs and symptoms to some pre- or transcorporeal logic (in fact this is demonstrated by the history of Chaucer s body), merely that the attempt to subordinate the body must always return to that which generated it—the body itself. Elisabeth Bronfen offers us a provisional answer to the question of how to talk about body and text without engaging too much in this subordination of the material. She suggests that the status of dead body and text is not only dependent on the relationship between the two, but on how that relationship is conceived: “What determines the effect of the corpse-image as pharmakon seems to depend on whether the translation of the corpse into heaven and into narrative is acknowledged as a tropic turn or whether the reduplication produced by the imaginary ‘represencing’ is endowed with the literal, i.e. not severed from

INTRODUCTION • 11

material referentiality.”41 Bronfen wishes to claim that both the “fetishistic denial” of the tropic turn and the material acceptance of death which leads to the desire for death (or quiesence) both tend toward the desire for closure. But I would suggest that the material body frustrates this desire for closure precisely because its continued existence in the material world after life continues to signify loss and decay. In fact, it is this frustration that ultimately leads to the attempt to dissociate the material from the transcendent, the sign from what it signifies. In terms of Chaucer we see this in Coleridge’s attempted dissociation of Chaucer’s poetic ability from any connection with what he calls a pathological “morbid drooping.” What is at stake here is the historical choice between abstract and literal connection, i.e. between transcendent and material representation.42 And it is here that I would take issue with Barbara Stafford’s complaint that the body (and particularly the image of the body) has only been recuperated to the extent that it is masquerading as a text—that in order to make it acceptable it must be “read” as rational and transcendent.43 I would argue (and this is part of my larger thesis) that the body is not masquerading or emulating a text precisely because it has a primary function as a text. It is always a representation. This is not to say that it is always read as being completely trustworthy. Indeed, just as the body is often seen as figuring forth that which is transcendent, it is sometimes read as being untrustworthy because it incarnates that which “should” remain immaterial. But what these conflicting readings tell me is that text and body are in some sense coextensive even as they can be, or perhaps, precisely because they are, read against themselves. The nexus of the connection of body and text, as I suggest above, is the act of recovery. And this recuperation is ultimately carried out in writing, for it is in writing that we attempt to compensate for loss. This particular project examines how a series of different kinds of writing—epitaph, poetry, journalism—over a period of six hundred years not only reads and represents both the body of Chaucer and the corpus of his work but depends on a logic which links the two and reveals that the fascination with the body inflects the recovery of Chaucer with a necromantic charm. In the first chapter I examine the personal difficulties that fifteenth-century poets experienced as they attempted to recover (poetically) the loss of “Chaucer”—a man they purportedly knew. Far from being monolithic, initial attempts at this recovery were heterogeneously embodied in at least two figures—John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve. Lydgate, for all his protestations to the contrary, probably did not know Chaucer; and so (in a process well rehearsed by Dominick LaCapra), Lydgate translated what was essentially an abstract absence into a personal loss. This process of refiguring historical absence into loss enabled Lydgate to exploit a kind of humility topos in his poetry that seemed to enable him to take the place of Chaucer. But it also appears that this process led to a perpetual state of melancholia from which Lydgate never really escaped. In the very act of appropriating the loss of Chaucer, Lydgate is so insistent on Chaucer’s loss that he symbolically does away with Chaucer in order to lay claim to his poetic mantle. Thomas Hoccleve,

12 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

on the other hand (who did know Chaucer), appears to have more successfully navigated the mourning process by translating his lament for the poet not only into poetry, but into an image (commissioned for the manuscript) which he was able to commod ify. By representing Chaucer in words and image, Hoccleve manages both to interpellate other readers and viewers into his position of mourner and to receive compensation for his loss in the form of an annuity from no less than the son of his king. Though Lydgate’s and Hoccleve’s strategies of recovery might be seen as fundamentally different, they both highlight how the recent loss of the “person” of Chaucer led them to represent and attempt to recuperate a “personal” Chaucer in their poetry. This initial attempt to recuperate Chaucer, I argue, set the stage for a secondary and more abstracted version of the recovery of Chaucer’s texts. In the “second recovery” of Chaucer (most notably by the scribe John Shirley and the printer William Caxton) compilators and editors who never knew or even pretended to know Chaucer translate loss or absence into textual presence, but they nonetheless appropriate the metaphors of presence to represent, even ventriloquize, the voice of Chaucer in his text. Like the primary recovery of the poet, this secondary recovery is characterized by at least two different strategies for obliterating the temporal distance between author and audience—strategies which reflect the move not just from Chaucer’s life to death but also from the scribal to the typographical. Hence, John Shirley suppresses the scriptological means by which these poems are produced. This occlusion of the scribal function draws attention away from the scene of writing and thus attempts to suppress what writing always gestures toward—the absence of him who speaks the written words. By suppressing the mediation of the scribe and by claiming that the words he quotes were spoken at the moment of Chaucer’s death, Shirley transforms absence and death into presence and life. William Caxton, on the other hand, draws attention to the written transmission of Chaucer’s corpus, emphasizing the technology of the printing press as a compensation for the enfeebled body of the scribe. Yet far from merely memorializing Chaucer, Caxton’s printing of Chaucer’s epitaph ventriloquizes the poet and interpellates the readers into the position of a kind of quasi-aural audience which enjoys the auricular “presence” of Chaucer even as it reads his words. As these editors point to the absence of Chaucer, then, they attempt to close the temporal gap between present words and lost poet, hence ensuring that our hermeneutical work of textual recovery gives a kind of consolation for the loss of the body. In chapter two, I examine how issues of textuality and burial come together in the twin translations of the poet’s body and works. The mid-sixteenth century translation of Chaucer’s body to the altar tomb and the eighteenth-century translation of Chaucer by Dryden into the vernacular could both be seen as Catholic attempts to reappropriate Chaucer for the old faith. Yet Nicholas Brigham’s mid-sixteenth century removal of Chaucer to his present tomb was not simply an act of Catholic appropriation during the reign of Queen Mary; it was arguably an attempt to put an end to the dangerous nachleben of the poet. In

INTRODUCTION • 13

anthropological terms, the exhumation and reburial of Chaucer was an endeavor to prevent the poet from becoming a kind of revenant who haunted his heirs and successors. By putting Chaucer to rest in a Marian tomb, Brigham hoped to “return” Chaucer to what he was originally—a Catholic poet. Given Brigham’s apparent motive for translating Chaucer, it is not surprising that, after Mary died, his translation became a kind of hermeneutical stumbling block for Reformation commentators like John Foxe (who imagined Chaucer as a proto-Protestant). What is perhaps unexpected, however, is that this Protestant resistance to the translation was reawakened in the eighteenth century when John Dryden, himself a Catholic, not only translated Chaucer into early modern English, but was himself apparently placed in Chaucer’s grave. I argue that, as a result, Dryden, the “Father of Modern Poetry,” became a kind of dark double, even scapegoat, for Chaucer; as such, his body was used to draw off those negative qualities (like affinity with the “phantastical popish religion” or untoward interest in material gain) which could not properly be associated with the Father of Ancient Poetry. Even as the early nineteenth century entertained suspicions that Dryden had been buried in Chaucer’s grave, late nineteenth-century commentators began to be anxious about a counternarrative that asserted that Chaucer was buried in someone else’s tomb. In chapter three I argue that concerns about this reuse of an old tomb arise from Chaucer’s position as the Father of his country. The filiations of “Englishness” which spread throughout the empire and knit the nation together were threatened by this counternarrative because the “Father” of this “Englishness” was buried in a tomb which predated him. Not only did this burial in a reused sepulchre desecrate another man’s tomb and, by extension, profane the memory of Father Chaucer, it also gestured toward a prehistory which could not be compassed by a patriarchal nationalism. Like Brigham’s “Catholic” translation, then, the theory of the “rifled” tomb becomes something which must be resisted and repressed because it portends the inability of England’s cultural productions to provide a coherent national narrative. Chapter four examines how Chaucer’s tomb increasingly came to be seen as akin to his manuscripts. The tomb, itself a late production, was seen as an imperfect container for the corpse, just as the manuscripts were considered to be an imperfect container for the literary corpus. In an effort to supplement this imperfection, an aesthetic sense was imported into the appreciation of both tomb and text. Just as manuscripts like the beautiful Lansdowne 851 were chosen by editors precisely because they seemed com plete, so Chaucer’s tomb increasingly became the focus for a project of restoration in order to call attention to its existence as the authentic and final resting place of Chaucer. These impulses to repair tomb and corpus need to be understood as an attempt to bring together a transcendent aesthetic notion of the beautiful Chaucer along with a more material notion of the national importance of the “Father of English Poetry.” The goal, in either case, was not simply to obliterate temporal distance between Chaucer and his audience, but to embody in this Chaucerian recovery a symbolic

14 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

reminder of the timelessness of England itself—a timelessness that might evince itself with a visit either to Poets’ Corner or to the collected works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Where chapter four dwells on nineteenth-century aesthetic responses to tomb and text, chapter five examines how the modernist formulation of a transcendent Chaucerian “genius” ultimately led to a kind of twentieth-century disembodiment of Chaucer. This formulation, I argue, was a response to a nineteenth-century subtradition, which attempted to link genius with the poet’s “stature.” From at least the seventeenth century there had been reports that Chaucer was unusually short. Nineteenth-century critics appropriated this corporeal “fact” and used it to combat notions that Chaucer had “succumbed to time’s ravages.”44 Chaucer’s genius, they explained, was connected with his ability to be like a child—an ability made legible both in his works and (as contemporary physiognomists claimed) his child-like body. So, too, he lived in the “childhood of man” and thus his genius was not only “to be a boy again at will,” but also to transport his readers into an unmediated experience of childhood. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, critics began to reject the notion that Chaucer was somehow underdeveloped or “childish.” What replaced this earlier notion was an assertion that Chaucer’s purported “shortness” did not indicate a lack of poetic stature or an inability to reach the “high seriousness” of Matthew Arnold; instead it revealed his ability to discourse about low things without himself being “low.” As T.R.Lounsbury put it, Chaucer’s low style enabled him to “cling persistently to the language of common life.”45 This strategy of distinguishing between low subject matter and low style allowed critics to maintain that Chaucer spoke “the language of the people” and thus spoke to the “people” of the nineteenth century despite the perverting lens of temporal distance. As Chaucer’s diminutive stature was increasingly read as a sign of dwarfishness or lameness, modern critics such as John Livingston Lowes and Howard Patch moved away from the connection between corporeality and genius. Unwilling to invest in contemporary theories (like those of Cesare Lombroso) that linked pathology with genius, these critics attempted not to create a normative Chaucerian body; instead they suggested that Chaucer was “modern” precisely because body and person, man and poet were separate. As T.S.Eliot put it, “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.”46 This divorce of the author function from the author’s body enabled critics to represent the poet’s words as transcendent and immanent. Thus the poet’s works would remain perpetually relevant to temporally disparate audiences. Yet this conceptualization of the author had the unintended effect of unmooring Chaucer from his “common” roots. As his genius became disembodied and transcendent, he became a poet of High Culture, one of those poets that (as F.R.Leavis put it) the “disinterested clerisy” studied in their academic retreats. I conclude by arguing that this discarnate Chaucer, disconnected from his historical roots (and thus his

INTRODUCTION • 15

identity as the “Father” of the English poetic tradition), became emblematic not of a resurgent study of the Middle Ages, but of a kind of separation of the father from his descendents. Hence the historical narrative which linked the English poetic tradition with the larger cultural sphere was attenuated as the body vanished. In this study, then, I suggest that, like those sixteenth-century debtors with which I began, we need to return to the tomb of Chaucer not to pay homage, but to pay what we owe to the body. By confronting the contingency of the poet’s life and death we can come to terms with our own “recovery” of Chaucer. Attempts to recover the corpus of the poet have, I argue, always relied on the death of Chaucer. Whether this death has been figured as a loss which has led to a melancholic recollection and re- visitation of the poet’s words, or as a stumbling block which has needed to be overcome, the death and resting place of Chaucer’s body has in some sense enabled the “recovery” of Chaucer’s corpus just insofar as it mirrors the attempt to “recover” Chaucer himself. Chaucer’s corpus is, after all, embodied in a number of manuscripts, and it is this embarrassing multiplicity (like the multiple sites of his grave) that critics have now to deal with. It is no accident, I think, that even as textual critics increasingly question the “authenticity” of readings enshrined in landmark Chaucerian manuscripts like Ellesmere, Seth Lerer is “at Chaucer’s tomb” while Joseph Dane and Derek Pearsall recapitulate earlier anxieties about the presence of Chaucer’s body in that tomb. We care about the location of Chaucer’s body because we continue to be in the grip of a corporeal metaphorics that is at once more and less than a simple analogy between the remains of Chaucer and what remains of Chaucer.

CHAPTER 1 Chaucer’s Death Two Stories, Three Mourners

Writing was in its origin the voice of the absent person. Sigmund Freud1 In books I find the dead as if they were alive. Richard de Bury2 Though it is not always obvious, early narrative treatments of Chaucer’s death betray a tendency to conflate the poet’s dying body with the poet’s literary productions. It is not only that these stories foreground the ways in which the poet’s literary corpus provides a substitute for his absent body, but also that his presence is manifested in ways which suggest how difficult it is to recover the poet’s corpus and, by extension, to make his absence present. This work of recovery is ultimately born of a need to exercise control over the death of the poet and so, implicitly, offers the poets, editors, and critics who follow Chaucer the illusion that they may control their language, art, and audience. This fantasy of authorial control over Chaucer’s body reveals the extent to which the body’s contingency and transcendence enables and problematizes various strategies of recovery. Such strategies gesture toward the ways in which the loss of Chaucer was transformed into an aesthetics of melancholia. As the poet was deemed transcendent, hence unrecoverable, an economy of mourning which focused on the commensurability of the poet seemed to offer a means by which Chaucer could be restored. The two early stories with which I begin this chapter reveal what initially seem to be two opposing strategies for recovery. In one case the poet’s final words are transformed into a poem that provides the audience with a penitential link to Chaucer; in the other a final poem is transformed into a narrative about the poet’s last words, which works to separate the poet from his post-mortem audience. What these two narratives share is a desire to appropriate Chaucer’s presence, at the moment of his absence, and to transform this liminal moment into a time when the distinctions between body and corpus vanish. The advantage to the abolishment of such distinctions becomes clear when we look at John Shirley’s recovery of Chaucer’s Adam Scriveyn. In this poem the scribe,

CHAUCER’S DEATH • 17

and by extension Chaucer, is anatomized, so that the poet’s person and his poem are brought into the reader’s eye as Chaucer does the work to recover himself. Thus the text, like Chaucer, is fragmented and recreated for the consumption of the reader. Yet if Shirley’s recovery of the Chaucerian text bespeaks a certain satisfaction with the ability to recover Chaucer—one which occludes death— those poets who cast themselves as literary descendents of Chaucer, such as John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, seem to feel the need to reach back and recover the moment of death itself. Lydgate seems to be in perpetual mourning for the “master,” as he constantly brings the dead body of Chaucer before his audience. Indeed, what Freud would call a melancholic attachment to Chaucer might be seen as pathological here, for Lydgate probably had no personal attachment to Chaucer while he was alive. Lydgate’s obsession with Chaucer’s body, I argue, is symptomatic of a kind of proleptic guilt, as he does away with Chaucer in order to render him symbolic of that which Lydgate wishes to be. Hoccleve, on the other hand, seems to carry out the mourning process successfully—with a more localized mourning poem, The Regement of Princes. One reason for this more successful navigation of the mourning process, I argue, has to do with the displacement of Hoccleve’s desire with something that Chaucer himself had desired—money. Hoccleve’s obsession with coin offers the earliest example of the material commensurability of Chaucer and thus sets a material value on him. At the same time, this focus on money hides a desire for a thing (currency), which, no matter how it physically looks, always has a symbolical incorruptible body. This body, in turn, is backed by the king whose image is imprinted upon it. Instead of revealing a cathexis to the small body of faithful auditors who might comprise the audience of the poem, Hoccleve performatively transfers his attachment to the locus of the regal listener, the body of the coin. If Lydgate’s and Hoccleve’s expressions of mourning for the poet are somewhat mediated by the symbolic and by the transcendent, William Caxton’s recovery of the dead poet seems firmly rooted in the material world. It is Caxton, of course, who first gives directions to Chaucer’s grave and perhaps commissions (as well as reprints) the epitaph which appears there.3 For Caxton, Chaucer’s death does not so much lead him to meditate on the loss of the poet as it yields an attempt to make good this loss—by making Chaucer immortal both through the medium of the printing press and through Caxton’s epitaph for Chaucer. Yet the printing of so many copies of Chaucer’s works seems to devalue the thing itself precisely because it eliminates presence, and hence authority. As Walter Benjamin famously puts it, “the situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated.”4 What has been lost, of course, is not only the person of the poet, but, for a printer like Caxton, the personal authority of the manuscript. The impersonality of the printing press robs the text of an authoritative scribal/poetic body to give it “authorial” form. Caxton’s attempt to make up this loss depends both on conjuring up an authoritative manuscript upon

18 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

which to base his second printed version and on generating a story about the genealogical origins of the manuscript, one which places it within a family history. Yet this familial history in some sense attempts to deny history, as it strives to return the text to the form which it had before Chaucer was lost, before Chaucer had become displaced by his post-mortem symbolization. Two Stories Since efforts to supplement the loss of Chaucer are located in the actual trauma of the poet’s death, it would seem obvious that we would have to return to the scene of the poet’s passing. Yet very little is known of the poet’s death. The date, the cause, and even the place remain in doubt. What little evidence we do have suggests that Chaucer died somewhere between the 28th of September, 1400 and the 28th of the same month a year later, when the tenancy of his house at Westminster passed to “Master Paul.”5 What he died of also remains a mystery. He may have been ill, but there is no evidence that (if he was ill) the illness caused his death.6 Chaucer left no will, so there is no suggestion of how he wished his property disposed of (though the will might have been lost or might have been a nuncupative will). This lack of information has proved somewhat frustrating for modern critics, who have supplemented this lack with their own speculations about what Chaucer was up to in his final days and hours. It is in these modern responses that we see the endpoint of a tradition which stretches back to the fifteenth century. Derek Pearsall couches his speculations about Chaucer’s death in very personal terms: “I should like to believe he was in these months engaged in expanding the plan of The Canterbury Tales and adding the non-finishing touches to the Cook’s Tale” (275). Pearsall here is careful to avoid suggesting that his personal desires have any basis in fact. Yet he provides his readers with a satisfying tableau that plays into what Pearsall judges to be the audience’s critical fantasies about Chaucer’s final work. In Pearsall’s eyes, Chaucer is, in his final days, at once expanding the Canterbury project and finishing one of the works within that project by purposefully leaving it fragmentary. Metonymically, then, he implies that the unfinished Tales may in some sense be (like the Cook’s Tale) finished in its unfinished state. This aesthetics of incomplete completion at once fulfills a kind of fantasy about Chaucer’s genius and (as I will argue in chapter five) elides the connection of body and corpus even as it depends on a recitation of Chaucer’s death. Donald Howard is a bit more chary about recreating a story about Chaucer’s final days, but he too wishes to satisfy his audience’s sense of an ending, so he identifies a work which he calls “a deathbed utterance written in advance.”7 In Chaucer’s Retraction, Chaucer famously asks “that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes; /and namely of my translascions and enditynges of worldly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns.”8 The audience would expect Chaucer to show concern for his soul on his

CHAUCER’S DEATH • 19

deathbed, so in some sense Howard’s assertion makes sense. But Howard goes on to imply that this forward looking deathbed utterance includes the final words of Chaucer’s final work. It is possible, of course, that Chaucer meant the Tales to be his final work, and that he meant the Retraction to stand as his final words to the final work, but these speculations seem to have as much to do with a kind of aesthetic desire for closure as they do with any applicable Chaucerian intent. Pearsall’s and Howard’s speculations differ somewhat, but they also share a common assumption. Pearsall finds completion in an intentional fragmenting of the Tales while Howard casts the completion of the work as a proleptic intention. What is interesting about this common assumption is the way that it uses the end of Chaucer as a beginning for literary closure and the opening up of interpretation. Pearsall’s and Howard’s speculations are part of a long tradition of making good the lack of any deathbed narrative, a tradition which began in the fifteenth century. Contemporary scholars, of course, reject those apocryphal stories about Chaucer’s passing, stories which very quickly gained currency in the fifteenth century. Yet these predominantly moral stories seem to be the flip side of the more modern aesthetic turn. Like more modern musings about Chaucer’s final hours, these ethical recountings give a kind of poetic closure to Chaucer’s life and works. But unlike modern narratives, these earlier stories provide us with a helpful etiology of the trauma of loss that seems to have followed the poet’s death, as they focus on the presence and absence of the poet’s body. Two more or less competing traditions offer some of the earliest examples of how compilers and clerics were able to produce out of this loss two meditations on the value of a kind of transcendence of loss. At the same time, both of these narratives reveal the extent to which the body—suppressed in order to enable transcendence—always returns to haunt these authors and undermine their project of making good the loss of Chaucer. In his Dictionarium Theologium Thomas Gascoigne (who was, among other things, Chancellor of Oxford University) reports that “Chaucer, before his death, often cried out, ‘Woe is me! Woe is me! For I shall not now be able to revoke or destroy those things that I have wickedly written concerning the wicked and filthy love of men for women and which will now be passed down forever from man to man, whether I wish it or not.’ And so complaining he died.”9 As Derek Pearsall and others have pointed out, this account of Chaucer’s death seems to have been an imaginative reconstruction of Chaucer’s Retraction rather than any genuine account of his death.10 Unlike a later narrative which (as we will see) identifies part of the Chaucerian corpus as the poet’s final words, Gascoigne uses part of the corpus to generate a fantasy about Chaucer’s final words. James Dean has suggested that this narrative fits neatly into assumptions about the kind of death speech that would be expected of the author of the Retraction. Yet one wonders why Gascoigne would have Chaucer claim that “I shall not now be able to revoke or destroy those things that I have wickedly written,” given that Chaucer had already explicitly revoked his works in his Retraction.11 It is

20 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

possible, of course, that Gascoigne had not seen the Retraction, and thus the story circulated separately as gossip, possibly inspired by the Retraction. It is also possible that the story was drawn from the story of his deathbed repentance.12 Yet what stands out about this story is the stark opposition between the permanency of writing and the ephemeral nature of the spoken word. In this particular case the great danger of such permanency is that when death comes, apparently suddenly, it will be too late to revoke the work which he has “wickedly written concerning the wicked and filthy love of men for women.”13 The studied ignorance of the Retraction here serves the purposes of the negative exemplum because Chaucer’s deathbed “retraction” remains oral (at least until recorded by Gascoigne), hence ineffective in combating the more permanent, one might even say immortal, writings which will now be passed down “from man to man.” The closure which Gascoigne offers here is, then, produced by a lack of closure. That which should be immortal (the soul) is not only threatened, but is displaced by the “immortality” of the immoral corpus, which lives long after the death of the body. As Seth Lerer points out, it was a fascination with the idea of literary immortality (an idea conveyed by the writers themselves) that especially characterizes the late medieval/early modern emergence of what we might call a humanistic sensibility.14 Lerer suggests that, in this sensibility, the poet becomes less a remembered absence and more a recovered auctor who lives not just in memory, but in the “performances of humanist laureates.”15 In support of his argument Lerer refers to a story widely circulated in the fourteenth century about the finding of Ovid’s tomb, a story which was attached to the pseudoOvidian De Vetula. According to this story the tomb of the poet was opened but contained no body; instead the tomb contained an ivory casket within which was a book unconsumed by the ages. The familiar saint’s life convention of the uncorrupted body—here displaced and projected onto the literary corpus of the poet—certainly could be linked to the humanist project of self-definition as Lerer suggests. This substitution of book for body also indicates why Gascoigne would characterize Chaucer as obsessed with his inability to destroy his works: once he was dead, his books would metonymically replace his body, hence perpetuating his reputation as an erotic, immoral writer via a permanently corrupted body of writing. Yet if Gascoigne emphasizes the mutable and ephemeral nature of Chaucer’s repentance, his anecdote also draws attention to the way in which the story violates the fundamental oppositions of ephemeral pleasure and everlasting life upon which it depends. For if the corruptible body in this formulation is opposed to the immortal soul, the immoral text is troped as everlasting and far reaching. In contrast, oral repentance is figured not only as temporally bound (belated), but as ineffective. The matter of these durable writings, the “filthy” love of one body for another, should be particularly evanescent, yet the anxiety is that “the wicked and filthy love of men for women…will now be passed down forever from man to man.”

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If this “wicked and filthy love of men for women” ensures the durability of Chaucer’s writings, it is, I would argue, because of men’s desire to read about such things. This desire, as others have argued, is in some sense a byproduct of a more deep-seated metaphorical construction of books as women.16 As the host of puns and jokes about “two-leaved books” in the period testify, books fulfill a male fantasy of the loose woman.17 They can be passed from one man to another, opened up and inspected for the marks of “masculine” pen. These gendered texts—especially the way in which they are passed from “man to man” might then be seen as a metaphoric version of what Gayle Rubin has called “the traffic in women.”18 For just as the exogamous circulation of women enables social bonds between men, so, in Gascoigne’s anecdote, the circulation of texts creates homosocial bonds between those men who exchange these texts. It is, in fact, precisely this connection between women and words that occasioned Claude Lévi-Strauss’s original insight that “the emergence of sym bolic thought must have required that women, like words, would be objects that were exchanged.”19 Yet these particular objects of exchange— Chaucer’s works—are problematized by Gascoigne because the means by which they attain this connection at once perpetuate and reveal the forbidden desire (the “wicked and filthy love”) which underlies all such transactions. The satisfaction of this desire is seen as a corollary to the illicit pleasure which led to the post-lapserian world in the first place. Gascoigne, of course, does not mean to undermine the traffic in texts which holds together homosocial society (in fact, as a producer of texts, he depends on it), but I think he inadvertently poses a problem for those who wish to continue this trade in texts, for it depends on the very desire which Gascoigne is purportedly arguing against.20 That which remains after the author’s death, that which has value because the circulation of texts depends on it, is the desire for the body which Gascoigne seems to argue against. Hence, at the very moment that Gascoigne attempts to argue for transcendence, he is haunted by the corporeal bases of textual transactions. The value of the transcendent, then, depends on affirming the power of the material, the corruptible basis of textual circulation. If Gascoigne ventriloquizes Chaucer in order to enable the reader’s meditation on the dangers of textual immorality and immortality, the other fifteenth-century deathbed tradition appropriates a text in order to mediate mortality. Possibly deriving from a lost John Shirley original, the headnote to the poem known as Truth in the now lost Cotton Otho A. XVIII claims that it was “A balade by Geffrey Chaucier vppon his dethe bedde lyinge in his grete Anguysse.”21 As recently as the late nineteenth century, Bernhard ten Brink defended the poem as Chaucer’s last words, claiming, “His last poetic utterance was the ballad on Truth —for why should we particularly in this point refuse to admit a credible nucleus to a well-accredited tradition? …His last ballad was the best, because the most pregnant, and flowing most from the depths of his soul.”22 For the nineteenthcentury critic, Chaucer’s death infuses the poem with a meaning which it would not have otherwise had. Just as Chaucer brings forth his “balade” from a soul

22 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

which is about to leave his body, so the body of the poem is pregnant with meaning. Chaucer, he suggests, is giving birth to his immortality with his death. For a fifteenth-century audience, on the other hand, it is the reiteration of Boethian commonplaces (“Tempest thee noght al croked to redresse/In trust of hir that turneth as a bal”) and the conventional suggestion that the reader should “lat thy gost thee lede” which would seem to confirm the poems status as a poet’s final words. As George Pace and Alfred David note, “Shirley’s rubric tells us that, if Chaucer did not in fact compose the first three stanzas of Truth on his deathbed, they are exactly what a wise man ought to say to the world from which he is about to depart.”23 The two historical periods, then, even if they disagree about the originality of the work, use Truth to express an attitude about the protocols of bodily death and art. The poet, in death, brings forth a poem that reflects back on the relationship between the poet’s art and the poet’s life. These words, as they provide a kind of continuity between the poet’s art, his dying body, and his post-mortem audience, affirm the life and continued presence of Chaucer because of his death. The difference here between Gascoigne and the tradition embodied in Truth is that the poem, particularly in the third stanza, insists on transcendence: Her is non hoom, her nis but wildernesse: Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal! Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al: Hold the heye wey and lat thy gost thee lede, And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede. (653:17–21) The comparison of the pilgrim to a beast who must look up to heaven, the suggestion that the spirit will lead the way, as well as the final iteration of the refrain from John 8:32 all lead inevitably to disembodiment. Yet against this disembodiment is the presence of the poem itself. What remains hidden in the recovery of this particular poem as deathbed utterance is the means by which the poem was passed on. Like Gascoigne’s story about repentance, the scenario suggests an oral text. Unlike Gascoigne’s story, the words are an actual poetic production rather than words about a poetic production. The question becomes, who was the amanuensis? One might well argue that John Shirley was simply uninterested in how the poem got recorded as long as it did not interrupt his gossipy claim that the work was by Geoffrey Chaucer “vppon his dethe bedde lyinge in his grete Anguysse.” Yet, I would argue that Shirley more self-consciously elides the means of production of the poem. In Derrida’s classic formulation, this repression of writing is “the repression of that which threatens presence and the mastering of absence.”24 To call attention to the writing, or copying, of the poem is not only to call attention to the ways in which the poem is distant from (in ten Brink’s words) the outpouring of Chaucer’s soul, but to distance Chaucer from his audience and disable the poem’s ability to master his absence. If such

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conceptions seem too modern for a fifteenth-century editor, we need only turn to Shirley’s own “reproduction” of Chaucer’s meditation on the presence and absence of the writing self. In MS R.3.20, a manuscript that includes Shirley’s headnote to Truth, Shirley offers his own copy of “Chaucier’s wordes . a Geffrey vn to Adame his owen scryveyne”: “Adam . scryvene/if euer it þee byfalle/Boece or Troylus/for to wryten nuwe/Vnder þy long lokkes/þowe most haue þe scalle/But affter my makyng/þowe wryte more truwe/So offt adaye . I mot þy werk renuwe/ It to . corect/and eke to rubbe and scrape/And al is thorough þy necglygence and rape.”25 This poem has, for good reason, become something of a locus classicus for discussions of the reproduction and reception of Chaucer’s works. As Seth Lerer has argued (129–131), Shirley is generally careful to trope the process of textual loss, recovery, restoration and correction as a kind of romance in which he is in some sense the hero—the compiler setting out on a quest to recover lost lyrics and especially pieces of the author’s life. Yet, I would argue that Adam Scriveyn fits uncomfortably into this Shirleian paradigm. The poem, after all, punctures the heroism of the scribe by suggesting that the quester is not up to the quest. The placement of the poem in MS R.3.20 may suggest that Shirley himself understood the implications of reproducing a poem that attacks the very kind of scribal reproduction in which he himself is engaged. Lerer implies that the poem’s placement in the MS is a kind of Shirleian afterthought. Unlike the magisterial placement of the lyric at the end of John Stow’s 1561 edition of Chaucer’s works, Shirley sandwiches the poem between two pieces by Lydgate. Copying it down “as a scribe’s entry in a string of poems on the writing self,” rather than, I would argue, as a poem which in some sense deauthorized the Shirleian project of recovery and restoration, Shirley satisfies two competing agendas.26 He recovers “Chaucer’s words,” and contextualizes the suggestion that it is only the author himself who can “renew” and “correct” the work so that it is “true”—a part of the genre of verse complaint. It is possible, of course, that the specificity of the Shirleian headnote was meant to differentiate Shirley the scribe from the negligent Adam Scriveyn. Unlike Stow’s later rubric to the poem (“Chaucer’s Woordes unto his owne Scrivener”), which suppresses the Christian names of the protagonists and may seem to speak to a more generalized scribal identity, Shirley’s headnote directs the criticisms by Chaucer toward one particular scribe. Yet such anxieties of differentiation still speak to the central problem of reproducing the poem. By conjuring Chaucer up, the poem points to his absence. For the poem both embodies Chaucer busily scraping away at Adam’s mistakes, and makes the reader realize that Chaucer’s voice is disembodied and potentially deauthorized by the scribal technologies which make it possible to represent him here. One could, of course, read the words of Chaucer’s persona very optimistically —that when he says, “So offt adaye. I mot þy werk renuwe” it means that Chaucer himself was constantly correcting the scribe’s original mistakes and repurifying the text. Yet what must have been clear to Shirley and other scribes

24 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

was that, if this complaint called into question the epistemological foundations of the scribal project of recovery, it also revealed the extent to which the poet’s purifying tendencies were lost with his body. Chaucer’s absence signifies that there is, finally, no way to verify the authenticity of any editorial project. The placement of the poem in MS R.3.20, and the Shirleian rubric, attempt to resolve this problem by offering Chaucer as a kind of shimmering image—neither wholly present to call the Shirleian project into question, nor by his absence to accuse the scribe/compiler of bad faith. What we have, then, is a kind of meditation on present and absent bodies. The body of the text is present but has been violated by the scribe. The body of the scribe, of course, is all too present—his errant hand and his scabby head are conjured up by the voice of the poet. It is through the incapacity of the scribal body that the hand of the poet is invoked to scrape the work damaged by the scribe’s “rape” that (as Carolyn Dinshaw points out) can certainly mean “to make haste” or “rush” as it is often glossed, but it can also carry the more sexual meaning connoting a kind of violation of the text.27 In the context of Gascoigne’s anecdote, then, the passage would suggest that the femininized text (one might even go so far as to identify it as a daughter) is violated when it is passed to another man via the mediation of the scribe. Specifically, how the text is violated is not immediately made clear, though the word “necglygence” hints at one of the problems of Adam’s transmission. In other contexts Chaucer uses the term “necglygence” to connote omission, which suggests that the real anxiety is not that something will be added, as that something will be lost.28 In this context I would argue that what is lost and what the poem mourns is a kind of poetic presence and authority. It is this presence that Shirley attempts to conjure when he elides the presence of writing in his headnote to Truth. It is, as we have seen, precisely the lack of apparent scribal mediation that gives the poem its great power. Gascoigne, Shirley, ten Brink and even Howard (with his proleptic last words) all attempt to recover unproblematically what might be called the “Rosebud” of Chaucer by interpellating their readers directly into the position of witnesses of an oral moment rather than readers of copied document. Their hermeneutic strategy, then, is to conjure up a Chaucer who, whether as moral exemplum or unmediated authority, transcends the temporal boundaries which keep him in the past. Their attempts to suppress the body precisely because the body is demonstrably absent are marked by a reemergence of the body—a fantasy of presence which pretends to authenticity. The Early Reception of Chaucer’s Death If John Shirley’s project was to recover Chaucer’s text by eliding the absence of his body, the fifteenth-century poetic heirs of Chaucer seem to foreground the absence of his body in order to lay claim to his poetic mantle. This pattern seems to affirm the critical notion that the fifteenth century was an age of poetic decline, a drab age which bridged the gap between the Ricardian poets and the

CHAUCER’S DEATH • 25

Elizabethan floresence.29 In this formulation, fifteenth-century poets (though early critics might not put it in precisely this way) felt inadequate because they compared their own verse with Chaucer’s and found it wanting. As a result they were, purportedly, unable to produce “great” poetry. No clearer sign of this inadequacy exists, according to these early critics, than the quality of laments about the loss of Chaucer and his poetic talent. More recently, A.C.Spearing has suggested the relevance of the Bloomian paradigm of the anxiety of influence in light of a fifteenth-century poetics of inadequacy. He shows that writers such as Lydgate at once style themselves as inadequate,30 and attempt to kill off Chaucer by, for instance, removing the poet from a Lydgatean version of the Canterbury pilgrimage.31 Spearing employs the Bloomian paradigm because, as he asserts, “Chaucer is the first English poet to exist as an ‘author’, the first to be known by name as the father of a body of work.”32 Seth Lerer, too, believes that Lydgate, Hoccleve, and others were unable to get out from under Chaucer’s shadow. Yet in some ways Lerer disagrees with Spearing’s second suggestion that “throughout his career he seems to be striving towards the culmination achieved in The Canterbury Tales, the relinquishment of his own fatherhood, the transformation of his work into a text.”33 Lerer asserts instead that Chaucer embeds his idea of literary fatherhood in the tales themselves, in characters such as the paternalistic Knight. He adds that various imitators and followers of Chaucer introject themselves into the filial position by adopting the rhetorical posture of characters, such as the Knight’s insecure and dilatory son—the Squire.34 Though I would assert that this Oedipal paradigm is relevant to the understanding of the fifteenth-century reception of the poet (as the many references to “Father Chaucer” indicate), it also seems useful to move beyond the familiar Freudian “familial” power struggle. Chaucer’s death suggests that the poetical moves of writers like John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve might also be illuminated by the instinctual economics of mourning and melancholia as well as by the Oedipal paradigm. In fact, I would argue that this melancholia (ostensibly an endless mourning for “Father Chaucer”) is actually a means by which Lydgate, at least, attempts to exercise his control of Chaucer by alternately discovering and concealing the dead body of Chaucer. This form of control, according to Freud, is a means by which the “child” deals with the absence of the parent. Like the story of the spindle which Freud’s grandson hid and discovered, Lydgate brings the body of Chaucer into view only to make it disappear again. The symbolic ability to control the absence and presence of the poet purportedly makes the loss of Chaucer more bearable. Yet in Lacan’s formulation of the fort/da episode, there is a sense in which the “games of occultation” are not simply an example of the child’s “mastering his privation by assuming it” but that, in his action, the child “destroys the object that it causes to appear and disappear.” In an even more provocative formulation, Lacan suggests that this action raises itself to the level of the symbolic in the “murder of the thing.”35 Chaucer’s transformation from live poet to dead symbol might

26 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

then be seen as a kind of homicide. For it is in the attempt to master that which has already happened (Chaucer’s death) that Lydgate lays claim to a kind of postmortem agency in the death of Chaucer by transforming lack or absence (that which, for Lydgate, was missing) into a narrative of personal loss. Lydgate, as we shall see, was not unaware that he employs Chaucer as a kind of symbol which he hoped to, if not suppress, then at least replace. At the same time, Lydgate’s melancholia suggests a certain amount of guilt at this killing which insistently interfered with his attempt to succeed the man he came to call the “master.” Such melancholia manifests itself in what may have been the first notice of Chaucer’s death that we possess. In his Flour of Curteyese Lydgate invokes Chaucer as part of an extended humility topos: Ever as I can supprise in myn herte Alway with feare, betwyxt drede and shame Leste oute of lose, any worde asterte In this metre, to make it seme lame, Chaucer is deed, that had suche a name Of fayr makyng that [was], withoute wene Fayrest in our tonge, as the Laurer grene. We may assaye for to countrefete His gay style but it wyl not be; The welle is drie, with the lycour swete Both of Clye and of Caliope.36 For readers of medieval poetry, Lydgate’s invocation of Chaucer here is hardly a surprise. Given the number of times that Lydgate will call forth Chaucer in precisely this way, it is difficult not to read this invocation formulaically—as a humility topos which is tired even before it is first used. Yet in the context of a very early Lydgatean work, one might see the abrupt asservation “Chaucer is deed” near the end of a Valentine’s Day poem as somewhat surprising (if not inappropriate) to Lydgate’s audience. It al most seems as if Lydgate is offering his services as poet to the lady, because her preferred lover, Chaucer “is deed.” Yet if he wishes to take Chaucer’s place, Lydgate also launches a larger project of mourning in which he claims that, in fact, the “laurer grene” cannot be recovered either by him or any of the poets of the fifteenth century (as the first person plural tells us) because “the welle is drye.” There are those, of course, who claim that all this talk of death was only another way of trying to ensure that Chaucer remained “buried”—more an exemplary presence from the past than an internalized father figure. As we saw earlier, Spearing gives voice to perhaps the most convincing example of this phenomenon when he argues that Lydgate not only attempted to lay claim to Chaucer’s legacy, but had the audacity to write himself into Chaucer’s position in the most thoroughgoing of early fifteenth-century Chaucerian productions— The Siege of Thebes.37 In his extension of the Canterbury project Lydgate

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happens on the pilgrims by “hap or fortune” in Canterbury and is invited to accompany them on the homeward journey; here he tells a tale which has affiliations with the Knight’s Tale. Spearing makes much of the fact that Chaucer is not with the pilgrims and that Lydgate shows no sign of surprise that he is absent, implying perhaps that Lydgate quite literally eliminates Chaucer in order to replace him. Yet there is no need to give such agency to Lydgate, for, as he tells us that he himself is nearly fifty, it would be an anachronism to claim that Chaucer was still alive. In any case, Lydgate is careful to note that Chaucer was “Chief registrer of this pilgrimage,” and that he “never shal appallen [wax pale or dim] in my mynde.”38 Far from demonstrating a desire to replace Chaucer, then, Lydgate’s Canterbury Tale seems to reinforce the hauntingly absent presence of the poet. In fact, it seems to be precisely this absent presence which indicates a poetics of loss. Lydgate, in other words, transforms a larger historical condition of absence (Chaucer is gone) into a personal loss. If, as we suspect, Lydgate did not actually know Chaucer, then why was he so intent on personalizing this absence as loss? Even if Lydgate did not know Chaucer, he apparently knew the Chaucer family, so it is possible that he adopted their grief as his own.39 In addition, as many critics have argued, it probably did not hurt his own poetic career to link himself so closely with Chaucer’s reputation. But one cannot help but think that he might have easily moved away from the attempt to draw attention to Chaucer’s death, even as he maintained the humility topos which apparently enabled his own labors. Recent work on the psychodynamics of loss is helpful here because it suggests the extent to which Lydgate’s behavior might be seen as an example of melancholia—an inability to work through Chaucer’s death. Unlike mourning, which classically enables the subject to reinvest itself in life after the death of the mourned, melancholia leads the “depressed, self-berating and traumatized self” to be “possessed by the past…and remain narcissistically identified with the lost object.”40 If Lydgate’s narcissistic obsession is not yet clear, we see it again some ten years after his original death notice (in his Lyfe of Our Lady) at the head of a “commendascion of Chaucers,” where he says “my master Chauceris nowe is graue.” In The hystorye, sege and dystruccyon of Troye a few years later (1412–1420), Lydgate again asserts “Chaucer now allas is nat alyue.” Some years after this, in his translation, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, Lydgate prays to Mary, “that ys the beste, /ffor to brynge hys soule at reste.” And finally, some thirty years after the death of Chaucer, in his Fall of Princes, Lydgate says for the last time, “My maister Chauceer/with his fressh comodyes/ Is ded, Allas.”41 His reiteration of Chaucer’s death so long after the event itself takes on a kind of obsessive quality here. In fact, I would argue that Lydgate is primarily interested in keeping the death of Chaucer alive precisely because he wishes to lay claim to a personal loss. If part of the mourning process is, as Freud puts it, a process of disconnecting the memories and hopes from the lost object, or, on some level, forgetting the person who has died, then Lydgate seems engaged in a rear guard action on this forgetting.42

28 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

What is so curious here is the way that Lydgate’s interest remains focused on the moment of loss. The reasons for this, I think, have to do with the intense guilt which underpinned Lydgate’s own poetic project. His desire to be identified with Chaucer led him not only to convert Chaucer into a symbol, but to adopt a kind of poetic alter ego which eventually dominated him. This symbolization, as we saw above, was a kind of murder of the lost object. At the same time, the symbol into which Chaucer was converted was itself about loss. The very story of Chaucer’s death, in other words, was at once a reflexive foretelling of Freud’s story about the spindle and an object lesson for how to become a great poet—to leave your poetic heirs with the desire to be like you. Of course, to leave your heirs behind, to have them completely internalize you, is only possible once you have gone. Lydgate’s narcissistic identification with Chaucer, then, takes the form of a death wish which at once enables him to identify with the dead Chaucer and disables his ability really to be like Chaucer, since Chaucer never really identifies with a previous poet in the same way. Guilt at appropriating Chaucer’s poetic mantle, and the desire to leave a poetic legacy suggest the reasons why Lydgate at once makes his “loss” seem personal and returns to the moment of loss in an obsessive (one might almost say ritualistic) way. One might well object that the continual references to Chaucer’s death occur in works that recall a Chaucerian poetics and so a mention of Chaucer would seem appropriate. For instance, Lydgate’s recollection of Chaucer’s death in the Fall of Princes also recalls that the “cheef Poete of bretayne—made ful pitous tragedyes” that were akin to the tales that Lydgate would tell. Admittedly, alongside these mentions of Chaucer’s death exists a ritualistic invocation of the poet which commemorates him in what might be seen as much more positive ways—offering a kind of poetic immortality enabled by an imaginative recovery of the poet and his works. In psychoanalytic terms we might see this form of remembering as what Hans Loewald has called “conscious recollection” in which, instead of compulsively repeating the past the subject recognizes the past as past and “re-creates” it—generating new organization from something old.43 This “active remembering” is meant to be seen in stark contrast to the compulsive reenactment which characterizes the will’s denial of the passage of time, but Lydgate’s invocation of Chaucer as “laureate poet” and “deed” disables a reading of Lydgate as one who has successfully undergone the mourning process. In fact, his routine invocation of the poet and the poet’s death might indicate that, far from wishing to work through the death of the poet and complete the process of grieving, Lydgate is intent on a poetics which neither retains a fantasy of the poet as he was nor allows his readers to finish what might be called a larger cultural process of mourning. The reason for this is that Lydgate himself was caught between absence and presence, between mourning and melancholia, between betrayal of a poet whose presence was, after all, always lacking and fidelity to a lost “master.” As may already be clear, I would argue that this stance (or perhaps lack of one) was dictated by the terms of

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Lydgate’s self-baptism as Chaucer’s heir—a christening complicated by the fact that Lydgate had to, in some sense, be his own sponsor. There is some evidence that Lydgate’s audience understood all too well that Lydgate was engaged in what might be called a poetics of suspension—neither allowing the audience to forget Chaucer, nor allowing it to re-member him—and became somewhat impatient with it. In a work with the suggestive title A Rebuke to Lydgate, an unknown poet gently scolds Chaucer’s “heir” in a familiar vein: So wolde god that my symple connyng Ware sufficiaunt this goodly flour to prayse For as to me ys non so ryche a thyng That able were this flour to counterpayse O noble chaucer passyd ben thy dayse Off poetrye ynamyd worthyest And of makyng in alle othir days the best Now thou art go thyn helpe I may not have Wherfor to god I pray right specially Syth thou art dede and buryd in thy grave That on thy sowle hym lyst to have mercy And to the monke of bury now speke I For thy connyng ys syche and eke thy grace After chaucer to occupye his place.44 The echo of Lydgate’s inability to praise the “flower” is clearly borrowed from The Flour of Curteyse and the multiple references to the “passing” of Chaucer imitate Lydgate’s own somewhat morbid poetic commonplaces. In addition, this Lydgatean address to “the monk of Bury” borrows the modesty topos from Lydgate himself and then disables it by suggesting that (because Chaucer is “dede and buryd”) Lydgate needs to get on with occupying Chaucer’s place and by extension cease the very use of the topos that insistently brings up Chaucer’s death. This rebuke was probably too late to have much effect, but given the extent and scope of Lydgate’s attempt to keep Chaucer at once alive in his audience’s memory and remind his readers of Chaucer’s death, one wonders whether Lydgate could have been convinced to take the place of the “maister” how ever many poems were addressed to him. Lydgate’s poetic project, as I have suggested, was enabled by guilt—the guilt of being alive (when Chaucer is dead), the guilt of appropriating (or attempting to appropriate) Chaucer’s mantle, and even the guilt of desiring the poetic immortality which only death could bring. These various forms of guilt led to the peculiar inability to let go of the past which is so apparent in Lydgate’s work— in particular that moment when Chaucer was transformed from live poet to dead exemplar—a moment which Lydgate apparently hoped for, feared, and felt guilty about all at once. Lydgate’s problem, then, was that Chaucer’s value was incommensurable. There was no

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poet who could match him. There was no work which could be as great as his. Thus Lydgate’s only option was to make Chaucer’s invaluability the topic of his poetry and to continue to attempt to master the unmasterable. If Chaucer’s death led to conflicting emotions in Lydgate, the process of mourning was perhaps less complicated with Hoccleve. It is not that Hoccleve relinquished control over his Chaucerian inheritance. Like Lydgate, he made Chaucer appear and disappear from his work. And as Derek Brewer comments, there were affinities between Hoccleve and Lydgate, for they were both “merely on the fringes of that courtly centre of power and prestige of which Chaucer was a full member.”45 The result is that, unlike Chaucer (who had the luxury of addressing a small congenial group), both poets found themselves addressing their superiors “constantly and explicitly.”46 In many ways, then, they have been seen as linked: both write for preferment, both associate themselves with Chaucer in order to authorize their own poetic voices.47 Yet, unlike Lydgate, Hoccleve undoubtedly knew Chaucer, and, working in the Office of the Privy Seal, he may have had professional as well as personal connections with the poet who was clerk of the works from 1389–91.48 Perhaps for this reason, the tone of his invocation of Chaucer is somewhat different from Lydgate’s. In his Regement of Princes Hoccleve addresses Chaucer as “maister” and “fadir,” which suggests not only that, like Lydgate, he knew the family, but that he saw himself as one of the family.49 O, maister deere and fadir reverent! Mi maister Chaucer, flour of eloquence, Mirour of fructuous entendement, O, universal fadir in science! Allas! þat þou thyn excellent prudence, In þy bed mortel mightist naght byqwethe; What eiled deth? allas! whi wolde he sle the? O deth! þou didest naght harme singuleer, In slaghtere of him; but al þis land it smertith; But nathelees, yit hast þou no power His name sle; his hy vertu astertith Vnslayn fro þe, which ay vs lyfly hertyth, With bookes of his ornat endytyng, That is to al þis land enlumynyng.50 As Pearsall has pointed out, Lydgate’s encomia lack the personal warmth of Hoccleve’s tribute and may indicate, by contrast, Hoccleve’s very personal connection with the poet.51 And we might see this contrast in the different ways in which the two poets deal with death. While Lydgate obsessively identifies Chaucer with death (almost as if he cannot believe it), Hoccleve mentions Chaucer only in this poem and embodies death as an enemy which can be overcome because it cannot slay his name.

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Yet if Hoccleve celebrates Chaucer’s immortality of name, and thus seems to work through the mourning process, he cannot allow his own embodiment of death to disembody the poet completely. Thus he corporealizes the poet by having his picture reproduced in the margin of his manuscript. In this picture (the best of which occurs in Harley 4866) Chaucer points to the Hocclevian text, which tells the audience: Al-þough his lyfe be queynt, þe resemblaunce of him haþ in me so fressh lyflynesse, þat, to putte othir men in remembraunce Of his persone, I haue heere his lyknesse Do make, to þis ende in sothfastnesse þat þei þat haue of him lest þought and mynde, By þis peynture may ageyn him fynde. (4992–98) Much of what has been written about this portrait focuses on the claim to verisimilitude made by Hoccleve.52 If the portrait did not actually look like Chaucer, then those who received Hoccleve’s manuscripts (we know that he personally supervised several presentation copies) were from a small enough group, one that was sufficiently contemporary (a decade or so after Chaucer’s death) to be able to tell if the portrait accurately represented Chaucer. It would not, the argument goes, have redounded to Hoccleve’s credit to have a portrait which did not resemble Chaucer when he claimed to have his “lyknesse” made “heere.” As might be expected, the implication of this argument for many scholars is that, since the Regement is both a Fürstenspiegel and a begging poem, it was to Hoccleve’s advantage to ensure that Prince Henry of Monmouth (to whom it was addressed) got a “genuine” image of Chaucer. This suggestion characterizes Hoccleve’s picture as part of a larger economic poetics in which the poet would offer an authentic image of his “fadir” in exchange for authentic images of Henry’s father (the annuity which was promised to him).53 It is a more generalized rhetoric of fathers and sons that, I would argue, underlies the equivalence of the exchange—and enables Hoccleve analeptically to work through the death of Chaucer by identifying the thing which can symbolically replace that which is lacking—the Father. Dominick LaCapra has argued that the creation of this kind of lack—“something that ought to be there but is missing”—is itself the product of a reaction to trauma.54 In the case of Lydgate and Hoccleve, the trauma would seem to be the death of Chaucer. And indeed, both Hoccleve’s and Lydgate’s reactions to this trauma would, as LaCapra suggests, “threaten to convert subsequent accounts into displacements of the story of original sin wherein a prelapserian state of unity or identity— whether real or fictive— is understood as giving way through a fall to difference and conflict.”55 Yet where Lydgate is trapped in a kind of suspension of

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melancholia, Hoccleve fixes his desire on what LaCapra calls a “future object” in order “to recover the lost or lacking object or some substitute for it.”56 Part of what Hoccleve seeks in his poem is, of course, money. But, in Larry Scanlon’s words, the poem also offers the possibility of “a fully moral exchange between a model ruler and a loyal subject.” It seems that Hoccleve gets a good deal more than “an annuity—in return for moral instruction.”57 The annuity symbolizes the relationship between superior and subordinate. To fail to have it paid indicates an attenuation of this relationship. To have it paid in full (as Hoccleve eventually did) is a visible and continuing sign of the poet’s relationship with his patron.58 In Hoccleve’s case, the foundation of this annuity seems to be governed by the paternal/filial correspondences in the poem. As Ethan Knapp has recently noted, there are a multitude of fathers in the poem, but for our purposes I would like to focus on two in particular—Henry IV who is alive and absent and Geoffrey Chaucer who is dead and absent.59 What Hoccleve apparently wishes to do in this poem is exchange one absence for another, and thus escape, on some level, the aesthetic power which Father Chaucer exercises over him. The method by which this exchange operates, if initially material, is on the level of the transcendent. In political terms, the exchange of one image of an absent father (Chaucer) for another (Henry IV) would seem to be relatively straightforward. Indeed, Paul Strohm’s treatment of the manifold ways that Hoccleve supports the Lancastrian cause in return for the Prince’s recognition, is only one of the later treatments of the complicated political subtext of the Regement. Strohm’s argument differs a bit from other arguments about the poem, however, in that it asserts a kind of equivalent genealogical structure between the sets of fathers and sons. Even as Hoccleve hastens to assert that Chaucer did not bequeath his talent to Hoccleve, he “is at pains to suggest that Chaucer’s ‘resemblance’ still lives in him—traditionminded poets, like worshipers of saints and properly anointed kings can incarnate the ineffable aura of the deceased.”60 So, too, “in monarchic succession, demise and proper internment necessarily precede the transfer of dignitas or royal aura.”61 Though Strohm undoubtedly has in mind here both the eventual and literal way that Henry V will succeed his father, and the attempt to create a symbolic legitimacy for Henry IV’s “succession” of the deposed Richard II, I would like to focus for a moment on what might be called the filial poetics of Hoccleve’s exchange. If Hoccleve is to avoid the melancholic poetics of Lydgate, he must find a way to at once lay claim to and renounce Chaucer’s “aura.” Part of the way he does this, of course, is to embrace his filial relationship to Chaucer. This gesture of filial piety avoids the trap of renunciation in which any attempt to kill the father leads to the reinscription of paternal power. What Hoccleve literally does in the Regement is to separate the aura of Chaucer from Chaucer’s corporeal image, and then expel the corporeal image. Of course, like the imp that cannot be given away, Chaucer must be embodied and exchanged with another for “coined money.”62 By engaging in this exchange with Henry IV’s son, Hoccleve realizes

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the worth of Chaucer, shows himself as a pious son and manages to avoid transforming Chaucer into a disabling idol. This exchange reenacts an exchange (poetry for money) that Chaucer himself made with Henry IV in his Complaint to His Purse—a poem that was, suggestively enough, attributed to Hoccleve in the early modern period.63 Hoccleve’s and Prince Henry’s reenactment of a previous scene in which both fathers played the part that their sons might now play is, however, complicated by the fact that the coin which Hoccleve will receive does not bear the image of the person with whom he is exchanging (Prince Henry). It is, in fact, precisely this difference which betrays how Hoccleve really benefits from this exchange. For even as the Prince spends his father’s image and lays claim to the ineffable power which lies in that image, the reception of that money by Hoccleve goes far beyond its ability to be exchanged for other things. Money’s power, as Slavoj Žižek argues, does not depend on its material presence, but on the fact that it is made of a “sublime material, of that other ‘indestructible and immutable’ body which persists beyond the corruption of the body physical.”64 If this seems close to the well-known idea of the king’s two bodies, it is because, as Paul Strohm’s discussion of counterfeiting has shown, it participates in the same sublime symbolical economy—money too has two bodies.65 What legitimates the worth of money is that it has a transcendent value: to counterfeit the base matter which holds the symbolic place of money is to treat money as if it has no transcendent value. So too, I would argue, it is not too much to assert that Hoccleve prepares and relinquishes Chaucer’s likeness in manuscripts like Harley 4866 because it is precisely in the circulation of the “lively resemblance” that the other transcendent body will gain reality. Hoccleve’s relinquishment, of course, is enabled by the fact that he quite possibly suffered a personal loss when Chaucer died. Thus, unlike Lydgate, he is never tempted to translate what was merely lack or absence into loss. If, as Žižek asserts, it is the “deceitful translation of lack into loss [which] enables us to assert our possession of the object,” Hoccleve never “needs” to fetishize Chaucer in quite the same way as Lydgate. “This” as Žižek puts it, “is also how one should read the medieval notion that the melancholic is unable to reach the domain of the spiritual or incorporeal: instead of merely contemplating the suprasensuous object, he wants to embrace it in lust.”66 Hoccleve translates Chaucer into an image that might “putte othir men in remembraunce.” He does not lay claim to it, but circulates the image so that it might be contemplated. It is not, of course, that Hoccleve does not wish to “control” Chaucer, rather it is that Hoccleve is able to avoid being caught between corporeal and incorporeal by drawing attention to the act of verisimilar representation and (as we saw above) underlining the rationale for the act. In order for his exchange with Prince Henry to work, Hoccleve depends on the ability to recover, reiterate and represent the body of the poet. Unlike Lydgate, he does not talk of counterfeiting Chaucer’s style, but lays claim to the minting of a true image of Chaucer. The “peynture” is therefore included in the manuscript so that the reader (or viewer

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of the picture) “may ageyn him fynde.” What is so interesting here is that Hoccleve presents the assumption that (like Henry’s image on money) his audience has seen (or at least knows) what Chaucer looks like.67 Yet one must admit that, unlike money, the poem will circulate among a very few people.68 This very personal recovery of Chaucer is in many ways at odds with the idea of impersonal and universal poetic immortality that was current in the later Middle Ages and early modern period.69 Lydgate’s textual insistence on the continuation of mourning, and Hoccleve’s visual representation of the poet— different reactions though they might be to the death of Chaucer, attempt to repair what both poets characterize as a poetic absence by the re-membering of Chaucer’s virtual body. Lydgate uses the death of the body to return us obsessively to the original circumstances which surrounded the reception of the poet’s corpus, thus at once appropriating Chaucer’s death for his own fame and assuaging the guilt he feels at doing so. Hoccleve, on the other hand, attempts to trigger our memory “of his persone” by embodying death in words, and Chaucer in “fressh lyflynesse” in order to create a transcendent Chaucer (at the same time exchanging and circulating the image of the poet for the material benefits of money). If both poets keep either the death of the poet before us or keep the body of the poet before our eyes, it is in some sense to control the appearance and disappearance of the “master/father” and thus attempt to compensate for the trauma of Chaucer’s death which, they both knew, made their poetry possible. If Lydgate makes incommensurability his topic, Hoccleve’s poetic exchange suggests that Chaucer is commensurate with some other object which can offer consolation and repair the loss of the father. To be sure, Hoccleve avoids the more disturbing aspects of what might be called the commodification of Chaucer by highlighting his filial piety, his attempt to generate remembrance of the father in other “mourners.” Yet this exchange, this intermingling of the transcendent aesthetic and material value, ultimately exposes the value of making death the subject of one’s discourse, because (as Derrida relates) “the magic of writing and painting is like a cosmetic concealing the dead under the appearance of the living,” for both make “the corpse presentable.”70 The magic of representation is to bring what seems to be life to the dead. To what extent that representation becomes at once problematized and enabled by the actual presence of the corpse becomes apparent when the new technology of representation (the press) begins to disseminate multiple copies of the text. The Body of the Poet Up until the end of the fifteenth century Chaucer’s body remains, then, an abstraction—recoverable in mind or as an imagined commodity rather than a physical presence. Yet in the latter part of the fifteenth century the body itself— its burial, disposition and location—becomes something of a contemporary topic of concern. This turn, I would argue, coincides with a move toward the emerging technology of the printing press. As such it indicates not only a mourning for the

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loss of the poet’s hand, but also a melancholia for the comforting and mediating hand of the scribe. The attempt to repair this loss involves a sacralization of the “final” resting place of the poet in an attempt to conjure the transcendent body of the poet to act as a muse for the new technology. There are no contemporary witnesses to the deposition of Chaucer’s body. Indeed, through the early modern period there remained substantial disagreement even about Chaucer’s death date, much less his burial.71 In fact, the first to mention the actual site of Chaucer’s grave is William Caxton, who, almost eighty years after Chaucer’s death, in his Epilogue to Boethius (c. 1478), tells us: I desire and require you that of your charite ye wold praye for the soule of the sayd worshipful mann Geffrey Chaucer first translatour of this sayde boke into englissh and enbelissher in making the sayd langage ornate and fayr whiche shal endure perpetuelly and therefore he ought eternelly to be remembrid of whom the body and corps lieth buried in thabbay of westmestre beside london to fore the chapele of seynte benet by whos sepulture is wreton on a table hongying on a pylere his Epitaphye maad by a poete laureat.72 Caxton’s pleonastic assertion that the “body and corps lieth buried” might simply be a formulaic assertion along the lines of “body and bones” or “flesh and blood,” but it also bespeaks a peculiar insistence that the living corpus and the dead corpse are now one thing in this grave, even if (as he has stated above) the soul “shall endure perpetually.” Some have read this epitaph as itself a marker not only of Chaucer’s grave, but of the moment when Chaucer was distanced from the present readers. As Lerer points out, the time for talking about Chaucer as dead is gone, for it is no news in the 1470s. So why spend so much time composing, commissioning, or even transcribing a new epigraph? Lerer argues that the new epigraph enables those in the present “to distance present readers from the past and to maintain that in the reproduction of his works his fame should live perpetually.”73 “Distance” here is equated with the perpetuation of immortality, and on some level I think that this reflects Caxton’s own belief. But this “distance” also occasioned an anxiety about whether what was being immortalized was actually Chaucer. The return to Chaucer’s grave, then, seems an attempt to link printing with what was known to be the authentic remains—a Caxtonian return to the body, as it were. Caxton believed (at least initially) that printing would renew what we might think of as an “authentic” version of the poet’s work. For, as he tells us in his epilogue to the third book of The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (c. 1475), he had originally conceived of printing as a way to compensate for the enfeebled body of the scribe: “Thus ende I this book whyche I haue translated after myn Auctor as nyghe as god hath gyuen me connyng to whom be gyuen the laude and preysyng/And for as moche as in the wrytyng of the same my penne is worn/myn hande wery and not stedfast myn eyen dimmed with ouermoche lokyng on the

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whit paper/and my corage not so prone and redy to laboure as hit hath ben/and that age crepeth on me dayly and febleth all the bodye/and also be cause I haue promysid to dyuerce gentilmen and to my frendes to adresse to hem as hastely as I myght this sayd book/Therefore I haue practysed and lerned at my grete charge and dispense to ordeyne this said book in prynte after the maner and forme as ye may here see/and is not wreton with penne and ynke as other bokes ben/to thende that euery man may haue them attones.”74 Printing here is not something which takes the audience further away from the author, but just the reverse. The press is seen as a kind of prosthesis for “the worn pen,” “the dimmed eye,” and especially “the weary hand.” It is a mechanical scribe which can produce multiple copies for a wide audience in a very short amount of time. In addition it mimics the “look” of manuscripts— something that Caxton points out to his readers by playfully pointing out what was obvious—it “is not wreton with penne and ynke as other bokes ben.” Caxton’s attitude towards the new technology of printing might find a parallel with late modern attitudes towards the virtual world. Far from distancing us from the work, technology renders a closer and closer approximation of what we take to be the “real” thing. We see this asymptotal process most clearly in the reproduction of the epitaph (following Caxton’s description of the location of Chaucer’s Tomb) written by Stephen Surigonus, a reproduction which seems to support relatively conventional medieval notions of immortality. “Non tamen extincto corpore fama perit/Vivet ineternum vivent dum scripta poete.” (“Yet even when the body is dead fame does not perish. It will live forever as long as the poet’s writings live.”) But then the epitaph slips into a kind of quasi voice of the poet himself. For near the end of an epitaph (which was said to hang on a leaden pillar before Chaucer’s grave site), the voice of the poet himself suddenly emerges: Hec sibi marmoreo scribantur verba sepulchro Hec maneat laudis sarcina summa sue Galfridus Chaucer vates: et fama poesis Materne hac sacra sum tumulatus humo Let these words as spoken on his own behalf, be inscribed on his marble tomb Let this remain the crowning burden to his own praise I, Geoffrey Chaucer, the bard, glory of my native poesy am buried in this sacred ground.75 Convention says that Stephen Surigonus is ventriloquizing the poet here, but later testimony claims that Chaucer himself had the verses inscribed on the “tombstone.” What kind of cultural work is this ventriloquism of the dead doing? Like Lerer, I would argue that the typography used to reproduce the epitaph on the tomb in Caxton’s work was an attempt to make the audience recognize, in the printed version, an equivalence to the epitaph of the tomb itself. But, unlike

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Lerer, I would argue that the attempt to render the tomb of Chaucer virtually present is also a suggestion that the new technology was able to, in some sense, resurrect the sublime body of the poet.76 Clearly, part of the effect of the lines is that the poet seems more immediate— present at the gravesite, since he is telling us how and where he is buried. Perhaps for this reason, later interpreters of the epitaph seemed to understand that these lines deserved special attention. In the first “Life” of Chaucer (c. 1545) John Leland claimed that William Caxton had taken the last distich from Surigonus’s poem and had had the lines inscribed on Chaucer’s tomb.77 John Foxe (in 1570) seems to suggest that the verses were first written on his present grave: [Chaucer] lyeth buried in the Churche of the minster of S.Peter at Westminster, in an ile on the South Side of the sayd Churche, not far from the doore leading to the cloyster, and upon his grave stone first were written these ii old verses.78 Thomas Speght, in his 1602 version of Chaucer’s works, says “the old verses which were written on his grave at the first, were these,” while Elias Ashmole takes the legend a step further in his Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum (1652) by claiming that “before Mr. Brigham built the aforesaid Monument it seemes Chaucer had a Stone layd over his grave upon which was ingraved this following epitaph.”79 These claims about the primacy of the “old verses” will become especially important later, when the dispute about the location of Chaucer’s grave actually begins; for now it is enough to claim that the verses, far from distancing the poet from his later audience, make him strangely present because they are in the first person present. They conjure Chaucer from the grave to speak with authority on his own resting place. Chaucer is, then, neither like those ancient dead authorities (Ovid, Virgil, Homer) whose existence as source legitimated the recovery of their texts, nor the poet whose followers (Hoccleve, Lydgate) could actually remember and attempt to recapture a time when he was still alive. I would agree with Lerer that Caxton, whether he meant to or not, ended up doing something different when he reproduced Surigonus’s epitaph in his epilogue to Boethius. Most of the epitaph repeats common-places that would have been familiar from early eulogies of Chaucer. The two differences are the description of the location of the grave and the two “old verses” that seem to make up the end of Surigonus’s epitaph. I think that we see in these two differences, for the first time, a kind of conjuring of a ghostly Chaucer—one who, though he has been disembodied, is able to speak. It is no accident that the first printed edition of any of Chaucer’s works contains directions to his tomb and an eerie ventriloquism, as Chaucer himself speaks to his readers from the pages of a printed book. It is almost as if Chaucer’s spirit has been infused into the new machine and thus been allowed to speak magically without the mediation of the scribal hand.80 At the same time, Caxton’s return to the grave

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might well indicate an understanding that even as the new technology seems miraculous, a more primal form of necromancy was in order—one which returned us to origin of the works that Caxton was printing. For even Caxton had to admit that the miracle of the press took his readers further and further from the material productions of the bodily Chaucer. In fact, very quickly, it became evident to Caxton (and perhaps other printers) that the promise of the new technology as a means of effacing temporal distance between author and audience was profoundly misleading. As Walter Ong has suggested, “the readers of manuscripts are less closed off from the author” than the readers of print because they are closer (or at least they perceive that they are closer) to the give and take of composition.81 Where handwritten documents convey a process of putting together a work, print suggests completeness and closure. If recent studies have taken issue with what some have called this “techno-determinism,” stressing the continuities and even co-existence of manuscript and print culture, it seems clear that Caxton, at any rate, eventually saw print as profoundly different from and perhaps even inferior to the manuscripts which he used.82 When, for instance, Caxton “corrects” the first edition of the Tales (c. 1477) in 1483, he first praises “the clerkes/poetes/and historiographs” who have “left to vs theyr monumentis wreton” [my emphasis]. He then praises Chaucer in particular for his “ornate wrytyng,” which appears in “beauteuous volumes.” He opposes these volumes of writing with his own “purpose temprynte by the grace of god the book of the tales of cauntyrburye” of which a number “were sold to many and dyuerse gentyl men.”83 Unfortunately, he says, this printed version was wrong and “by ygnouraunce I erryd in hurtyng and dyffamyng his book in dyuerce places in settyng in some thynges that he neuer sayd ne made/and leuyng out many thynges that he made whyche ben requysite to be sette in it.” And thus, he says, he will “enprynte it agayn/for to satysfye thauctor.”84 We can hear, I think, the great disappointment in Caxton’s “voice” here. To paraphrase David Wills, the prosthesis of the press actually exposes how the temporal limits of writing are wrapped up in temporal limits of the self.85 If, as Katherine Hayles suggests, “writing is a way to extend the author’s body into the exterior world,” Caxton (a little like Adam Scriveyn) has put his own body on display instead of that of “thauctor.”86 Like John Shirley’s Chaucer, Caxton’s Chaucer is not present to ensure that the “book” will be correct. But unlike Shirley, Caxton highlights the fact that what he must depend on is not an oral tradition, but written sources—or the handwritten book. Hence, Caxton claims to have chosen this “other” book upon which he based his new version of the Tales. Interestingly enough, he chooses it on the basis of one of his reader’s suggestions, who claims that his father owned, “lovyd,” and “wolde not gladly departe” from his “trewe” book, which was made “accordyng vnto hys owen first book by hym [Chaucer] made.” Critics have demonstrated, of course, that (wherever this book came from) it is doubtful that it was made from Chaucer’s own copy.87 But the point is that Caxton juxtaposes his own faulty printings of the Tales, which many gentlemen bought, with the

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private, personal manuscript which the father was loath to part with, even temporarily. Far from distancing the readers from the past, Caxton seems here to insist on a genealogical and historical connection with a personal past in which (like Lydgate and Hoccleve) Caxton’s anxieties about the loss of Chaucer lead him to assert Chaucer’s presence in the handwritten codex which is the source for the new edition. Caxton’s strategy here seems akin to those earlier manuscripts which integrated the voice of the jongleur into written works in order to mimic the voice of the poet. As Jeffrey Kittay and Wlad Godzich have demonstrated, this “voice” contains a trace of the presence of the poet.88 In Caxton’s case, we continue to have the trace of presence in the voice of the poet, but also as Chaucer “made…hys owen first book,” and as the father’s book was made “accordyng” to this book, we have a direct descendent of something made by his own hand. Like late modern medievalists or those nineteenth-century “medievals” who (as Kathleen Biddick has shown) mourned for the alienated labor of the scribal hand, Caxton feels the loss of the manuscript.89 One might even suggest that the famous woodcuts in the second edition are a crude attempt (along the lines of Hoccleve) to compensate for the earlier printed edition, which disseminated errors by disseminating pictures of the pilgrims in order to make them pictorially as well as textually present. What Caxton wishes to perform here is the recreation and recovery of “Father Chaucer” by means of a paternal text. As Shirley lays claim to an oral Chaucer in order to reproduce a handwritten poem, so Caxton recovers a manuscript that has affiliations with Chaucer in order to legitimate his reprinting of Chaucer’s works. In other words, he uses his links to a previous technology in order to lay claim to a genealogical restoration of the authentic voice of Chaucer. His Chaucer (and even Shirley’s Chaucer), then, is a different Chaucer from Lydgate’s and Hoccleve’s Chaucer. Caxton pretends to erase his own agency in recovering Chaucer with technology, and, when that fails, he closes the temporal gap with the “fadir” by returning to a paternal text (just as Shirley turns to the authority of the oral word). While the two poets, then, focus on the absence of the body, the scribe and the editor focus on the presence of the poet’s words. One might, of course, schematize this difference as a historical development, as poetical reception gave way to scribal/editorial control. But, as we will see, this narrative (satisfying though it may be) elides the ways in which these various impulses—absence and presence, mourning/melancholia and resurrection, symbolic interpretation and “real” recovery—are themselves the product of more localized social and political pressures.

CHAPTER 2 Translating Chaucer Denial and Resistance

In the poetical quarter I found there were poets who had no monuments, and monuments which had no poets. ——Joseph Addison1 What do we observe in the paternal register but that the mediation of the father is possible only to the extent that what functions as father is excluded from the world of other individuals, that is to say, is killed, functions only as the “dead Father” who rules only provided that he is separated from the group of people, that is, expelled into transcendence? ——Jean-Joseph Goux2 In her recent analysis of political corpses, Katherine Verdery has suggested that “bones, and corpses” are symbolically effective because “they are indisputably there…. Bodies have the advantage of concreteness that nonetheless transcends time, making past immediately present.”3 In the medieval period the “thereness” of a saint’s body could (as is well known) provide proof that a particular monastic or civic institution had special status.4 Chaucer was, of course, no saint. But his body was nonetheless the material residue of what might be called a transcendent poetic standard, as poets who followed him insistently attempted to measure up to this Father.5 Hence the body was infused with a kind of auratic presence normally reserved for the bodies of kings or saints. Yet if such bodies demonstrated that “hic locus est” in the Middle Ages (as Peter Brown suggests), the early modern period in England had a more troublesome relationship with such relics.6 The Reformation coded such preoccupations with the body as idolatrous—something that distracted from contemplation of the transcendent. What Eamon Duffy characterizes as the “disappearance of the corpse” occasioned a crisis of sorts for those who valued England’s literary corpus. For even as the decades following 1538 saw a turn away from the body, Nicholas Brigham, Exchequer official and antiquarian, apparently translated Chaucer’s body from his original grave to the familiar purbeck altar tomb in Westminster Abbey in 1556. This very act of translation, which established that Chaucer’s

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body was worthy of translation, imbued the body with value at a moment when the category “body” was being emptied of significance. Even more alarming to Protestant sensibilities, Chaucer’s movement from the floor in front of St. Benedict’s Chapel to the altar tomb against the east wall may have actually been an act of religious re-appropriation during the short reign of Queen Mary, which attempted to “fix” the resting place of Chaucer as that of a “Catholic” poet. Protestant attempts to deal with this second inhumation of Chaucer were, predictably, mixed. On the one hand, the reburial was judged improper and even dangerous because the body was indecently appropriated by those who were not Chaucer’s true “heirs.” On the other hand, anxieties about the capaciousness of the uses of Chaucer despite the reburial seemed to suggest that the reburial was at the very least imperfect, if it was carried out at all. This double burial, then, becomes a hermeneutical stumbling block for Protestant commentators—for even as it is denied or resisted, the very resistance of the burial infuses the material body with the same sort of auratic significance that a Catholic relic might possess. The Protestant reception of the burial makes clear that the real issue was not whether one localized body would have significance. Rather it shows how the value of the Father of poetry came to hover between the material and the transcendent, the bodily and the spiritual. The canonical implications of this antinomy become sharply defined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when anxieties about John Dryden’s “translation” of Chaucer into modern English become intertwined with anxieties about whether Dryden might be buried in Chaucer’s grave. Further, Dryden’s status as translator and poet-laureate (a post Chaucer purportedly held) begins to transform the “Father of Modern Poetry” into an uncomfortable double of “Father of Ancient Poetry.” This doubling becomes of especial moment because the nineteenth century defined Dryden as one who was himself interested not so much in the transcendent value of poetry as in the material value of money. Just as Dryden’s conversion to Catholicism is seen as an attempt to reap a pecuniary reward, so too his polishing of Chaucer’s “old gold” begins to transform the rare and transcendent corpus of the “Father” (who is himself the measure of literary value) into something that is commonly available and accessible. This revaluing, or (as some saw it) devaluing of the paternal text was ultimately a kind of inversion of Brigham’s translation of the body. For as Brigham had drawn attention to the ultimately auratic and transcendent value of the body by translating the corpse, Dryden focused attention on the accessible and material nature of the corpus by translating the text into modern English. The extent to which these translations affected the larger image of Chaucer as “Father of Poetry” can be seen in the controversy over whether Dryden’s own body was seen to desecrate the resting place of Chaucer—a controversy which points the way to the early twentieth-century “revaluing” of Chaucer. ***

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The evidence that Brigham translated the body is copious but not without its problems. The most cited reference to the translation is from 1600, when William Camden reports (in the first guidebook to the Abbey): In Australi plaga Ecclesiae. Galfridus Chaucer Poëta celeberrimus, qui primus Anglicam Poësin ita illustrauit, vt Anglicus Homerus habeatur. Obijt 1400. Anno vero 1555 [sic] Nicholaus Brigham Musarum nomine ossa transtulit, & illi nouum tumulum ex marmore, his versibus inscriptis posuit (see below for the verses).7 Though the report is clear and (except for the date) relatively unambiguous, it originates some forty-four (or forty-five) years after the purported translation. The earliest reference to Brigham’s relationship with the tomb may be some manuscript notes of John Bale that were supposedly made in 1562 and printed by Thomas Hearne in 1709. Here Bale does not actually say that Brigham translated Chaucer, but mentions that “Nicolaus Brigam” made four verses which were put on the tomb.8 The earliest published reference to the actual translation seems to be William Bullein’s A Dialogue bothe pleasaunte and pietifull, wherein is a goodly regimente against the feuer Pestilence (1564). In this work, Bullein resurrects Chaucer in order to have him commend “his deare Brigham for the worthy entombing of his bones, worthy of memorie, in the long slepyng chamber of most famous kinges.”9 The evidence for the translation seems to be quite straightforward, though, as I will argue later, the “commendation” which “Chaucer” offers in Bullein’s work is more complex than it first appears. If it seems clear that Nicholas Brigham exhumed Chaucer’s body and then reburied it in the altar tomb that currently inhabits the south transept in 1556, it remains unclear as to why.10 Part of the reason for this lack of clarity is because it remains somewhat unclear exactly who Nicholas Brigham was. John Bale describes him as “homo Latine doctus, & Anglicarum antiquitatum amator maximus.”11 And he apparently wrote the historical treatise “De Venationibus Rerum Memoribilium,” as well as some Latin poetry and a twelve volume work entitled “Memoirs by Way of a Diary,” but all of these works have been lost. From what we know of his library and the books he borrowed, he had an interest in medieval English history and poetry, so this interest could have translated into a concern about the resting place of the medieval “Father.”12 In addition Brigham’s residence in a chamber in Wodman’s Rents in the Almonry at Westminster Abbey from 1526–28 certainly puts him in the vicinity of the tomb (see figure 1, the almonry is number 44 on the map). Indeed, as the Muniments records tell us, at the same time that Chaucer was translated, Brigham purchased the eastern half of the Almonry from David Vincent, “being then an afficer belonging to the wardrobb of beddes to the most worthie prince of famous memorie King Henry the VIII.”13 Perhaps most telling, however, is the fact that many of his friends were Catholic, and that he attained his highest office (First Teller of the

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Exchequer) during Queen Mary’s reign, so it is possible that he was sympathetic to the old religion.14 Derek Pearsall, (following an intriguing if somewhat undeveloped suggestion by W.R. Lethaby) speaks to Brigham’s motive, connecting this translation of Chaucer’s bones with a decidedly Catholic turn in England’s destiny.15 Both Lethaby and Pearsall identify the tomb that Brigham erected as a monument that would recall earlier Marian forms of devotion. As such, the translation of Chaucer from his earlier tomb to this one would be something of a political act, especially in the reign of Queen Mary. Pearsall and Lethaby, then, focus on the religio-political rationale for the translation. They argue that Chaucer had essentially been co-opted by the Protestant authorities for two and a half decades. Hence, sixteenth-century audiences tended to see Chaucer as a kind of proto-Protestant. Certainly his works had been among the few that were explicitly exempted from the list of forbidden books in the Act for the Advancement for True Religion (1542–3); indeed, as Thomas J.Heffernan has pointed out, William Thynne’s 1542 edition (prefaced with a dedication to Henry VIII) had already gone a long way toward constructing a Chaucer who was an early proponent of ecclesiastical reform.16 Arguably, then, Brigham’s interest was in reappropriating Chaucer for the Catholic Mary and using him in what Pearsall calls a “counter-reformation.”17 Even if, as Pearsall notes, Brigham does not explicitly claim to recover a Catholic Chaucer, the poet, in Pearsall’s formulation, becomes iconic of religious orthodoxy precisely because of the translation.18 Pearsall’s and Lethaby’s idea that Mary would be especially interested in funereal rites and death rituals at this time would seem to be supported by her husband’s restoration of the Edicule, the little house that covered the purported tomb of Christ in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The year before Brigham translated Chaucer (1555), Boniface of Ragusa, Custos of the Holy Land, undertook the restoration of the Edicule at the direction of Pope Julius III, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and his son King Phillip of Spain. Boniface, in his Liber de perenni cultu, says that Phillip actually paid for the work.19 The translation of Chaucer, then, might be seen as a secular echo of the greater work being done in Jerusalem as the Catholic queen carries on a reverence for the body based on her husband’s desire to revere the body. This powerful notion of the recovery of the “Catholic” Chaucer can, I think, be extended if we examine the anthropological underpinnings of the translation. As Robert Hertz has shown in his analysis of societal death rituals, double burials are used to eliminate the strange doubleness of the corpse.20 Far from consigning the corpse to a stable symbolic locus, the first burial neither enables the corpse to retain its social status among the living, nor does it allow the corpse to pass into the spiritual life of the dead. The period between the first and second burials, then, is a liminal period during which the corpse is seen as impure, so that those who associate with the corpse are considered dead socially.21 The reason for this notion of impurity seems to be that the deceased continues to be treated as if s/he were still alive.22 Between the two burials, the body occupies a

44 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

Fig. 1. The earliest extant map of the Westminster Precincts (1755) to include the almonry (W.A.M. 34508D). Nicholas Brigham’s residence (The Almonry) is number 44. Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

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kind of interzone between life and death in which it is seen as dangerous—a situation which is remedied only after the bones are completely denuded of flesh.23 The idea seems to be that “as the visible object [the body] vanishes it is reconstructed in the beyond, transformed to a greater or lesser degree.”24 This expulsion from the visible to the invisible and from the material to the transcendent would suggest that the reinhumation of Chaucer’s body was an attempt to put an end to the Protestant nachleben of a poet who was, after all, Catholic. If we wish to see an analogous situation in the Middle Ages, we might remember how, as Paul Strohm has recently noted, the corpse of Richard II occupied precisely this liminal position between his death and initial burial in 1400 and his reburial in 1413. Until it was reburied, his corpse wreaked havoc precisely because it became a focus for resistance to Henry. People, for instance, believed that it was “alive” and living in Scotland.25 In her literary reformulation of Hertz’s insight about the double burial, Elizabeth Bronfen puts it this way, “second burial replaces the dangerous fetish with a safer memorial image that works on the principle of a resemblance to the deceased but nevertheless also emphasizes its difference, its allegoric relation to the object it serves to resurrect commemoratively.”26 If, initially, the corpse enables us to deny the ungraspable, inaccessible nature of death, its status as neither that which was alive nor the emptiness which is death leads it to refer to nothing but itself. This doubling of the formerly living self in the corpse threatens to give the corpse a kind of morbid life which eludes the control of the mourner. This life, then, needs to be brought to an end by a second burial. This second burial has a connection with Lydgate’s attempt to “murder” (as Lacan puts it) or “kill” (as Goux puts it) the Father, by rendering him symbolic, rather than pretending to return to the thing itself. The great difference between Brigham and Lydgate, however, seems to be that Brigham’s appropriation of Chaucer is absent the complex feelings of guilt that haunted Lydgate. Part of this absence can be attributed to the fact that Brigham not only monumentalizes Chaucer (or returns him to the past), but also that this return to the past, for Brigham, means returning Chaucer to what he “originally” was—Catholic. Thus the recovery of the Catholic Chaucer (even if it cannot erase the afterlife of the poet when he became, or was transformed, into a proto-Protestant) can be seen as an attempt to put an end to this afterlife. Of course even if Brigham could deceive himself into believing that his reappropriation of Chaucer somehow recaptured the “original” Chaucer, we must admit that, if Brigham was successful in his “translation,” it is still only because he was able to replace one afterlife with another. In this context, what Walter Benjamin says of the translation of the text might very well be said about the translation of the body: “no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living— the original undergoes a change.”27 Brigham may, in other words, attempt to reappropriate Chaucer, but this reappropriation is itself something of a

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transformation of the “original” which (like the Protestant “reformation” of Chaucer) will ultimately guarantee what Benjamin terms its “uberleben.” And it is on the basis of this transformation (as opposed to recuperation) that Chaucer’s second burial (far from fixing the body and enabling transcendence) actually occasioned a good deal of resistance from those Protestants who returned to power with the accession of Elizabeth. John Foxe, the great Protestant martyrologist, who claimed that certain parties “by readyng of Chausers workes, they were brought to the true knowledge of Religion” was, to say the least, neither interested in burying Chaucer’s protoProtestant reputation nor in enabling the Catholic “uberleben” of Chaucer.28 This is undoubtedly why he seems somewhat hesitant about Brigham’s translation. In the Actes and Monuments (1570), John Foxe reports that Chaucer Iyeth buried in the minster of S.Peter at Westminster, in an Ile on the South side of the sayd Church, not far from the doore leading to the cloyster, and vpon his grave stone first were written these ii old verses Galfridus Chauser vates et fama poesis Maternae, hac sacra sum tumulatus humo. [I, Geoffrey Chaucer the bard, glory of my native poesy, am buried in this sacred ground.] Afterward, about the yeare of our Lord 1556, one M.Brickam, bestowyng more cost vpoon his tumbe did adde therunto these verses folowyng Qui fuit Anglorum vates ter maximus olim, Galfridus Chaucer conditur hoc tumulo. Annum si quaeras Domini, si tempora mortis, Ecce nota subsunt, quae tibi cuncta notent. 25. Octob. An. 1400 [He who was once the thrice greatest English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, is buried in this grave; if you ask the year of the Lord, the period of his death, look at what is written below, which tells you all.] There are a number of oddities here, but one omission fairly leaps out at the reader. Foxe omits any overt suggestion that Brigham moved Chaucer’s body. Instead, he essentially repeats what Bale said in his notes—that Brigham added the lines to an already extant grave marker. Foxe’s assertion about Brigham’s “bestowing more cost upon the tomb” could be read as a suggestion that the tomb was merely upgraded—a suggestion that (as we will see later) has profound implications for the location of Chaucer’s body.”29 Indeed, in the same work in which he makes the above claim and seems to assert that Brigham did not translate Chaucer, Foxe gives voice to an anxiety about the proto-Protestant nature of Chaucer’s corpus. In 1542, the antifraternal Wycliffite work entitled The Plowmans Tale was included in the second edition of William Thynne’s Chaucer’s Works.30 John Foxe reprints the work here, and then, just before he mentions Chaucer’s grave, he avers,

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For to omitte other partes of his volume, whereof some are more fabulous than other, what tale can bee more playnely told, than the talke of the ploughman? or what finger can pointe out more directly the Pope with his Prelates to be Antichrist than doth the poore Pellycan reasonyng agaynst the gredy Griffon? … Agayne what egge can be more lyke, or figge vnto an other, than ye words, properties, and conditions of that rauenyng Griphe resembleth the true Image, that is, the nature & qualities of that which we call the Churche of Rome, in euery point and degre? and therfore no great maruell, if that narration was exempted out of the copies of Chaucers workes: whiche notwithstandyng now is restored agayn, and is extant, for euery man to read that is disposed.31 Foxe’s retrospective claims about the “restoration” of the proto-Protestant work, of course, suggest that it is not the Protestants who have altered Chaucer, but the Church (or those affiliated with the Church) that Chaucer supposedly criticized so sharply. Foxe’s circular reasoning here (The Plowmans Tale shows that Chaucer is a proto-Protestant, but it is not initially attributed to Chaucer because it is a proto-Protestant work) gives voice to an anxiety about the nature of the Reformation cooptation of Chaucer. By claiming that both the new work and the new tomb are old, he restores both corpus and corpse to something close to his conception of what was “original.” Unlike other early modern writers who, as David Quint puts it, contrasted “a counterfeit man-made culture, in which all meaning is generated from and therefore dependent upon the situations of human history, to an authentic culture which can trace institutions and meanings back to the sources of the Christian dispensation,” Foxe confuses historical originality and transcendental originality in order to lay claim to Chaucer.32 Thus, in the same work in which he talks about Chaucer’s grave, John Foxe reclaims Chaucer as “a right Wicleuian” some fourteen years after Brigham’s translation. If Pearsall is right when he claims that “the reburial of Chaucer was part of this larger programme of counter-reformation,” then Foxe’s suggestion that Brigham did not rebury Chaucer might make sense.33 For to claim that Brigham only added verses to an already extant tomb would deny Brigham the honor of reburying Chaucer and thus reclaiming him for Catholicism. Foxe’s attempt to deny Brigham’s “appropriation” might be seen as one response to the profanation of the remains of the deceased. Hertz tells us that one of the great anxieties about the corpse is that the bones will be stolen from the tomb. Considered “warm with spiritual power,” these “magically potent” bones could be used to serve the “hostile designs” of enemies, perhaps, in this case, Catholicism.34 To claim that the appropriation never took place is to repress the anxiety that papists could steal the poetic power of the man who was insistently characterized as the father of English poetry. After Mary’s death, even Catholic writers were cautious about trumpeting Chaucer’s translation. In 1561 (three years after the death of Queen Mary) John Stow brought out a new edition of Chaucer’s works. Stow was a Catholic whose

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religious sympathies were so suspect that his house was ransacked for harboring “olde phantasticall popishe bokes”; these books (as Bishop Grindal wrote to Cecil and the Queen’s Council) “declare him to be a great favourer of papistrye.”35 We would expect, then, some recognition of Brigham’s efforts. Yet, there is no mention of Chaucer’s new grave. In fact, Stow essentially followed Thynne’s 1542 edition, even in reprinting The Plowman’s Tale and the dedication to Henry VIII, which cast Chaucer as something of an official and, as such, Protestant, poet. At the end of his edition Stow not only seems ignorant of Brigham’s tomb, but seems to return to Chaucer’s first tomb, claiming that he has “added” a version of Surigonus’s epitaph to his edition (which, as we saw above, was first included in Caxton’s Boece), though it was already present in Thynne’s edition and was absent from the new tomb.36 It is, of course, dangerous to make too much of negative evidence, but it is odd that Stow, after adding so many works to the Chaucer canon, would fail to take notice of the recent physical translation of Chaucer and report instead Surigonus’s twice-printed epitaph as a new find. I would suggest that in 1561 (unlike 1598 when Stow does remark on the translation in his Survey of London) the proximity of the translation to the recent change in religious orthodoxy made it politically expedient for a Catholic to ignore the “new” grave precisely because this grave had been part of a larger project to reclaim Chaucer to the old faith.37 At a very elemental level, these Marian attempts to steal the body recall the multitude of medieval stories about the theft of relics, in which the body is carried off to another geographic location. Yet unlike those other thefts, Chaucer’s body is not appropriated by another religious house. Chaucer remained in Westminster Abbey—being moved only about thirty feet. And this is the difference between early modern treatments of Chaucer’s body and the medieval treatments of the body of a saint. Where appropriations of relics in the medieval period were meant to add prestige to a particular house or civic entity within the same religious framework, the appropriation of Chaucer’s body was apparently meant to signal a shift from one religious framework to another. If we think of Westminster Abbey as a royal mausoleum (which it was from at least the time of Henry III), then Mary’s reappropriation of Chaucer would have no better place than the Abbey itself, which she was in the process of reappropriating from her father’s control. It may be no coincidence that, in the same year as the construction of the tomb of Chaucer, the Queen abolished the Dean and Chapter (which her father had established a decade earlier) and directed Cardinal Pole to reestablish the monastery, which he did on September 26 of the same year. Yet if this Marian reappropriation of Chaucer was put into effect in order to put Chaucer’s Protestant nachleben to rest, the swift transition back to Protestant rule required either that the burial be repressed or that Chaucer’s exhumation and reburial be recast as a desecration. This idea of desecration is, in fact, implicit in Bullein’s 1564 work (A Dialogue…against the feuer Pestilence). For if, unlike Foxe and Stow, Bullein

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readily accepts Brigham’s translation, there are hints that there was a certain level of discomfort with Brigham’s removal and reburial of Chaucer’s body: Wittie Chaucer satte in a chaire of gold couered with Roses, writyng prose and Risme, accompanied with the Sprites of many Kynges, Knightes and faire Ladies, whom hee plesauntly besprinkeled with the sweete water of the welle consecrated unto the Muses ecleped Aganippe; and as the heauenly spirite commended his deare Brigham for the worthy entombing of his bones, worthy of memorie, in the long slepyng chamber of most famous kinges. Euen so in tragedie he bewailed the sodaine resurrection of many a noble man before their time, in spoyling of Epitaphes; whereby many haue lost their inheritaunce, & c.39 Critics tend to read “Chaucer’s” words as unreservedly enthusiastic about the reburial, but it is difficult not to read something of a critique of Brigham in the above-quoted lines.40 The words “even so” mark an adversative statement which at first glance is somewhat puzzling. What does Bullein mean by representing Chaucer as “bewailing the sodain resurrection of many a noble man before their time”? He would almost seem to be complaining about his own “sudden” resurrection, which (if Bullein accepted the lore about the “ii old verses” being carved on Chaucer’s gravestone at his request) would “spoyl” his epitaph, just as the others’ epitaphs had been spoiled.41 The notion that Bullein might be critiquing the translation needs to be seen in the historical context of Tudor attempts to “reform” not only the living, but also the dead. The Pope’s bull of excommunication of Henry VIII in 1538, for instance, accused him of ordering Thomas Becket’s body to be burned and the ashes scattered to the wind. Such attempts to prohibit the veneration of the body (especially the body of Chaucer’s “hooly blisful martir”) by destroying it would seem to indicate an early Protestant attempt to deny the importance, in general terms, of the afterlife of the body. Indeed, as Eamon Duffy points out, the revision of the rite of the dead in the 1552 prayer book leads to a kind of “disappearance of the corpse.” Unlike the rite in the 1549 prayer book, in which the corpse is addressed, the minister (at the moment of committal) turns away from the corpse to address the living congregation. This turn away from the body accompanies, of course, the Protestant move away from images of the body as idolatrous.42 These images, as Archbishop Latimer preached in 1536, were “only to represent things absent.”43 As Francis Rous notes somewhat later, religious painting is good, except when “[i]t hath been abused to Idolatry, eyther while that which is worshipped is painted, or that which is painted is worshipped.”44 In Augustinian terms, idolatry is mistaking the signifier for the signified, or, as David Hawkes has argued, “to establish an equivalence between the ideal and the material through the use of representation.”45 Protestant suspicions about the body, then, would seem to dictate that the dead body of Chaucer should be of

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limited importance—one of a multitude of bodies whose displacement was of no especial moment. Indeed, the programmatic aspects of this attempt to deny images and the body become clear in the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London which narrates not only how “alle the placys of relygione within the citte of London” were “subprest in November” of 1538, but goes on to discuss the resuppression that began on September 5, 1547, when Edward VI began his “vysytacion” at Powelles and alle imagys pullyd downe…and alle churches new whyttelymed, with commandmenttes wryttyne on the walles…at this time was pullyed up all the tomes; grett stones all the auteres, with the stalles and walles of the qweer and autere in the church that was some tyme the Grey Freers, and solde, and the qweer made smaller…1552. Item the xxv day of October was the pluckynge down of alle the alteres and chappelles in alle Powlles church with alle the toumes at the commandment of the byshoppe then beynge Nicholas Rydley…and wolde a pullyd downe John a Gauntes tome but there was commandment (to) the contrary from the counsell.46 Eamon Duffy has already described how, even as the injunctions of 1547 against images, relics, and ceremonies were essentially the same as those in 1538, their implementation was radicalized. Hence it is no surprise that those who zealously suppressed the old religion would wish to eliminate ritualistic reminders of how that religion functioned.47 Yet to declare such a radical break between Catholic and Protestant in terms of the body is, perhaps, to ignore the profound ambivalence toward the body even at the height of the Reformation. Protestant attacks on bodily relics often hinge on their Pardoner-like spuriousness rather than their status as synecdochal remnants of the body. Nicholas Shaxton’s Injunctions for Salisbury, for instance, attack the cult of relics as the source of “intolerable superstitions and abominable idolatry,” but then instruct that all relics be sent to Shaxton and those that were “undoubtedly true relics” would be returned with instructions for their proper use.48 Latimer seems to take a harder line, calling for the abolition of relics, but then gives the game away when he says, “if ye purpose to do anything, what should ye sooner do, than to take utterly away these deceitful and juggling images…?”49 His identification of these “relics” as images suggests that they are mere representations of, for instance, “St Blasis heart which is at Malvern, and of St Algar’s bones” made by the hand of man—pigs’ bones (as he says) instead of saints’ relics. Not only, then, does this attempt to represent “authentic” relics fetishize “the products of human labour, bestowing upon them a superstitious power,” but, since this representation is secret, one can never know whether a relic is a relic or if it is a man-made fetish.50 Thus, it seems that there is not so much of a distrust in the idea of the relic as there is a distrust that the relic is authentic.

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We see an expression of this uncertainty in William Bullein’s reaction to Chaucer’s translation. Writing in 1564, some six years after the death of Mary, we might expect Bullein to follow the official Elizabethan line, which, if we are to judge by the Injunctions of 1559 (and their implementation), was even more assiduous in rooting out forbidden images and or naments than either Henrician or Edwardian forms of Protestantism.51 Yet Bullein takes a less provocative line on the translation than we might expect. He elides the fact that it takes place during the reign of Mary and instead likens it to the radical tearing down of tombs during Edward’s reign, having Chaucer bewail “the sodaine resurrection of many a noble man before their time, in spoyling of Epitaphes; whereby many haue lost their inheritaunce, & c.” It is almost as if Bullein is less interested in the religious aspects of the burial and more interested in the ways in which the constantly shifting religions of various monarchs have led to a kind of corporeal impermanence that is unhealthy. The epitaphs, those words that point to the presence of the corpse, are “spoiled” and thus no longer point to the body. The result is that Protestant religious practices have actually led to uncertainty about the location of these bodies. Though I think that it is too much to suggest that Bullein is expressing skepticism about the location of Chaucer’s body at this early date, there seems to be a lingering suspicion here that corporeal impermanence leads to hermeneutic incoherence. Words (like epitaphs) no longer lead to bodies, and, hence, inheritances are “lost” because history—which could lead back to these bodies—has been erased. There is, then, a tension in Bullein (and indeed in Foxe and Bale) between the transcendent poetic inspiration which can (as Bale puts it) be obtained from the muses’ well on Mount Helicon and the earthly incarnation of that inspiration which, though now a corpse, still maintains its hold on the Protestant imagination as the “true” body of Chaucer. The location of this body, like the authenticity of relics in the sixteenth century, remains important precisely because of fears that the products of human labor (in the erection of a purportedly “true” memorial for example) may inadvertently be mistaken for the thing itself. Paradoxically it is the generalized uncertainty about burial that was produced by the Reformation and the anxiety/ belief that Chaucer’s body was itself moved that imbued Chaucer’s body with value for Protestants in the sixteenth century. Whether they are resisting the translation or comparing it to the exhumations that took place under Edward, the body begins to look something very like a relic. Dryden’s Poetic Translation and Corporeal Desecration If Brigham’s translation of Chaucer from a medieval grave to an early modern tomb can be said to transform Chaucer’s corpse into something of value, John Dryden’s translation of Chaucer’s corpus from Middle English to an eighteenthcentury koiné might also be said to revalue Chaucer’s works. Though Dryden was not the first early modern poet to “modernize” Chaucer, his Fables Ancient and Modern initiated the debate about the propriety of rendering Chaucer in a more

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accessible form.52 This project was all the more controversial, as Dryden himself promised the Earl of Leicester that he would not modernize Chaucer; in fact he waited to do so until after Leicester’s death.53 The reason for this delay, Dryden himself said, was, that those who believe Chaucer should not be modernized, “suppose there is a certain Veneration due to his old Language; and that it is little else than Profanation and Sacrilege to alter it.”54 Chaucer’s language, like his body, continued to be seen as something that had certain sacral qualities and should continue to be venerated in its unchanged form. Dryden’s later comments in the preface to his Fables seem to speak even more directly to the anxieties about translation that would become prevalent some one hundred and fifty years later. “Yet I think I have just Occasion to complain of them [those who can read Chaucer in the original], who because they understand Chaucer, would deprive the greater part of their Countrymen of the same Advantage, and hoord him up, as Misers do their Grandam Gold, only to look on it themselves, and hinder others from making use of it.”55 Those “saxons” who discourage translation are like misers who refuse to share the familial (or in this case one might say national) wealth. These attempts to “hoord” Chaucer should be seen in the larger context of the value of Chaucer. For, as John Guillory has noted, it is precisely the inaccessibility of certain works of art which leads to their rarity—their value as high art.56 To modernize the medieval poet is to take him out of the realm of restricted production and transform him into a commonly available commodity. This ambivalence about the commodification of Chaucer becomes especially evident in later reactions to Dryden’s rationale for his translation. Dryden’s claim that Chaucer “must first be polish’d, e’er he shines” would provide the grounds for a value-based critique of the very idea of translation.57 Robert Southey, for instance, belittles those “little men” like Dryden, who “were for improving everything. Dryden…could perceive that Chaucer was a poet, but his old gold seemed to him to want scouring, and he thought it was reserved for him to make it shine.”58 Southey picks up on Dryden’s golden metaphor here to suggest just how useless it is to believe that true gold could need scouring. The result of this commodification, as William Hazlitt claims, is that “His [Dryden’s] alterations from Chaucer and Boccaccio show a greater knowledge of the taste of his readers and power of pleasing them, than acquaintance with the genius of his authors.”59 Far from polishing up Chaucer, then, Hazlitt suggests that Dryden is debasing Chaucer’s genius in order to please the presumably less than discerning “taste” of his readers. Attacks on Dryden and on modernization in general continued well into the latter part of the nineteenth century.60 When Richard Hengist Horne asked Walter Savage Landor to aid him in a project to modernize Chaucer—one which included Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt, Landor replied in terms which recall John Milton’s assessment of his own audience, “as many people read Chaucer as were fit to read him.”61 Horne, obviously stung, echoes Dryden by claiming that Landor wished “to keep Chaucer for himself and a few friends.”62 In strong contrast to Horne, John Saunders sardonically remarks that the Tales might

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reasonably be modernized, “whenever a man shall arise possessing exactly the same powers, views, tastes, and individual characteristics as the great father of our literature.”63 These two quotations neatly encapsulate what is seen as the problem with modernization—first, those who remain unable to read Chaucer are not, on some level, “fit” to appreciate his genius; second, there is no one who can replicate what Hazlitt called Chaucer’s “genius.” In fact, Dryden’s very attempt to make Chaucer accessible to a larger audience casts him as one of the “little men” who perhaps believe that they can improve themselves by improving the poet. What is at stake here, then, is the “value” of Chaucer. For the translations of Chaucer, in making the art of the Father more generally accessible, might be seen as threatening Chaucer’s works as “art.” Just as the production of cheap copies of the classics were seen to “commodify” art and threaten the singular and incommensurable status of these classics, so Chaucer’s status as the measure of poetic value depended on his remaining incommensurable, untranslatable, or, as Jean-Joseph Goux puts it, transcendent.64 Dryden’s status as “translator,” or commodifier, becomes more apparent in the context of what is clearly the most vicious slander propagated by Lord Macaulay in his influential History of England (originally published in 1848). Though Macaulay does not, as we might expect, have any patience for Dryden’s Catholicism, it is Dryden’s base and materialistic rationale for his conversion which is the focus of Macaulay’s attack: Dryden was poor and impatient of poverty. He knew little and cared little about religion…. He had, during many years, earned his daily bread by pandaring to the vicious taste of the pit, and by grossly flattering rich and noble patrons. Self respect and a fine sense of the becoming were not to be expected from one who had led a life of mendicancy and adulation. Finding that, if he continued to call himself a Protestant, his services would be overlooked [for renewal of his annuity], he declared himself a Papist. The King’s parsimony speedily relaxed. Dryden’s pension was restored: the arrears were paid up; and he was employed to defend his new religion both in prose and verse.65 Macaulay’s enormously influential account of Dryden casts him as one who is both grasping and pandering.66 He has cashed in his aesthetic and religious convictions; in doing so, he has exchanged that which should remain transcendent (art) for that which is material (gold).67 If, then, Dryden seems to have escaped the label of opportunist early in the eighteenth century, by the nineteenth century, his conversion, and his seemingly grasping ways identified him as a poet whose soul was profoundly uncongenial to Chaucer (despite Dryden’s protestations to the contrary).68 Like the physical translation of Chaucer by the Catholic Brigham, then, the poetic translation of Chaucer by Dryden was resisted by those who had anxieties about the contiguity

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of the eighteenth-century poet who—in his Catholicism and opportunistic ways— seemed to highlight precisely those qualities that would be unacceptable in Chaucer. This is the reason, I argue, that there begin to be a series of questions about the postmortem disposition of Dryden’s body, questions that ultimately follow up on the idea that Chaucer was never translated to the tomb that Brigham had built for him. The idea that Dryden’s remains would in some sense desecrate Chaucer’s body much as his translations desecrated Chaucer’s corpus was relatively new to the nineteenth century. Most of the accounts, when Dryden was buried in 1700, not only stated that Dryden was apparently buried in Chaucer’s grave, but positively celebrated this burial. Henry Hall, for instance, declaimed: Nor is thy latest Work, unworthy Thee. New Cloath’d by You, how Chaucer we esteem; When You’ve new Polish’d it, how bright the Jem! And lo, the Sacred Shade for thee make’s room, Tho’ Souls so alike, should take but up one tomb.69 Hall reiterates here Dryden’s own comment about how his soul is congenial to Chaucer’s; he then celebrates the comment about how he “polished” Chaucer’s work. This celebration sets the stage for the notion that the two souls are so similar that they “should” be collapsed into one tomb.70 In comparable language an unnamed poet suggests that it was Dryden’s closeness to death which enabled his “resurrection” of Chaucer: Though, All H’ [Dryden] has done dares Envy’s Nicest Test, And His worst Poem’s better than our Best. His latest Work, though in His last decays, As far exceeds His former as Our Praise. And Chaucer shall again with Joy be Read, Whose Language with its Master lay for Dead, Till Dryden, striving His Remains to save, Sunk in His Tomb, who brought him from his Grave.71 Punning here on the “remains” of Chaucer, the poet uses the posthumous publication of Dryden’s Fables to suggest that, in order to rescue Father Chaucer from death, his poetical son had to give up his own life. Being sunk in “His” tomb, then, is only natural, as it was from that tomb that Dryden managed, as Goux would put it, to expel the Father into transcendence by translating his works. It would seem clear from the above verses that Dryden was laid in the grave to which Chaucer had been translated in 1556. But, in 1723, this notion was muddled by Chaucer’s early biographer, John Dart, who, in his Westmonasterium claims that the erection of Dryden’s monument somehow interfered with Chaucer’s grave. “His (Chaucer’s) stone of broad Grey Marble, as I take it, was

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not long since remaining; but was taken up when Mr. Dryden’s Monument was erected, and sawn to mend the pavement.”72 Dart’s account is puzzling for a number of reasons. First, Camden and others had reported that Chaucer’s body had been translated to the purbeck marble tomb that had been erected by Brigham. Dart cannot be talking about this tomb, because the tomb that he mentions is apparently only a “slab.” Also, the 1556 tomb is too far away from the Dryden monument to have been interfered with (see Fig. 2). Dart, then, seems to be talking about the earlier, and perhaps original, grave of Chaucer from which the poet’s corpse had been translated in 1556. One could see, as Caxton’s description has told us, that Dryden’s monument seems to occupy the precise spot “tofore the chapele of seynte benet,” that Chaucer apparently originally inhabited. If we are to believe Dart, then, it seems likely that Dryden was, indeed, put into Chaucer’s old grave. Yet one must, then, ask what Dart means when he suggests that Chaucer’s “stone…was taken up…and sawn to mend the pavement.” Is this meant to suggest that, since Chaucer was no longer in the original tomb, its original stone was destroyed? Such a thesis is attractive, yet one must then ask why Scott, Pepys, and Dart all fail to distinguish the old grave from the new one (see below). One other possibility is that the “new” tomb erected by Brigham was considered a memorial which did not contain the bones of the poet. As the quotation from Addison at the beginning of the chapter makes clear, there were, by the eighteenth century, a number of monuments which were not graves, and Brigham’s might have been thought to be one of these. By the middle of the eighteenth century, then, the seeds were sown for exactly the kind of confusion that Bullein feared when he had Chaucer complain about the “resurrection” of bodies “before their time.” When bodies are exhumed and reburied, skepticism arises as to where the bodies are buried. And, in this case, when bodies are intermingled, one cannot tell whose body is whose, nor where the authentic site is where one may pay homage to Chaucer’s bones. These problems of confused identity and desecration come to fruition in the middle of the nineteenth century, at about the same time that, as we will see, a controversy over the upkeep of Chaucer’s tomb led to the formation of the Committee to repair the tomb. A reader, N.B., sent in a letter saying, It had been thought that Dryden was interred between Chaucer and Cowley. It is clear from the context that this was what Sir Walter Scott meant when he spoke of “the procession of talent and rank which escorted the remains of Dryden to the tomb of Chaucer… But Pepys writing on the 9th May, 1700… remarks that Mr. Dryden is dead, and will be buried “in Chaucer’s Grave”…if Chaucer’s grave was desecrated on that occasion, was any note made of the circumstances which attended the disturbance of the resting place of the Father of our Poesy? I am rather inclined to fear that Chaucer’s grave was interfered with, either on that occasion or subsequently when Dryden’s monument was erected….73

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Fig. 2. The Original Grave Plan (1870) for the South Transept of Westminster Abbey (updated 2003). The Dryden monument is just in front of St. Benedict’s Chapel, while Chaucer’s tomb is further south along the east wall. Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

N.B.’s letter offers a paradigm of how the dislocation of the corpse can translate into a kind of desecration of memorial respect. Initially, the writer interrogates the actual location of Chaucer’s corpse. And then, far from suggesting that Dryden deserved to be buried in Chaucer’s tomb, N.B. argues that either Dryden’s burial or the erection of his monument some twenty years later, “desecrated” the resting place of the “Father.” What is more telling, however, is what followed N.B.’s suggestion that Dryden was buried in Chaucer’s tomb—a kind of screed against the Dean and Chapter of Westminster:

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The Dean and Chapter of Westminster, the legal keepers and appointed preservers of some of our dearest memorials, the successors of those who had no doubt been paid a good round fee for permission to lay down that stone, violated the permission of their predecessors. That spot of earth had in their judgment too long lain fallow: it was made to yield a harvest to themselves. And, at the same time, with a vigorous thriftiness, and true tradesman-like diligence, they not only earned money on the one hand, but they saved it on the other. The stone was sawn to mend the pavement! Do Deans and Chapters act after this fashion now-a-days? Are we kept out of so many of our cathedrals by paltry fees, in order that such things may go on unobserved within?74 As Dryden’s monument was erected in 1720 by Dryden’s friend John Sheffield (the Duke of Buckingham), one might well argue that this attack on the Dean and Chapter was some one hundred and thirty years too late. Indeed, the vitriolic nature of the attack suggests that some other more current slight underlies the complaint. Part of N.B.’s motivation seems to be the suggestion that those in charge of Westminster were acting like “tradesmen” or even farmers. Much as Hazlitt hinted that Dryden’s translation of Chaucer smacked of too strong a love for lucre, so N.B. claims that a strong desire for money, akin to Dryden’s, led the Dean and Chapter to “plant” Dryden’s body in order to yield a harvest of “gold.” Their actions, in this formulation, reflect what happens when commercial concerns become more pressing than a reverence for the Father or even for poetry itself. Unlike Hoccleve, then, money is for N.B. a materialistic marker which inhibits the transcendence of the poet, the Dean, or anyone else interested in a spiritual connection with the beyond. This movement from corporeal desecration to commercial critique reveals the extent to which the burial place of the Father of English Poetry is wrapped up with more general questions of the transcendent nature of poetry itself. Recalling Macaulay s critique of Dryden’s desire for money, N.B.’s critique of the Dean and Chapter suggests that the reverence which is due to poetry has been corrupted by money. As David Hawkes has shown, this critique was part of an ongoing suspicion of the links between commerce and art in England since the theatrical controversies of the sixteenth century.75 Once artistic representation is subordinated to money, that representation no longer can make claims about its own truthfulness. As Anthony Munday put it, “Who writeth for reward, neither regardeth virtue, nor truth; but runs into falsehood, because he flattereth for commoditie.”76 In the context of Chaucer’s burial, the suspicion is both that late attitudes towards Chaucer have been influenced by money and, as a result, that Dryden—a poet who has “sold” his services—has been allowed to desecrate the grave. The result may be that the tomb, purportedly a sign that signifies the place of Chaucer’s body, may not signify what it is supposed to signify.

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It is partially for these reasons that John Gough Nichols, who has so much to say about the repair of Chaucer’s tomb (see chapter four), takes issue with N.B.’s interpretation of the facts in one of the following numbers of the same magazine: the object of the present remarks is first to shew how entirely conjectural these statements of Dart are… Here we find that Caxton states that the poet’s body had been buried “to fore the chapel of seynte Benet,”—a chapel formed where the eastern wall of the transept joins the southern ambulatory of the choir. Is this expression positively determinate that his grave was rather where Dryden’s monument now stands than where his own monument has now long stood? …it is very easy to account for an expression which, in the present crowded state of the building appears incorrect,—that his tomb was before St. Benet’s chapel… We can readily believe that the grey marble slab which Dart says was sawn up marked the place of some ancient internment; as we all know that such nameless gravestones are common enough; but it does not follow that Dart had any other authority but Caxton’s expression for his idea that it marked Chaucer’s grave. That may have been nothing more than a conjecture, suggested by finding such a stone upon the spot which Caxton was supposed to describe.77 Though Nichols’s letter attempts to allay the anxieties occasioned by Dart’s remark about the sawing of Chaucer’s gravestone, its verbal gymnastics reveal an uncomfortable connection between the monument erected to Dryden some twenty years after his death and the project to restore Chaucer’s early modern tomb. The discomfort may even stretch to the status of the 1720 monument itself. The fact that it is a monument rather than a tomb, and that it may be quite distant from Dryden’s burial spot gestures toward a worrisome sepulchral instability in Poets’ Corner. Not only is there some question about where Dryden is buried, or whether his monument disturbed Chaucer’s grave, but the location of Chaucer himself begins to look a bit more uncertain. One may begin to wonder whether Brigham’s tomb was, in fact, more like Dryden’s monument—a late addition to the South Transept that celebrates the idea of the poet rather than a marker of the body itself. The anxieties that drove those who wished to claim Brigham’s tomb as the actual resting place of the poet apparently led to a close examination of this sixteenth-century sepulchre. Doubts about whether the Brigham tomb contained the body of Chaucer invariably centered on the possibility that Chaucer’s remains were never translated from the original tomb. In a brief editorial about the tomb, in the same year as Nichols’s letter, the editors of the Athenaeum revert to a position that is akin to that of Bale and Foxe: they claim that the tomb is original and that Chaucer was never actually translated to a new tomb:

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One of the objections formerly urged against taking steps to restore the perishing memorial of the Father of English Poetry in Poets’ Corner was, that it was not really his tomb, but a monument erected to do honour to his memory a century and a half after his death. An examination, however, of the tomb itself by competent authorities has proved this objection to be unfounded:— inasmuch as there can exist no doubt, we hear from the difference of workmanship, material, &c., that the altar tomb is the original tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer, —and that instead of Nicholas Brigham having erected an entirely new monument, he only added to that which then existed the overhanging canopy, &c. So that the sympathy of Chaucer’s admirers is now invited to the restoration of what till now was really not known to exist—the original tomb of the Poet.78 In the context of the supposed desecration of Chaucer’s grave either by Dryden’s body or by the placement of Dryden’s monument, we find, then, an attempt to repair this profanation by “re-placing” Chaucer in his original grave which is “Brigham’s tomb” itself. This elegant, if historically suspect, solution restores not only “the original tomb of the poet” but lays claim to a rediscovery of the original, hence authentic, Chaucer. As psychologically satisfying as this solution might have been to those who sought to stabilize the location of the body, it was seen as historically indefensible. The result was an ongoing attempt to reconcile the idea that the bones were translated to the tomb and that Chaucer’s grave was somehow disturbed by the burial of Dryden and the placement of his monument some twenty years later.79 Perhaps the most influential treatment of the tomb resolves part of the problem by claiming that Chaucer’s grave was not disturbed by Dryden’s burial. In the 1868 handbook of the Abbey, Dean Stanley (quoting Pepys) reports about Dryden that “the Father, as he has been called, of modern English Poetry was laid almost in the very sepulchre of the Father of ancient English Poetry [my emphasis] .”80 Stanley takes issue here with those sources that report the burial of Dryden in Chaucer’s grave. He tacitly acknowledges the confusion of the two fathers here, but, just as he attempts to separate the gravesites, he also attempts to distinguish between “ancient” and “modern” fathers. His attempt to “remove” Dryden from Chaucer’s grave may have been authorized by Tom Brown’s observation (which he cites in his notes) that “At Chaucer’s feet, without any name lies John Dryden his admirer, and truly the English Maro.”81 But if Stanley seems to resolve the doubts about whether Dryden was buried in Chaucer’s grave, the location of Chaucer’s bones remains somewhat doubtful. As we might expect, Stanley repeats the story about Chaucer’s gravestone being sawn to mend the pavement, but again, since the monument to Dryden was erected well after Chaucer’s body was said to have been moved, one wonders why Stanley would refer to the stone as the marker of Chaucer’s grave. And Stanley’s description of what he calls both Chaucer’s “tomb” and Chaucer’s “monument” is equally ambiguous. He says only, “it was not till the reign of

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Edward VI [sic] that the present tomb, to which apparently the poet’s ashes were removed, was raised, near the grave, by Nicholas Brigham [my emphasis].”82 Stanley, here, not only expresses doubts about the resting place of Chaucer, but locates the translation of the body in the reign of a Protestant ruler instead of Mary. His solution to the disposition of Chaucer’s corpse, then, neatly resolves the problem of the Catholic translation by either relocating it in an earlier reign, or suggesting that the translation never took place at all. Stanley’s doubts about the location of Chaucer’s grave were apparently serious enough that he felt there should be some marker of where Chaucer’s body might, in fact, lie. Indeed, the photograph of Abraham Cowley’s stone in the Westminster Abbey Muniments Library has the following notation, “This large stone seems to have been used by Dean Stanley to add the names of some poets and writers buried in this transept but with no visible marker.” The stone was recut in 1993, but in a nineteenth-century lantern slide (see fig. 3) the stone clearly reads, “NEAR THIS STONE LIE BURIED Geoffrey Chaucer 1400, John Dryden 1700 etc.”83 This stone, as we will see, occasioned all sorts of mischief, but for now it is enough to point to the Dean’s uncertainty about the presence of Chaucer’s body in the monument erected by Brigham, since the stone is some distance from the 1556 “tomb.” In addition, the presence of Dryden’s name on the stone—who, much like Chaucer, had both a gravestone (though unlike Chaucer’s it was nameless) and a monument—suggests that Stanley sees Chaucer and Dryden as twins in funereal dislocation and overdetermination. In fact, Stanley’s reasons for this connection of Chaucer with Dryden certainly have a good deal to do with the fact that they were buried close to one another. Yet their proximity to one another in the Abbey also signals a proximity, if not in time, then in thought. Like the burial of Alfred Lord Tennyson next to Robert Browning or Matthew Prior at the feet of Edmund Spenser, Dryden’s burial in/ next to or at the feet of Chaucer’s grave initially signified a kind of spiritual congeniality between the poets and then began to signify a mortuary uncertainty that seemed to profane the memory of “the Father of Ancient Poetry.” Given the somewhat peculiar circumstances surrounding Dryden’s burial, it is perhaps unsurprising that no one took the time to explain why Dryden was being buried in or near Chaucer’s grave.84 It may, in fact, have seemed obvious that a poet who claimed a poetic kinship with Chaucer would want to be, like Spenser, buried near or even in the grave of the Father of English Poetry. Yet if Dryden’s contemporaries celebrated the burial of Dryden “in” Chaucer’s grave, and the mid-nineteenth century equivocated about the burial, late nineteenth-century authorities followed Stanley in doubting the presence of Chaucer’s body in Brigham’s tomb. In 1881 M.H.Bloxham again quotes Dart’s omnipresent claim that Chaucer’s gravestone was sawn to mend the pavement. But here Bloxham notes that Dart’s account of the tomb contradicts the idea that Brigham translated Chaucer’s bones. He then concludes his article with a curious reference to Dean Stanley, “It is much to be regretted that the late Dean of Westminster had not his attention drawn to an investigation of the probable site of sepulchre of the poet,

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Fig. 3. A nineteenth-century lantern slide of the stone upon which Dean Stanley had Chaucer’s name cut. Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

Chaucer, on which there are, as I have shewn, conflicting opinions. After all, his works are the most fitting memorial of his fame.”85 As we have seen, even if Dean Stanley did not fully investigate the whereabouts of Chaucer’s body, he appreciated that the various accounts seemed contradictory, and it is clear that these accounts left him in some doubt about the location of the corpse. What seems odd about Bloxham’s quotation, however, is the apparent non sequitur in the final line. We would expect that Bloxham would emphasize how important it is to find the final resting place of the poet rather than talk about how important his works are. The mysterious non sequitur is explained, I think, if we turn to the beginning of the essay in which Bloxham generalizes about how often he has entered the nation’s Cathedrals only to discover that the monuments and sepulchral effigies in them “were not those of the individuals to whom they had been popularly ascribed but were of a much earlier or later period.”86 As Bloxham’s project here is to demonstrate that Brigham’s tomb is a much later production, I would argue that he is discrediting the new tomb as an empty monument in order to equate the earlier tomb with the authentic original “Chaucer’s works” which (as it is original) is the fitting memorial of the poet’s fame. Bloxham here is surely punning on the notion that the tomb as well as Chaucer’s writings are both in some sense Chaucer’s memorials. In bringing together corpus and corpse, Bloxham not only raises the question of where Chaucer was buried but perhaps touches on what was, at the end of the nineteenth century, the larger question (and a question to which we will return): what did Chaucer actually write? More to the point, he reveals that behind the

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intense interest in Chaucer’s body—its location, its translation, its “purity”—lay a strange equivalence with Chaucer’s corpus that produced a series of anxious reactions to anything that would threaten that body. Dryden’s burial in Chaucer’s grave, or his memorial’s disturbance of Chaucer’s body, suggest the extent to which, like Brigham, Dryden was seen as a dislocating force—someone whose “translation” of Chaucer literally displaced the Father. Though Dryden was not the first to translate Chaucer, he became the poet who mediated (or we might say channeled) Chaucer for more modern readers.87 The problem with what Dryden calls this “spiritual communion” was, as Dean Stanley suggests, that Dryden becomes a kind of replacement father for the ancient father that the nineteenth century felt that it had lost. Yet far from recognizing and distinguishing between the genealogical father of ancient literature and its “stepfather” of literature, there seems to have been an anxiety that their close identification would obviate the need to recover the original, authentic father. This anxiety of loss was certainly the result of a nostalgia for the original “bard,” the genuine father, but what was also at work was a desire to distance Chaucer from another poet whose work was seen as the result of a devaluing, precisely because he had exchanged his work for money; hence he had subordinated aesthetical concerns to monetary ones. Those things which made Dryden unpalatable—his allegiance to Catholicism, his grasping ways, and his political problems—certainly rendered him unsuitable to “be” Chaucer for many nineteenth-century readers. But what was at stake was more than merely the literary/personal reputation of the Father of English Poetry. As we will see in the next two chapters, Chaucer becomes a national poet, a patriarch whose body and poetical productions become a kind of origin for an emerging secular statehood.

CHAPTER 3 Nineteenth-Century Necronationalism and the Chaucerian Uncanny

There was never a man who was more of a Maker than Chaucer. He made a national language; he came very near to making a nation… Chaucer was the Father of his Country, rather in the style of George Washington. G.K.Chesterton1 If suspicions about the burial of Dryden—the Father of Modern Poetry— in Chaucer’s grave led to anxieties about the pollution of Chaucer’s work, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentators became concerned about the possibility that the Father of Ancient Poetry was buried in someone else’s tomb. This inversion of anxieties was accompanied by an inversion of attitudes toward Brigham’s translation. Critics no longer resisted Brigham’s translation as an attempt to appropriate the father for the old religion. Instead they mounted a spirited defense of the reverent nature of Brigham’s translation. The reason for this reversal is that critics increasingly looked to ground the values of English society in the cultural productions of England rather than a Protestant religious consensus. Hence, more and more, Chaucer, the Father of English Poetry, is seen as a repository of “Englishness”—a national quality which differentiates the English from other peoples. Chaucer’s body, standing as it does, at the head of all of the other tombs and monuments in Poets’ Corner, becomes the material locus of what Etienne Balibar calls “an invariant substance”—that national “stuff” which is handed down from the father to succeeding generations.2 His tomb, by extension, becomes a kind of secular shrine—a geographical locus which, as Dean Stanley puts it, binds together London and Canterbury, Commonwealth and religion. Attempts to defend Brigham’s translation of Chaucer, then, resist the idea that Chaucer’s tomb (a metonymy for Chaucer’s body) is not, or at least was not originally, his tomb. Behind this resistance lies a fear of sepulchral instability. For if the tomb, in fact, had some prehistorical identity before it was Chaucer’s tomb—if the boundaries of Chaucer’s tomb prove to be porous—then, analogically, the ability of Chaucer’s body to limn out the boundaries of Englishness is suspect. It gestures toward some body which originally lay in the

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tomb, some history before the Father, which is unknown, confused and ultimately discontinous with the idea of England herself. *** Though we might now see Chesterton’s somewhat hyberbolic connection of Chaucer with Washington as quaint, his desire to transform the father of English poetry into an anachronic George Washington was only one example of a larger nineteenth- and twentieth-century project to connect the founding of English poetry with the founding of the nation. George Dawson, for instance, saw in Chaucer an ability to bind together race and class—the force that separated “Englishmen” since at least 1066. “[Chaucer] combined the speech of the Norman gentlemen with the Saxon poetry of the people; he turned himself to the people, and he did more than any other man in history in the admirable task of binding together the classes of the nation.”3 John Richard Green locates in Chaucer a genius that is characteristically English. “The genius of Chaucer was neither French nor Italian, whatever element it might borrow from either literature, but English to the core.”4 Matthew Browne grounds that which made England “great”—the colonial project—in the essential Englishness of Chaucer.5 What Chaucer offers, then, is a locus wherein those forces which threaten to divide Englishmen from each other (race, class, colonial distance) can be defeated. Like religion itself, this nationalistic locus (as Benedict Anderson puts it) “transforms fatality into continuity…concerns itself with the links between the dead and yet unborn.”6 In England, of course, there is no better place to link the dead and the unborn than in the monuments of what has been called her national mausoleum—Westminster Abbey. And at the head of these links, as Dean Stanley puts it, was “the erection of the monument [by Brigham which] so long afterwards shows how freshly the fame of Chaucer still flourished, and accordingly, within the next generation, it became the point of attraction to the hitherto unexampled bursts of poets in the Elizabethan age.”7 It therefore became, as one turn of the century guide put it, “a magnet to draw into its neighborhood the memorials of Drayton, Ben Jonson, Spenser…and many more.”8 This connection of loss with presence, as well as the personal with the national is perhaps most clearly expressed in Stanley’s forward-looking plea that Westminster Abbey remain a central site of necronationalism: What a poet, already quoted, said of a private loss is still more true of the losses of the nation—“A monument in so frequented a place as Westminster Abbey, restoring them to a kind of second life among the living, will be in some measure not to have lost them.” The race of our distinguished men will still continue. That they may never be parted in death from the centre of our national energies, the hearth of our national religion, should be the joint desire at once of the Church and of the Commonwealth.9

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In the face of increasing doubts about the existence of a life after death, Poets’ Corner provides a reassuring place in which religious and secular afterlives are ensured. The loss of these distinguished men is rendered moot by the ability of national energy and religion to spring from what Stanley calls the “centre.” Certainly here he means the Abbey itself, but what is the Abbey without the corpses of these distinguished men? What Brigham did in translating Chaucer’s corpse was to begin the formation of precisely the kind of corporeal “centre” which, Stanley asserts, already exists in the Abbey in 1868. There is a sense, then, that these monumentalized bodies are (or at least point toward) an immaterial, hence transcendent, notion of England itself. One might well ask how the dead body—the site of decay and dissolution— can provide the subject with a national image of coherence and unity. If anything, we might expect a kind of disembodiment of this national quality of “Englishness,” which would enable it to encode “England” as a sublime notion untouched by the ravages of history.10 Part of the answer to this historical problem can be found in the Victorian preoccupation with death—a preoccupation which flows from increasing skepticism about the possibility of an afterlife. Early twentieth-century studies of the Victorian way of death emphasized the self-indulgence of Victorian mourning rituals, characterizing them as “vulgar madness,” or a “congealed and morbid romanticism.”11 And, indeed, to twenty-first century readers these customs and behaviors undoubtedly seem excessive. The wearing of the hair of the dead in small lockets, the two-year dress code for widows and the making of death masks all might suggest an “unhealthy” preoccupation with death that might interfere with the natural process of detachment from the beloved which characterizes successful mourning.12 Naturally, at the head of these studies was the figure of Victoria, whose devotion to the dead Prince Albert extended to keeping his rooms exactly as they were when he was alive, including having hot water and his clothes laid out every morning.13 More recent studies have moved away from this modernist critique of the Victorians by attempting to place such activities in their nineteenth-century context. In some of these explorations it is Victoria herself who becomes an aberration, someone whose words—“I live on with him, for him; in fact I am only outwardly separated from him, and only for a time”—indicate an atypical mourning that has, because of its bearer’s importance, been given too much credence as a “Victorian” way of mourning.14 Yet Queen’s Victoria’s hyperbolic expression of loss tells us a good deal about the way that many in the nineteenth century thought about death. Implicit in her actions and words is what Phillipe Ariès has identified as an attempt to control the dead body by denying its loss. This predilection toward fetishism was well recognized in the nineteenth century. Writing about the Parisian cemetery controversy, Dr. Robinet averred that Man prolongs beyond death the existence of those who have succumbed before them…he continues to love them, to imagine them, to converse with

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them after they have ceased to live, and establishes in their memory a cult in which his heart and his intelligence strive to assure them perpetuity…. This property of human nature…makes us affectionate and intelligent enough to love creatures who are no more, to rescue them from nothingness, and to create for them in ourselves this second existence, which is, no doubt, the only immortality.15 As the last sentence suggests, Robinet was one of those who followed what was known as the Positivist “Religion of Humanity,” which had been popular in France and found an outlet in England through Frederic Harrison and Richard Congreve.16 In this “religion” the consolation to the living was not that the bereaved would live a life immortal (for no one could know if they would), but instead that they would live again in the memories of those that they left behind. This “religion” (really a philosophy) was picked up by some of the English literati. George Eliot’s poem “Oh May I Join the Choir Immortal,” which has been seen as an informal confession of this philosophy, was read not only at a number of agnostic funerals, but at the poet’s own. The opening lines of this poem, “Oh may I join the choir invisible/Of those immortal dead who live again/ In minds made better by their presence,” focus on the good that the dead can do for the living. But this introjection of the dead only works if the living can control the “presence” of the dead (at least psychologically) and in this way overcome death. I do not mean to suggest that Queen Victoria, or even the majority of the inhabitants of the British Isles, were positivists. Indeed, evidence suggests that the philosophy was not widespread.17 But the anxiety occasioned by what many scholars have recognized as the gradual encroachment of religious skepticism— along with a loss of belief in the afterlife—may have led both agnostics and believers to seek quasi-positivist consolation in the sustained presence of the deceased.18 Part of the way that this presence was sustained was through the building of elaborate memorials to the dead.19 The Albert Memorial is perhaps the most visible example of how one believer dealt with her grief, but unbelievers alike had cenotaphs built. William Morris’s friend, Phillip Webb, for instance, designed a complicated structure to house the tombstone of his atheistic comrade.20 These monuments, then, are material replacements for the lost body. Their completeness and presence signal an internal “restoration” of the lost person to (as Stanley puts it) “a second life.” This is why (as we will see in the next chapter) the decay of Chaucer’s tomb became such a critical issue in the nineteenth century. For should the monumental sign of the presence of the dead itself begin to decay, it suggests the loss of Chaucer’s presence and, by extension, the corruptibility of that invariant substance located in Chaucer which is known as “Englishness.” The ability of Chaucer’s tomb to at once signify the body and defeat time was ultimately based on his art—that numinous thing that is able to transcend categories such as past and present, death and life. Yet this sepulchral aesthetics

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is not simply the formalist notion of art as that “which transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation” (as Clive Bell put it).21 This notion in the above recovery of Chaucer is utilitarian in nature—much more in line with Morris than Bell. As Frank Pick, the head of the London Underground project, put it, “I think art might be converted and become a religion of society. It is a social bond and that is what religion means.”22 Art, then, as a displaced transcendence offers (as Terry Eagleton puts it) an “aesthetic analogy of liberal Anglicanism…. As [Matthew] Arnold recognized, such degutted religion is a way to preserve discipline and social order among a populace who are less and less inclined to enthuse over the Virgin Birth.”23 Eagleton may collapse the notion of art and imposed ideology a bit too readily here, but it is worth noting that (as we will see in chapter five) people like Pick and W.R.Lethaby (Westminster Abbey’s Surveyor of the Fabric) programmatically attempt to offer a substitute (medieval modernist art) for the ordering and bonding principle of religion in an increasingly secular England. It is not exactly news that modernism attempted to replace the ordering principles of religion with the “corporate, hierarchical, code governed” principles of art.24 But what is interesting is the way that even displaced transcendence has its roots in “a surreptitiously geographical basis” (as John Guillory puts it)—in this case, England itself.25 Chaucer’s “Englishness,” after all, is the basis for his recuperation and canonicity. Yet this Englishness might itself be called into question. As Žižek puts it, “the first step towards the identity of the nation is defined through differences from other nations, via an external border. If I identify myself as an Englishman, I distinguish myself from the French, Germans, Scots, Irish and so on. However, in the next stage, the question is raised of who among the English are ‘the real English,’ the paradigm of Englishness; who are the Englishmen who correspond in full to the notion of English?”26 Particularly during the period of the nineteenth century, when national identity was crucial to the colonial project, Englishmen looked for an exemplar of Englishness, and a place which “enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been—and always will be—‛at home.’”27 It is precisely this domesticity, this heimlichkeit, which is threatened by the unheimlich (as Freud puts it) or uncanny suggestion that Chaucer is buried in another man’s grave—a notion that threatens the stability of Poets’ Corner. Picking up on earlier suggestions by John Gough Nichols in 1850 and Gilbert Scott in 1863, M.H.Bloxham argued in 1881 that one of the tombs that had been “ravished” during the Reformation must have been acquired by Brigham since Chaucer’s “monument is very evidently not of the date of the period in which it was here erected.”28 Such monuments had been sold in the sixteenth century for £50 and they would provide not only a cheap tomb, but one that corresponded to the date which Bloxham thought must have originally been the date for Chaucer’s “second” tomb. Bloxham’s assertion echoes, in some ways, Bullein’s anxieties in 1564 about the Edwardian destruction of tombs at the time of the

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Reformation, during which there was, as Bullein put it, a “sodein resurrection” of those noble men who had been buried either at Greyfriars or St. Paul’s. As Freud tells us, the “uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it through the process of repression.”29 In larger cultural terms, Bloxham is only returning to a scene which is already deeply familiar to Englishmen—uncertainty about the location of the tomb during the Reformation. Within this scene is a deeply disturbing sepulchral instability occasioned by the ravishing of tombs from other churches in the sixteenth century. As we will see below, what is repressed is the anxiety that Chaucer’s tomb—putatively a geographical locus which signifies the wholeness and continuity of England—is actually a symbol of its religious and civil fragmentation. But what, we must ask, triggered Bloxham’s “memory” of this desecration? Part of the answer can be found both in nineteenth-century concerns about the existence of an afterlife and in the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cemetery debates. What initiates the controversy are concerns about the insalubrious conditions which prevailed in many graveyards. So bad were the noxious odors which were escaping the graves that stories began to circulate about how such odors were actually responsible for the deaths of gravediggers and others who happened to be near the cemeteries.30 Part of the problem was that the cemeteries were increasingly crowded, and, thus, bodies, bones, and graves were being moved about. The result was that various methods of “cemetery management” came into vogue. This “management” consisted of graves being reopened and up to twenty coffins being put in them. Graveyards were also trenched every few years, and the contents were either put into bone houses or burned. Bodies were exhumed and burnt while their coffins were broken up to be used as firewood. There was, as well, a brisk business in second-hand coffin furniture.31 Despite the difference in motivations, the similarity between these nineteenth-century exhumations and the sixteenth-century exhumations mentioned in the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London is, I would argue, what led to the recrudescence of the anxieties about Chaucer’s translation.32 Perhaps alerted to Bloxham’s anxiety by the Chaucer quincentenary celebrations, John Hales writes to the TLS and quotes the passage from Bullein that has Chaucer commending Brighan and bewailing “the sodaine resurrection of many a noble man before their time, in spoyling of Epitaphes, whereby many haue lost their inheritaunce, & c.” in order to assert that Chaucer was commending Brigham for translating what was genuinely “him” to another part of the Abbey.33 As Hales puts it: “Chaucer protests against the rough way in which many graves have been disturbed and rifled—a way in such contrast to Brigham’s reverent translation of the poet’s bones to another spot inside the great Abbey Church.”34 Hales’s remarks demonstrate a classic ambivalence about the past, as he admits that the translation calls up disturbing memories of the Reformation, but resists the notion that Chaucer’s tomb is in any way implicated in the desecrations. Other commentators, however, seemed less resistant to the

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notion that Chaucer might be buried in a used tomb. In his reply to Hales, Albert Hartshorne reiterates Bloxham’s suggestion that the grave which holds Chaucer may not actually be a new tomb. Hartshorne suggests that “the ‘new tomb’ was in 1555 [sic] an old one, and had already served its purpose elsewhere.”35 Since such tombs sold for fifty pounds, the suggestion is that Brigham got the tomb on the cheap. Ultimately, however, even Hartshorne tries to pull back from the most disturbing aspects of his claim. He says that he does not wish “to cast a slight upon Nicholas Brigham” and says that since by the process of “shocking and impious spoilation refined memorials of great men were then constantly turned to the most sordid uses, we may welcome a conspicuous and bright exception, and admire the spirit and the patriotism which urged Brigham to obtain and rescue the best grave he could.”36 Hartshorne’s comments appear to be an attempt to make a virtue of necessity. Instead of resisting the notion that Chaucer was buried in another man’s grave, he makes the observation better that a tomb remain a tomb than that it be converted to some other (unknown but assuredly sordid) purpose.37 Further, he suggests that the “rescue” of this grave was actually a conspicuous example of patriotism, but his inability to say precisely how this monumentalization of the father intersects with his love of the nation only draws attention to the ways in which Hartshorne’s patriotic claim seems a sophistical trick intended to paper over “impious spoilation.” If Chaucer is buried in some other man’s tomb, then the memorial project which is Poets’ Corner is built on a lie. For if nationalism and religion really converge in the “centre” which is the Abbey (as Stanley claims), then that center, which depends on the connection of memory with corporeal presence, is revealed as unstable. That this anxiety of evanescence might seem to be more widespread is attested to by Charlotte C.Stopes’s response to Hales and Hartshorne a month later.38 She claims that since Brigham was a devout Catholic and since “he performed his work of reverence in the reign of the most Catholic queen…this tends to weaken the theory of the ‘rifled tomb.’”39 Stopes’s invocation of Brigham’s Catholicism here indicates just how desperate critics were to distance Chaucer from the “rifled tomb.” The claim is also interesting because it suggests a devoutness and care for the body which seems to be divorced from Dean Stanley’s celebrated marriage of nation and Protestant religion. Unlike those earlier Protestant critics who calumniated Catholics like Dryden for displacing Chaucer’s corpse, Stopes suggests that true devotion to the body lies before the sacred and the secular came together in the form of the state religion. One might think that Stopes’s concession would put an end to disputes about the rifled tomb. After all, she seems to respond to the unheimlich notion that Chaucer was buried in a used tomb by working through what might be called the prehistory of the Father. In the process, she seems to dissolve links between “Church and Commonwealth… Canterbury and London” by locating Chaucer’s translation in the discontinuous period between Edward and Elizabeth—a period whose legitimacy rested on the ostensive separation of nation from religion. Yet, far from vanishing, the belief in the “rifled tomb” lived on in such books as Mary

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Sturgeon’s Westminster Abbey: Its Memories and Its Message (1921), in which Sturgeon castigates the “nation” for allowing Chaucer’s initial and “sole memorial” to be “an epitaph written by a foreigner [Stephen Surigonus].”40 At the same time she claims that “the whole truth about the monument of the English nation to the Father of English Poetry” is that “it was not erected by the nation at all.” She adds that “it was ravished from some other church and had contained some other poor body.”41 In short, the belief in the “rifled tomb” had become so commonplace by the late 1920s that it occasioned an impassioned defense of the tomb in the TLS by W.R.Lethaby, the Surveyor of the Fabric at Westminster Abbey. He argued that “what has been thought of this monument during the last two generations may be told by a quotation from the late Francis Bond’s Westminster Abbey, 1909 ‘The Monument is of a design very common c. 1500, and may well have stood originally in one of the great churches of the Black Friars or Grey Friars before they were dismantelled.’”42 Lethaby takes issue with this reading of events (as Pearsall would claim some sixty-five years later), claiming that the tomb could have been a Marian production which was contemporary with and remarkably similar to a 1555 tomb from Old Church Chelsea. What is interesting, however, is the language that Lethaby employs to defend Brigham from charges that he reused a tomb: “Brigham had an entirely new tomb made, and did not cheaply acquire some old thing which had been cast out from another place. His incentive to have the new tomb made may have been some recent disturbance of the original grave under the pavement near by; certainly it was connected with the restoration of the old regime.”43 Lethaby’s disparaging reference to some “old thing” and his assertion that Chaucer’s second burial was connected with the restoration of Catholicism, suggests the extent to which critics who wished to maintain the sanctity of Chaucer’s tomb were, unlike their Protestant forebearers, forced to embrace the Catholic translation of the poet. Indeed, it was not only Westminster’s Surveyer of the Fabric who leapt to the defense of Brigham. In a letter dated October 13, 1929, Lawrence Tanner, Keeper of the Muniments and Library at Westminster, writes excitedly, “I have found a tomb in Northhamptonshire Church which appears to be identical to Chaucer’s!!! There’s a discovery for you! I await a better photograph of it than I have at present. I am going to see Lethaby this week and perhaps shall try to look myself into writing an article on these two and the Chelsea one.”44 Tanner did indeed write the article, but apparently never published it. Fortunately an undated typescript (though a later note says c. 1930) of the proposed article is preserved in the Abbey Library. In “Chaucer’s Tomb and Nicholas Brigham” (see appendix), Tanner identifies a tomb in Irthlingborough, Northhamptonshire as a “replica of the Chaucer tomb” and a production c. 1550–1560 (see figure 4). If Tanner is right, then (with two mid sixteenth-century tombs which are similar to Chaucer’s), the original reason for suspecting that Brigham reused a tomb (that the tomb was older than the interment) has probably been dealt a fatal blow. Yet what remains equally interesting is the vehemence with which the debate

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Fig. 4. An engraving of the Irthlingborough tomb (background) from Hyett’s Sepulchral Memorials within the County of Northamptonshire (before the tomb was altered in 1839). By permission of the British Library 142.i.1.

continued over whether Brigham’s tomb was new or old. This vehemence, in fact, raises the question of why reusing an old tomb would be considered transgressive or demeaning to the Father of English Poetry. Particularly “demeaning” is the notion that, as both Lethaby and Tanner (in a later publication) point out, Brigham was apparently being “cheap” when he

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translated Chaucer’s body.45 This, in turn, would cheapen Chaucer’s memory, now associated (as George Gilbert Scott puts it) with “an old tomb used up.”46 Clearly, the value of Chaucer is related to the amount of money that people were willing to spend on him. This equation of reverence for Chaucer with monetary value is not without its problems. As we have seen, in the case of Hoccleve, money can provide a kind of substitute for Chaucer because of the way that its corruptible body figures forth a symbolic, transcendent uncorrupted body. In this formulation, loss of the poet is supplemented by that which the material substance of money figures forth—the transcendent belief in money. Indeed, as Žižek suggests in his analysis of money and the body, it is the focus on what the body of money symbolizes that enables its sublimity: “this other body of money is like the corpse…which endures all torments and survives with its beauty immaculate.”47 If the association of Chaucer with monetary value buttresses his transcendent power, money can also be seen (as in the case of Dryden) as an attempt to reduce the transcendent concepts of poetry to a commodity commensurate with base materialism.48 It is this struggle to make sense of the monetary value of Chaucer’s corpse that leads to the fragmenting debates about Brigham’s translation. Lethaby and Tanner, I argue, are anxious about the extent to which a “cheap” tomb reveals the opposition between material and transcendent to be effectively breached. For, as we saw in Strohm’s discussion of counterfeiting, the idea that the material body may actually come to “infect” the transcendent realm occasions the loss of that transcendent body. What is at stake, then, is not merely the idealized prehistory of Protestant England, or even the appropriation of the body of Father Chaucer for Catholicism. More central to the national project is what is almost never discussed, the actual body of Chaucer itself. About as close as any of the commentators gets to the corpse is Lethaby, who links the translation of Chaucer’s corpse both to Mary’s realm and “some recent disturbance of the original grave.” If the tomb to which Chaucer was translated was “rifled” from another spot in the sixteenth century, then some other “original” dead body had to be moved from the “borrowed tomb,” so that Chaucer’s body could take its place. What all of these commentators are attempting to repress, in other words, is the display of the decaying body of the father—the results of which would have been all too apparent to a generation that had experienced the crisis of overfull cemeteries. This repression of the body in favor of other words like “reverent work,” “spirit,” and even “patriotism” is central to the maintenance of a symbolically transcendent body. This spiritual work, then, is opposed to what Hartshorne called “impious spoilation,” and the “sordid uses” to which other memorials were put. This particularly spiritual language might explain some curious comments by early twentieth-century interlocutors in the debate about the tomb. Katherine Esdaile, for instance, rounds out the public debate about the tomb: “It is surely inconceivable that Brigham, who paid such honours to the poet and himself wrote his epitaph, should have picked up a second-hand tomb for the purpose;

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and the analogy of the Northumberland tomb so happily quoted by Mr. Lethaby should surely knock this heresy on the head for ever.”49 Esdaile’s use of the word “heresy” was, I am certain, seen by early twentieth-century readers as precisely the kind of flip and witty response that so many other letter writers to the Times had employed. But her decidedly religious language picks up both on Charlotte Stopes’s earlier comment “that Brigham was a devout Catholic, and that he performed his work of reverence in the reign of the most Catholic queen,” and Dean Stanley’s association of the “centre of our national energies” with “the hearth of our national religion.”50 As Balibar suggests, to grasp the reasons why the state is able to fabricate a national consciousness, one needs to turn toward the analogy of religion. For it is within the transcendent notion of national filiation— a sense of numinal kinship or chosenness—that a concept of nationhood is founded. In the context of these discussions of the sanctified work of Brigham, the Englishness of Father Chaucer is passed down to his heirs. To focus on how tombs have been violated, on the discontinuity and decay of the body of the Father is to preach heresy— to call into question the reverence, continuity, and immortality to which a monument (like the Albert Memorial) should call attention. As Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us, this sepulchral signification is effective because it so peculiar.51 Though the Greek word for “sign” is the same as the Greek word for grave (sema), the grave was not merely “one sign among others. It was a sign that signified the source of signification itself, since it stood for what it stood in—the ground of burial itself. In its pointing to itself, or to its own mark in the ground, the sema effectively opened up the place of the ‘here.’”52 Such self-signification not only makes the grave a very special kind of signifier, but reveals that the strange presence of the corpse proceeds from the fact that signifier and signified are more or less one. The tomb, then, is not merely a monument which reminds the viewer of the dead person.53 In containing that which it gestures toward, it seems to collapse past and present, absence and presence, and hence enables a collapse of temporal distinctions. If, as we saw in the last chapter, “bones, and corpses” are symbolically effective because “they are indisputably there,” then what happens when a tomb like Chaucer’s cannot refer to itself?54 For the failure of this self-signification and its failure as a national monument we need to turn to the words which were supposedly written on Chaucer’s tomb itself—words which, if the tomb were reused, cannot in any sense be said to be Chaucer’s. In addition to “ii old verses” that ventriloquize Chaucer (I, Geoffrey Chaucer the bard, glory of my native poesy/ am buried in this sacred ground), there seems to be another kind of ghostly ventriloquism. In his notes (later printed by Thomas Hearne) John Bale not only gives a version of Brigham’s epitaph that we know existed on the monument, but adds: Super ejus Sepulchro, Si rogites, quis eram, forsan te fama docebit

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Quod si fama negat, Mundi quia gloria transit, Haec Monumenta lege.55 Over his Tomb If you ask who I was, perhaps fame will tell you which if fame denies, the glory of the world being transitory Read this monument. Bale reports seeing the inscription in 1562 (though his notes were not published until 1729), but both Pearsall and Dane ascribe the first transcription of these verses to either Camden (1600) or Speght (1602), over forty years after the tomb was erected. Yet soon after, the verses vanished. It is, of course, highly ironic that the writing on the tomb should wear out before the fame of the tomb’s occupant —giving the lie to the idea that writing (even in stone) will last longer than gloria mundi. But there is another irony hinted at here—the notion that the writing may not have referred to Chaucer at all. The mystery of whom the verses might have referred to is wrapped up with what ultimately happened to them. Both Speght and Camden (as well as those who follow them) report that the verses are around the top of the tomb. Speght goes on to say, “About the ledge of which tombe were these verses, now clean worn out.”56 In his analysis of the various quotations that were supposedly on the tomb, Dane demonstrates that there are three variants which determine the origin of the quotation. Speght’s version of the epitaph agrees with Bale’s in all three variants, so it is probable that even if Speght could not see the quotation (if in fact there was one) he was able to put together the content of the quotation either from Bale’s note, to which he might have had access, or (since Speght’s quotation is probably more trustworthy than Camden’s) the two might be using a single source. Aside from the heading “Super ejus Sepulchro,” (which might be seen in Speght’s explanation of where he thinks the verses are—“about the ledge”) there are only accidental differences between the two renderings of the epitaph. Interestingly enough, neither Camden nor Speght claims that he actually saw the epitaph. Recently this has led Joseph Dane to suggest that, “the verses above the ledge, if they existed at all, were probably on the ledge before the physical monument became ‘Chaucer’s Tomb’ in 1556, and were removed. Stated succinctly: the verses about the ledge of Chaucer’s tomb were never about the ledge of Chaucer’s tomb.”57 What Dane implies, I believe, is that the verses were originally meant to refer to someone else and thus that the tomb was not originally Chaucer’s because the verses were never actually on Chaucer’s original tomb. This is an intriguing thesis because it suggests not only that Dane believes the tomb was recycled, but that he believes that there was agency in making certain that any traces of the tomb’s former inhabitant were erased. This somewhat conspiratorial notion, born of ghost writing which two of the three most important witnesses (Camden and Speght) did not see, suggests the extent

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to which the theory of the rifled tomb continues to maintain its hold on the late modern imagination. Indeed, Derek Pearsall’s spirited defense of the “newness” of the tomb acquired by Brigham is especially intriguing in the ways that it calls up the debates of the early twentieth century. In other words, the notion that the body of Father Chaucer provided a locus of heimlich nationalism may continue to be disturbed by the uncanniness of the “ravished tomb” (even if it is a legend). These debates about the body, the tomb, and sepulchral stability (as we have seen) are bound up not only with modernist notions of poetic identity and source (a juxtaposition to which I will return), but also with modern ideas of the formation of a national cultural consciousness.

CHAPTER 4 Beautiful Tomb/Beautiful Text

The first question, as it seems to us which we are bound at once to ask or to answer, is—belongs he to the living or the dead? anonymous1 Writing, Jacques Derrida famously proclaimed, is a carrier of death because it replaces the utterance which requires the “self-presence in the breath” with a textual absence.2 Yet, as Walter Ong has argued, the writer’s text also acts as a surrogate for the author and thus ensures the immortality of the writer precisely because of its likeness to that which ultimately stands in for the dead writer—the tomb.3 I will argue that concerns about Chaucer’s tomb gave rise to an attempt to defeat the oppositions of death and life and absence and presence by its “restoration.” Ultimately troped as a national undertaking, this restoration of the tomb of the “Father of English Poesy” attempted to ensure the timelessness of England’s literary heritage and, by extension, the sublime nature of England herself. Yet even as the nineteenth century nurtured fantasies about the ability of memory to recover the authentic “Father,” the controversy over the “restoration” of the Chaucer memorial laid bare the contradiction at the heart of the memorial project that attended the recovery of Chaucer’s text. It highlighted the extent to which the memory of the father depended less on the restoration of already existing patrilineal bonds and more on the imagining of a history which never was. In Chaucer’s case, this imagined history was enabled by the disposition of the sepulchral sign, that which (as Harrison has suggested) signifies its own signification.4 The tomb erected in 1556, as we have seen, not only failed to mark the position of the original burial, but it was not the original marker. Ultimately, this “translation” of the body to a sixteenth-century tomb altered nineteenth-century perspectives toward the “marker.” But, initially, at least, the tomb had all the necromantic charm that we might expect of the “original” tomb. This is why, when the tomb began to decay—to fail to signify the coherent body that it stands for—it became a cause for some anxiety. Only forty-six years after Brigham translated Chaucer, Thomas Speght (the editor of the 1598 and 1602 editions of Chaucer) asserted that some of the verses

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on the tomb were “clean worne out.”5 But it was not really until the nineteenth century that concerns about the tomb really became anxieties. A certain L.G.W. calls attention to the fact that, by 1808, the entire monument that marked the resting place of the “first poet” itself was in a state of disrepair: “from the mutilated state of that [tomb] of our first Poet Chaucer, very few know the spot where he was interred; indeed the inscription is almost defaced, and the Monument has suffered much through neglect.”6 Some fourteen years later the first published call for the restoration of the tomb comes because (as Edward Brayley also notes a year later) the slab behind the tomb with the inscription on it had undergone so much decay and disintegration that the inscription was almost totally obscured.7 But, perhaps just as importantly, the writer complains that he “was much disappointed at the slight show of the monument of my old favorite Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English Poesy. I did expect, amoung other repairs and restorations, to have seen this tomb noticed, at least the inscription made legible, and the figure of the old Bard restored, which had been nearly obliterated; but it is at present merely coloured black, probably the restoration will follow; decency demands something should be done.”8 Phrases such as “old favorite,” “old bard” and “father of English Poesy” thrust Chaucer back into the past as something to be recovered or, as the writer puts it, “restored.” The fact that the inscription on the tomb is not Chaucerian is of little moment, perhaps because, like the figure of the old Bard, it nonetheless partially restores the loss of the poet by giving “notice” of the resting place of Chaucer. “Decency” is served, according to this writer, because an attempt is to be made to “re-père” the identity of the poet as “the father of English Poesy.” Despite these notices of the decay of the tomb, it was not until mid-century that any action was taken to fix the memorial. In 1846 A Historical Description of Westminster Abbey (a publication which was sold by the vergers in the Abbey) said of Chaucer’s tomb that “this has been a very beautiful monument in the Gothic style, but is now much defaced, and is generally passed over with a superficial glance, except by those who never suffer anything curious to escape their notice.”9 This rather elegiac description, that links lost beauty with the reduction of the monument to a curiosity, may give us some clue as to why attempts at restoration of the tomb really take off at mid-century. The prevailing opinion seems to have been that the “defaced” tomb was no longer able to signify (except to a very small audience) the resting place of (as the guide says) “the Father of English Poets.”10 The more general anxiety was that this memorial impermanence pointed to the impermanence of the nation itself. If the father of an entire tradition can be neglected, then what can his heirs lay claim to? This neglect led Samuel Shepherd, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, to propose to the Dean of Westminster Abbey that the tomb be restored. In a letter dated Feb. 7, 1850 Samuel Shepherd writes to Dean Buckland, apparently only to confirm arrangements that have already been made: Rev. and Dear Sir,

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Since I had the honour of an audience with you respecting the Tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer, I have seen Mr. Poole [mason at Westminster Abbey] twice— I have had a copy of his former estimate sent again, the expense will be about 12 or 13£ at most. In the Gentleman’s Magazine of this present month you will see a short extract from a letter I sent the Editor outlining the affair which I doubt not you will happily approve as an excellent way of quietly calling the attention of noblemen, gentlemen and those able and willing to forward this very interesting and I may perhaps add national undertaking. In addition to this I have written to the Earl of Ellesmere—[and] the Dean of St. Pauls who formerly used to take an interest in (and whom years back I had written) himself a poet, and a lover of ancient Poets [,] witness his Life of Tasso just finished! and some others—It is therefore possible you may receive a letter with subscriptions from some of them, as wishing all to be properly appropriated I have requested them to forward to you their subscriptions which would avoid trouble. There will not be many I fear but should there be enough for the purpose which I do not fear the object so long desired will be pleasantly done, and from the interviews I have had with Mr. Poole he seems to be very highly qualified to perform it well, and having already repaired many of the Abbey monuments of various kinds understands what he is about. With thanks for your kindness in writing to me, hearing me and paying so much attention to this national project of mine; amidst your numerous and important engagements.11 Shepherd’s repeated suggestion that this is a “national undertaking” is perhaps what stands out about this letter, for it suggests the extent to which an antiquary might identify Chaucer’s poetry as a national treasure and part of the British national identity because that reverence is embodied in the display of that which contains his body. In addition, though Shepherd lays claims to “this national project of mine” at the end of his letter, his project is ultimately inclusive, cutting across the lines which separate noblemen from gentlemen and gentlemen from “those able and willing to forward” the restoration. All those, in other words, who could pay could take part. I do not mean to suggest that Shepherd’s project was in any way radical. Indeed one might argue that it was a conservative desire to preserve the English past that led to the project. In addition, Shepherd’s plan to enlist the support of a lord and a clergyman in a gentleman’s project might be seen to represent a slightly altered version of the three estates. This reaffirmation of the feudal hierarchies, as Lee Patterson reminds us, was one of the great nostalgic projects of the nineteenth century—a project perhaps best represented in Sir John Manner’s poem England’s Trust:

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Each knew his place—king, peasant, peer or priest— The greatest owned connexion with least, From rank to rank the generous feeling ran, And linked society as man to man.12 Yet if Shepherd’s letter suggests that he too knew his place, his method, as we will see, was calculated to appeal to a popular audience and was undoubtedly based on such successful subscription ventures as the Camden and Surtees societies. As David Matthews has argued, these societies arose in response to more exclusive and aristocratic book clubs, such as the Roxburghe Club, which treated the past as its own private preserve and jealously kept any of the club’s literary reprints away from the general public.13 Though Shepherd’s subscribers came from both the Camden society and the Roxburghe Club (indeed a number of them belonged to both) he clearly has the notion that the past (in the form of Geoffrey Chaucer) is a national and hence public treasure. One might well ask what happens when the idea of a subscription series for a book is adapted to the restoration of a tomb? After all the subscribers would receive no material item like a book, so what was it that they were to receive? Part of the answer can be found in announcements and advertisements for the restoration of the tomb. Indeed the extract from The Gentleman’s Magazine, which Shepherd mentions, says, “let us gladly hasten to rescue from decay the tomb of the great father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer. Nicholas Brigham in the time of Queen Elizabeth [sic], from a love to the great poet’s memory, and ‘in the name of the Muses’ caused a monument to be erected. What is desired is, that this should be kept up and repaired; not altered.”14 What is emphasized here is that the project is one of preservation—the tomb should be “kept up” out of the same “love” of the poet’s memory that Brigham had. Further, the tomb, which was erected “in the name of the Muses” recalls the more spiritual sense of poetry as originating and issuing from Parnassus Hill. What the subscription series promises, then, is a conservation of a visible reminder of Chaucer and his poetry. The subscribers invest in a visible reminder of their love of the poet, which is, unlike the poet’s body, immortal and unchanging. To fail to “rescue from decay the tomb of the great father of English poetry” is to risk corrupting the memory of the “father” so that the tomb stands as a monument, not to the immortality of poetry, but to time’s ability to corrupt England’s literary heritage. It might seem, then, that part of the attraction of Shepherd’s subscription series could be linked to the attraction afforded by the antiquarian book clubs of the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact, Matthews argues that these clubs were an attempt by aristocrats (in Pierre Bourdieu’s words) “to master time” by possessing things from the past.15 Yet Shepherd’s project seems somewhat different from the collecting impulses of those aristocrats, whose acquisitions are signs of their leisurely approach to time. In fact, advertisements for the subscription which appear in the pages of The Gentleman’s Magazine, Notes and

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Queries, and in a separate handbill attempt to convey a sense of urgency rather than leisure (see figs. 5 and 6). At one point the language in the advertisement becomes positively martial: “The tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey stands in need of repair…. Such an announcement is calculated to stir every heart that can respond to the claims of poetry, or feel grateful for the delight which it affords to every cultivated mind. It summons us, like the sound of a trumpet, ‘To the rescue!’” Part of the reason for this martial tone is, of course, that the appeal is to a largely masculine audience (especially one sensitive to the demands of a “glorious” English imperialism). The first advertisement for the committee is, after all, in The Gentleman’s Magazine and the list of subscribers does not contain any names of women contributors (despite the appeal in the advertisement to “every heart.”)16 To trope the attempt to repair Chaucer’s tomb as a martial action also creates a homosocial bond between those who would soldier against time and elides the differences in social status which seem so apparent in the list of “Subscriptions Received.” One could, in fact, see an attempt on the part of the committee to democratize the appeal (hence strengthening the homosocial bonds between different classes) by having everyone from earl to lord to knight to gentleman initially give only five shillings —despite the fact that they could all afford much more. Certainly the language of the appeal seems more an attempt to create a sense of solidarity among a large and perhaps international group of like-minded men who (unlike those clubbish aristocrats who attempt to master time) may be unable to contribute more than five shillings. “It is thought that…multitudes of people in various conditions of life, and even in distant quarters of the globe, who venerate the name of Chaucer, and have derived instruction and delight from his works, will be anxious to contribute their mite to the good deed.” The evocation of Mark 12:41–43 here is not, I would argue, accidental, for the collected monies are given out of the “veneration” of the name of Chaucer—thus the project takes as its point of departure a love, perhaps even a spiritual love, which will be manifested in the renewal of the tomb of the father. Interestingly enough there seems to have been some jockeying for the honor of who first entertained the idea of restoring Chaucer’s tomb. In the first announcement of the plan to repair the tomb, one of the editors of The Gentleman’s Magazine (probably John Gough Nichols), says of the idea, “the suggestion is not new to us. We know that other persons have entertained the same views, and a proposal was very recently about to be made public for some repairs of a rather more extensive kind than Mr. Shepherd seems to contemplate. Mr. Shepherd is the first to put the subject forward in a tangible form. We hope it will not be lost sight of. We are ready to aid it in any way in our power.”17 Whether fair or not, behind this somewhat taciturn show of support seems to be a suspicion that Shepherd has stolen some “other person’s” thunder with a somewhat cobbled together proposal. If there was any lingering sense of ill will, however, it seems to have been quickly transformed into homosocial solidarity. The first official announcement

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Fig. 5. Recto page of a handbill (dated 1851) advertising the project to restore Chaucer’s tomb. Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

of the formation of the Committee to Repair Chaucer’s Tomb tells us that Shepherd and the other person (William John Thoms, also F.S.A. and founding editor of Notes and Queries) “have united in carrying out their joint object, and a Committee has been formed which has held its meetings under the roof of Sylvanus Urban [the fictional name of the editor of the periodical].”18 It also

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Fig. 6. Verso page of the handbill shown in Figure 5.

seems that despite the fact that Shepherd had already consulted extensively with Henry Poole, he was persuaded to accept Thoms’s larger project. As the magazine says, “A survey of the monument has proved that the repair is much more necessary and must be considerably more extensive than Mr. Shepherd at first anticipated. To do what is absolutely essential in a manner worthy of the father of English poesy will require a sum of nearly 100£.”19

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This alteration of the scope of the project may indicate some anxiety about the “worth” of the literary father. His descendents, of course, are attempting to compensate for his loss—a loss which they have contributed to in their failure to keep up the memorial. Though money could (as we saw in the last chapter) seem to be a crude and even threatening medium to repair loss, there were similarities between nineteenth-century attempts to repair the tomb and Hoccleve’s attempt to repair his loss of Chaucer. The project here is, of course, somewhat different. Hoccleve’s was a personal loss that he could attempt to repair through exchange with his ruler. To theorize the grounds of this exchange we might turn to JeanJoseph Goux’s analysis of money, which suggests that it is precisely money’s homologous relationship to the father that makes it the ideal medium to repair loss. As he puts it, just as “‘identification with the paternal totem’… is made possible only by the death of the real father who then takes up the position of the dead father, first fetishized and subsequently symbolized and idealized. In the same way, the commodity…in a development parallel at every turn to the emergence of the Father—becomes money, assuming the position first of a fetish, then of a symbol, of an idealized standard and measure of values.”20 Like Chaucer, the “dead father, who rules only provided that he is…expelled into transcendence,” money governs trans actions and is able to repair loss precisely because of its idealized or transcendent nature. Yet, there is more than money to connect Hoccleve’s fifteenth-century remembrance of the father with this nineteenth-century attempt to fix the tomb. Where we might find further resemblances between Hoccleve’s attempt to repair the loss of the poet and the committee’s attempt to repair the tomb is in the loss of the picture of Chaucer from the tomb itself. Though this picture—a kind of replacement for the sepulchral statue— had (by the nineteenth century) long since disappeared, one of the lay vicars of Westminster Abbey said that the figure could be made out as late as the end of the eighteenth century “by rubbing a wet finger over it.”21 As is evident from early representations of the figure, it was a full-length copy of some version of Hoccleve’s original picture in the Regement of Princes. I would argue that it originally served much the same purpose—ensuring not only that the name of Chaucer would remain, but that his likeness would corporealize him for anyone coming to the tomb.22 Indeed, the absence of the picture must have been felt, for in the same year that Poole announces the “discovery of the long-lost inscription of Chaucer” a window was installed above the tomb by Dean Stanley (see figs. 7 and 8).23 At the head of the window, in the middle of a sixfold tracery, is a medallion of Chaucer, which Stanley said was meant to supply the “loss” of the original portrait on the tomb.”24 In addition, Stanley actually uses the corporeal metaphor at the beginning of his description of the window: “The Memorial Window to Chaucer, immediately over his tomb is intended to embody his intellectual labor, and his position amongst his contemporaries.”25 Indeed, the central medallions portray Chaucer as a trusted civil servant “receiving a commission from Edward III to the Doge of Genoa, and his reception by the latter.”26 One might, in fact, see in

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this medallion a fantasy of homosocial affairs, in which Chaucer was engaged in national work, like those gentlemen who were to take up the mantle of repairing Chaucer’s tomb while the portraits at the base of the window show the pilgrims departing from the Tabard Inn and arriving at Canterbury. Chaucer is among the pilgrims, so the window reveals a nice balance between embodiments in the imaginative and political world. Frederick Furnivall’s Preface included an announcement of the Chaucer window in which he attributes the installation of the window to Stanley, “who for us renews the bond between London and Canterbury that Chaucer wove.”27 Like the connection between Genoa and London, Chaucer is described here as cementing bonds, not in this case between two countries, but between the seat of government and the seat of religion. Less easy to explain is the choice for the representations at the apex of the window. J.G.Waller, the designer of the window, could hardly have done worse in choosing to represent subjects from The Flower and the Leaf. As early as 1775 Thomas Tyrwhitt expressed doubt that the poem was Chaucer’s. But to the description of the window (supplied by Dean Stanley) Furnivall adds, “Mr. Bradshaw does not allow this poem to be Chaucer’s.”28 Skeat later argued that the great enthusiasm for the poem was due more to Dryden’s famous versification of it than to any evidence that Chaucer actually wrote it.29 Yet in this particular case I think that it is more than a matter of critics assigning it to Chaucer “merely because they like it”; rather, I would suggest that it fits beautifully with a national identity of Chaucer.30 In Stanley’s description of the window, he quotes from a modernization of the poem, “As they which honour the Flower, a thing fading with every blast, are such as look after beauty and worldly pleasure; but they that honour the Leaf, which abideth with the root, notwithstanding the frost and winter storms, are they which follow virtue and during qualities, without regard to worldly respects.”31 As Stanley suggests, this is a “moral poem,” but more than that, it is a poem about loss and impermanence. As such it readily speaks to the nineteenth-century construction of Chaucer. Beauty, in this paradigm, is seen to be worldly and thus unenduring, while virtue is constant and perhaps even otherworldly. This would imply that Chaucer’s poetry may be beautiful, but his moral qualities make him enduring. The poem, then, becomes a self-conscious epitaph about the tomb: for even as the beautiful tomb decays and the body passes away, something more sublime remains. This sublime residue can surely be communicated by the corporeality of the poet (visually by the portraits of Chaucer, or the picture of Chaucer among the pilgrims). But at the bottom of the window we are once again reminded of loss, for printed just below the lively rendering of the pilgrims are four lines from what Stanley calls the “Balade of Gode Counsaile,” now known as the poem “Truth.” We have seen that, until the late nineteenth century, the poem was taken to be the final words of the poet—a kind of Boethian consolation, with phrases like, “That thee is sent, receyve in buxomnesse; / The wrastling for this world asketh for a fall.”32 What these words are meant to make present, then, is the poet on his death bed passing on his poetic wisdom. This wisdom, of course,

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Fig. 7. A pre-war photograph of the Chaucer Window (to the left, just above Chaucer’s tomb). The window was destroyed by a bomb blast in 1940. Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

transcends death, not so much because the wisdom is made visible in the beautiful window (Stanley surely understood the impermanent nature of glass), but because it is able, like the leaf, to embody “virtue and during qualities.” Like those manuscripts and printed editions of Chaucer, then, the tomb and the commemorative window reveal a kind of paradox. They are the embodiments of the dead poet which make him present; at the same time they demonstrate the fragile nature of these embodiments and the fragility of the attempts to restore the corruptible and impermanent corporeal shell. The Beautiful Text 1868 was not only the year that the Chaucer window was installed and that the announcement of the discovery of the long-lost inscription of Chaucer was made

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Fig. 8. A photo-litho of the Chaucer Window, which was installed above Chaucer’s Tomb in 1868. Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

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(see below), but it was also the year that F.J.Furnivall began the great textual work of the Chaucer Society. As if to punctuate the coincidence, Furnivall publishes an account of the window in his A Temporary Preface to the Six Text Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The reason for this coincidence, I would argue, is that the two projects shared a common interest in making the corporeality of the poet manifest. Certainly Furnivall feels the loss of the poet’s body, as he later outlines in his edition of Edward II’s Household and Wardrobe Ordinances: “As we delight to see, to know our Tennyson, Ruskin, Huxley, of today, and get their looks, their tones, their little special ways, into our eyes and ears and hearts, to hear from an old schoolfellow or college friend, all their history, so we desire to realize to ourselves, so far as may be, the looks and life, the daily work and evening task, of the Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, who’ve left us in the body, but are with us in the spirit, friends of our choicest hours, guides in our highest flights.”33 In her insightful essay on reading communities of Chaucer, Stephanie Trigg reads this passage in the larger context of what might be called a poetics of affinity, in which poets and editors lay claim to a spiritual identification with Chaucer in order to authorize their own work.34 Underlying this spiritual identification, however, is a profound nostalgia for the body. Chaucer may be with us in spirit, but Furnivall desires “to see, to know… to hear,” just as he is able to with those who are bodily with him. Furnivall’s sensual embodiment of the poet would seem at first to be quite different from the visual project of representing Chaucer in the window or on the tomb, but his own characterization of the reparation of Chaucer’s text is notable for its use of visual metaphors: For above three centuries and a half, to the disgrace of our nation, the works of the second greatest poet of our country, the fourth greatest of the world, were left half-smothered by a heap of spurious poems and prose which rendered impossible a clear view of the poet’s life and progress in poetical power, and made men attribute to him many works infinitely below the height of his genius.35 His greatest work, the Canterbury Tales, was also left contradictory in plan and execution, defaced by spurious insertions, structureless, and misunderstood. But this state of things, I am happy to say, my Chaucer Society has changed, or is changing. With the help of honoured fellow-workers, I have cleared the shams from the gallery of Chaucer’s works, have set the true pictures in their right order of time, and arranged his best in the sequence of compartments in which he painted it, so that at length the blossom, the ripe fruit, and (alas!) the dying leaves, of his genius can be seen in their true state, and men induced to honour and love him as they should.36 The anxieties that drive the project are much like those that inspired subscription for the restoration of Chaucer’s tomb, in that there is a concern that the artifact by which we memorialize Chaucer is “defaced…contradictory in plan and

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execution.” In other words, it appears architecturally incoherent or “structureless.” Furnivall’s plan has been to “clear the shams” and thus reveal the works which were “half smothered by a heap of spurious poems” just as the committee sought to uncover, in some sense, Chaucer—or at least the tomb that contained his body.37 This language of purification gives way to the language of the museum, as Chaucer’s works are constructed as a kind of chronological exhibit—the whole of which will be able to unveil the development of Chaucer’s “genius.” What remains unclear here is how the arboreal perception of Chaucer’s development (from blossom to dying leaves) will induce men “to honour and love him as they should.” At least this refrain remains unclear until we remember Stanley’s words about The Flower and the Leaf. But here, the “during” leaf seems to die, like the flower of beauty. This sense of loss accents the suggestion that the appreciation of beauty and loss are preconditions to the reestablishment of a poetical presence. We also may get a hint as to why Furnivall focuses on the chronology of Chaucer’s development in his chatty conclusion to this description of the Chaucer Society’s successes: “By this work too, I have made plain, that the humourful bright time of Chaucer’s merry Tales was preceded by a long sad early manhood of hopeless and disappointed love, which adds to the pathos of his memory, and shows why in his younger days he wrote of the widowed John of Gaunt, the jilted Troilus, the forsaken Anelida, and other victims of Inconstancy’s wandering will.”38 Furnivall seems to claim here that we inherit an accurate or “true” picture of Chaucer’s emotional life when we reconstruct the chronology of his works. Chaucer becomes even closer to us because we understand his pain and admire his recovery into “merriness” just as we suffer sadness at Chaucer’s loss and joy at the recovery of Chaucer in the work of the Chaucer Society. The difference between this construction of Chaucer’s life and the picture on the tomb, or the picture on the Chaucer window is that, according to Furnivall, it is a self-portrait which, with a bit of work, can be made clear. Once we see Chaucer clearly, Furnivall affirms, we will love, honor and sympathize with him. The affective response that makes this love and honor possible seems to be a pathos which proceeds from a memorial reconstruction of the poet’s work. It is a mark of how successful Furnivall thought this strategy was that, when outlining his methodology for the New Shakspeare Society (as he called it), Furnivall falls back on his experience with Chaucer’s corpus: “Unless a man’s works are studied in the order in which he wrote them, you cannot get at a right understanding of his mind, you cannot follow the growth of it. This has been specially brought home to me by my work at Chaucer. Until I saw that his Pity was his first original work, the key of his life was undiscovered.”39 Furnivall says here that he attempts to get at “the right understanding of his mind” just as earlier he suggested that, spiritually, the great poets are still with us. But, to paraphrase what Judith Butler has said about the discourse of the soul, the spirit or mind here seems to be “a figure of interior psychic space inscribed on the body as a social signification that perpetually renounces itself as such.”40 The

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immaterial—mind, soul—is insistently invoked by Furnivall in his attempt to make Chaucer materially present. His attempt to commune with the poet might be seen as an extension of Dryden’s claim to being a “congenial soul.” For both Furnivall and Dryden such otherworldly aspects of the poet promise access to an essence which transcends the material. Yet it is the discourse of the body to which Furnivall ultimately has recourse. Such inscriptions can be read by Furnivall just as Chaucer’s audience can read his works. These attempted displacements of the corporeal only reinforce what Furnivall strives for—a denial of the passage of time itself. There is, in Furnivall’s thinking, no insurmountable temporal distance between editor and poet. This may be why he keeps insisting on uncovering the true chronology of the poet’s works and life. His delivery of a past chronology into the present is an attempt to embody Chaucer himself in his works. This ideal allows us to know Chaucer from the inside out, for, as Furnivall puts it, “he has written himself in his books, if ever writer has, and we know the man from soul to skin.”41 Justifying his “reading” of Chaucer by collapsing writer and writing, body and book, Furnivall is able to deny the loss of Chaucer by maintaining control of or even fetishizing Chaucer. Henry Bradshaw, who might be called the motivating force behind the Chaucer Society, embodied Chaucer in a somewhat different way.42 When Furnivall and Bradshaw had something of a nasty exchange about the way Chaucer’s work would be published, Bradshaw’s language reveals the extent to which they remained at loggerheads over how to make Chaucer present: Dear Furnivall, Thanks for your letter and its enclosures—The skeleton is admirably done if you had but gone a little further. Not having any definite view as a reason for your subdividing I suppose it doesn’t matter to you; but if your object were, as mine is, to see how they [the Tales and the links] were actually written, with a view of seeing how the work may be partially reconstructed, you would see that the three most important subdivisions are ignored in your scheme… When you determined to start a Chaucer Society, you remember we discussed the way of printing. You were for doing what you still insist upon doing, printing the copies parallel. I urged what I considered the only rational way, printing a manuscript as it stands, only with all the divisions and subdivisions marked. Once break up the work into its 47 pieces, and give a skeleton in which every one of these parts has been numbered, & you have only to go through a MS. and take down the order in which the pieces come & and you are master of the subject.43 Of course Bradshaw does not mean the same thing as we do when he speaks of being “master of the subject,” but in Bradshaw’s letter there is an element of mastery and control which any creator might expect to exercise over his subject. In fact, Bradshaw emphasizes the Shelleyan implications of rebuilding the

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“skeleton” of the work when he takes issue with Furnivall’s idea of parallel printing. Bradshaw’s notion is that the individual editor must attempt to reconstruct the product of individual “genius” in order to get at what “was actually written.” Furnivall’s notion, on the other hand, is “to interest a large circle of men…in Chaucer” by providing parallel versions of the best manuscripts available so that they can decide what is Chaucer’s and what is not.44 Like the more widespread appeal of the committee to repair the tomb, Furnivall’s notion is to involve several classes in the appreciation of Chaucer’s work.45 Bradshaw’s adamant proposal that the manuscripts be reprinted might, of course, be seen as privileging these aesthetically pleasing coterie productions because it disables the idea of “every man his own editor.” Thus we might see him as advocating a less democratic approach to editing than Furnivall’s.46 Yet, as we saw above, Furnivall was not immune to the notion of the beautiful, elite text. Indeed, in one instance the aesthetics of completion dictated what texts he would include in his Chaucerian project. Furnivall, of course, admitted that (as Tyrwhitt put it), “the Tales as a whole were ‘left imperfect’…and that their ‘defects and inconsistencies… can only be accounted for on the supposition that the work was never finished by the Author.’”47 But there is no doubt that this “incompletion” rankled Furnivall mostly because the incompletions and the inconsistencies that result were used to excoriate the poet. Much of the Preface, in fact (some thirty pages), is used to clear “Chaucer from having made the tremendous mess of his work that Editors’ and writers’ want of care has attributed to him.” Furnivall’s response to those who wish to say that Chaucer made a mess of things is that “it is much more gratifying to human nature to write your author down ‘ass,’ than yourself.”48 To repair this “mess” Furnivall sets out the most probable “Scheme of the Order of the Canterbury Tales, and the Halting- and Sleeping-Places of the Pilgrims on their Journey to Canterbury with Chaucer.”49 The tremendous work in laying out the scheme (with its acceptance of the Bradshaw shift) is “not done in order to keep our work to ourselves; but in order that Chaucer’s words may be more studied, his memory cleared from unjust blame, and he more loved and honoured by ever-widening circles of readers.”50 The connections between the memorial restoration of Chaucer’s works here and the restoration of Chaucer’s memorial are, in some sense, evident. Like those “gentlemen” who wished to restore Chaucer’s tomb and claim that it was “authentic,” or who installed a window to repair the loss of Chaucer’s picture on the tomb, Furnivall is not only poised to lay claim to a praiseworthy, and, in some sense, complete Chaucer. He also wishes to lay claim to an “authentic” Chaucer. And this, I think, is where two competing impulses of beauty and authenticity get him in some trouble, particularly in his dependence on one manuscript.

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Lansdowne 851 and the Construction of a “Chaucerian” Text In the Preface Furnivall quotes a letter from John Earle (the Editor-designate of the Oxford edition of Chaucer’s works), in which Earle says of Lansdowne 851 “we are in possession of the real and palpable words of Chaucer…we look upon the veritable text of Chaucer with hardly a film of interposed modification. The Lansdowne is, indeed, full of varieties, and those of a very strongly-marked character; but they are hardly of a nature to raise a question about the original text of the poet. They seem to me to be provincial work.”51 Earle’s letter, quoted with approbation by Furnivall, at once affirms the great project of the Chaucer Society to recover Chaucer’s texts, and calls into question one of the more puzzling decisions that Furnivall made in his choices of which manuscripts to print. Ultimately, I will argue, Furnivall’s choices came down to a series of judgements about the pleasingness of completeness. It is to these choices and the manuscript that occasioned it that I would like to turn to illustrate how the aesthetic comes into conflict with and supplements the arguments about the genuiness of the Chaucerian corpus—an argument that will eventually circle back on questions of how Chaucer should be monumentalized. Except for Harley 7334, no Chaucerian manuscript in the mid-nineteenth century had a better reputation than Lansdowne 851. Thomas Wright collated Lansdowne with Harley for his “best text edition” of 1847–51; Richard Morris used it (along with 7334 and others) in his 1866 edition; and, of course, Furnivall reprinted it with five other texts in his six-text edition. Yet, in narrating his reasons for choosing Lansdowne 851 as one of the six texts to be printed by the Chaucer Society, Furnivall was curiously ambivalent. He says in his Temporary Preface to the Six-Text Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “For the other three MSS for our Society, I had then to turn to public Libraries; and with the desire of choosing, if possible, one from each of our great stores of MSS, London, Cambridge, and Oxford, I selected temporarily the Lansdowne 851, from the British Museum.”52 This geographical approach to manuscript choice ultimately created problems for Furnivall. For here he outlines his doubts about the choice of this last MS, and later says, “I wished to find another to substitute for the Lansdowne MS from the British Museum.”53 He looks at and rejects Barlow 20 and then turns to Arch. Seld. B. 14, “but as the readings of Arch Seld. B. 14 were poor in many places,” he says, “I did not feel justified in throwing over the Lansdowne MS for it.”54 On the next page of his Preface, however, he narrates further his misgivings about the MS, finally declaring “Had I known as much of it as I do now, I should have tried harder for a substitute for it.”55 Modern editors might well agree that he should have tried harder, for though Lansdowne 851 is one of the earliest manuscripts containing Chaucer’s works, Manly and Rickert dismiss it as an “inaccurately copied and…much edited” text. If one is looking for an example of the influential c text, most scholars argue, one would be better off with Corpus Christi 198 (a MS also printed in Furnivall’s Six-

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Text Edition), which is not only produced from the same set of exemplars, but is earlier and seemingly more conservative. The Lansdowne manuscript is not only later and somewhat carelessly copied, but it also contains a full set of spurious links between the tales, which, being unique to the manuscript, strongly suggest that its editor invented “Chaucerian” texts where there were none before. Why then did Furnivall choose Lansdowne? Though he did not have the benefit of Manly-Rickert, he well understood the problems with Lansdowne—he knew, for instance, that the Tale of Gamelyn (included in Lansdowne) was, as he put it, “no more [Chaucer’s] than it is mine,” and that, appearances in Lansdowne notwithstanding, Chaucer left the Squire’s Tale unfinished. But Furnivall comments that “its provincialisms and mistakes do not offend me, at least, no more than [do] those of [Cambridge Dd. 4. 24],” another MS that he considered publishing instead of Lansdowne.56 One reason that he was unwilling to substitute the Cambridge manuscript for a manuscript that was deposited in London is, we have seen, his plan to have a representative manuscript from Cambridge, Oxford, and London. But Donald Baker postulates another reason for Furnivall’s desire to publish Lansdowne. Baker asserts that “it must be admitted that perhaps its great beauty played a part, too”57 Lansdowne is indeed a handsome manuscript. Even while denigrating its faults, Charles Owen avers that it has “perhaps the most impressive opening page of any of the manuscripts.”58 Part of the beauty, for Furnivall, would undoubtedly have been the portrait of Chaucer that exists on the opening page. As we have already seen, a visual representation of the poet would have appealed to Furnivall, as it would present a picture of the poet’s “little special ways, into our eyes.” Furnivall, of course, was not the only critic who delighted in visual representations of the poet. We have already seen the importance of the representation of “the old Bard” on Chaucer’s tomb, and the window above it commissioned to “make good the loss” of the picture. In addition, Pater’s supposed comment about the frontispiece of Thomas Speght’s 1598 The Workes of Our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, “this portrait…has as much within it as a vast number of the so-called commentaries of the Bible,”59 might be seen as a confirmation of Furnivall’s notion that the look of the poet, “the physical representation” gives rise to an understanding of his corpus. This mediumistic quality of the look of the poet is also translated into an ability not only to “understand” the text, but also to reproduce something like it. Indeed, at various times, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Morris, and Richard Dixon were all said to look like the Hoccleve portrait of Chaucer.60 This supposed resemblance is undoubtedly, as Caroline Spurgeon has asserted, “a sign of the enthusiasm of the Pre-Raphaelites for Chaucer,” but it also speaks to a particular strain of medievalism in the nineteenth century, in which Victorian intellectuals and artists indulged themselves in producing, reproducing, and commenting on likenesses of the poet.61 As Kathleen Biddick has put it in a slightly different context, such practices suggest an “‘economics of the mind’ (as Freud

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designated it), a melancholy…that is, they concentrated, not on the disturbing lost object…but on a sense of loss that they articulated.”62 This melancholia ensured that “the corpse must remain dead, in its place the corpse; one must at all times be assured of this. It must not return, nor be allowed to return and with it the dream of the lost object.”63 In this formulation the Pre-Raphaelites actually resist recuperating Chaucer by providing a series of likenesses which continually point to the loss of the poet; presumably this frees the Pre-Raphaelites to produce their own version of Chaucer. In terms of Chaucer’s corpus, then, these likenesses might seem to culminate in the production of the 1896 Kelmscott Chaucer, which, though it would never be mistaken for an “original” pretends to point back to the coterie products of manuscript culture. This pretension indulges freely in a kind of editorial aesthetics because what is striven for is only a likeness, a nostalgic version of the past rather than what one might term an “authentic” similitude. Furnivall cannot be accused of producing anything like Kelmscott, yet his own interest in beauty does implicate him in a suspect editorial principle which looks increasingly like that of the Pre-Raphaelites. Beauty, of course, would hardly seem to be the criteria by which to choose an authentic manuscript. In fact, one might well assert that the beauty of a manuscript is inversely proportional to how much it can be trusted. The attempt to create a deluxe MS often leads scribes and editors to paper over inconsistencies and render unfinished texts (which will leave ugly visual gaps) complete. Yet, it was one of Furnivall’s desiderata that “for the society complete MSS were wanted,” and he rejected a number of manuscripts because they either did not contain all the tales, had lost leaves, or (one suspects) because they “seemed” incomplete.64 In addition, the rise of Ellesmere might be linked to a review of Wright’s edition, in which the manuscript is picked out for notice not only because the text is purportedly “older” and “purer,” but because the volume has “elaborate illuminations.”65 This pre-modernist notion of completion, then—with its promise of wholeness and presence rather than “authentic” fracturedness and absence—may have led early editors to reenact fifteenth-century attempts to render Chaucer present by privileging those early manuscripts that seemed to contain more that was Chaucerian in them, even if it was not quite Chaucer. This desire to add to the Chaucer corpus in order to make it “more complete” naturally came under attack from those who wished to purge Chaucer’s works of such spurious additions. T.R.Lounsbury, for example, draws a comparison between the monumentalization of the poet in his works and his tomb. The literary monument to Chaucer’s memory, so far as it was represented by his collected writings, began in time to assume something of the nature of a cairn, upon which all who had the opportunity felt it a duty, or looked upon it as a pleasure, to cast a stone. It rose steadily, in consequence, to huger proportions. Everybody interested in the man tried to furnish his offering from the material, no matter how rugged or ragged, which had

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drifted down from the past. Many of these contributions naturally added to the magnitude rather than to the impressiveness of the memorial.66 Lounsbury’s argument is interesting to the extent that it does not abandon a recourse to aesthetics. Instead, it echoes Furnivall’s earlier comments about the “clearing of the shams” which essentially bury Chaucer. Those interested in memorializing the poet have, perhaps out of good impulses, deposited works that are not beautiful (“rugged or ragged”) into the corpus. Hence the memorial has lost the ability to “impress,” precisely because of the misguided attempts to “complete.” John Stow and the Purification of Chaucer The person who becomes the cynosure for questions of canonicity and bodily location is John Stow. Antiquarian, purported beggar and, not incidentally, Catholic, John Stow is perhaps best known for his 1561 edition of Chaucer, which added some seventeen works to the Chaucer canon. But he also helped Thomas Speght compile his 1598 and 1602 editions of Chaucer—a relationship that begins the process of calumniating Stow. As we saw above, the midsixteenth century connection between Chaucer’s body and his corpus here would seem to be based mostly on negative evidence. Stow did not comment on the translation of Chaucer to Brigham’s tomb probably because it would be politically inexpedient in the reign of the Protestant Elizabeth to point out that Queen Mary had been able to appropriate the poet’s body for her own purposes. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, it became known that Stow had cast doubt on the original resting place of the medieval poet. This “mistake” as well as the fact that Stow was responsible for the attribution of a number of spurious works to the Chaucer canon enabled later editors to cast themselves as positive versions of the sixteenth-century antiquary and thus to legitimate their ability to purify the Chaucer canon by opposing themselves to Stow: they, unlike Stow, could locate both physically and metaphysically where Chaucer “was.” In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the last great “purification” of Chaucer’s corpus was taking place. While this process can be traced back to 1775, when Tyrwhitt went a long way toward establishing the “genuine” canon of Chaucer’s works, doubts about several of the works remained. In 1869, for instance, John Ruskin had planned to publish an edition of the spurious Chaucer’s Dream (now known as the Isle of Ladies) with, as he says, “no doubt at all expressed of its genuineness.”67 Being forestalled by Furnivall’s Temporary Preface (in which Furnivall expressed strong doubts about the “Dreme, Flower & Leaf, Goodly Ballade, and Praise of Women”),68 Ruskin writes to thank Furnivall, claiming, “had this come out, I should never have got over it in literary disreputation.”69 If Furnivall’s project was, as he put it, to “clear the shams,” one could argue here that Furnivall seeks to reenact Brigham’s project of translation by exhuming Chaucer’s literary corpus. After all, he suggests that

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the only way to “see” the life of the poet is to uncover the poet’s works which were “left half-smothered.” Further, he suggests that if we do not uncover the true corpus now, then spurious works will not only obscure our vision of the poet, but will encourage the continuing addition of spurious works which only further occult the poet’s “true” life and lead to a kind of false nachleben. In putting forth his idea that Chaucer’s works would show the true character and even the life of the man, Furnivall is essentially paraphrasing what Thomas Tyrwhitt had said about the addition of spurious works to the canon by the sixteenth-century editor John Stow, “it would be a waste of time to sift accurately the heap of rubbish which was added, by John Stowe, to the Edit. of 1561.”70 John Stow had by this time become something of a figure of fun for adding so many works of dubious authority to the Chaucerian canon.71 And, indeed, Stow’s additions to William Thynne’s canon suggest that there was some reason for Stow’s dubious reputation as an editor. Yet, as Anne Hudson has pointed out, Stow certainly understood that William Thynne’s edition (the basis for his own edition) itself contained apocryphal material. In addition, Stow probably did not regard all of the poems that he added to the canon as of equal authenticity. She concludes, “it is possible that the hostility to Stow shown by such critics as Tyrwhitt has been too raucous.”72 It is this possibility, as well as the reason for it, that I would like to explore. For Stow was not only roundly criticized because he added doubtful works to the Chaucerian corpus, he also came under fire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for a suggestion he made about the location of Chaucer’s tomb. Robert Bell’s 1854 edition, for instance, claims that “he [Chaucer] is said by some writers to have been buried in the Cloisters, and afterwards removed to the Chapel, but this statement is shown to be erroneous by Caxton.”73 Though this statement here supposedly originates with the martyrologist John Foxe, it would nonetheless ultimately be attributed to John Stow, who, perhaps having misinterpreted Foxe’s assertion that Chaucer “lyeth buried not far from the doore leading to the cloyster,” reported that Henrie Scogan, a learned poet, [lies] in the cloister. Geffrey Chaucer, the most famous poet of England, also in the cloister, 1400; but since Nicholas Brigham, gentleman, raised a monument in the south cross aisle of the church. His works, were partly published in print by William Caxton in the reign of Henry VI., increased by William Thinne, Esquire, in the reign of Henry VIII., corrected and twice increased through mine own painful labours, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, to wit, in the year 1561; and again beautified with notes by me collected out of divers records and monuments, which I delivered to my loving friend Thomas Speght; and he having drawn the same into a good form and method, as he also explained the old and obscure words, & c., hath published them in anno 1597.74

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Stow’s movement here from discussions of the disposition of Chaucer’s body to comments about the disposition of Chaucer’s work would seem to suggest that Stow sees himself and Brigham as coeditors of “Chaucer,” both of whom, in some sense, monumentalize the medieval poet. It may, in fact, have been this assertion that fed some of the later hostility toward Stow. For Stow’s claim that Brigham raised a monument to Chaucer, and his co-claim, that Chaucer was buried in the cloister, were read not only as an assertion that Chaucer’s body was not in Brigham’s “monument,” but also raised the suspicion that Chaucer was not in the works that we possessed. In this context, it becomes clearer why Bell’s edition would take issue with the idea that Chaucer was originally buried in the cloister. A note in the edition relates that “the statement of the erection of a tomb earlier than that placed over the grave by Mr. Brigham is not entitled to credit.”75 Bell’s clear investment in the new tomb as the original resting place of Chaucer recalls remarks made only a few years earlier that were made to support the appeal for the restoration of the tomb. Bell wants to uncover the “original” works of Chaucer, just as those who wished to “restore” the tomb wanted to make certain that the tomb was indeed “original.” Yet much like those earlier assertions that Dryden was buried in Chaucer’s grave and that Chaucer was translated from the grave, there was in the 1850s a kind of concordia discors that the “authentic” Chaucer could be found and that Chaucer needed to be restored in order to be “authentic.” The gap between these two ideas was bridged, of course, by the editorial methods of the Chaucer Society, as ideas of restoration began to outstrip ideas of monumentalization. In many ways, such notions of editorial activism might be seen as an acknowledgement that “restoration” was more than the clearing away of the historical detritus which blocked our view of the poet. This acknowledgement that editorial activism has a place in restoring Chaucer’s works finds its most important expression in what Ker calls “the first critical text of Chaucer,” W.W.Skeat’s The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.76 One of Skeat’s most enduring achievements (as A.S.G. Edwards points out) was to purge the canon of spurious works. Unsurprisingly, then, he has especially harsh words for John Stow. Perhaps enlarging on Tyrwhitt’s “heap of rubbish” comment he says, “the remaining [spurious] pieces…were simply pitchforked into the volume because Stow had access to the MS. which contained them.”77 At the same time, however, Skeat acknowledges that the editor of Chaucer also had to have a positive effect on the canon and text of the poet. Hence he argues for the inclusion of a number of poems in the Chaucer canon that had not hitherto been seen as Chaucer’s. Some of these, like “To Rosemounde,” have entered the canon. Others, such as “Against Women Unconstant” (a poem first published by John Stow) have not had as happy a history.78 Skeat’s editorial activism—or intuitive editorialism—extended to treatments of Chaucer’s text. As Eleanor Hammond puts it, “Skeat has not devoted to the MSS such examination as Morell or Tyrwhitt made, and his editorial procedure, a century or more after Tyrwhitt, is guided by the erroneous supposition that the true Chaucerian readings may be picked out intuitively.”79

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It is, then, both a sense of nostalgia for the old historical work and anxiety about this editorial activism which drives twentieth-century attacks on Stow. For, oddly enough, the controversy about Stow’s role in “increasing” Chaucer’s works, along with Stow’s speculations about the location of the grave, flare up again at the beginning of the new century—at precisely the time when the work of the Chaucer Society was finished and when the canon of the poet was more or less established. In 1902 John Hales writes in the Athenaeum there is no corroboration to be found anywhere for this placing Chaucer’s first interment in one of the cloister walks, and there is evidence that, far from corroborating is directly contradictory. We have no explanation at present to offer of this error—as certainly it can be shown to be—and might be content to remark of its maker, ‘interdum dormitat.’ But perhaps it may be noticed that other contributions of Stow to our knowledge of Chaucer and his writings have not met with final acceptance—have, in fact, been summarily rejected.80 This unrelenting attack on Stow’s ideas about the original gravesite (particularly the suggestion that, to put it mildly, Stow was nodding), enabled as it is by Stow’s reputation as an editor who would accept virtually anything into the canon, suggests that the actual location of the body and the more metaphysical location of the canonical “Chaucer” are in some ways linked: to misconstrue one is to misconstrue the other. Though Stow occasionally had his supporters, the larger mass of scholars continued to use Stow as a whipping boy.81 Not only was there another exchange about the location of the gravesite in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement in 1929 (which once again painted Stow as untrustworthy), but Tyrwhitt’s “heap of rubbish” comment runs through Eleanor Hammond’s bibliographic manual like a mantra: it is repeated at least nine times.82 So too, Skeat, even as he championed a number of dubious Chaucerian poems, attacked Stow for printing “a miscellaneous collection of Middle-English pieces of various dates…as being ‘certaine workes of Geffray Chauser,’ without paying any regard to their contents or style.”83 And Thomas R.Lounsbury gives perhaps the most ungenerous account of Stow’s disastrous effect on the establishment of the canon. The character of most of these additions [to the Chaucer canon], however, was not such as to inspire confidence in the intelligence or the taste of the man who had rescued them from the oblivion into which they had fallen. John Stow was, indeed, what our fathers used to call a ‘painful antiquary.’ Unfortunately, his judgment bore little proportion to his pains. Still, the pieces he added were received without much question, and have in some instances come to play an important part in the biography and literary estimate of the poet.84

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One can hardly miss the heavily ironic tone of the final sentence, as Lounsbury seems to suggest that far from having no effect, Stow’s “contributions” had for many years completely obscured whatever accurate picture of the poet and his works readers might have had. Lounsbury’s comments here recall Furnivall’s project of literary exhumation; yet one might well ask why, at such a late date, the negative influence of Stow’s sixteenth-century musings is so insisted upon. Part of the answer is that Stow provides a negative image against which other editors and critics can define themselves and mask their own anxieties about stirring up the poet’s corpus. Hence, it is no accident that the “heap of rubbish” comment is repeated so often. Even if Tyrwhitt is not the first editor to “trash” Stow, he is considered the first great modern editor of Chaucer, and it is clear that among nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics there is a kind of poetics of identification with that eighteenth-century editor. Of course, this begs the question of why these editors and critics felt such a need to identify with Tyrwhitt. What anxiety, in other words, led these later scholars to “need” to slander the long dead Stow with the words of Tyrwhitt? One answer, I think, can be found in the early twentieth-century discussions of Stow’s location of Chaucer’s body. In adding works to the canon and multiplying the possible resting places of the poet’s body, Stow is seen to create multiple Chaucers at precisely the point when these editors and scholars are seeking a singular, original Chaucer. They do so by creating a negative version of themselves onto which they can project their potential deficiencies as scholars. This editor/ compiler is injudicious and even slow. These latter day editors are by contrast wise and quick witted. What is so telling about the excoriation of Stow is the extent to which his cluelessness about the location of Chaucer’s body and his inability to discriminate between “authentic” and “inauthentic” Chaucerian texts are brought together. Stow, then, really embodies the secret anxiety that editors do not have the authentic Chaucer. It is no accident that many of these condemnations of Stow are contained in early twentieth-century discussions of the dislocations and even uncertainties about the location(s) of Chaucer’s body. The insistence on the fallibility of Stow hides the great fear that editors are perhaps more like Stow than they know. To return to Lounsbury’s connection of text and tomb, the magnitude of the literary “monument” may seem to be impressive, but there is no guarantee at this late date that it is actually constituted of Chaucer’s authentic writings. All we really have (since we do not have a holograph) is what scribes and editors (like the Lansdowne-compiler or Stow) tell us that we have. How, finally, can one tell what an injudicious or “unscrupulous” scribe or editor has added or subtracted? The difficulty of Lounsbury’s metaphorical linkage between sepulture and the literary monument might be better understood when we realize that, for Lounsbury, the monument does not so much memorialize Chaucer as threaten to bury him. The ambivalence is contained in the word “sepulture” itself. It is at once something that marks the place of the burial and the act of burial itself. The

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problem for Lounsbury is that, in the slippage between tomb and text, it becomes apparent that the real slippage is between the work of the monument and “authentic” memory. As Russ Castronovo recalls, the word monument comes from monere which means not only “to remind” but “to instruct.”85 The function of a monument is not to “prompt independent musings on the past,” rather it is to consolidate various rememberings into one coherent and communal remembering.86 Thus scholars such as M.H.Bloxham can claim that Chaucer’s “works are the most fitting memorial of his fame” (even as he searches for Chaucer’s “authentic” tomb); but the establishment of these works as a monument makes them vulnerable to the same pressures to which the monument itself is subject.87 Hence, even a canonically suspect work like The Flower and the Leaf is transformed into a kind of Chaucerian monument (embodied in glass) precisely because it can “instruct,” or because, as Stanley puts it, it has a “moral.”88 This tension between “authentic” recovery and monumentalism is reflected in the opposition between preservation and renovation which governs proposals for the tomb. What is compelling is the way that this need for preservation quickly gives way to a desire for renovation. We get a clue about the more radical impulses of the Committee to Repair Chaucer’s Tomb from the aforementioned John Gough Nichols, who was not only coeditor of The Gentleman’s Magazine, and a cofounder of the Camden Society, but a member of the committee: In the proposed work of restoration it may be well to renew the entire design of Brigham, not as being a composition of high art, but as a familiar and time-hallowed object, which has long fulfilled its destined intention, of perpetuating the national respect for the father of its modern poetry. Such was the spirit which prompted Nicholas Brigham nearly three centuries ago, and the same spirit will actuate those who now repair the decay which his work has suffered. The only deviation or improvement I would suggest is that an inscription in brass-plate should be let into the verge of the tomb, which has a hollowed margin intended for that purpose…it will not be difficult to dictate a few characteristic words that would be more appropriate [than the two old verses attributed to Chaucer]…to be engraved in a plain and legible black-letter, not in any of the fanciful characters which seem to be recommended by some modern artists on account of their obscurity, and not from any real resemblance to ancient examples.89 Nichols’s suggestion that the tomb be viewed “not as a composition of high art” would seem to pave the way for a renovation rather than the restoration of the tomb. For the tomb here is figured as a “familiar” and “time-hallowed object” that is not in itself important except insofar as it fulfills its “destined intention,” which is to perpetuate “national respect for the father of its modern poetry.” Nichols’s seemingly contradictory impulses here arise from the dual functions

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which the tomb is to carry out. It is the “authentic” tomb, but it is also a monument which organizes “national respect” for its paternal poet—hence, like the respect (and indeed nationalism itself), the monument must be renewed. Nichols’s proposal also would seem at odds with the earlier promise in the appeal that the tomb “should be kept up and repaired; not altered,” for Nichols does suggest an alteration (though he calls it an “improvement”). After dismissing the two old verses as being non-Chaucerian, he suggests that, since they have been lost, another non-Chaucerian verse should be dictated to take their place. His rationale for this somewhat puzzling suggestion would seem to be that the two examples that he dismisses had been mistaken for Chaucer’s actual words. We can see this notion in the anxious injunction that the inscription be engraved in the black letter of the printers, and not “fanciful characters” that might be taken for (or might presume) to represent Chaucer’s words as they appeared in the manuscripts. The rationale for putting the text in black-letter is to avoid the engraving of “fanciful characters” which were favored by modern artists “on account of their obscurity.” Yet belief in the “clarity” of black-letter was probably a minority view in the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Thomas R.Lounsbury points out, the great virtue of eighteenth-century editions was that “for the first time the poet was taken out of the bondage of the black-letter which had done its part towards making his writings ob scure.”90 Probably then the reason for the reproduction of epigraphical black-letter would have been to mimic the older printed texts of Chaucer and thus enable the text to “reproduce” the spirit of a spurious antiquity.91 This attempt at once to add spurious lines to Chaucer’s tomb and to “reproduce” them as legitimate finds a metaphorical echo in, among other things, Furnivall’s choice of the Lansdowne manuscript. For Nichols’s somewhat contradictory desires to preserve and renovate the monument might be seen as analogous to Furnivall’s production of an authentic Chaucerian text. Just as Furnivall understands the problems with Lansdowne, Nichols understands that Chaucer’s tomb is a late production. It is not “high art,” but it is hallowed by time, even if it is not authentic. What is renewed, then, is not any “original” medieval feeling about Chaucer, but rather the early modern spirit which prompted Brigham to build the tomb. Thus if Nichols et al. thought to preserve the essential nature of the tomb, it must be admitted that they, like Brigham, wanted, in some sense, to appropriate or colonize Chaucer by imposing their own idea about how Chaucer should be remembered. Nichols’s suggestion, then, would comfortably “write” the committee (of which he is a part) into the Chaucer legend, as Brigham had written himself into the legend with his translation of Chaucer. At the same time Nichols’s suggestion would clearly distinguish the committee’s words from Chaucer’s and avoid the confusion which led the two old verses and the Chaucerian distich to be mistaken for Chaucer’s actual words. This metaphorical connection between Brigham’s tomb and a printed version of Chaucer’s works, however, may have drawn too much attention to the already attenuated link

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between poet and tomb. No one would claim that the tomb was “high art,” but no one else seems to have picked up on Nichols’s radical suggestion that Brigham’s design should be renewed. Part of the Committee’s reluctance to indulge in “renovation” of the tomb undoubtedly had to do with the fact that it drew too much attention to the “unoriginal” nature of the tomb. The suspicion that the Committee wanted to avoid was that, like those post-mortem Chaucerian manuscripts and printed texts, the early modern tomb did not embody the poet’s authentic medieval monument. Yet if most of the Committee initially elided the distinction between medieval and modern tomb (indeed some claimed that the tomb was medieval), one other member came to embrace the connection between printed edition and early modern tomb.92 A little more than a year and a half after the appeal was first announced, William Thoms, approaching something like disgust, writes not only of the failure of the Chaucer project, but of another project to erect a memorial to William Caxton:93 The result of the appeals which have recently been made to the sympathies of the present age for the purpose of erecting a Memorial to our first Printer, and of restoring the crumbling tomb of one of our earliest and greatest Poets, has gone near to prove that the admirers of Caxton and Chaucer are disposed to yield to the objects of their hero-worship little more than lip service. In short, the plan for the Caxton Memorial, and that for the restoration of Chaucer’s Monument, have nigh well failed.94 Thoms’s attack, with its passing reference to Thomas Carlyle’s famous set of lectures “On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History,” takes to task those “lesser” men who have not the respect that they should for “Great Men,” the history of which (according to Carlyle) is “the history of what man has accomplished in this world.” That Thoms should characterize such “heroworship” as receiving nothing more than “lip service” suggests an anxiety about the evanescence of human history—as that which, like words spoken and not recorded, will pass away. Thoms’s invocation of William Caxton here is not, of course, accidental. It was Caxton who first printed Chaucer, and Thoms believes that it might once again be Caxton (or at least his admirers) who will ensure that Chaucer’s epitaph will be “reprinted.” Thoms’s proposal is that the money which had been collected from the Caxton monument (and beset by all sorts of problems) be used to repair Chaucer’s tomb, much as Caxton himself worked to memorialize Chaucer.95 But Thoms’s letter also suggests the extent to which money once again becomes an issue in the recollection of Chaucer. If men will yield “little more than lip service” it means that they will not yield the offering (however little) that will enable the memorialization of the poet. I think Thoms’s disgust lies in even having to bring up the fact that those who should remember history are too cheap to do so.

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One might well claim that an appeal that asks no more than five shillings from each giver is setting itself up for failure, but I think that this misses the point. For the whole idea was to make the repair of the Chaucer monument a national undertaking—a project that would include as many citizens as possible. This failure can be seen as a national failure to hold that which defines England (its heritage) in esteem—a failure which presages those (like Mary Sturgeon) who will castigate the nation some seventy years later for not raising a monument to the poet. In Notes and Queries Thoms reprints part of an article from The Gentleman’s Magazine that suggests that, since some of the money for the Caxton monument (which will probably never be built) has already been collected, why not repair Chaucer’s tomb with it? Nothing would be more agreeable to Caxton himself. He not only printed Chaucer’s works, and re-imprinted them merely to get rid of errors; but feeling that the great poet ‘ought eternally to be remembered’ in the place where he lies buried, he hung up an epitaph to his memory over that tomb which is now mouldering in decay… The epitaph, touching evidence of Caxton’s affection for the poet, has disappeared. In a few years the tomb itself will have submitted to inevitable fate. What better mode of keeping alive the memory of both Chaucer and Caxton, or of doing honour to the pious printer, than by showing that even after the lapse of centuries his wishes for the preservation of Chaucer’s memory in that place are not forgotten? If the fund is more than sufficient for the purpose, the surplus might be invested on trust to perform the wish of Caxton by keeping Chaucer’s monument in repair forever.96 What is particularly telling here is the way that the epitaph which Caxton commissioned, the printing of Chaucer’s works, and the repair of Chaucer’s tomb are all conflated. The language of loss and supplement here is especially key. The epitaph “has disappeared,” the works had to be “re-imprinted… merely to get rid of errors,” and the tomb is about to submit “to inevitable fate.” What will repair this potential loss is a “surplus” which will “perform the wish of Caxton by keeping Chaucer’s monument in repair forever.” In this calculus of supplement and loss, Caxton’s re-imprinting of Chaucer’s works is seen as an extension of the maintenance of the body’s resting place precisely because, I would argue, the idea of the text and the idea of the body are seen as coextensive —as signifiers of “Chaucer” which time threatens to make illegible. Something is needed to supplement the sign, whether it be money for repair, or editorial acumen to repair the errors which have crept into Chaucer’s corpus. Ultimately, that supplement, in the form of a return to the historical “origins” of Chaucer’s corpus (the manuscripts), will supplement the efforts of nineteenth-century editors, just as it supplemented Caxton’s second edition. The same cannot be said for those who wished to repair Chaucer’s tomb. For if they were willing to

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invoke the spirit of those dead editors who repaired Chaucer’s works, they were unwilling to offer up the material monies needed to keep the tomb in good repair. Ironically, then, if there is a failure of any spiritual connection with Chaucer, it is made evident in the failure of a real material signifier of that transcendent connection. It is as if disrespect for the visible, the material, actually led to an attenuation of the transcendent. The spiritual body of Chaucer begins to fade (at least according to Thoms) because there is no attention to the worldly body. In this sublime symbolic economy, to show a lack of respect for the material body is to treat it as if it has no transcendent value.97 It is difficult to tell when the appeal actually failed. In 1858 an indignant reader writes to The Gentleman’s Magazine to complain that “happening to be passing by Poets’ Corner the other day, I dropped into Westminster Abbey, wishing to see the effect of restoration on Chaucer’s monument, which I vainly supposed had been accomplished… As may be supposed, my surprise was only equalled by my disgust at seeing, not only that no restoration had been effected, but that this beautiful tomb was entirely hemmed in by umbrella stands…”98 For this reader, Chaucer’s tomb, like Chaucer himself, has been rendered banal. That transcendent magic of the body that is an extension of his genius, begins to fade with the tomb. Too late, the writer offers to “hand over my mite” to remove any deficiency in funds. In fact, it is quite possible that even with sufficient funds the planned restoration would never have been carried out. In 1889 Henry Poole (who was then Master Mason of Westminster Abbey) relates how he had been consulted by Samuel Shepherd when he first undertook to begin the appeal. He remembers the outcome of the project as follows, In the year 1850, a good antiquary, Mr. Samuel Shepherd, F.S.A., called attention to the decay and ruin going on in Chaucer’s monument. He obtained the sympathy of many other antiquaries, and it led to the appointment of an influential committee, headed by the then Presidents of the Antiquarian and Camden societies. Subscribers were enlisted, and closer examination and trial was made, in which the writer assisted; but the difficulties of treatment were so many, and the satisfactory result seemed so doubtful, that the proposition was, happily, abandoned.99 It is a bit difficult to know what kind of “trial” was made and what the “difficulties of treatment” could have been. For, some sixteen years later, Poole would in fact effect a restoration of the tomb—cleansing the tablet and restoring the lettering. Possibly Poole’s “restoration” was much more modest than the committee’s project had become. A document from the West-minster Abbey Library states that the cost of preparing the tablet and of painting the inscription was 1£ 6.100 Even Shepherd’s original project would have cost 12 or 13 £, so we can assume that Poole’s repair was scaled down. Poole, however, does not fail to tout his success in repairing the tomb. In 1868 he announces the

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Discovery of the long-lost inscription of Chaucer. On our minute examination of the sadly decayed surface of the Purbeck marble facing of the recess which Brigham had placed on the table tomb, we found some traces of lettering. This led to the cleaning and the induration of the decaying surface with Mr. Scott’s solution.101 Great was our gratification to find all the letters still there, though very faint, except only about four or five in the middle, where rottenness had quite destroyed the lettering. The induration made the whole surface secure for an indefinite period of time. We then proceeded to paint all the engraved letters with a golden chrome yellow, filling in the absent letters on the rotten surface left. This has unexpectedly restored the most interesting inscription to Poets’ Corner, an achievement gratifying to all the world.102 At the very end of his announcement Poole’s rhetoric approaches the somewhat overheated prose of Shepherd, perhaps because in some ways it fulfills Shepherd’s own national, or even international, project of restoration. Though this very minor “repair” does not, like Gough’s more radical suggestion, “improve” the tomb, its “restoration” probably does not fit in with more modern ideas of conservation. We are told that all the letters were still there…except for four or five which were filled in (on what basis we are not told). Poole then informs us that the letters which were present were painted over in order to make them more legible. The “unexpected” result is the “restoration” of the inscription. What Poole outlines, of course, is a kind of editorial method. He has discovered a text that is apparently illegible (though his expertise allows him to read it) and he has “published” it by making it easier to read (by apparently using his method, common sense, and other sources) to fill in gaps in the text. In psychoanalytic terms these gaps or absences in the text are a lack which must be disavowed. We see this disavowal, I think, in Poole’s almost simultaneous acknowledgement of the absence (“rottenness had quite destroyed the lettering”) and his assertion of presence (“filling in the absent letters on the rotten surface left”). Poole’s mission is to “discover” that which has been “longlost.” But, of course, what he has really done is disavowed absence because of the threat engendered in such absence or lack.103 This disavowal is perhaps made most clear when he proudly declaims that “we then proceeded to paint all the engraved letters with a golden chrome yellow.” The transformation of the text into golden letters might be seen as a kind of nineteenth-century corollary to the use of gold leaf in medieval manuscripts. As Laura Kendrick notes, “to write letters in gold signified a ‘wealth’ of meaning.”104 But one also might note that this transformation of words into wealth is another way of asserting control over the text by fetishizing it. The absence in the text is now not merely painted over, but something which, as gold, can be hoarded, deployed, or, as in this case, displayed. This display, in turn, assures the reader of the “presence” of the text and perhaps even the poet himself, for it is the letters that tell us who is in the tomb. As Laura Mulvey reminds us, “the fetish very often attracts the gaze. In

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popular imagination, it glitters. It has to hold the fetishist’s eyes fixed on the seduction of belief to guard against the seduction of knowledge.”105 In this case, the knowledge that the fetish guards against is the absence of knowledge which “informs” the “restoration” of the letters and disables doubts about the identity of the one entombed. Poole’s narrative, in which he explains how he “repaired” the incompletions in the monument, lays bare the mechanism by which an editor might make good the disturbing lack in a text. Despite the fact that we do not have an accompanying narrative from the compiler/editor of the Lansdowne manuscript, I would suggest that there are interesting analogies between the repair of the epitaph on Chaucer’s monument and the representation of the text in Lansdowne. The transformation of the text on the tomb into a complete and beautiful epitaph is not so far from what the Lansdowne editor did with the Canterbury Tales in his landmark manuscript. In other words, one of the things Lansdowne, and its reception in the nineteenth century have to tell us is that this practice of representing a complete and beautiful version of the Tales is not simply a quaint fifteenth-or nineteenth-century impulse. To paraphrase Octave Mannoni’s famous phrase, Furnivall understood very well that Lansdowne was not an “accurate” representation of Chaucer’s text, yet he nonetheless continued to use it.106 There was, in other words, a desire on some level to elide absence and participate in a fantasy of completeness. I would suggest that, as the heirs of earlier editors and compilers, we ourselves are conflicted—striving both to produce the beautiful text (especially in our use of what Ralph Hanna has called the “admittedly beautiful” Ellesmere) for those who would consume it and to represent “accurately” the fractures and incompletions which mark the text we know as the Canterbury Tales. Hence we also find ourselves invested in perpetuating an idea of the transcendent body, unmarked by time, even as we dilate on the historical distance of Chaucer. We may then find that we are not so far removed from those nineteenth-century refurbishers of Chaucer’s tomb, who, contemplating the resting place of the poet, disagreed about the extent to which the grave should be “renewed.” This tension between monumentalism and memory, between an attempt to coalesce responses to Chaucer and do justice to the historical distance separating post-industrial reader from pre-modern poet is not merely a national concern, but also gestures toward larger questions of identity, subjectivity, and the body, as we will see in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 5 Chaucer’s Stature

“High-brow” is an ominous addition to the English language. R.R.Leavis1 In 1897, Havelock Ellis published an article entitled “Genius and Stature” that dealt with what he called the “anthropometry of genius.” In this essay he asserted that “great men” (as he called them) tended either to be short (below 5′ 4″) or tall (above 5′ 9″). It is, as he says, “mediocrity alone that genius seems to abhor.”2 He explains this theory by claiming that in both cases, “it seems probable that the primary cause is a greater vital activity… Among the tall such intensity of vital action has shown itself in unimpeded freedom; in the short it is impeded and forced into new channels by pathological or other causes.”3 It is easy now to look back on such speculations as a pseudo-scientific attempt to extract (as Barbara Stafford has demonstrated) “semantic meaning from isolatable looks”—a bygone attempt to link the visible with the invisible, the material with the spiritual.4 Yet the slippage between literal height and the symbolic “stature” of genius here is only the most evident manifestation of a more deep-seated rhetoric of aesthetic value that conditioned the recovery of Chaucer in the twentieth century. This rhetoric facilitated two seemingly opposed impulses in the modernist reception of the poet. On the one hand, formalists recuperated the poet by claiming that Chaucer’s value lay in his modernity. His “stature” as a great poet enabled him to transcend temporal boundaries and speak to all ages. The value of Chaucer—his greatness—was coextensive with what made him historically accessible—in the familiar formalist formulation, ars gratis artis. Yet if the poet’s greatness or “stature” was what made him historically accessible, it remained invisible to most of the population. Only a very few of the cultural upper caste supposedly had the “taste” to discern this greatness and thus to pass this knowledge on to the rest of the reading public. Thus “high” modernism was at heart a class-based formulation of aesthetic value that privileged the elite over the common, the transcendent over the material, and the spiritual over the bodily. Yet if, in the early twentieth century, the materialist conception of poetry was insistently repressed (some might even say buried), like the body, it always threatened to rise up and reveal the contingency of the formalist idea of aesthetic

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value. This materialist conception, which located Chaucer’s aesthetic value in his utility, was related to the functionalist (or what Michael Saler calls the medieval modernist) extension of William Morris’s and John Ruskin’s more democratic ideas about the “organic integration of the individual into a temporal and spiritual community.”5 The conflict between these two conceptions of aesthetic value sketches out the crisis of meaning that precipitated the modernist project of recuperation and recovery. For whether it was a transcendent aesthetic realm or a nostalgic project of reintegration, modernists of both stripes were attempting to “restore harmony, stability, and spirituality to a ‘modern’ world that appeared increasingly fragmentary, transitory, and secular.”6 The functionalist approach, based primarily on a harmonious vision of Chaucer’s England, saw value in Chaucer’s historicity. But for the formalists, Chaucer’s presence at the head of the English literary tradition—something which had hitherto ensured his relevance and canonicity—became something of a liability, as Chaucer became seen as antiquated, either dismissed or ignored because of his lack of relevance to modernity. By extension, he came to be seen as someone who did not exist in the developing or even evolving tradition of the English literary canon. The formalist attempt to make claims for Chaucer’s modernity was ultimately based on the idea of Chaucer’s genius—a transcendent characteristic of the poet that could make the antique into something new. This new Chaucer was in many ways an extension of the Romantic idea of one who was able to establish a childlike connection with nature. Initially this conceptualization of childhood heralded success for medieval studies, for it made the Middle Ages a kind of fountainhead of English literature, and, at the same time, suggested a connection not with mannered society (that was distant from nature), but with a primal society that fit well into the notion of Romantic origin. Further the idea of the childlike Chaucer offered a congenial literary narrative in which poetry and expression were always on the rise—developing, progressing, and maturing. Increasingly, however, medievalists resisted this notion of Chaucer as child, for it fit uncomfortably into the paradigm of the modernist poet who was constructed as interiorized, reflective, individualistic, ironizing, and lively. But if, according to some modernist critics, Chaucer was not a genius because of his childlike connection with the past, what then defined him as a genius? Popular theories of genius had it that genius could be detected in corporeal abnormalities or pathologies, yet some medievalists resisted these readings, hoping to code Chaucer as normative. There were, in other words, two impulses in the reading of the medieval poet. On the one hand, there was what might be called a popular desire to connect Chaucer’s peculiar genius with his body because it was through the body that the signs of genius could be commonly perceived. These readings, then, would legitimate Chaucer’s status as a “canonical” author to a wide audience. At the same time there was a more specialized rhetoric which denied the connection of body and corpus precisely because a number of scholars believed that Chaucer’s genius could not be localized without compromising his

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status as a transcendent poet. These critics were invested in demonstrating the extent to which Chaucer was “modern” precisely because body and person, or as T.S.Eliot put it, “man…and…mind” are separate. This divorce of the author function from the author’s body enabled critics to represent the poet’s words as transcendent and immanent. Thus the poet’s works would remain perpetually relevant to temporally disparate audiences. Yet this conceptualization of the author had the effect of unmooring Chaucer from his “common” roots. As his genius became disembodied and transcendent, he became a poet of high culture, one of those poets that (as F.R.Leavis put it) the “disinterested clerisy” studied in their academic retreats. This discarnate Chaucer, then, disconnected from a materialist and utilitarian conception of literary history, becomes a kind of useless “Father”—acknowledged and humored —but cut off from anything more than a spiritual paternity. *** If Havelock Ellis’s speculations about the interconnectedness of height and genius (with which I began this chapter) seem initially distant from Chaucer studies, it is only because the poet’s temporal distance from Ellis’s anthropometrical calipers would seem to disable any contemporary evaluation of his height. Yet Henry Troutbeck wrote into the periodical The Nineteenth Century with this somewhat astonishing piece of information about Chaucer’s height: I notice that the name of Chaucer does not occur in the list of ‘men of genius’ given in Mr. Ellis’s interesting article in the current number of The Nineteenth Century, and indeed, so far as I can ascertain, there is no record of his stature extant. Perhaps, Mr. Ellis might be interested to know that I had the privilege of examining Chaucer’s bones when they were exposed in the digging of Browning’s grave some years back. From measurements of the principal long bones remaining intact, I calculated that his height must have been about 5 feet 6 inches.7 There was good reason to believe that Troutbeck knew what he was talking about. His father was Precentor and Minor Canon of Westminster Abbey. Henry Troutbeck had gone to the Abbey school and, though he was not (as is so often stated) the Coroner for Westminster, he was a medical doctor. Yet, as anyone who has been to the Abbey knows, Robert Browning’s grave is sufficiently distant from Chaucer’s altar tomb that it is highly unlikely that Chaucer’s bones would have been disturbed by Browning’s burial. And indeed there are no records in the Abbey of any exhumation of Chaucer’s corpse after 1556. We are left with something of a puzzle then. The Abbey records, common sense, and even the Abbey librarian all dictate that Troutbeck must have been mistaken, despite Troutbeck’s apparently authoritative knowledge of the Abbey precincts.8 His belief that the body he had measured was Chaucer’s is, I argue, the product of late nineteenth-century suspicions that Chaucer was not buried in

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Chaucer’s grave. Or to put it more accurately—that Chaucer was never translated to the altar tomb which was prepared for him in 1556. His corpse, then, would still reside in the “original” grave that William Caxton mentions in the late fifteenth century—a location that is, indeed, close to Browning’s grave. It was, as we saw in the chapter two, John Dart’s 1723 comment about Chaucer’s stone being “sawn to mend the pavement,” after Dryden’s monument was apparently constructed over Chaucer’s grave, that led to a spirited exchange in the midnineteenth century about whether Chaucer’s body was actually translated to the altar tomb. Those who supported the nineteenth-century renovation of Brigham’s altar tomb (like John Gough Nichols) were, of course, invested in discrediting Dart’s assertion as mere conjecture.9 Yet those who asserted that Chaucer’s body was in fact still under the pavement seem to have planted a seed of doubt in the mind of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster from 1864–1881. Four years after his accession to the Deanery he published his Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey in which he reports that the ashes of the poet were “apparently” removed to the altar tomb in 1556; Stanley also repeats Tom Brown’s observation that Dryden was buried at Chaucer’s feet—an observation at odds with the removal of Chaucer to the altar tomb. In addition, Stanley notes John Evelyn’s (the eighteenth-century diarist) observation that Abraham Cowley was buried “next Geoffrey Chaucer, and near Spenser.”10 It is, perhaps because of Evelyn’s comment that, in 1880, Stanley had cut on Abraham Cowley’s tomb (see figure 3) these words, “Near This Stone Lie Buried Geoffrey Chaucer 1400, John Dryden 1700 etc.”11 Stanley’s decision to have these words engraved on Cowley’s tomb, less than a year before Stanley died, would seem to indicate some hesitation about the ultimate resting place of Chaucer’s body. In light of the controversy over the burial site of Chaucer along with the stone that Stanley had carved, it is perhaps not so unusual that Troutbeck, in 1889, thought that he had examined the bones of Chaucer. Cowley’s recarved grave stone—as is evident from figure 2—lies immediately adjacent to the place where Browning is buried, so it is likely that the inscription by Stanley (as well as a more general belief that Chaucer was not in his altar tomb) gave credence to Troutbeck’s belief that the bones he examined were Chaucer’s, when, in fact, they could have been the bones of Dryden, Matthew Prior, or any poor soul who happened to be buried in this particular part of the south transept.12 These suspicions about the disposition of the body lasted well into the twentieth century.13 As late as 1929, W.R. Lethaby, Westminster Abbey’s Surveyor of the Fabric, returns to the stone that Stanley had cut and reports that “it has been thought that Chaucer’s body probably still lies under the floor of the transept. His name has been cut on one of the paving slabs, and this is pointed as the position of the actual grave.”14 The question that I would like to ask is, what difference would the dead body of Chaucer have made to the construction of that which Troutbeck called Chaucer’s “genius” in the late nineteenth century? Part of the answer has to do with the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rage for analogies between the

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timeless, buried essence of the human and concrete measurements of the body. We have seen how Ellis used this theory to determine the height of genius. Yet, according to Troutbeck, Chaucer’s measurements at 5′ 6″ are perfectly average— part of (as Ellis asserts) that “mediocrity that genius abhors.” And indeed, earlier physiognomists use strikingly similar language to describe what they call “mediocre” body types. For instance, Johann Caspar Lavater, the famous French physiognomist, described one particular face from his Silhouettes of Clerics as one which would “remain in a medium sphere of activity” and would “sink from prudence to timidity, but never rise to heroism.”15 This idea of mediocrity’s inability to “rise to heroism” might well foreshadow Furnivall’s comments (quoted above) about what he perceived to be the great problem in Chaucer studies, that “men attribute to him many works infinitely below the height of his genius.” This “rise to heroism,” coupled with the metaphorical and actual idea of the “height of genius,” seems at odds with Troutbeck’s assertion that Chaucer is (at 5′ 6″) absolutely mediocre in height. Yet the importance of Troutbeck’s corporeal intervention rests not, of course, on whether he disagreed with Ellis’s assertions about anthropometry or with the entire idea of anthropometry itself. What is so compelling is the way that the metaphorical incarnation of poetic stature becomes implicated in a generalized materialist history of the body and yet resists a reductive reading which equated poetical power with physical height. In fact, the nineteenth-century history of Chaucer’s body uncovers the ways in which the trope of poetical stature was adapted to a developmental notion of the poetical tradition. In general, nineteenth-century critics tended to believe that Chaucer was not only short, but that this shortness revealed something of Chaucer’s childlike nature. Both J.P.Collier and F.J.Furnivall, for instance, quote one of the earlier assertions of Chaucer’s shortness, the so-called Greenes Vision: “His stature was not very tall/Leane he was, his legs were small.”16 The connection between Chaucer’s shortness and his infantilization is most clearly apparent in Algernon Swinburne’s A Midsummer Holiday On a Country Road, in which Chaucer is imagined as both father and son. Each turn of the old wild road whereon we stray, Meseems, might bring us face to face with one Whom seeing we could not but give thanks, and pray For England’s love our father and her son To Speak with us as once in days long done With all men, sage and churl and monk and mime, Who knew not as we know the soul sublime, That sang for song’s love more than lust of fame. Yet though this be not, yet, in happy time, Our father Chaucer, here we praise thy name.17

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Swinburne’s troping of Chaucer as a “son of England,” and his thrusting Chaucer back into “days long done” make him both father of tradition and son of nation—both old and young. He further imparts that if “we” cannot speak to Chaucer as did “sage, and churl and monk and mime,” we know (as they did not) Chaucer’s soul sublime. It is the audience’s ability to see what was hidden and thus transcendent in Chaucer that enables us to appreciate what those of his age could not know. For Swinburne, the temporal distance between medieval and nineteenth-century audiences somehow enables nineteenth-century knowledge of that which the medievals could not see. Swinburne’s treatment of Chaucer as in some sense young because he was of an earlier age is a displaced version of a long nineteenth century tradition of treating Chaucer metaphorically as a child. Like Swinburne, Walter Savage Landor mixes a wish to reanimate Chaucer with his observation that Chaucer is like a child. “Chaucer, O how I wish thou wert/Alive and, as of yore, alert! … The lesser Angels now have smiled/To see thee frolic like a child,/and hear thee, innocent as they,/Provoke them to come down and play.”18 In the process he seems to suggest that Chaucer’s appeal was, in some sense, his ability to be childlike. In using this trope he may be giving voice to a kind of fetishization of childhood during the nineteenth century. Perhaps the leading proponent of such fetishization, J.M.Barrie, might be expected to claim, “What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will.”19 But even Browning admits, “Genius has somewhat of the infantine.”20 This ability to get in touch with one’s childhood speaks, I think, to the ability to bridge what Stafford has named as “the perceived distance between historically conditioned human beings and the ahistorical transcendent object of their desire—whether…sunk within the body, or stretching horizontally into primitive and remote cultures.”21 Genius’s ability to transcend temporal bounds is at once its identifying factor (to be a boy again at will) and that which makes genius ultimately recoverable (the author’s genius is to allow us to transcend temporal bounds as well). This connection between bodily and societal history was not new, and it is perhaps unsurprising that only the “transcendence” of genius could be successful in bringing these dualities of past and present together. Yet such discussions also occasioned a kind of problem for genius. An unknown writer in 1873 is perhaps the best example of the problems associated with troping genius as childlike. The writer talks about Chaucer as existing at the beginning of the day of poetry, He talked, a child, to children—the biggest, oldest, wisest, cleverest child of the company—and so he amused them incessantly…. In a sense, ordinary persons now alive may be said to have overtaken him, just as extraordinary persons have far outstripped him. In the early dawn of English poetry it required a man of the highest genius to feel what nearly everybody now feels, and to put the feeling into words which have almost passed into commonplace, and which would indeed have done so but for

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the musical and cunning fashion in which they are arranged…. In a word, it is the childhood of poetry.22 Whether consciously or not the author invokes the old notion that “The child is father of the man,” or (as Milton puts it) “The childhood shows the man, As morning shows the day.”23 Chaucer may be the “father” of English poetry, but his very fatherhood disables his authority because it puts him in the past when poetry was not as well developed as it is today. Chaucer’s place is thus to show us where we came from rather than to be compared with those who have “overtaken him.” The metaphorical connection between the life of man and the life of society betrays the writers’ indebtedness to the whiggish idea of history, in which society (and thus poetry) is ever advancing. From this perspective we see in Chaucer the earliest stages of a “natural” development of the poet from the “dawn” to the present day. One of the great problems of talking about Chaucer in this way was that it seemed to dim his genius. And indeed, the anonymous writer suggests that genius is not transcendent. What is genius in one age is commonplace in the next. This particular writer is probably a bit harder on Chaucer than others of his ilk. Writing on Chaucer and Shakespeare, for instance, John Hales cannot quite bring himself to suggest that Chaucer’s genius is somehow injured by time. Even as he claims that “Chaucer lived in the morning twilight of…[the Supreme Dramatic age],” he says of Chaucer and Shakespeare that, “their geniuses differ rather in degree than in kind.”24 So too, though Matthew Arnold translates the discourse of genius into the discourse of “greatness,” he famously outlines Chaucer’s insufficient stature when he distinguishes between the birth and maturity of Italian and English poetry. The verse of Dante is “altogether beyond Chaucer’s reach,” he writes, because “it was necessarily out of reach of any poet in the England of that stage of growth.”25 Though Arnold here suggests that development is determined as much by nurture as by nature, the recapitulation of a specifically English poetic childhood nonetheless makes clear the extent to which an organic notion of the development of the poetic tradition conditions Chaucer’s reception. Indeed, when Arnold finally gets around to saying what it is that Chaucer lacks, he employs the term σπoυδαιóτης what Arnold translates as “high seriousness”—something beyond the reach of a childish Chaucer.26 The troping of Chaucer as the son of a youthful age, childlike, immature (and, ultimately, of insufficient stature to aspire to the heights of genius) exists, then, in juxtaposition with the renewed appreciation of Chaucer as a childlike genius in the nineteenth century. These contradictory perspectives exposed a conflict between the organic or progressive notion of history and the privileging of Chaucer as the timeless Father of English poetry.27 Writers like Furnivall and Bradley wanted not only to assert the importance of Chaucer as the founder of a literary tradition, but also wanted to assert his continuing importance for nineteenth-century readers.

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One of the possibilities of which critics availed themselves was to make virtue of necessity. Since Chaucer lacked “high” seriousness, his genius is located in his ability to represent the “lower” orders. He wrote, as one critic suggests, in the “language of the people…he does not indulge in fine sentiments… The light upon his page is the light of common day.”28 In one of the more influential formulations of this “lowness,” T.R.Lounsbury connects Chaucer’s “low” style with his ability to represent the “low”: It is impossible to take final leave of the poet without some notice of what is on the whole the most pronounced characteristic of his style. This is the uniformly low level upon which he moves. There is no other author in our tongue who has clung so closely and persistently to the language of common life… There have been many men of genius who have been able to say grand things grandly. To the fewest of the few is reserved the achievement of the far harder task of discoursing of mean things without discoursing meanly; of recounting prosaic events of life without becoming prosaic one’s self; of narrating them in the plainest terms, and yet investing them with a poetic charm. It is in the power of genius only to accomplish this at all; but it is by no means in the power of all genius…. It is because he stayed so persistently on these low levels that Chaucer was enabled to combine with apparent ease characteristics and methods that are often deemed incompatible.29 This insistent connection of the “low,” with the “common,” and “prosaic” accomplishes a number of different things. It frees Chaucer from the imputation that his existence at the “dawn” of the life of English poetry renders his verse somehow childish (as opposed to childlike). At the same time it allows Lounsbury to use the organic model to his own advantage. Shakespeare, for instance, “mounts higher,” but then he would be expected to. Chaucer’s great genius is not to reach too high. Indeed, when Lounsbury later writes, “in dealing with the common-place he is never common,” he might be seen as responding to that anonymous writer (quoted above) who claimed that it took early genius to give voice to what is merely commonplace today. This recuperation of Chaucer’s genius thus maintains Chaucer’s place at the beginning of the poetic tradition while sustaining the poetic transcendence which marks him as distinctive, or, as Lounsbury puts it, it “acknowledges the supremacy of him who it recognizes as its founder.”30 But, perhaps more importantly, this identification of Chaucer’s genius with the “common” and the “low” enabled a kind of political aesthetics that was crucial to the situation of medieval literature in the nineteenth century. The Two Cultures In the nineteenth century medieval studies in general and Chaucer studies in particular had been central to “the quintessentially liberal and Arnoldian idea

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that the study of literature of the English past could serve to recover the organic unity that the class-divided society of the nineteenth century had lost.”31 But, as David Matthews has demonstrated, even though such notable Chaucer scholars as Furnivall and Skeat can be at least partially credited with the institutionalization of English as a discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, medieval studies very quickly became marginalized within the institution or university.32 Matthews attributes this marginalization to the “difference” of medieval studies along with the increasing denigration of a philology, which would be able to eliminate, or at least attenuate, the difference between the modern and medieval periods. Yet, as Patterson, Matthews, and Kathleen Biddick suggest, it was precisely the difference between the two periods which made the Middle Ages so appealing. For, in Patterson’s terms, “medieval literature was in large part understood as the expression of a human nature valuably different from our own precisely because it was unconstrained by narrow and dehumanizing institutions.”33 What medieval literature offered was unmediated access to a universal human nature that linked all classes. To account for the marginalization of the Middle Ages, then, one would expect a change in the appealing nature of the “organic society” to larger culture (as Patterson puts it), or a change in the way that medievalists thought of themselves. Oddly enough, as Michael Saler has argued, far from being eclipsed by modernism’s formal aesthetic, Ruskin’s and Morris’s social aesthetic (which located in art a “medieval” ability to establish communal, hence, organic order) remained a vibrant force in the interwar years. Indeed, one of the central players in the drama of Chaucer’s tomb, W.R.Lethaby (Westminster’s Surveyor of the Fabric and a disciple of Ruskin and Morris), asserted that, within art existed an order that should be reflected in civilization.34 Frank Pick, the chief executive of the London Underground, went so far as to see art as a socio-religious bond: “I think art might be converted and become a religion of society. It is a social bond and that is what religion means.”35 In this context of a resurgent aesthetics of utility, it is perhaps unremarkable that, as late as 1932, G.K.Chesterton identified England as Chaucer, “an elemental and emblematic giant, alive at our beginnings and made out of the very elements of the land.”36 By collapsing Chaucer with England, Chesterton locates in Chaucer a single corporate order that is ancient, grand, and natural. Yet if this corporate metaphor seems to repair and order society, it is because it assumes a universal ability to perceive and, indeed, be a single unreconstructed Chaucerian body. In fact, as Leavis’s lament about the invention of “high-brow” suggests (at the beginning of this chapter), society is not only broken into classes, but is troped as a separate body—the body of the critic— dissociated from the aesthetic object which it perceives. Moreover, it is the discord about taste within the social body itself which separates it from the harmonious aesthetic object because there is no agreement about what constitutes a beautiful object. Hence the “high-brows” with their lofty aesthetic sense and their disdain for the popular culture are themselves marginalized.

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This conflict between academic and popular culture was perhaps most clearly adumbrated in F.R.Leavis’s Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930). Following on T.S.Eliot’s idea of the dissociation of sensibilities, Leavis advances the notion that, in the past, society was neatly divided into a popular majority culture and an intellectual minority culture. The role of the minority culture was to mediate the cultural achievements of the past and ensure that the culture as a whole did not degenerate. Like those intellectuals who translated, updated, and annotated the corpus of Chaucer, or, even more tellingly, translated and repaired the corpse of Chaucer, minority culture tried to ensure that the social body was kept coherent and did not suffer indignities of the mouldering physical corpse. Leavis argued that, for various reasons, this quiet hierarchy had broken into two antagonistic classes. Under pressure from what would later be called “low” culture, the minority, or “high” culture, had gradually retreated to the university, where, at least in Leavis’s formulation, it failed to offer resistance to what he called the degradation of “mass civilization.” The timing of this break between “mass civilization and minority culture,” along with the nostalgic vision which the Middle Ages offered people like William Morris in the nineteenth century, would seem to suggest that the twentieth century was the perfect time for a revivification of medieval studies. So why does the twentieth century see the marginalization of medieval studies? Part of the answer is, most assuredly, the coalescence or even the eclipse of medieval studies by the study of Chaucer. As Matthews points out, “it was when the study of Chaucer converged with… Middle English that the discipline was formed, and this was because Chaucer’s work allowed critics to approach Middle English in ways that were already familiar from the study of later texts…the centrality of Chaucer that resulted has been a feature of Middle English ever since.”37 This centrality, I would argue, robs Middle English of what made it so compelling as a field of study in the nineteenth century. For it was the very sense of multiplicity within the Middle Ages and its difference from the modern world that occasioned so much interest from those who might be called pre-academics and lay readers. There is perhaps no better example of this perceived distinction between Chaucer and the rest of medieval poetry than William Morris’s only substantial comment on the poet in his “Feudal England, ‘Signs of Change,’” in which he dissects the body of medieval literature: The Middle Ages have grown into manhood; that manhood has an art of its own, which, though developed step by step from that of Old Rome and New Rome, and embracing the strange mysticism and dreamy beauty of the East, has forgotten both its father and its mother, and stands alone triumphant, the loveliest, brightest, and gayest of all the creations of the human mind and hand. It has a literature of its own too, somewhat akin to its art, yet inferior to it, and lacking its unity, since there is a double stream in it. On the one hand is the court poet, the gentleman, Chaucer, with his Italianizing

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metres, and his formal recognition of the classical stories; on which, indeed he builds a superstructure of the quaintest and most unadulterated medievalism, as gay and bright as the architecture which his eyes beheld and his pen pictured for us, so clear, defined, and elegant it is; like those of a happy child, the worst of them an amusement rather than a grief to the onlookers; a world that scarcely needed hope in its eager life of adventure and love, amidst the sunlit blossoming meadows, and green woods, and white begilded manor-houses…. That is the spirit of Chaucer’s poetry; but alongside of it existed yet the ballad poetry of the people, wholly untouched by courtly elegance and classical pedantry; rude in art but never coarse, true to the backbone; instinct with indignation against wrong, and thereby expressing the hope that was in it; a protest of the poor against the rich, especially in those songs of the Foresters, which have been called the mediaeval epic of revolt; no more gloomy than gentleman’s poetry, yet cheerful from courage, and not content. Half a dozen stanzas of it are worth a cartload of the whining introspective lyrics of to-day; and he who, when he has mastered the slight differences of language from our own daily speech, is not moved by it, does not understand what true poetry means nor what its aim is.38 Morris’s definition of the two strains of medieval poetry along with his emphasis on Chaucer’s associations with the court, and with “gentility” are undoubtedly driven by impulses contrary to the nostalgic medievalizing which constructed a Middle Ages which was, if divided by class, nonetheless a whole organic entity. Morris’s socialistic leanings certainly led him to construct one of the more radical narratives concerning medieval literature. What is especially interesting is the proffering of Chaucer as merely a “happy child”—an unknowing advocate for “a sunny world even amidst its violence and passing troubles.” “Chaucer… does not appear greatly to interest” Morris, because Chaucer, in his eyes, exists as a kind of place-holder—the inevitable other side of the perennially two-sided equation that pitted the court against the people.39 If the period approximating the interwar years saw an eclipse of the “poetry of the people” in favor of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, it was not because nineteenth-century scholars cared little for the “working man.” Indeed, Furnivall, like Morris, taught at the Working Man’s College. Yet, as we have seen, Furnivall’s notion was not so much to spread the poetry of the people as to spread poetry to the people. Furnivall’s idea was, as Matthews has shown, to further a kind of Arnoldian idea of education. To put it in terms which coincide with Leavis’s notion of the two cultures, “The general project of Arnold and his followers can be described as an attempt to replace the current dogmatic and explicit forms of ideological expression with the implicit and intuitive properties of literary sensibility.”40 As John Guillory has pointed out, this “literary sensibility” was expected to neutralize “the very political ideologies which set the classes in opposition to one another. The literary sensibility was to unify the

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nation culturally.”41 Yet in order to establish this sensibility, Furnivall and his cohorts had to focus on how the world was present in Chaucer rather than on how Chaucer was present in the world. Dryden’s claim that “here was God’s plenty” becomes something of a shibboleth both to Furnivall and to the critics who followed him because the idea was to find in Chaucer every thing high, low, and in-between that defined society. Increasingly, in other words, the ability to “read” the Middle Ages became the ability to read Chaucer. But if this functionalist legacy was to locate in the poet an ideal society, it became increasingly clear that the justification for reading the poet became located in critics—the very “high brows” who were disdained by those who championed popular culture. The problem with this critical divorce of author from his own authority is revealed in the extent to which Chaucer’s relevance, or aesthetic value, was wrapped up in his ability to represent all classes. By bringing together the concerns of childhood, Chaucer, and the ballad, Morris actually highlighted how, historically at least, Chaucer and the ballad shared a unique characteristic. In 1772, John Aiken, in his essay on the link between pastoral poetry and the ballad, asserted that the basis of the two genres in nature ultimately could be transformed into a kind of temporal development, “The rude original pastoral poetry of our country furnishes the first class of the popular pieces called ballads. Their language is the language of nature, simple and unadorned.”42 Aiken here allies “original” poetry with natural language—something that, as Guillory points out, became a desideratum for Wordsworth. As Wordsworth puts it, “The language, too, of these [rustic] men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appears to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived” (my emphasis).43 Wordsworth here collapses the class status of “rustic men” with the temporal status of language which is “originally derived” from nature. In a note to this section he further gives the game away when he says, “It is worth while here to observe, that the affecting parts of Chaucer are almost always expressed in language pure and universally intelligible even to this day.” His suggestion here is, I think, that far from making Chaucer’s works more difficult to read, his presence at the dawn of poetry actually enables his readers to understand him more clearly. Ballads, then, and the works by Geoffrey Chaucer have a common origin because they are temporally distant, pastoral, and natural. What makes Wordsworth’s insight so striking is the way that he collapses class with temporal distance. The “lower” classes (“rustic men”) use a common language and thus are closer to nature. Chaucer too (by virtue of his childlike characteristics) is close to nature and thus offers his audience a “language pure and universally intelligible.” This slippage is occasioned by romantic ideas of what poetry was. As Christopher Norris suggests, the ideal Romantic poem looks “back regretfully to a period in childhood when the visionary sense of communion with nature was

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as yet untouched by the dislocating, alien effects of self-consciousness and adult knowledge.”44 Both Chaucer and the people, in this formulation, are not alienated from nature and thus need not suffer the regret of “modern” poets who are in the “adulthood” of the tradition and hence removed from the close experience of childhood. Yet if twentieth-century critics wished to embody notions of political unity in the person of Chaucer by calling upon his ability to revisit childhood, they were confronted with a kind of hermeneutic barrier. As Patterson has suggested, it was the unmediated quality of Chaucer’s work (or any medieval poetry) that enabled him to call up an organic unity of the classes. Yet, as early as 1586, the polemicist William Webbe suggests that to perceive “a perfect shape of a right Poet,” requires the work of recovery. “Though the manner of hys [Chaucer’s] stile may seeme blunte and course to many fine English eares at these dayes, yet in trueth, if it be equally pondered, and with good judgment aduised, and confirmed with the time wherein he wrote, a man shall perceiue thereby euen a true picture or perfect shape of a right Poet.”45 Webbe’s associations here between Chaucer’s old (hence blunt and coarse) style, contemporary refined Elizabethan ears, good judgement, and the ability to see the “true picture or perfect shape” of the poet all point to fundamental connections between the poet’s “shape” and his work. “At these days” Chaucer’s works might seem blunt and coarse because they are old. Yet “judgement” is able to overcome the temporal gap. Webbe here acknowledges the ability of history to affect (initially) the perception of the poem, but argues that the audience is able to recover not so much an appreciation of the poem, but something far more important—the picture or shape of the poet (though only if one uses “good judgement”). The following two centuries would be much more pessimistic about the ability to recover the poet. In 1668 Edmund Waller argues that “years have defac’d his matchless strain.”46 Some twenty-five years later, Joseph Addison claims that Chaucer’s characteristic merriness has succumbed to time’s ravages, “…Age has Rusted what the Poet writ,/Worn out his Language, and obscur’d his Wit: / In vain he jests in his unpolish’d strain/And tries to make his Readers laugh in vain.”47 Though Alexander Pope would later claim that Addison never meant for his comments to be published, it was, in fact, at the death of Pope that the “rust of age” would not only be applied to Chaucer, but would be put into the poet’s mouth. In mourning the death of Pope, William Mason has Chaucer claim, “Old Time, which alle things don maliciously, /Gnawen with rusty tooth continually, / Gnattrid my lines, that they all cancrid ben.”48 This connection between the workings of time and canker suggests a connection between the pathology of the corpus and that of the natural body. Like his poetry, Chaucer is being eaten away by the “rusty tooth” of time. This metaphorical connection between age and decay is nowhere so clear as in a poem lamenting the death of the actress, Mrs. Oldfield. “In vain, secure of deathless praise, / There [to Westminster] poets ashes come, /Since obsolete grows Chaucer’s phrase, /And moulders with his tomb.”49 The suggestion here is that “deathless praise,” or the kind of

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extracorporeal existence that is assured by fame, is actually as much at the beck and call of time as is the physical tomb itself. In the absence of the body (which is now simply ashes), the tomb acts as a substitute which, like the physical body, moulders. This language of sickness, obsolescence, and old age ultimately gave many of these writers the opportunity to claim that translators like Dryden and Pope were able to minister to Chaucer’s works. If, as Jabez Hughes puts it, “Time had injur’d Chaucer’s Name, /And…/Deform’d his Language” so that he was “Almost a Stranger ev’n to British Eyes,” then Dryden could make the “banish’d Bard” reappear.50 Yet if Hughes and others claim that Chaucer’s “Cadence lame” could be repaired by contemporary translators (or, in the language of Leavis, mediated), other eighteenth-century writers focused on the way that Chaucer’s “Numbers are in some places as hobling as his contemporaries.” This discourse of lameness continues into the early nineteenth century, when an anonymous contributor to The Gentleman’s Magazine claims that “The state of our language at so distant a period as 400 years would not permit much harmony in composition; nor had at that time much attention been paid to the rules which govern verse. Hence it arises that Chaucer is often harsh and sometimes lame in his numbers… his genius was not of the highest class, nor can all the hyperbolical praises of the illustrious Dryden prove that he was gifted with one spark of the sublime spirit of the Grecian bard.”51 Genius and Pathology Chaucer’s “deformation” by time, his “hobbling,” and his metrical “lameness,” are all literalized in M.H.Spielmann’s assertions about Chaucer’s physical body in his 1900 essay on the portraits of Chaucer. As he analyzes the Hoccleve portrait found in Royal MS 17 D. vi, Spielmann directs attention to, “the strange drawing of the feet. The left foot is not more uncouth in shape than the character of the boot and the draughtsmanship of the period would explain; but the toes of the right foot turn up curiously. This might not be regarded as a noteworthy circumstance were it not for the fact—not hitherto recognised, so far as I am aware —that other full-length portraits invite attention to a similar peculiarity… I would hazard the theory that it was this short-leggedness which inspired the artist of the Ellesmere MS. to show on horseback a bigly made man with the leg of a dwarf.”52 We know now that the peculiar dimensions of the legs in the two portraits probably resulted from an attempt to render a full-length Chaucer from the three quarters portrait that was probably the source of the two portraits— either the Hoccleve portrait from Harley 4866 or an earlier exemplar of the Harley portrait.53 But until at least the mid-nineteen sixties, discussions of Chaucer’s height seemed to work insistently against the assertion that he was malformed and short. In a popular treatment of Chaucer, Henry Dwight Sedgwick quotes Thomas Hearne’s 1711 diary entry (based on the Harley Hoccleve portrait) that, “Chaucer is a Man of an even Stature, neither too high

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nor too low.”54 Roger Sherman Loomis asserts that the Ellesmere portrait confirms the Host’s assertion that Chaucer, “in the waast is shape as wel as I,” then he adds that “he was no dwarf, and the shortness of his legs was imposed on the miniaturist by the requirements of the marginal space.”55 Loomis’s insistence that the portrait is verisimilar in one respect but somehow not in another reveals, I think, the degree to which he is invested in resisting the notion that Chaucer was somehow “stunted.” Perhaps even more tellingly, no less a personage than J.M.Manly resurrects the old story about the exhumation of Chaucer to refute the notion that Chaucer was dwarfish. In an introduction he wrote to the Henry Holt edition of the Canterbury Tales he has a section suggestively entitled “Chaucer’s Appearance”: That Chaucer was about five feet six inches in height was estimated when his bones were accidentally uncovered in digging the grave for Robert Browning in Westminster Abbey. That his legs were unduly short in proportion to his body, as has sometimes been inferred from the picture in the Ellesmere manuscript was not supported by this examination. That he was fond of good cheer and in his later years somewhat portly not only appears from his portraits but is definitely stated in more than one passage by the poet himself.56 Manly’s assertion that Chaucer may have been fat but not short once again highlights the twentieth-century investment in representing Chaucer’s genius as normative. Thus the response arises to the notion that Chaucer was somehow malformed—that his genius was the result of pathology rather than normal variation. The anxieties of Manly, Loomis and Sedgwick are, I think, the result of a particular school of thought that connected the transcendent characteristic of genius with the corporeal. Indeed, one of the great disputes of the nineteenth century was whether genius was a pathological condition similar to insanity or whether it was a “normal variation.” Though Havelock Ellis (to whom Henry Troutbeck was responding in his letter) believes that “the real affinity of genius is with congenital imbecility rather than with insanity,” he nonetheless seems inclined to the view advanced by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso that (as Seneca put it) “no great genius without some mixture of insanity.”57 Further, Lombroso believed that genius tended to occur on an epileptoid basis. The reason for this connection between pa thology and genius is, I would argue, precisely that it is an attempt to make genius—that which can be recognized but not seen— legible. Though Ellis resists Lombroso’s larger claims about epilepsy, he too searches the sick body for signs of genius, arguing that “We have further seen that there is a tendency for children who develop genius to be of feeble health, or otherwise disabled, during the period of physical development. It is easy to see the significance of this influence, which by its unfavourable effects on the

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development of the limbs—an effect not exerted on the head, which may remain relatively large—leaves an unusual surplus of energy to be used in other directions.”58 Ellis’s claims here echo his earlier assertion that the “vital activity” of men of genius is sometimes forced into new channels by pathological causes. These claims also give a rationale for a bias which he acknowledged before he began his study that “the small men of genius would predominate.”59 His reason for this bias would seem to be drawn from a multitude of cultural sources, as he quotes everyone from Balzac (“nearly all great men are little”) to the Hindu shastras to support the idea.60 As long as Chaucer’s shortness could be troped as “natural”—a kind of metaphoric extension of his existence at the infancy of the English poetic tradition—it was safe to code him as short. However, once this shortness became associated with malignancy, or with something which was unnatural or monstrous, the critical tradition becomes invested in creating a Chaucer who is neither too tall nor too short. In this formulation, Chaucer’s genius is located in his ability to represent and be representative of the “normal.” The reasons for this desire for normality have a good deal to do with earlier notions of Chaucer’s personability. Furnivall’s equation of Chaucer with his own schoolfriends is only a later example of a nineteenth-century tendency to fantasize an approachable, knowable Chaucer. As Leigh Hunt puts it, “Chaucer…has…been one of my best friends.”61 Coleridge specifically locates his ability to “know” Chaucer in the poet’s lack of pathology: “I take increasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping… How well we seem to know Chaucer!”62 The suggestion here is that Chaucer’s genius can be explained without recourse to the pathological: he is like us, and therefore we have access to him. If we return to Troutbeck’s discovery of the “body” of Chaucer and to the recovery of the fact of his average height, we find that, even if Troutbeck merely meant to suggest that Chaucer is one of those rare individuals who is a genius despite his mediocre height, he nonetheless seems invested in demonstrating that his literal proximity to the body enables him to make the same kinds of connections between body and genius that Ellis has. Troutbeck clearly delights in discovering to us the measurable and analyzed body of Chaucer. As such, his measurement can be seen as a fetishization of Chaucer’s body—as Troutbeck claims to repair and control the absence of Chaucer in Ellis’s article by offering the poet’s concrete measurements. This attempt to render Chaucer as a bodily presence might be seen as a nineteenth-century analogue to those fifteenthcentury manuscript pictures of Chaucer. Their purpose, as Laura Kendrick has noted, is to “restore the person of the author to his writing.”63 Even if Troutbeck could not have foreseen that his comments would be used to “normalize” Chaucer, his recollection of the physical measurements of the body nonetheless have an equivalent effect. For he brings the body into the presence of those who

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read his letter and makes him all the more knowable (and normal) through the simple recapitulation of measurements of the body. But if this recovery of normalcy signals a renewed appreciation of Chaucer, what does the lack of external signs or markings of his genius say about the recoverability of Chaucer? For if the remarkable thing about Chaucer is his very unremarkability, how can we distinguish him from other poets who do not share his “genius?” Part of the answer can be found in nineteenth-century discussions of genius. For, even as nineteenth-century critics and theorists insisted on the knowablility of Chaucer the man, they began to divorce the unusual talent of the author from any unusual qualities that might be manifested in the man. In a characteristic passage, Coleridge argues that, “The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned, with regard to immediate reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity, which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself.”64 Here the works, the “manly,” and the authorial are collapsed and genius is marked not by unusualness but by the absence of oddity: “tranquility,” “calmness,” “indifference,” and “resignation” are all notable precisely because of their lack of notability. Later in the Biographia, when Coleridge is forced to deal with the notion of “the moody and irritable genius,” he translates his earlier connection between genius and the lack of remarkable qualities into a divorce of the quality of genius from the body itself. “Yet even in instances of this kind [the moody and irritable genius], a close examination will often detect, that the irritability, which has been attributed to the author’s genius as its cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain, or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. What is charged to the author, belongs to the man.”65 This separation of the authorial function from the person of the poet is calculated to deny the connection between visible pathology and invisible genius. If Coleridge seems to contradict himself here, it is because he wishes to have his cake and eat it too. Insofar as genius is marked by manliness, cheerfulness, and tranquility, he is quite happy to have it associated with the body. However, the suggestion that genius is somehow marked by pathology leads him to disembody the genius of the poet. Coleridge is participating here in a debate about genius that stretches back at least to Plato. Where Plato distinguishes between the divine madness of the poet (given by the Muses) and the madness which results from disease,66 the pseudoAristotelian Problems collapses the two kinds of madness, asking “Why is it that all those who are outstanding in philosophy, politics, poetry or arts are melancholic?”67 The answer, according to the author of the Problems, is that both melancholia and “outstandingness” are the result of the same physiological condition—an excess of black bile. The commonplace nature of the early modern

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connection between melancholia/madness and genius has been well documented, but it is worth noting that (despite Coleridge’s hesitations) it was the Romantics who most celebrated a connection between these two which would reach its scientific apogee in the work of Lombroso.68 Opposition to this Romantic connection between pathology and genius— between what Coleridge translates into the “man” and the “author”—would ultimately find one of its more influential (if more general) renderings in T.S.Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent:” “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.”69 This separation of author and man from works underlies the formalism and New Criticism of the twentieth century—movements which relied heavily on the Romantic notion that—whatever the historical period of the poem —it had the ability to communicate transcendent and immanent values. Yet what will become clear is that the Romantic notion of the historically conditioned pathology which ultimately gave rise to genius is directly at odds with the notion of the transcendence of genius that became so important to the modern recovery of Chaucer. Transcendent Chaucer As we saw earlier, there was, in the nineteenth century, some resistance to this notion of Chaucer’s existence in the childhood of man, but by the twentieth century critics and scholars almost wholly rejected the metaphorical infantilization of Chaucer. John Matthews Manly (echoing George Lyman Kittredge) castigates those who would buy into this notion of “romantic composition”: “strangely enough, naivete and unsophistication are still occasionally counted as among the elements of his charm. Tributes to him as the poet of the dawn, innocently lisping in accents of beauty because he was near to nature and lived in a world as yet uncontaminated, are still quoted with approval by those who should know better.”70 As Manly here rejects a Romantic Chaucer whose words are ill-formed and unsophisticated, he also rejects a larger notion of the Middle Ages as childlike. His goal, as he says later, is to show “that the fourteenth century was no more a period of naïve, undisciplined thought and action or of naïve and untrained work in art than is the century in which we live. There was a freshness of feeling, there were the freshness and spontaneity belonging, not to the childhood of the race, but to the perennial advent of genius.”71 This genius, as might be clear from the title of Manly’s book, can most clearly be found in Chaucer. That this idea of genius would seem to be so close to the earlier notions of childhood that Manly rejects is perhaps unsurprising since, as Christopher Norris suggests, the idea of genius, even in the twentieth century, continued to owe much to its Romantic origins. The difference seems to be that critics of Chaucer wished to place the poet on a more even footing with those Romantic poets for whom genius was an ability to overcome temporal barriers, or, as Hans-George Gadamer might have put it, a “refusal to

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distinguish between experience and the representation of this experience.”72 The freshness and spontaneity thus indicates an ability to recover experience which is at once a sign of genius and (as Kitteredge, Lowes, Manly, and Howard Patch all claim) Chaucer’s modernity.73 But if Chaucer is unmoored from what might be called the poetry of the people by his displacement from the “childhood of the age” to the modern period, some critics were (as we saw above) quick to claim that Chaucer’s genius was to be able to represent (in the manifold meanings of that word) the “lower orders.” In perhaps the most famous example of this reclamation, Patch ends his essay “Chaucer and the Common People” (which was reprinted in his collection of essays nine years later) by comparing Chaucer’s treatment of the poor to two other medieval poets: “He spreads the contagious propaganda of a kindly view of human nature. In the fourteenth century it is noteworthy that he extends this kindly view to the lower classes, even when he is talking with kings; and his influence inevitably would tend to create a broader social sympathy. Gower and Langland give all the necessary evidence that they pitied the poor. Chaucer without sentimentality appears to have loved them.”74 In this section, you can hear, I think, Patch’s attempt to put back together the old ideal of the association of the classes in the medieval period. Yet even as he does so, it is difficult not to read the jolting phrase “contagious propaganda” as a betrayal of what he actually attempts to do. Chaucer is clearly not one of the “common people,” so he must be seen to link the classes with love “even when he is talking to kings.” Chaucer’s genius, then, sets him apart from his fellow medieval citizens even as it makes him more accessible to modern ears. The problem is that disjoining him from his fellow citizens and even his fellow poets makes him less normative, less representative, and ultimately less a part of the demos. The very thing, then, that makes him worth reading makes him less of a central figure in the larger curriculum because he has been made to exist outside the genealogy of the poetic tradition. Lowes, perhaps, best exemplifies this disconnection from his historical roots when he opens his book by saying, Nothing more unlucky, I sometimes think, could have befallen Chaucer than that he should have been christened ‘the father of English poetry.’ For ‘father’ in such a context conveys to most of us, I fear, a faint suggestion of vicarious glory—the derivative celebrity of parents, otherwise obscure, who shine, moonlike, in the reflected lustre of their sons. What else than progenitors were the fathers of Plato, or Caesar, or Shakespeare, or Napoleon? And so to call Chaucer the father of English poetry is often tantamount to dismissing him, not unkindly, as the estimable but archaic ancestor of a brilliant line. But Chaucer—if I may risk the paradox—is himself the very thing that he begat. He is English poetry incarnate.75 Despite the fact that Lowes wishes to claim that Chaucer “is English poetry incarnate,” he disincarnates the poet by removing him from the poetic tradition.

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He exists without a father and is not even a father himself. Just as other critics claim that Chaucer cannot be said to be “childlike” so, too, Chaucer cannot be a “father,” for neither appellation is worthy of the poet. Chaucer, in begetting himself, becomes the beginning and end of his own tradition. By literalizing the genealogical metaphor, Lowes evacuates it of its significance and displaces the poet from his temporal relationship with the tradition. If Lowes’s attempts to divest the genealogical metaphor of its significance were the result of a larger attempt to assert the timelessness of Chaucer, this attempt had the unforeseen result of alienating Chaucer from one of the central projects of modernism. In his classic refiguration of the literary tradition, T.S.Eliot revivifies the notion of tradition by embracing it and making it a central part of any evaluation of the poet. Part of this process includes an acceptance of the death of the poet. Eliot, in fact, seems to anticipate the transcendent disembodiment of Chaucer by claiming, “No poet, no artist of any art, has any complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”76 If anything, the critics of the interwar years vehemently resisted the notion that any morbidity attached itself to Chaucer. In fact, “vitality” becomes something of a mantra for these critics—not only the lively rendering of fourteenth-century life, but also the ability to revivify forms of literature upon which “rigor mortis had already almost supervened.”77 As Lowes puts it, “the specific difference of the Canterbury Tales is their immersion in life —which is tantamount to saying (to amend my metaphor) that they are dipt in Geoffrey Chaucer.”78 It is easy to see why the critics would insist on the lively Chaucer, for one of the great anxieties driving medieval studies was that their works were too far distant in time to be considered alive to twentieth-century tastes. The choice that these critics make is to embody the work in the poet in order to keep the poetry alive,79 something that Eliot cleverly avoids in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by shifting the terms of his discussion from the poet (whose place is with the dead) to the work of art. Hence the works, or as he puts it, the monuments have a nachleben all their own; The necessity that he [the poet] shall conform, cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art towards the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.80

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Eliot’s metaphor of the coherence of the monumental order seems a much more congenial metaphor than the genealogical one that Lowes et al. were so troubled by. Indeed, one might think, that given the fraught history of Chaucer’s tomb and the coalescing force of monumentalism in the formation of a national identity, Eliot’s transformation of the genealogical trope into a monumental metaphor would catch on quickly among Chaucer scholars, but it almost seems that the very resistance to corporeal constructions of fatherhood, childhood, tallness, and shortness led medieval critics to continue to be invested in the body even as they asserted the incorporeal nature of genius. Nowhere is this disconnective connection between body and genius more evident than in the twentieth-century reassertion of Coleridge’s observation that Chaucer the man was devoid of “sickly melancholy” or “morbid drooping.” The final paragraph of Lowes’s study of the development of Chaucer’s genius attempts not only to dissolve the distinction between high and low culture, but asserts the “health” of the poet as well: Finally, I am not greatly concerned about Chaucer’s alleged defect of ‘the σπoυδαιóτης, the high and excellent seriousness, which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand virtues of poetry.’ …that poet was not deficient in seriousness, high or deep. He had, to be sure, no ‘message.’ But his sanity (‘He is,’ said Dryden ‘a perpetual fountain of good sense’), his soundness, his freedom from sentimentality, his balance of humorous detachment and directness of vision, and above all his large humanity—those are qualities which ‘give us,’ to apply Arnold’s own criterion, ‘what we can rest upon.’ And we should be hard put to it to name another poet with clearer title to rank with those who, in Philip Sidney’s words, ‘teach by a divine delightfulness.’81 What remains so telling about this passage is that Chaucer’s sanity is offered as a kind of antidote to the notion that he has no real “message.” It is the very fact that he is free of sentiment; he is not pathological; he is not connected; and (in a suggestive anachronism) his humours are balanced that leads to his greatest attribute, his “large humanity.” This capacious humanism, defined almost completely in negative terms, in turn, enables his ability not just to teach and amuse, but to have the ability to access the “divine.” If it is difficult to know what it is that Chaucer teaches, we may get a hint from Lowes’s teacher, Kitteredge: “Chaucer had an immense enthusiasm for life in this world; for the society of his fellow-creatures, high and low, good and bad; for real men and women—knights and sumners, millers and parsons, monks and merchants, delicate cloistered ladies and boisterous wives of Bath. Whatever was good of its kind was a delight to him.”82 What Chaucer taught, it seems, was evident in Chaucer’s delight, and that delight was defined by an ability to span “high and low” “good and bad” “men and women.” What Chaucer taught, in other words, was his own pleasure in the world and it is precisely this pleasure

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which, I have argued, is able to collapse conceptual distinctions between high and low culture and the academy and mass civilization. Yet, as the interwar critics knew all too well, this delight—a bodily attribute—needed to be connected to that which is incorporeal—the divine—in order to refute Arnoldian charges that “height” was needed to be worth reading. And so, in some ways, we return to Havelock Ellis’s theory about height and genius. If Troutbeck’s observation that Chaucer was of medium height was ultimately based upon an informed fantasy of where the body was buried, it was a fantasy that was congenial to the interwar critics.83 For, like Troutbeck, these critics could take the measure of Chaucer’s body and dispense with nonnormative and potentially pathological qualities (like height and shortness) that purportedly defined genius. Both Kittredge and Patch, separated by almost twenty-five years, are careful to divorce the attribution of genius to Chaucer from the suggestion that this genius would “poison his cup,” hence they distance Chaucer from the divine madness which Lombroso et al. take as the true mark of genius.84 Chaucer, then, is a genius with no marks of a genius. He is neither childlike nor paternal. He is neither tall nor short. This via negativa ultimately leads to a corporeal incorporealness which at once satisfied the critics’ attempts to define Chaucer as capacious and all embracing, one who brings together high and low, one who is unbound from the temporal ties which would render him quaint or superannuated. Yet this unmooring of Chaucer from the tradition which followed him left medieval studies with a corpus which was so undefined (particularly by that which followed it), so capacious, so transparent that it ran the risk of being no body at all.

CODA Secular and Sacred Pilgrimages Chaucer’s Corpse and Becket’s Body

Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is it that of the impossible mourning, which, leaving the other his alterity, respecting thus his infinite remove, either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in the tomb or the vault of some narcissism? ——Jacques Derrida1 Why have printers, poets, antiquarians and academics kept returning to Chaucer’s body? The answer seems closely connected with a fidelity to the idea of “Father Chaucer.” Recently, expressions of fidelity have focused on the Abbey tomb as a convenient site to meditate on the nature of that fidelity—its origins and its connections with death. But there is another kind of fidelity, one that recovers Chaucer not by journeying to Chaucer’s corpse in Westminster, but by accompanying an imaginatively vital Chaucer on his journey to Becket’s body. This “Canterbury Chaucerianism” recapitulates the touristy aspects of the journey of Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury in order to allow modern day pilgrims to fantasize about what it must be like to be a character in an imaginary narrative. In 2001, not one but two reenactments of the pilgrimage apparently took place. In one, the tourist could accompany minstrels, jugglers, conjurors, songsters, and bards in a three and a half day journey titled “Chaucer Live!”2 When the “pilgrims” arrived, they could stay in the Chaucer Bed and Breakfast or the Chaucer Hotel. For entertainment, the pilgrims might call at the Visitor’s Centre in Canterbury “where you travel with the medieval pilgrims from the Tabard Inn.”3 One can almost hear medievalists intoning, “but we are a long way from Chaucer now.” The Chaucer that we are distant from, of course, is Chaucer the writer, Chaucer the civil servant, or (as some might claim) Chaucer the corpse. Yet is the image of this popular Chaucer so unfaithful to the “real” Chaucer? Jacques Derrida’s interrogation of the idea of infidelity to the dead (above) illuminates a kind of false dilemma that colors the “recovery” of Chaucer. Either

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we internalize the poet and make him too much like ourselves (one thinks of the pre-Raphaelites who began to “look like” Chaucer), or we define the poet as profoundly other and incapable of being remembered because he “moulders with his tomb.” Derrida’s quotation, however, contains a kind of enabling confusion. For, as we have seen, the “tomb” does not necessarily signify a profound unrecoverability. In Derrida’s quotation we become the container of the “image, idol, or ideal”—a kind of living sepulchre, but one that may enable us to avoid a disabling skepticism about the ability to recover the poet. Of course, if we are to avoid the narcissism that simply makes Chaucer a version of us, we need to engage in a certain amount of interpretive work. As L.O.Fradenburg has argued, the drive in academic discourse is to get things “right,” i.e. to make sure that when we remember something, we remember it as it actually was.4 But if we value the recovery of Chaucer, we also value the imaginative labor that went into this recovery. As Paul Strohm puts it, “rememorative reconstruction” is our job, and we value the method as much as what it produces.5 Popular treatments of Chaucer, on the other hand, do the labor of “misremembering” or misrepresenting the poet for any number of reasons, and it is these misrepresentations that academics are troubled by because no attempt at “authentic” work seems involved. In fact, much academic inquiry is based on the necessity to “correct” these representations. Unsurprisingly, recent scholarly returns to the body have often been about correcting such misrepresentations. In scenes that recall Chaucer’s own correction of his scabby scribe, Adam Scriveyn, Joseph Dane has returned to the tomb of Chaucer in order to correct transcriptions of the epitaph, while Derek Pearsall reminds us that, however much English Protestants attempted to claim Chaucer as their own, the 1556 tomb was probably a monument to attempts to construct a Catholic counterclaim to Chaucer’s corpse/corpus. And, in a bit of interpretive work that in some sense uncovers the origin of Chaucerian interpretive labor, Seth Lerer travels to the “original” tomb (from which Chaucer was translated), where he purports to locate the moment when the early modern version of what might be called academic discourse comes into play: “no longer can the fictions of a literary ‘father’ be projected onto an advisory and entertaining Chaucer. What happens at the end of the fifteenth century is a new grounding of the ideas of paternity and laureation in the practices of the university and courtly education.”6 Lerer here recapitulates the moment when, “the desire to recover the lost body of the past fueled humanist philology.”7 Those who come after this moment and continue to rewrite Chaucer, rather than recover him, are, according to Lerer, “throwback[s].”8 Lerer gives voice here to what might be termed the great fear of the Chaucerian academy, that “Chaucerianism has become the voice and vehicle for fantasy. The privacy of making has become the making of privacy.”9 Lerer’s own labor here is to valorize the making of academic labor—the interpretive work of locating the “authentic body” of the poet. To fail to engage in this labor is to give free reign to a fantastic conception of Chaucer.

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Dane’s, Lerer’s, and Pearsall’s corrections are, of course, enabled by their academic pilgrimages to the body of the poet. As Pearsall suggests, however, theirs is only a late acknowledgement of how Chaucer’s body begins to be like the body that the poet’s own pilgrims seek. For the moment when the body becomes an object worthy of pilgrimage is at least as early as 1556, when the body was translated to the new tomb: “In being translated to a worthier tomb in the main shrine of Catholic and Christian England he is being given the treatment normally accorded to a saint or other venerable person.”10 I like to think that Pearsall has his eye on the irony of Chaucer’s corpse becoming very much like the body of his “hooly blisful martir” (which was also translated to a worthier tomb). The irony is that the more Chaucer’s corpse becomes like Becket’s body, the more the journey to Chaucer’s body participates in the logic of the Canterbury pilgrimage—a journey which, as Chaucer’s own narrative reminds us, is as much about pleasure as it is about saving souls. It is these pleasurable aspects that, we recall, occasioned questions about the value of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, the most notorious interrogation of which can be found in William Thorpe’s testimony before Archbishop Arundel, which characterizes pilgrimage in terms suprisingly close to the “Chaucer Live!” reenactment: “dyuerse men and wymmen wolen goen þus aftir her owne willis and fyndingis out on pilgrimageyngis, þei wolen ordeyne biforehonde to haue wiþ hem boþe men and wymmen þat kunnen wel synge rowtinge songis, and also summe of þese pilgrimes wolen haue wiþ hem baggepipis…. And if þese men and wymmen ben a monepe oute in her pilgrymage, manye of hem an half 3eere aftir schulen be greete iangelers, tale tellers and lyeris.”11 The problem that Thorpe and his fellow Lollards had with pilgrimage is that it seemed less a spiritual quest than an excuse to sing songs and have fun. The result was that “þese men and wymmen” reverted to sin shortly after their return from their penitential experience. Suspicions about the worth of physical pilgrimage were not, of course, restricted to Wycliffites in the Middle Ages, but it is this wholesale rejection of pilgrimage that one of the main players in the drama of Chaucer’s body, A.P.Stanley (Dean of Westminster Abbey), returns to and recapitulates in the nineteenth century.12 Stanley quotes a translated version of Thorpe’s attack on pilgrimage and then links this attack with the Canterbury Tales by giving an extended summary of what he calls “the Supplementary Tale” (a decidedly profane treatment of what might have happened had Chaucer’s pilgrims reached Canterbury, now known as the Pseudo-Chaucerian Prologue to the Tale of Beryn). Stanley admits that Chaucer never wrote of the pilgrims’ arrival at Canterbury but says that “for historical purposes the gap is in great measure filled by the ‘Supplementary Tale.’13 Stanley uses the non-Chaucerian “Tale” not only to narrate the “ordinary amusements of the better class of Canterbury pilgrims,” but to reveal that “the rest are described as employing themselves in a less creditable manner.”14 He goes out of his way here (to the point of using Chauceriana) to attack not only pilgrimage, or even the pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine, but

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specifically Chaucer’s pilgrimage. We get a hint about why Stanley would launch such an attack from the final page of his treatment of Canterbury: “our pilgrimage cannot be Geoffrey Chaucer’s, but it may be John Bunyan’s…in that pilgrimage… Canterbury Cathedral, let us humbly trust, may still have a part to play. Although it is no longer the end in the long journey, it may still be a stage in our advance…,”15 In a familiar move, Stanley suggests that it is the spiritual Protestant, Bunyan, rather than the corporeal Catholic, Chaucer, who really captures what pilgrimage should be like. Yet if Stanley wishes to claim that the tomb of Becket “was entangled with exaggerated superstitions, which were condemned by the wise and good even of those very times,” this does not mean that Stanley wishes to discourage pilgrimage to the tomb of Chaucer himself.16 Indeed, we only need to remember that, in Furnivall’s discussion of the Chaucer window, he asserts that Stanley, “renews the bond between London and Canterbury that Chaucer wove.”17 Stanley himself focuses on how the bodies within Westminster point to the continuation of “the race of our distinguished men,” and he asserts that the “peculiar glory” of Poets’ Corner derives from a “single tomb.”18 Thus, even as he seeks to efface (at least in contemporary terms) the site of medieval pilgrimage —Canterbury, he wishes to displace it with a new Protestant site and even transforms Brigham’s tomb into a Protestant production by locating Brigham’s work not in 1556, but in 1551, during the reign of Edward VI. Stanley, then, attempts to reclaim Chaucer for Protestantism even as he resists the idea of a Catholic translation; at the same time he attempts to dissociate his proto-Protestant notion of Chaucer’s body from the body of Becket, a body associated with unruly and profane pilgrimage. In other words, Stanley wants to lay claim to the auratic and relic-like qualities of Chaucer’s body, even as he wishes to distance it from a medieval devotion to the body. As we saw in chapter three, his is a kind of secular sainthood that relies more on what Etienne Balibar calls a national “invariant substance” that can be passed down to the poet’s heirs. Stanley’s goal, then, is not unlike that of those gentlemen antiquarians who attempted to repair Chaucer’s tomb. Their project was a patriotic one that attempted to galvanize a popular love of the “father.” Yet, as we saw, the appeal was ultimately a failure. Unlike the pilgrims to Becket’s shrine, those who journeyed to Chaucer’s tomb were unable to provide for its upkeep. Part of the reason the appeal failed is undoubtedly the impracticality of the expanded plan to restore the tomb. At the rate of giving set up by the initial donors, the Committee would need four hundred subscribers to effect a repair—a large number given the Society of Antiquaries’ inability to get its own subscribers (including William J.Thoms, one of the founders of the committee) to pay for its own upkeep.19 The twin aims of the Committee—to raise enough money to restore the tomb and to make the restoration a national project, were ultimately at cross purposes. What this failure reveals is a contradictory consciousness on the part of the Committee. This small group of gentlemen

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wished at once to mark out Chaucer as someone who was valuable to everyone and to locate that value in the fact that he was not accessible to everyone. In other words, to rephrase Howard Caygill’s formulation about civil society, the appeal “was haunted by the problem of taste.”20 Unlike other societies which attempted to woo the laboring classes, the Committee was manifestly a gentlemen’s preserve. And, with the exception of the handbill (which was probably distributed to those who had already paid to enter the Abbey), the announcements were confined to the organs of a small circle of gentlemen antiquarians.21 The announcements of the appeal were therefore confined to those who already had the leisure and taste to appreciate Chaucer. The appeal’s failure, in other words, resulted from the mutually incompatible beliefs that Chaucer should not be subordinated to popular taste, but that he should be popular. This opposition between the “serious” project of the “restoration” of Chaucer and popular Chaucerianism will seem, in some measure, familiar to professional medievalists. I do not mean to overemphasize the connection between a group of nineteenth-century gentlemen antiquarians and clerics, and the more diverse and professionalized medieval academy. We no longer participate in the same symbolic economy that marks out Chaucer as a national father whose memory must be kept alive. But the logic of inaccessibility that led to the failure of the appeal may shed light on the uneven appeal of medieval studies in the twentyfirst century. Like the antiquarians, the academy sometimes sends the message that it wishes to claim Chaucer as its own and maintain the relevance of Chaucer to the larger public. Recently, some medievalists have spoken to the importance of moving toward an appreciation of a more public or popular medievalism, not just as a way to get people interested in things medieval, but as an object of inquiry itself. These critics have argued that it is time to stop feeling guilty about the study of medievalism because it is pleasurable.22 As Fradenburg puts it, “isn’t it the lure [of popular medievalism] that made many of us medievalists?”23 In other words, the academic journey to what some call the “authentically medieval” is often undertaken for what may be pleasurable reasons. Like the pilgrims in the “Chaucer Live!” reenactment, or even Chaucer’s pilgrims themselves, to focus too much on the end result of the journey is to miss much of what the pilgrimage is all about. After all, Chaucer’s pilgrims never actually reach the body of Becket, and even now “pilgrimages” to Canterbury are journeys to an empty space in Trinity Chapel, for the Shrine of Becket was destroyed over four hundred years ago. Maybe this, though, is what gives rise to academic anxieties about popular medievalism—that there is no end point, no conclusion, no rationale for what might simply be a good time. To say this, though, is to ignore the ways in which pleasure will create its own endpoint. As early as the fifteenth century, the anonymous author of The Prologue to the Tale of Beryn created a text in which the pilgrims reach the Shrine. So too, the Canterbury Tales Visitor Attraction in Canterbury provides not just a realization of the tales, but a reconstruction of Becket’s shrine “a

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stone’s throw” (as Stephanie Trigg puts it) from the Cathedral itself.24 It is this corpseless popular reconstruction that, as I suggested in the introduction, some medievalists find problematic. Like many of the actors in this book, they wish to recover and recuperate the poet by returning to the body, the authentic corpus, not to some reconstructed thing or an empty tomb that is a long way from Chaucer. It would be easy at this point to ask, do we want Chaucer as a vigorous presence or a deathly absence? But to ask this question is to fall into the false dilemma that equates vitality with that which is popular and death with the academic. If this book has been about anything, it has been about how the corpse of the author and the corpus of his works are vitalized by a mortuary imaginary that is not limited to an academic understanding of fidelity and infidelity. Unlike William Thorpe, then, I want to hear the voices of the “greete iangelers, tale tellers and lyeris” because I believe that their “false” tales are as historically important as any purportedly “true” history.

APPENDIX Chaucer’s Tomb and Nicholas Brigham Laurence Tanner (Keeper of the Muniments and Library at Westminster Abbey)

An undated typescript c. 1930 It is a well-known fact that in the 16th century and indeed earlier it was possible for the noblemen or rich merchants (or their executors) to order a tomb or brass for themselves according to pattern and complete (at any rate for brasses) with a representation of the required number of sons and daughters in a gradually decreasing perspective of conventional figures. It is not, therefore, surprising in itself that there should be more than an accidental resemblance between tombs of approximately the same date. A remarkable instance of this was pointed out by Professor W.R.Lethaby some months ago (Times Literary Supplement Feb. 28 1929) when he drew attention to the close resemblance between the tomb of the Duchess of Northumberland (1555) in the Old Parish Church at Chelsea and that erected to the memory of the poet Chaucer in Westminster Abbey by Nicholas Brigham in 1556. The general form of these two tombs is not an uncommon one. We may compare, for instance, the fine tomb of William Dudley, Bishop of Durham (d. 1483) in Westminster Abbey, and that of John Croke (d. 1477) in All Hallows, Barking. But the unusual and curious feature in both the Northumberland and Chaucer tombs of the diapered supporting shafts makes it almost certain that they must have come from the same workshop. The suggestion has frequently been repeated that the Chaucer tomb was “an old tomb used up.” But, as Professor Lethaby points out “the remarkable correspondence of this (tomb) with the tomb at Chelsea, in form and date, proves that Brigham had an entirely new tomb made, and did not cheaply acquire some old thing which had been cast out from another place.” It does not seem, however, to have been previously noted that at Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire there is a third tomb, which, in its original form, was for all practical purposes a replica of the Chaucer tomb. It is very unfortunate that only the matrices of the original brasses and inscription remain at the back of the recess, and that it seems to be no longer possible either to date the tomb exactly or to find out to whom it was erected. But it cannot be doubted that the date must be c. 1550–1560 and, if so, it helps corroborate the view about Chaucer’s tomb put forward by Professor Lethaby. The Irthlingborough tomb

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was moved from the south to the east wall of the choir aisle about 1839, but an engraving in Hyett’s Sepulchral Memorials of Northamptonshire (1817), p. 35, shows it in its original position and without the three central wooden pillars which were inserted at the time of the removal. The tomb is of dark grey marble (again corresponding to Chaucer’s) and has the same “fayre canopie” and soffit with fan-traceried vaulting. The matrices of the braces represent “a man and a woman in a kneeling posture, with a scroll from each, and shields at the four corners; in each of the outer compartments are similar traces of two smaller scrolls.” These three tombs, therefore, form a somewhat remarkable group, almost undoubtedly from the same workshop and more akin in feeling to an earlier age than to the later “Elizabethan” tombs. It is much to be desired that more could be discovered about that rather mysterious personage, Nicholas Brigham, who erected (as he tells us in the inscription) the tomb in 1556. He seems to have been a Latin scholar, an antiquarian and a poet, but there is little to add to the account given of him in the Dictionary of National Biography and in the two articles in The Athenaeum (1894 and 1902). His “Memoirs by way of a Diary,” which he is known to have written, would be of considerable interest, but neither these nor his other works “seem now to be extant.” He may have been the Nicholas Brigham who took the degree of B.Civ.L. at Cambridge in 1522–3, and he was almost certainly the Nicholas Brickham, “Dominus,” who had a chamber in Wodman’s Rents in the Almonry at Westminster Abbey from 1526–28 and paid a rent of 10 shillings per annum for it,— although the Almoner felt aggrieved about it and claimed that the full rent was 15 shillings. But he evidently liked the surroundings for some years later he returned to the Almonry. Among the Abbey Muniments is a bond (W. A. M. 5390) dated November 30th, 1547, from Nicholas Brigham, Gentleman of Westminster, to David Vincent, Armiger, in £40, whereby he agrees “at his entering in the Almshouse” to allow the Almsmen to draw water at their well, to make a conduit at the Almshouse for the use of the Almsmen and to allow two aged women then dwelling in part of the said Almshouse to remain in undisturbed possession. The bond is in bad condition and somewhat illegible but there are faint traces at the bottom of Brigham’s signature. A seal is attached which, by careful cleaning, has been made to reveal the arms “argent a fleur-de-lis with an orle of martlets sable” and these are the arms of Brigham of Yorkshire, Cumberland and Oxfordshire. Nicholas is known to have had a brother, Thomas, who held lands by inheritance at Caversham, Oxon., and, although he does not appear in the recorded pedigree of Brigham of Oxfordshire, there can be little doubt that he belonged to that house. At any rate, he was not descended from Brigham of Brigham, Yorks., whose arms are altogether different. The explanation of the bond quoted above is to be found in an undated petition of the King’s Almsmen at Westminster which is also among the muniments (W. A. M. 5325). The Petition is addressed to Queen Elizabeth and belongs to the first years of her reign. The Almsmen, being “very pore, lame ympotent persons”

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complain “in most lamentable wise” that “so it is and it may please your excellent Maiestie that of late yeares past one David Vincent, being than an afficer belonging to the wardrobb of beddes to the most worthie prince of famous memorie King Henry VIII” has dispossessed them not merely of their Hall, Chapel, Garden and “a severalle chamber” for each almsman, but by “such lyke synister dealing” they have also lost their “wood, colys, water, gownys and badges.” They go on to state that he (Vincent) afterwards “sold the same unto one Nicolas Brigham, who converted the same to a dwelling house for hym selfe and to his use and tooke awaye the arms standing and fixed over the gate thereof.” The Almshouses had been built by Henry VII for 13 poor men and stood to the south of the Gatehouse more or less on the site of No. 3 on the west side of Dean’s Yard. No trace of them now remains. The whole trouble appears to have arisen owing to the fact that the Dean and Chapter of Westminster had handed them over by deed to Edward VI who in 1546/7 granted the eastern half of them, including the Hall and Chapel, to Richard Cecil, the father of the great Lord Burghley. He conveyed them to David Vincent who, as stated above, sold the building to Nicholas Brigham. The Queen appointed a Commission of Enquiry but nothing seems to have come of it and it was not until 1604 that restitution was made to the unfortunate Almsmen. Brigham must have lived there from 1547, but we get no further glimpses of him from the Muniments, and in 1558 he died.

Notes

Introduction 1. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 13. 2. Caroline Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 128. For the other two mentions of the habit see 99 and 143. 3. Haselwood, under the pseudonym Eu. Hood, had published “A Note on the habit of payment of money at Chaucer’s Tomb,” in The Gentleman’s Magazine 93 (1823): 226. There is also a collection of cuttings in William Winstanley’s Lives of the English Poets which was probably put together around 1833. One of the cuttings is from The Ancient State, Authoritie, and Proceedings of the Court of Requests, 2 October 1596, which details the 1577 repayment. Haselwood has added a long manuscript note detailing his questions. 4. Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 147. 5. William Camden, Reges, Reginae, Nobiles, & alij in Ecclesia Collegiata B.Petri Westmonasterij sepulti… (London, 1600), Ila. 6. See David Wallace’s discussion of Chaucer’s use of the verb in “‘Whan She Translated Was’: A Chaucerian Critique of Petrarchan Academy,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 156–215; here 195–200. 7. Boece, in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 414, l. 21. All quotations from Chaucer’s works, unless otherwise noted, will be from The Riverside Chaucer. 8. Patrick Geary, Living With the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 213–14. 9. Geary, 214. 10. Derek Pearsall comes close to saying as much in “Chaucer’s Tomb: The Politics of Reburial,” Medium Aevum 64 (1995):51–73. 11. Edward Wedlake Brayley, The History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St. Peter, West-minister…illustrated by John Preston Neale (London: 1818–23):2:265, 267.

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12. A few selections from this still burgeoning genre might include Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Religious Culture and Late Medieval Piety (New York: Routledge, 1993); Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body, trans. R.Burr Litchfield (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2001); Peter Brown, The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); The Book and the Body, ed. Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997); Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, ed. Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 13. Laqueur, 12. 14. Ibid. 15. As Laqueur himself acknowledges. See 13. 16. Caroline Walker Bynum, “A Medievalist’s Perspective on the Body,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1995):4. 17. N.Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 192–93. 18. Hayles, 5. 19. See, for instance, Nigel Barley’s Grave Matters (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995), Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body (New York: Routledge, 1992); Jonathan Dollimore’s Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998); Armando Petrucci’s Writing the Dead (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and the collection of essays edited by Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen, Death and Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Specifically medieval works might include Paul Binski’s Medieval Death (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), and Christopher Daniell’s Death and Burial in Medieval England (New York: Routledge, 1997). 20. Bynum, 33. 21. To misquote Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents (London: Routledge, 1985), 122. 22. Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Summer, 1999):696–727; here 700. 23. For a recent treatment of this idea, see the collection of lectures in The Book and the Body, ed. Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). 24. This version of the charter is taken from Bodley 89, which is printed in Mary Caroline Spalding’s The Middle English Charters of Christ (Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr College, 1914), 26; ll. 75–89. 25. Michael Camille discusses Richard de Bury’s preoccupation with book and body in “The Book as Fetish in Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon” in The Book and the Body, ed. Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, 34–77; here 54. There are numerous examples, but see, for instance, the Disputacion between Mary and the Cross, in Carl Horstmann, ed., Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, EETS, o.s., 117 (London: K.Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1901), 617–18. An ABC Poem on the Passion of Christ, in Frederick Furnivall, ed., Political Religious and Love Poems, EETS, o.s., 15 (London: K.Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1903), 217:ll. 1–11; and

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the Digby Burial of Christ, in Frederick Furnvall, ed., The Digby Plays, EETS, e.s., 70 (London: K.Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1896), ll. 271–74. 26. The translation of Guillaume de Deguilleville’s prayer is called La Priere de Nostre Dame in the manuscripts, but now generally goes by the title An ABC. The relevant stanza concerns the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ: He vouched sauf, tel him, as was his wille, Bicome a man, to have oure alliaunce, And with his precious blood he wrot the bille Upon the crois as general acquitaunce To every penitent in ful creaunce.

The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 638:11. 57–61. 27. Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole, an English Father of the Church and his Followers, ed. C.Horstmann (New York: Macmillan, 1895–1896), 2:206. 28. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 225. 29. William Mason, Musaeus, a monody to the memory of Mr. Pope, in imitation of Milton’s Lycidas (London, 1747), 8–10. See chapter five for the full quotation. 30. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 30–33. 31. See, for instance, the extensive work of Michael Camille; Mary Carruther’s Book of Memory and her Craft of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Laura Kendrick’s Animating the Letter (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999). 32. Frederick James Furnivall: A Volume of Personal Record (London: H Frowde, 1913), l-li. See also the Third Report to the Chaucer Society (1872), 2. 33. Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 147. For a sustained treatment of this theme in The Regement of Princes, see Derek Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: the Poetics of Royal Self-Representation” Speculum 69 (1994):386–410. 34. Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 204. 35. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 303. 36. Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1996), 7. 37. Thomas Wright, The Life of Walter Pater (London: Everett & Co., 1907), 2:267– 68. 38. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 127. 39. Bronfen, 90. 40. Derrida, 103–104. 41. Bronfen, 90.

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42. One might well argue that ideas of material and the transcendent are no less implicated in Derrida’s critique of Western attempts to establish the ground of writing. But Bronfen’s point is that the historical instantiation of the use of these categories tells us something about how writing and the corpse are connected. 43. As Stafford avers, “the sensuous image, like the body, is by definition already theoretically severed from the noble language paradigm whose duty it is to emulate.” Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1991), 6. 44. An Account of the Greatest English Poets, in The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, ed. Richard Hurd, Bohn Series (London: 1854–6), 1:23. 45. Thomas Raynsford Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1892), 3:441. 46. T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–32 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932), 18.

Chapter 1 1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W.Norton, 1961), 42. 2. Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. E.C.Thomas, with a foreword by Michael Maclagan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), 21. 3. See Norman F.Blake, “Caxton and Chaucer,” Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 1 (1967):19–36. 4. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1968), 221. 5. “Master Paul” may have been Richard II’s king’s clerk and physician, Master Paul de la Mounte (Martin M.Crow and Clair C.Olson, ed., Chaucer Life-Records [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966], 539.) 6. Derek Pearsall speculates that he may have been ailing (The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer [Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992], 275.) 7. Donald R.Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Work, His World (New York: E.P.Dutton, 1987), 499. 8. The Riverside Chaucer, 328. 9. Chawcerus ante mortem suam sepe clamavit ve michi ve michi quia revocare nec destruere jam potero illa que male scripsi de malo et turpissimo amore hominum ad mulieres et jam de homine ad hominem continuabuntur. Velim. Nolim. Et sic plangens mortuus (Martin M.Crow and Clair C.Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, 547). 10. Pearsall, 275–76. James Dean argues that just as the Retraction was viewed as a fitting (and conventional) conclusion to the Canterbury Tales, so Gascoigne and a fifteenth-century audience would have seen the story about Chaucer as a fitting conclusion to his life (“Chaucer’s Repentance: A Likely Story,” Chaucer Review 24.1 [1989]:64–76). 11. As Douglas Wurtele puts it, “he quotes, in effect, Chaucer’s last words as a despairing regret that now no time remains to do the very thing that the Retraction does in fact succeed in doing, as far as lay in Chaucer’s power” (Douglas Wurtele, “The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Viator 11 [1980]:335–59; here 349).

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12. The authenticity of the Retraction has largely been accepted, though its status as the ending to the Canterbury Tales remains under discussion. See James D.Gordon, “Chaucer’s Retraction: A Review of Opinion,” in Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Albert Croll Baugh, ed. MacEdward Leach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), 81–96; the review of the literature in Wurtele and, most recently, Charles A.Owen Jr., “What the Manuscripts Tell Us about the Parson’s Tale” Medium Ævum 63 (1994):234–49; and Míceál Vaughan, “Creating Comfortable Boundaries: Scribes, Editors and the Invention of the Parsons Tale” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authenticity and the Idea of the Authentic Text 1400–1602, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 45–90. 13. Dying suddenly was one of the great fears of the Middle Ages, so it is not remarkable that this aspect of the story would receive attention (Daniell, 32). 14. Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 149. 15. Ibid. 16. There were those, of course, who wished to trope the “feminine” books engendered by these male authors as sons rather than daughters. In the middle of the fourteenth century, for instance, Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham writes in his Philobiblon, “thus the transcription of ancient books is as it were the begetting of fresh sons, on whom the office of the father may devolve, lest the commonwealth of books suffer detriment” (147). But Michael Camille argues convincingly that de Bury suppresses the feminine aspect of the trope in order to assert “textual immortality without the necessity for maternal materiality.” He claims that the natural progression of a series of tropes which link sex and writing (plough, pen, penis) would have made “the author’s inscription, his word, his seed planted on the female flesh of the parchment.” As much as de Bury attempts to trope books as male, he himself cannot help but talk about them in feminine terms (Camille, 53– 54; 47–48). 17. See Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 131. 18. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. 19. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 469. 20. One could imagine another (perhaps more “legitimate”) model of manuscript circulation that would depend on virtuous desire. And, in fact, this licit desire might fit in neatly with an exogamy that is authorized by a homosocial society. Gascoigne’s scurrilous attack on Chaucer, however, seems to participate in the desire he wishes to suppress. 21. Two other manuscripts also contain the claim that “Truth” was made on Chaucer’s deathbed (Hatton 73 and the John Shirley manuscript R.3.20). However, George Pace has demonstrated that all three titles have a common ancestor (George B.Pace, “Otho A. XVIII,” Speculum 26 [1951]:306–315). 22. Though Furnivall had printed the version of the poem (from BL Additional 10340) which contained the envoy addressed to Sir Philip (de) la Vache, Bernhard ten

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

Brink apparently rejected its authenticity. (History of English Literature, trans. Horace M.Kennedy, William Clarke Robinson, L.Dora Schmidt [New York: Henry Holt, 1883–96], I. 205–206). George B.Pace and Alfred David, eds., The Minor Poems, Part One (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 49. Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 197. Pace and David, 136–37. Lerer, 144. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 8. See Benson, The Riverside Chaucer, 603; The Legend of Good Women, ll. F 537, G 525; the Canterbury Tales, I:1881, 50. See David Lawton’s review of early opinions about the fifteenth century in “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH 54 (1987):761–88: here 761. See, for instance, Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. H.Bergen, EETS 97 (London: Pub. for the Early English Text Society, by K.Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., limited, 1906– 35), 97:239–240. A.C.Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 107. Spearing, 106. Ibid. Lerer, 59. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W.Norton, 1977), 103. W.W.Skeat, Chaucerian and Other Pieces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1897), 273: ll. 232–242. Spearing, 68. John Bowers, The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), 14:ll.48, 44. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1970), 161–162. LaCapra, 713. Caroline Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357– 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 1:19, 24, 35, 37. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” trans. Joan Rivière, in Freud: General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: 1963), 163–179; here 165. Hans W.Loewald, “Some Considerations on Repetition and Repetition Compulsion,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 52 (1971), 59–66, here 62. The minor poems of John Lydgate pt. 2, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS 192 (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1934), ll. 15–27. Derek Brewer, “Images of Chaucer: 1386–1900,” in Chaucer and Chaucerians (London: Nelson, 1966), 245. See also Strohm, “Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and The Narrowing of the ‘Chaucer Tradition’” SAC 4 (1982):3–32; here 17n. 45. Strohm, “Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience,” 17. See, for instance, David R.Carlson, “Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait,” Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991):283–300, particularly 283–84; Pearsall,

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

“Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Self Representation,” Speculum 69 (1994):386–410; see especially 402–03, 410; Strohm, 17; Lerer, interestingly enough, distinguishes between a psychologizing personal Hoccleve and a Lydgate who is more concerned with “the social and political institutions and individuals that order, read and transmit works of literature,” 23. Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regement” 399 n. 46. As Lerer points out, 23. Thomas Hoccleve, The Regement of Princes, in Works, ed. F.J.Furnivall, vol. 3, EETS e.s., 72 (London, 1897), 11.1961–6. Pearsall, Lydgate, 63. See, for instance, Carlson and Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes,” 401. For a detailed treatment of the irregularity of Hoccleve’s annuity, see the appendix to J.A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1994). LaCapra, 703. LaCapra, 700. LaCapra, 708. Larry Scanlon, “The King’s Two Voices: Narrative and Power in Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380– 1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 216–247; here 236. Indeed, as Pearsall notes, the Regement was so successful that Hoccleve became a kind of unofficial court poet for a while (“Hoccleve’s Regement” 410). Ethan Knapp, “Eulogies and Usurpations: Hoccleve and Chaucer Revisited,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999):247–273. The only father who is both alive and present is the old man who, as Scanlon points out, Hoccleve initially wishes were absent. The reason for this is, I think, that the old man is also (being a beggar) a kind of figure for Hoccleve himself. As Hoccleve says, “it moste be a greter man of myght/þan þat þou art, þat scholde me releve” (176–77). Hoccleve wants, not simply an old man, but “a greter man of myght” whose very power, I would argue, derives from the fact that he is absent. Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 147. Ibid. I borrow the concept from Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story, “The Bottle Imp.” Chaucer’s poem was attributed to Hoccleve in the 1602 edition of his Works, edited by Thomas Speght. For a discussion of some of the possible reasons for this attribution see my “Politics, Prodigality, and the Reception of Chaucer’s ‘Purse,’” in Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. William Gentrup (Belgium: Brepols, 1998), 63–76. The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 18. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 139–141. “Melancholy and the Act,” Critical Inquiry 26:4 (Summer, 2000):657–81; here 660. Undoubtedly, Hoccleve also means for the recipient of the poem to recover the memory of the “forgotten” annuity in the same way and corporealize that memory as money. Though I do not wish to range into numismatic arcana, it is worth noting that there are other differences between the portrait and money. The portrait, a well-executed picture drawn by hand which had claims to verisimilitude, is different from a

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69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

stylized impression of the king on a minted coin. Indeed early in Henry IV’s reign some of the dies from the reign of Richard III were still in use. In 1412, however, the weight of the coinage had changed, and there is no doubt that there was a general belief that the picture on the nation’s coins was a picture of Henry IV—the power that guaranteed the value of the money. Despite the critical agreement that Hoccleve was engaged in a public, even national, project here, a number of critics have commented on the personal nature of this recovery of the poet. See, for instance, Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, 402; Larry Scanlon, 241. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 142. John Bale thought Chaucer had died in 1450, while Raphael Holinshed thought it was either 1400 or 1402 (Spurgeon 1:114, 3:20). The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W.J.B.Crotch, EETS o. s., 176 (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 37. I have silently expanded some abbreviations. Lerer, 148. Crotch, 7. Text and translation (by R.G.G.Coleman) can be found in Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage: 1386–1837 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), 1:78–79. In 1478, when Caxton recorded the epitaph made by Stephen Surigonus, the last four kings had been buried in Westminster. It is probable that Caxton wished to advertise the connection between all those dead royal bodies and Chaucer as a way to add allure and prestige to his new and “improved” version of Chaucer’s works. In doing so Caxton was not only bringing a sacral quality to Chaucer’s works, but also giving prestige to Chaucer as a poet closely associated with the court. Caxton’s representation of Chaucer’s burial, then, gave Chaucer’s body at once earthly and heavenly prestige, giving it, as a result, a kind of mystical quality. Given the regal and sacral inflection of Chaucer’s buried body, it is not irrelevant to look at this body in light of Ernst Kantorowicz’s notion of the king’s two bodies, one sublime and immaterial and the other terrestrial and subject to corruption. The obvious king with whom we might see a connection is Richard. Though it would be too much to claim that Richard’s body is co-extensive with Chaucer’s body, there are analogies. Chaucer, of course, worked for Richard. Both were translated from one grave to another (as we will see in the next chapter). And, as Paul Strohm has demonstrated, Richard, like Chaucer, had a lively afterlife. This notion that the dead body continues to exert a material living force may explain why Richard was translated some thirteen years after he had died (or was murdered) in the reign of Henry V—the son of the usurper. Pearsall has suggested that this translation was to put to rest persistent rumors that Richard was still alive; the translation would prove that Richard was dead and monumentally buried. This was quite possibly the strategy, especially as (as Paul Strohm has demonstrated) Richard remains in some sense alive—a kind of revenant from 1400–1413, “The Trouble with Richard: The Reburial of Richard II and Lancastrian Symbolic Strategy” Speculum 71 (1996), 87–111. Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicus, ed. A.Hall (Oxford, 1709), 425. The second edition of 1570 is the first to contain the lines. Foxe, Ecclesiasticall history contayning the Actes and Monumentes of thinges passed in every Kynges tyme in this Realme (London: John Day, 1570), 2:966.

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79. Thomas Speght, The Workes of our Antient and Learned Poet, Geffrey Chaucer (London, 1602), clv; Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (London, 1652), 472. 80. Indeed, in the fifteenth century, printing was at once praised as a “divine art,” and castigated as diabolical. See Elizabeth L.Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 19, 158. 81. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Methuen, 1982), 132. 82. See, for instance, Linda Ehrsam Voigts, “Scientific and Medical Books,” in Jeremy J.Griffiths and Derek Pearsall, eds., Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 345–402; and N.F.Blake, “Manuscript to Print,” in ibid., 403–432. 83. Canterbury Tales, ed. William Caxton (London: 1483?), A2r. 84. Ibid., A2v. 85. David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 18. 86. Hayles, 126. 87. Beverly Boyd identifies the manuscript as of the a text. She, however, asserts that it is not an impossibility that Caxton thought he was using a manuscript that carried Chaucer’s authority (“William Caxton,” in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G.Ruggiers [Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1984], 24–25). 88. Jeffrey Kittay and Wlad Godzich, The Emergence of Prose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 203 et passim. 89. Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 17–57.

Chapter 2 1. The Spectator: A Corrected Edition, ed. Alexander Chalmers, (London: 1806), 1: 146. 2. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 17–18. 3. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 27. 4. Indeed, the body indicated the “thereness” of that most important of places, the altar, as every church altar was to contain a relic. (Patrick Geary, Living With the Dead [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994], 202). 5. We have seen that Lydgate and Hoccleve cast themselves as poetic heirs who must measure themselves against their predecessor. And this notion of Chaucer as the measure of poetic value continues at least through Spenser in the sixteenth century. Such references are fairly common throughout the period, but see especially Peter Betham, The Prefatory Epistle [to] The precepts of Warre (London: 1544), 69; Roger Ascham, A Report and Discourse written by Roger Ascham, of the affaires and state of Germany and the Emperour Charles his court during certaine yeares while the sayd Roger was there (London: 1570), A4r; A new booke called the Shippe of safegarde, wrytten by G.B. 1569 (London: 1569), D7v. Stephen Hawes’s preference for John Lydgate might be seen as an anomaly. See The Historie of graunde Amoure and la bell Pucel, called the Pastime of plesure (London: 1554), F3v-F4v.

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6. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), 86. 7. Reges, Reginae, Nobiles, & alij in Ecclesia Collegiata B.Petri Westmonasterij sepulti… (London, 1600), Ilr. 8. Pearsall, “Tomb,” 60 suggests that in his Scriptorum illustrium maiores Brytannie… catalogus (printed in Basle in 1557) Bale says that Brigham made the tomb. Bale does indeed give a brief biography of Brigham, but does not mention the tomb here. For Bale’s comments about the tomb see Thomas Hearne, Johannis de Trokelowe, Annales Edvardi II, (1729), Appendix III, 286–7. 9. William Bullein, A Dialogue bothe pleasaunte and pietifull wherein is a goodly regimente against the feuer Pestilence…Newly corrected by William Bullein the autour thereof. ed. M.W. Bullen and A.H.Bullen EETS e. s., 52 (London: N.Trübner and Co., 1888), 16. 10. See James Alsop, “Nicholas Brigham (d. 1558), Scholar, Antiquary, and Crown Servant,” Sixteenth Century Journal 12.1 (1981):49–67. 11. Scriptorum illustrium Maioris Brytanniae quam nunc Angliam et Scotiam vocant, catalogus (Basel, 1557–59), 718. For the most up to date biography of Brigham, see James Alsop, “Nicholas Brigham,” 49–67. 12. For instance, he owned a copy of Ailred of Rievaulx’s life of Edward the Confessor, and a note on the last leaf of the Bodleian Laud Misc. 581 Piers Plowman records a note from Ralph Copinger, a customs collector in the port of London, “Memorandum that I haue lent to Nicholas Brigham the Pers Ploughman which I borrowed of Mr. Lee of Addyngton” (see Alsop, “Nicholas Brigham,” 62). 13. See Appendix One for Laurence Tanner’s unpublished typescript about Brigham and the Abbey. A bond (W.A.M. 5390) discusses the plumbing arrangements occasioned by Brigham’s purchase of the almonry. And though W.A.M. 5325 (a complaint by the King’s Almsmen) does not tell us precisely what Brigham received in his purchase, “A Breviat of the Case between the Governors and Sir Anthony Irby for the Almsmen of Westminster” (W.A.M. 18395 c. 1653) informs us that it included the Hall, Chapel, Pantry, Buttery, Larder, Laundry and four out of the sixteen chambers. It also tells us that it was originally granted to Richard Cecil (Father of Lord Burleigh) and he conveyed it to David Vincent. Apparently a wall was constructed between the portion that Brigham owned and the portion that the almsmen still controlled, which would explain the need for the conduit mentioned in W.A.M. 5390 (W.A.M. 18398). 14. Curiously, he was indirectly involved in a conspiracy against Mary, a fact that Derek Pearsall will make much of. See below. 15. See Derek Pearsall, “Chaucer’s Tomb: The Politics of Reburial,” Medium Aevum 64 (1995):64. 16. Thomas J.Heffernan, “Aspects of the Chaucerian Apocrypha: Animadversions on William Thynne’s Edition of the Plowman’s Tale” in Chaucer Traditions, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 155– 67. 17. Pearsall, “Chaucer’s Tomb,” 62. 18. Pearsall, “Chaucer’s Tomb,” 66. 19. Martin Biddle, The Tomb of Christ (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 101– 102. 20. Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1960), 27–154.

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Hertz, 52. Hertz, 46. Ibid. Ibid. Strohm, 106–127. Bronfen, 104. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken, 1968), 69–82; here 73. 28. Foxe, 2:965. 29. The translation of the epitaph is from Pearsall, “Chaucer’s Tomb,” 71. Foxe seems to be giving a loose account of some lines that he fails to include in the transcription of the epitaph. These two lines following “25. Octob. An. 1400” in Foxe’s transcription are omitted (but are present in Bale’s notes as well as in other transcriptions of the lines on the grave): Aerumnarum Requies Mors N.Brigham Hos Fecit Musarum Nomine Sumptus 1556 [Death is rest from afflictions. Nicholas Brigham undertook these costs on the muses’ account.]

It is possible, of course, that Foxe simply omitted the lines that he thought were extraneous to the quotation, but there are other problems with the quotation as well. As Joseph Dane has pointed out in his detailed treatment of the inscription, the M.S. preceding the quotation (standing for Manibus/ Memoriae Sacrum or Sacred to the Shades’ Memory) is also omitted, and the word “vitae” in line three is replaced with “mortis.” (Joseph A.Dane, “Who is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb? —Prologomena,” Huntington Library Quarterly 57 [1994]: 98–123; here 112.) 30. This work, a debate between a Pelican and a Griffin, had been printed separately somewhat earlier. John Bowers claims that the original date of composition was c. 1400 and that it had been kept alive throughout the fifteenth century by the Lollard underground (The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions [Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992], 24.) See also, Thomas Heffernan and Andrew N.Wawn, “Chaucer, The Plowman’s Tale and Reformation Propaganda: The Testimonies of Thomas Godfrey and I Playne Piers,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 56 (1973):174–192. For a recent edition of the tale, see James Dean, ed., Six Ecclesiastical Satires (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), 51–114. 31. Foxe, 965–66. 32. David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 24. 33. Pearsall, “Chaucer’s Tomb,” 60. 34. Hertz, 72. 35. Qtd. in Survey of London, ed. C.L.Kingsford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), xvii.

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

For a full text and translation of Stephen Surigonus’s epitaph, see Lerer, 155–56. Survey of London, 2:110–111. See Spurgeon 1:28. Bullein, 16–17. See John Hales’s and Albert Hartshorne’s readings of Bullein’s quotation from what Hartshorne calls, “The Vision of the Poets” below, chapter three. This spoiling of the epitaphs, in addition, resurrects an old anxiety about the violation of the tomb of the Christian believer. Though ecclesiastical writers attempted to discourage such popular beliefs about the afterlife, it was popularly believed that any violation of the tomb threatened the ability of the body to be resurrected. As one tombstone put it, “May this sepulchre never at any time be violated, but may it be preserved until the end of world, so that I may return to life sine impedimentum when He comes who is to judge the living and the dead.” (Como, late sixth century. See Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne s.v. “Ad sanctos.”) The implication here is that the disturbance of the sepulchre would impede the “return” to life of the inhabitant of the grave. See Ariès, 32–33 for a discussion on how popular belief connected violation of the grave with difficulties of the resurrection of the body. In fact, Eamon Duffy perceives (in the later Middle Ages) a devotional move from relics to images (The Stripping of the Altars [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992], 167). Sermons by Hugh Latimer, ed., G.E.Corrie, Parker Society 53 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), 35–57. Francis Rous, The Diseases of the Time (London: 1622), 306. David Hawkes, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1996), 19. Chronicles of the Grey Friars of London, ed. John Gough Nichols (Camden Society: 1852), 42, 54, 75. Duffy, 450–51. So, too, it is perhaps no surprise that with the reinstitution of Catholicism, Brigham included an image of Chaucer on the right side of the tomb. This inclusion of images specifically prohibited under the 1538 and 1547 Injunctions might be seen as part of the Catholic “recovery” of the body of Chaucer. Duffy, 414–15. Sermons by Hugh Latimer, 55. Hawkes, 19. Duffy, 570–71. Jonathan Sidnam, for instance, modernized the first three books of Troilus and Criseyde c. 1630. See Herbert G.Wright, ed., A Seventeenth-Century Modernisation of the First Books of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Cooper Monographs on English and American Literature 5 (Bern: Franke, 1960). James Kinsley, ed., The Poems of John Dryden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 4:1457. Ibid. Ibid. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 330. William Harrison, for instance, in 1706 wrote:

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This Dryden saw, and with his wonted fate (Rich in himself) endeavor’d to translate; Took wond’rous pains to do the author wrong, And set to modern time his ancient song. Cadence, and sound, which we so prize, and use, Ill suit the majesty of Chaucer’s muse His language only can his thoughts express, Old honest Clytus scorns the Persian dress.

(William Harrison, Woodstock Park, a Poem, in A Collection of Poems by several hands, ed., R.Dodsley [London: 1758], 5:192–93). 58. Robert Southey, “Review of Ritson’s Ancient English Romances,” The Annual Review 2 (1803):516. 59. Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A.R.Waller and Arnold Glover (London: J.M.Dent and Co., 1902–1904) 5:82. 60. James Russell Lowell says “you must put no faith at all in any idea you may have got of Chaucer from Dryden” (Conversations on Some of the Old Poets [Cambridge, Mass.: 1845], 15). Alexander Smith goes a bit further, suggesting that “Dryden and Pope did not translate Chaucer, or modernize Chaucer; they committed assault and battery upon him” (“Geoffrey Chaucer,” The Museum 1 [1862]:459–466; here 460). 61. Spurgeon, 2:238–9. 62. The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer modernised (London: Whitaker and Co., 1841), ix. 63. John Saunders, Canterbury Tales from Chaucer (London: C.Knight, 1845), 1:5. 64. Guillory, 329. 65. Lord Macaulay, The History of England: From the Accession of James the Second, ed. Charles Harding Firth (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), 852. 66. Macaulay’s “gossip” was repeated both by W.D.Christie in his influential Globe edition of Dryden, and by the Encyclopedia Britannica. See James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 610 n. 65. 67. Significantly, Macaulay’s work reveals a tendency (as John Fisher puts it in his work on John Gower), to read back into history the tensions and obligations of the present. There were superficial similarities between the political situations at the end of the 14th century and at the end of the 17th. In both periods party politics were strong, serious religious differences divided the public, and abrupt shifts in power and depositions of ruler made the problem of integrity very real. While one man remained loyal to a lost cause and suffered, another might shift allegiance and appear to profit by it. Dryden was, of course a conspicuous example of both kinds of behavior (John Gower [New York: New York University Press, 1964], 20).

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Fisher invokes Dryden here in order to make a point about a particular paradigm of the political poet who was at the mercy of political forces. Just as Gower and Chaucer were seen as contrasting exempla (negative and positive) of what can happen to the poet laureate especially when caught between two monarchs, Dryden might be seen as in between the two poets. He is figured as at once grasping convert (like Gower) and loyalist (like Chaucer). 68. Dryden says in the preface to his Fables that “I have presum’d farther in some Places, and added somewhat of my own where I thought my Author was deficient, and had not given his Thoughts their true Lustre, for want of Words in the Beginning of our Language. And to this I was the more embolden’d, because (if I may be permitted to say it of my self) I found I had a Soul congenial to his, and that I had been conversant in the same Studies.” (James Kinsley, ed., The Poems of John Dryden [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958], 4:1457: ll. 521–29). For a sustained treatment of Dryden’s claim see Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 145–52. 69. To The Memory of John Dryden, Esq., in Luctus Britannici or the Tears of the British Muses for the Death of John Dryden, Esq…written by the most Eminent Hand in the two Famous Universities, and by several Others (London: 1700), 18. 70. Stephanie Trigg places Dryden’s claim that he “had a Soul congenial” to Chaucer in a larger context of fantasies of spiritual communion with the “Father” (“Discourses of Affinity in the Reading Communities of Geoffrey Chaucer,” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority and the Idea of the Authentic Text 1400– 1602, ed. Thomas A.Prendergast and Barbara Kline [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999], 270–91. See especially, 285–87. 71. Verses To Dr. Samuel Garth, occasioned by the much Lamented Death of John Dryden Esq, in Luctus Britannici, 54–55. 72. John Dart, Westmonasterium, or the History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St. Peter’s, Westminster (London: 1723), 1:83. 73. N.B., “Chaucer’s Grave,” Gentleman’s Magazine n. s. 32 (1849):594–95. 74. Ibid. 75. David Hawkes, “Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in the Antitheatrical Controversy,” SEL 39.2 (1999):255–273. 76. Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (London: 1580), 109. 77. John Gough Nichols, “The Date of the Erection of Chaucer’s Tomb,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 34 (1850):280–81. Later in the letter we discover why Nichols is so insistent on the contingent nature of Dart’s comments. He wishes to suggest either that the bottom portion of the tomb is the original tomb of the poet or that Nicholas Brigham was the first person to raise a monument to the poet. The reason for this insistence is that, as one of the members of the committee to repair the tomb, Nichols is deeply invested in proving that the tomb that he is actually to restore, in fact, contains Chaucer’s body. Any suggestion that Dryden was buried in Chaucer’s grave (or for that matter quite near Chaucer) would bring into question the whole project of repairing the tomb.

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78. Athenaeum July 10(1850):768. One suspects here that the “competent authorities” who determined that the tomb was the original one may have included one John Gough Nichols, the antiquary most responsible for publicizing the appeal. 79. Like so many others, the mid-century collaborative History and Antiquities of Westminster Abbey conflates Camden’s suggestion that the bones were translated to the new tomb with Dart’s account of Chaucer’s gravestone being sawn to mend the pavement without comment. It says, “From Camden’s words—Musarum nomine hujus ossa transtulit, —it would seem that Chaucer’s ashes were removed to the new Tomb. Dart states that his gravestone was taken up when Dryden’s Monument was erected, and sawn in pieces to mend the pavement!” (Le Keux, Woolnoth, Byrne, Scott and John Preston Neale, in The History and Antiquities of Westminster Abbey and Henry the Seventh’s Chapel; Their Tombs, Ancient Monuments and Inscriptions [London: Willis and Sotheran, 1856], 92.) 80. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey (London: John Murray, 1868), 276. 81. Stanley 276. The anonymity of Dryden’s grave is echoed by Alexander Pope. In writing his epitaph for Nicholas Rowe (poet laureate to George I), Pope suggested that the real value of Rowe’s tomb was that it pointed the way to what he calls Dryden’s “rude and nameless stone.” In this formulation, uncertainty about the location of Dryden’s grave replaces, or perhaps supplements, uncertainty about Chaucer’s grave. 82. Stanley, 269. 83. The newly cut stone (by Tim Metcalfe with money give by Professor Misenheimer) still has eight of the names (including Chaucer’s). 84. Stanley gives the following description of Dryden’s burial, “It is difficult to know how to treat the strange story of the infamous practical jest by which the son of Lord Jeffreys broke up the funeral on the pretext of making it more splendid: the indignation of the Dean, who had ‘the Abbey lighted, the ground opened, the choir attending, an anthem ready set, and himself waiting without a corpse to bury;’ and the anger of the poet’s son, who watched till the death of Jeffreys, with ‘the utmost application,’ for an opportunity of revenge. At any rate, twelve days after Dryden’s death, his ‘deserving reliques’ were lodged in the College of Physicians. There a Latin eulogy was pronounced by Sir Samuel Garth, himself at once a poet and physician, and also wavering between scepticism and Roman Catholicism: and thence ‘an abundance of quality in their coaches and six horses’ accompanied the hearse with funeral music…” (Stanley, 276). 85. The paper was delivered only three days after Stanley’s funeral (July 26,1881) (M.H.Bloxham. “On Chaucer’s Monument in Westminster Abbey,” Archaeological Journal 38 [1881]:364). 86. Bloxham, 361. 87. See Trigg, Congenial Souls, 144–56.

Chapter 3 1. G.K.Chesterton, Chaucer (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), 15.

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2. “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Becoming National, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 132–149; here 132. 3. For much of what follows in this paragraph I am indebted to John Ellis’s Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). See also George Dawson, “Chaucer,” in Biographical Lectures, ed. George St. Clair (London: K. Paul, Trench and Co., 1886), 207. 4. Green, A Short History of the English People (New York: Harper, 1877), 221. 5. See Ellis, 58–59. 6. Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991), 11. 7. Stanley, 269. 8. Frederic William Farrar, Westminster Abbey (New York: M.F.Mansfield and A.Wessels, 1899), 13. 9. Stanley, 340. The poet quoted is Aaron Hill in a letter to Alexander Pope. The occasion of the letter was the death and burial of Hill’s wife. See Stanley, 336. 10. Indeed, even as Balibar seems to identify this national “substance” as passed down through lines of filiation, he talks about it as “soul or spirit,” 141. 11. Bertram S.Puckle, Funeral Customs: Their Origin and Development (London: T.W.Laurie, ltd., 1926) and see John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971). 12. Pat Jalland, “Death, Grief, and Mourning in the Upper-Class Family, 1860–1914,” in Death, Ritual and Bereavement, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (London: Routledge, 1989), 171–187; see especially 182–83. 13. Jalland, 173. 14. Ibid. 15. Qtd. in Ariès, 544. 16. Martha McMackin Garland, “Victorian Unbelief and Bereavement,” in Houlbrooke, 151–170; here 160–61. 17. Walter Simon, European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), passim. 18. Indeed, Ariès asserts that, in France, the Positivists and the Catholics concurred on the increased emphasis on the dead body as a focus for the attempts by the living to deny death. The literature on the loss of faith in the nineteenth century is extensive, but see F.L.Baumer, Religion and the Rise of Scepticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1960); A.O. J.Cochshut, The Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought, 1840–1890 (New York: New York University Press, 1964); O.Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); S.Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheism and Agnosticism in English Society, 1850–1960 (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977). 19. Garland, 153. 20. Peter Stansky, William Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 88–9. 21. Clive Bell, Art (NewYork: Capricorn Books, 1958 [1914], 27). 22. London Transport Museum, B2 “Art and Commerce” February 1916, 10, quoted in Micheal Saler, The Avante-Garde in Interwar England, 27. 23. “Having One’s Kant and Eating It,” London Review of Books vol. 23, number 8 (April 19, 2001), 9. 24. Eagleton, 9.

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25. John Guillory, 278. 26. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 110. 27. Balibar, 139. 28. M.H.Bloxham, 362. J.G.Nichols had suggested that the tomb was older than the canopy which must have been added by Brigham (The Gentleman’s Magazine 36 [Sept. 1850]: 281–282). Scott actually suggests that the tomb was not new when Brigham acquired it (Gleanings from Westminster Abbey, second edition [Oxford: J.Henry and J.Parker, 1863]). 29. “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 17:219–256: here 241. 30. Ariès, 481–82. 31. Jennifer Leaney, “Ashes to Ashes: Cremation and the Celebration of Death in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Houlbrooke, 119. 32. What makes these anxieties even more potent is the way that nineteenth-century anxieties about the body’s afterlife reflected earlier concerns about the resurrection. Just as physical movement of the body led to concerns about the ability of the body to rise, so physical destruction of the body through cremation seemed to militate against the promised resurrection on the last day. Yet, in the face of the ways that bodies were being treated in the latter portion of the nineteenth century, proponents of cremation questioned whether the body would be treated as any less “sacred” if it were burned. As one writer put it, “What…becomes of sentiment or sacred regard for the relics of the dead?” (Rev. H.R.Haweis, Ashes to Ashes, A Cremation Prelude [London, 1875], 17). And as to Judgement Day, Bishop Fraser asked “Could they suppose that it would be more impossible for God to raise up a body at the resurrection, if needs be, out of elementary particles which had been liberated by the burning, than it would be to raise-up a body from the dust, and from the bodies which had passed into the structure of worms?” (Qtd. in W.Robinson, Cremation and Urn-Burial, or the Cemeteries of the Future, [London, 1889], 86). And, if this is true, then, as the Earl of Shaftsbury asks, “What would in such a case become of the blessed martyrs?” (Qtd. in W. Eassie, Cremation of the Dead, Its History and Bearings Upon Public Health, [London, 1875], 12). Though there was no question of Chaucer’s body being cremated, questions like these, I argue, led to a cultural climate in which questions about the continued existence of the body, the location of the body, and especially the translation of the body became even more important as the coherence and transcendence of the body came under attack. Both Bishop Fraser’s and Lord Shaftsbury’s questions indicate the extent to which they answer the objections of those who wish to maintain burial practices by claiming that the body (in particular, the sacred body) is always already mingling with dust. Yet the questions themselves indicate that even if nineteenth-century men and women understood intellectually that the body’s borders became completely porous when it was buried, effectively they treated the body as if it were something which would not be destroyed. 33. William Bullein, A Dialogue bothe pleasaunte and pietifull…, 16–17. See chapter two for a more extensive treatment of the quotation. For a brief discussion of these celebrations, which were largely London based, see Ellis, 18–19. 34. Hales, 190.

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35. Albert Hartshorne, “The Grave of Chaucer,” The Athenaeum 3905 (August 30, 1902), 288. Hartshorne was secretary of the Royal Archaeological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. 36. Hartshorne, 288. 37. Ibid. 38. Mother of the reformer Marie Stopes, Charlotte Stopes wrote widely on Shakespeare and was the first woman to receive a university certificate in Scotland. 39. Charlotte C.Stopes, “The Grave of Chaucer,” The Athenaeum 3913 (Oct. 25, 1902), 552. 40. Mary Sturgeon, Westminster Abbey: Its Memories and Its Message (New York: Frederick Stokes, 1921), 210. See also Georgina Troutbeck, Westminster Abbey (London: Methuen, 1900), 199. The Keeper of the Muniments and the Library, Lawrence E.Tanner, was still refuting the theory of the “rifled tomb” in the 1950s (The History and Treasures of Westminster Abbey [London: Pitkin, 1953], 66). 41. Sturgeon, 211. 42. W.R.Lethaby, “Chaucer’s Tomb,” TLS (Feb. 21, 1929), 137. 43. Lethaby, 137. 44. W.A.M. 67176. 45. See above and Tanner, The History and Treasures of Westminster Abbey, 66. 46. The comment is quoted by W.R.Lethaby, 137. 47. Žižek, Sublime, 18. 48. Slavoj Žižek neatly delineates the opposition between the material and transcendent aspect of money this way, “we know very well that money, like all other material objects, suffers the effects of use, that its material body changes through time, but in the social effectivity of the market we none the less treat coins as if they consist, ‘of an immutable substance, a substance over which time has no power, and which stands in antithetical contrast to any matter found in nature’” (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [London: Verso, 1989], 18). Žižek is quoting Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978), 59. 49. Katherine A.Esdaile, “Chaucer’s Tomb,” TLS (Feb. 28, 1929), 163. This wasn’t quite the last word in the discussions of 1929. Walter H.Godfrey wrote in a week later to point out that the resemblance between Chaucer’s “novum tumulum” and the Duchess of Nothumberland’s tomb had been noted in a monograph (Survey of London, volume 7, The Parish of Chelsea, Pt. 3) prepared by the London Survey Committee and published by the London City Council in 1929. See TLS (Mar. 7, 1929), 186. 50. Stopes, 552. 51. Robert Pogue Harrison, “Hic Jacet,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001):393–407. 52. Harrison, 396. 53. For a discerning discussion of the connection of “monument” with “monere” (to remind), see Russ Castronovo, Fathering the Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 109–111. 54. Verdery, 27. 55. See Spurgeon, 4:28. 56. Thomas Speght, The Workes of our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer (London: 1602), Clv.

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57. Joseph Dane, Who is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb?: Studies in the Reception of Chaucer’s Book (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 30. Some evidence for this assertion might be found in an earlier version of this argument. Dane says, “The verses, if they existed at all, were probably on the ledge before the monument became ‘Chaucer’s Tomb’ in 1556, and did not survive the transformation” (Dane, “Who is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb?” Prolegomena, Huntington Library Quarterly 57 (1994):114). I assume he means the transformation from one tomb to another. In a later article, co-written with Alexandra Gillespie, he seems more certain that the verses existed because he has discovered a witness independent of Bale. His discovery, however, does not speak to whether the verses were part of the “pre-history” of Chaucer’s tomb (“Back at Chaucer’s Tomb—Inscriptions in Two Early Copies of Chaucer’s Workes” Studies in Bibliography 52 [1999]:92–97).

Chapter 4 1. “Chaucer,” The North British Review 10 (1849):294. 2. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 25–26. 3. Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 239. 4. Harrison, 129. 5. Speght, The Workes of Our Ancient and learned English Poet Geffrey Chaucer (London: 1602), Clv. 6. L.G.W., “Chaucer’s Tomb,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 78 (1808): 974. L.G.W. also goes on to complain that the tomb has been “made the supporter of another, which (not to say anything of the striking discordance) absolutely appears as if it had casually perched on it.” 7. Edward Wedlake Brayley, The History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St. Peter, Westminster…illustrated by John Preston Neale (London: 1818–23), 2:265. 8. P., “Chaucer’s Monument,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 112 (1822):221. 9. A Historical Description of Westminster Abbey; its Monuments and Curiousities (London: James Truscott, 1846), 103. This description of Chaucer’s tomb may have been conventional. See Thomas Allen’s much earlier description, “The monument of Geoffrey Chaucer…is now much defaced and is often only very slightly glanced at,” The History and Antiquities of London (London: 1828), 4:117. 10. A Historical Description of Westminster Abbey, 103. 11. W.A.M. 57671. Quotations from the muniments are made by permission of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. 12. Patterson, Negotiating the Past, 9–18. Qtd. in Mark Girourard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 83. 13. David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 85–109. 14. The Gentleman’s Magazine 33 (Feb. 1850):182–183. 15. Matthews, 103. Matthews quotes Bourdieu: “to possess things from the past, i.e., accumulated, crystallized history, aristocratic names and titles, châteaux or ‘stately

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16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

homes,’ paintings and collections, vintage wines and antique furniture, is to master time, through all those things whose common feature is that they can only be acquired in the course of time, by means of time, against time, that is, by inheritance or through dispositions which, like the taste for old things, are likewise only acquired with time and applied by those who can take their time” (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984], 23). The appeal appears a month later in Notes and Queries, probably because Shepherd beat its editor W.J.Thoms (who apparently had a similar idea at the same time) to the punch. See Notes and Queries 1 (1850):343. The Gentleman’s Magazine 33 (Feb. 1850):183. The Gentleman’s Magazine 33 (Feb. 1850):632. Ibid. Goux, 18. M.N.S., “Chaucer’s Monument,” Notes and Queries 2 (1850):420–21; here 421. The quotation from the lay vicar is in an editorial note to the article by a certain M.N.S. who also notes that in the early nineteenth century colors were still visible “of the curious little figure which was painted on the tomb of Chaucer.” See J.T.Smith, Nollekens and His Time, 2 vols., (London: 1828), 1:179. See also P’s comment above about the ability to make it out (barely) in 1822. As the sepulchral effigy was originally the mummified corpse itself, we might see the picture as an attempt to bridge the distance between representation of the body and the body itself. See Harrison, 396. The window was presented by Dr. Nathaniel Rogers and designed by J.G.Waller. It was destroyed on September 19, 1940 by a bomb blast (W.A.M. 65071). Two original drawings for the window were offered to and apparently accepted by the Abbey in 1966. They have since disappeared. In addition, the medallions in the middle show Chaucer in civil service (A Historical Description of Westminster Abbey [London: Jas. Truscott & Son, 1882], 110–111). The quotation first appears in Appendix Three of F.J.Furnivall, A Temporary Preface to the Six-Text Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (London: N.Trübner and Co., 1868), 133. Later it appears in a work sold by the Vergers of the Abbey, A Historical Description of Westminster Abbey (London: Jas. Truscott & Son: 1882), 110–111. Furnivall, 133. Ibid. Furnivall himself is less willing to make such a cut and dried decision. He lists the poem among a series of doubtful poems, but then asks the members of the Chaucer Society to “work at the question of the genuineness or spuriousness of the following poems.” Later he is a bit more forceful in his questioning of this poem along with others, but even here he says that he only allows that they do not seem to be Chaucer’s, “in the present state of some of their stanzas” (Ibid., 107; 110). W.W.Skeat, Chaucerian and Other Pieces (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), lxviii. Skeat, lxii. Furnivall, Temporary Preface, 133. This couplet, as well as the more famous lines “Flee fro the prees, and dwell with sothfastnesse, /Suffise unto thy good though it be small” were placed on the

NOTES • 157

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

window. The text is from the description of it in Furnivall, Preface, 134. See also figure eight. Frederick J.Furnivall, ed. King Edward II’s Household and Wardrobe Ordinances (London: Trübner, 1876), v. Stephanie Trigg, “Discourses of Affinity in the Reading Communities of Geoffrey Chaucer,” 288. Furnivall is repeating a conventional attack on the spurious poems here. See William Godwin, Life of Chaucer, vol. 4 (London: T.Davidson, 1804), 4:146. Godwin himself is quoting Tyrwhitt. The text is from Furnivall’s unsuccessful application for the Royal Academy Secretaryship in 1873. It is quoted in the biography by John Munro in Frederick James Furnivall: A Volume of Personal Record (London: Oxford University Press, 1911), l–1i. Furnivall’s identification of Chaucer with his works might be best seen in his reasons for rejecting the Tale of Gamelyn as Chaucer’s (though he decides to publish it): “Its rigamarole never came from Chaucer’s pen: there’s not a touch of him in it” (Furnivall, Temporary Preface, 107). Frederick James Furnivall: A Volume of Personal Record, l-li. See also the Third Report to the Chaucer Society (1872), 2. “The Founder’s Prospectus of the New Shakspeare Society,” New Shakspeare Society Transactions (1874): Appendix, 6–7. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 135. Frederick James Furnivall, “Chaucer and Arthur,” The Reader 18 (1865):555–556. See William Benzie, Dr. F.J.Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1983), 163. Number 607, box 2, Add. 2591, University Library, Cambridge. Much of the letter is quoted in Baker, 161–162. Of course, the Society ultimately did print manuscripts both in parallel and separately as Furnivall said they would in his Fourth Report to the Chaucer Society, (Jan. 1873), 16. Number 608, box 2, Add. 2591, University Library, Cambridge. See Donald Baker, 163, for a complete text of the letter. Indeed, his politics made it crucial that he do so. See Furnivall, Preface, 2–3. For an account of Furnivall’s attacks on aesthetics as criticism and, in particular, his quarrel with Algernon Swinburne see Benzie, 179–216. Furnivall, Preface, 11. Furnivall, 41. Furnivall, 41–42. Furnivall, 112. Furnivall, 86–87. Furnivall, 6. Furnivall, 7. Ibid. Furnivall, 8. Furnivall, 9. Baker, 160. Charles A.Owen Jr., The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Woodbridge: D.S.Brewer, 1991), 13.

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59. Wright, 2:268. Also, see above (10). 60. W.M.Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; his Family Letters (London: Elligand Elvey, 1895), 1: 170; DNB, first supplement (1901), 2:139; Spurgeon, 1:lxiv. 61. Spurgeon, 1:lxiv. 62. Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 12–13. 63. Jacques Derrida, “Introduction” to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), xxxviii. 64. Furnivall rejects Sloan 1685 because it is lacking Thopas, Melibee, the Manciple’s Tale, and the Parsons Tale and claims that one of the reasons that he rejected Cambridge Dd.4.24 is because of “the large omissions”—probably lost leaves, but it also has more of the appearance of an unfinished MS with its large gaps between the Pardoner’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale, between the Nun’s Priest Tale and the Second Nun’s Tale, as well as gaps after the Squire’s Tale and the Cook’s Tale. 65. Athenaeum 23 (1851):294–95. For a discussion of the review see Thomas W.Ross, “Thomas Wright (1810–1817),” in Paul G.Ruggiers, Editing Chaucer, 154. 66. Thomas R.Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer: His Life and Writings (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1892), 1:364–65. 67. Letter of Dec. 15, 1873 to Furnivall, qtd. in Spurgeon, Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, lxv. 68. Furnivall, Temporary Preface, 108. 69. Qtd. in Spurgeon, lxv. 70. Tyrwhitt, 5:xxii. 71. As I have argued elsewhere, it was probably Stow who had occasioned Francis Thynne’s call for distinguishing “Chaucers proper woorkes…from the adulterat” at the end of the six teenth century (“Politics, Prodigality and the Reception of Chaucer’s ‘Purse,’” in Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. William Gentrup, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 1 [Belgium: Brepols, 1998], 68–69). In the nineteenth century William Godwin quotes the “heap of rubbish” line in his Life of Chaucer (London: T.Davidson, 1804), 4:146. 72. “John Stow(1525? –1605),” 62. 73. Though he refers to “some writers,” in the notes, the writer of the “memoir” which precedes the edition refers the reader to John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. (Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Robert Bell, [London: Charles Griffin and Co., 1854–56], li 36). 74. John Stow, Survey of London, ed. C.L.Kingsford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), 2:111. See Foxe, 966. 75. Bell, 36. 76. Qtd. in A.S.G.Edwards, “Walter W.Skeat,” in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G.Ruggiers (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984), 179. 77. The Chaucer Canon (New York: Haskell House, 1965:1900), 120. 78. As A.S.G.Edwards dryly puts it, “Skeat’s final enduring achievement is a negative one. It consists in what he did not include in the Clarendon Chaucer…. He was somewhat less successful in adding to the canon” (188). For a list of the poems which Skeat attempted to add to the canon see Edwards, 188.

NOTES • 159

79. Eleanor P.Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 145–46. 80. Athenauem 3902 (Aug. 9, 1902), 189. See also 288. John Hales was probably John Wesley Hales, the King’s College professor who co-edited Bishop Percy’s folio manuscript with Furnivall. 81. Charlotte Stopes might be seen as one of the few who would defend the sixteenthcentury antiquary. She writes in response to Hales’s article to assert that “Stow’s statement might be taken as a possible alternative” (Athenaeum 3913 [Oct. 25, 1902], 552). 82. W.R.Lethaby calls Stow’s idea a “mistake” (rimes Liferary Supplement [ [Feb. 21, 1929], 137); Katherine Esdaile repeats the suggestion that Stow must be wrong because he disagrees with Caxton TLS (Feb. 28, 1929):163; (Eleanor Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographic Manual [New York: Macmillan, 1908], 66, 121, 413, 427, 428 [3 times], 440, 457). 83. Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. Walter W.Skeat, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Supplementary Volume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), lxxii. 84. Lounsbury, 1:270. 85. Castronovo, 109. 86. Ibid. 87. See chapter two. 88. Furnivall, Temporary Preface, 133. 89. The Gentleman’s Magazine, 34 (June, 1850), 281–82. 90. Lounsbury, 1:292. 91. Indeed, Lounsbury asserts that the 1687 reprint of Speght was done in black-letter “as if this variation of the Roman letter were in some way essential to the purity of Chaucer’s text” (1:292). 92. For an assertion that (contrary to all available evidence) the tomb was original, see Thoms’s assertion below about Caxton’s epitaph hung “over that tomb which is now mouldering in decay.” 93. There was some suggestion earlier that the appeal was in trouble. A certain C.R.M. wrote in March of 1851 to ask whether, if any of Chaucer’s descendents were alive, they might be asked to contribute to the fund (C.R.M., Notes and Queries 3 [1851]:188). 94. William Thoms, Notes and Queries 4 (1851):145. 95. There was a good deal of disagreement over what the monument should look like. The Dean of St. Paul’s had suggested a “symbolical ‘lamp and fountain’” while others (such as Thoms himself) thought that a “cast-iron statue” of Caxton might be more fitting. As it became clear that there was not enough money to build the monument, some subscribers came up with other less costly proposals. See Notes and Queries 4, (1850):145–47. 96. Notes and Queries 4, (1850):145. 97. See Strohm, 139–41 and my discussion in chapter one about money and the sublime economy. 98. The Gentleman’s Magazine n. s., 4 (Jan. 1858):83. 99. Henry Poole, “Westminster Abbey: A Study of Poets’ Corner,” The Antiquary 4 (1881): 137–139; here 139. 100. W.A.M. 34510. The document even gives us the exact date of the restoration, “1866, Mar. 10 Preparing Tablet and painting the decayed inscription on

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101.

102.

103.

104. 105. 106.

monument in Poets’ Corner Chaucer 1 £ 6.” Oddly enough the bill is not issued until Oct. 25, the anniversary of the day that Chaucer was supposed to have died. In an earlier issue of Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects we are told that the solution is made up of “shell-lac dissolved in spirits of wine.” (Jan. 2, 1890):114. G.G.Scott was the Architect of the Abbey. Poole touted his “discovery” in at least two newspapers, the Illustrated London News, Dec. 12, 1868 and the Daily Telegraph, Dec. 15, 1868. See also the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Feb. 6, 1890): 169, 14 and W.A.M. 57671. The threat is manifold. But clearly the lack must be disavowed because it engenders an anxiety of castration, i.e. a threat to masculine power. The power it threatens in this reading, is, on one level, a menace to the power to control the text. But in larger terms I would argue that the lack also threatens the ability to represent the author behind the text. The extension of this threat might be seen in Slavoj Žižek’s long note on lack and castration anxiety, in which he argues that “the real traumatism is not the loss (of phallus) but the fact that woman never had what she lost” (For They Know Not, 174–75). In textual terms, the great anxiety is that the text never had what the editor is attempting to restore. Kendrick, 75. Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiousity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 6. Mulvey, 8. See also Žižek, Sublime Object, 30–32.

Chapter 5 1. F.R.Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1930), 25. 2. Havelock Ellis, “Genius and Stature,” The Nineteenth Century 41 (July 1897):93. 3. Ibid., 94. 4. Barbara Stafford, Good Looking (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 38. 5. Michael T.Saler, The Avant-garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18. 6. Saler, 6. 7. The Nineteenth Century 42 (Aug. 1897):336. 8. Tony Trowles (the Abbey Librarian) in private correspondence cites William Camden’s report that Chaucer’s bones were translated to the altar tomb in 1555 (sic), and says that there are no records of any other disturbances of the grave. Despite the historical lack of any evidence of exhumation, no scholar (as Joseph Dane points out) “has registered the slightest skepticism concerning this report” (Who is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb?, 226). 9. To this end Nichols somewhat unfairly quotes William Thoms’s assertion that Dart’s life of Chaucer, which was attached to John Urry’s edition of Chaucer, “was very uncorrectly drawn up” (The Gentleman’s Magazine 34 [1850]:280). For an account of the dispute between Dart and William and Timothy Thomas, see William L.Alderson, “John Urry (1666–1715),” in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, 93–115; see especially 100–101.

NOTES • 161

10. Stanley, 291. He also includes an unhelpful note to the effect that the Burial Register of the Abbey says that “Mr. Cowley, a famous poet, was buried near to Chaucer’s monument.” Cowley could, of course, have been buried next to Chaucer and near Chaucer’s “monument,” if the monument were simply an empty monument and not a tomb. 11. The Fabric Voucher slip for 1880 reads “Cutting other names of poets buried in S.Transept (previously with unmarked graves) on Cowley’s large gravestone.” The bill itself is from Piersey and Co. and is dated Nov. 3, 1880. The work, according to the bill, was done on Oct. 8th. The bill reads, “Deeply engraving 192 letters on Black Marble Ledger in poets corner recutting 22 in old inscription and shield on same filling whole with cement.” See chapter two for more on this controversy. 12. Georgina Troutbeck, Henry Troutbeck’s sister, seems to agree with her brother’s assessment of the burial place of Chaucer. In her 1900 guide to the Abbey, she says that Chaucer, “lies at the entrance of St. Benedict’s Chapel. The present monument was erected one hundred and fifty years after Chaucer’s death, by Nicholas Brigham” (Westminster Abbey [London: Methuen, 1900], 199). 13. See, for instance, Mrs. A.Murray Smith, Westminster Abbey (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1906), 52; Mary Sturgeon, 211. 14. W.R.Lethaby, “Chaucer’s Tomb,” 137. 15. Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to promote the Knowledge and the love of Mankind…, trans. Henry Hunter, 3 vols. in 5 (London: John Murray and T. Holloway, 1792), 2: Part 1, 24. 16. Greenes Vision. Written at the instant of his death Conteyning a penitent passion for the folly of his Pen, in The Life and Complete Works, in prose and verse, of Robert Greene, ed.A. B.Grosart (Huth Library, 1881–6), 12:211. Furnivall quotes “Greene’s Vision” in his Life-Records of Chaucer vol. II, King Edward II’s Household and Wardrobe Ordinances (London: N.Trübner, 1876), viii. J.P.Collier quotes the work in A Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language (London: Joseph Lilly, 1865), 1:338. 17. “A Midsummer Holiday On a Country Road,” in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1904), 6:10. 18. “To Chaucer,” in Heroic idylls: with additional poems (London: T.C.Newby, 1863), 142. 19. J.M.Barrie, Tommy and Grizel (New York: C.Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 249. 20. Robert Browning, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwanger (London: Smith, Elder, 1871). He qualifies this by adding, “But of the childish, not a touch nor taint.” 21. Stafford, Body Criticism, 29. 22. The Cycle of English Song, II, in Temple Bar 38 (June-July, 1873):311–312. 23. Merrit Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey, 1957), 4:1.220. But the idea is a commonplace. 24. John Hales, “Chaucer and Shakespeare,” The Quarterly Review 134 (Jan. 1873): 227. Interestingly, he goes on to suggest that one of the amazing things about Chaucer is that “He attempts to portray the entire society of his age from the crown of its head to the sole of its foot” (231). This corporealization of society might be seen to fit into the larger organic sense of development. 25. Matthew Arnold, The Study of Poetry, in Introduction to The English Poets, ed. T.H.Ward (London: 1880), xxxiv. This Danto-centric reading of Chaucer continues well into the twentieth century. See Steve Ellis, 81–82.

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26. Arnold, xxxiv–xxxv. 27. This might be seen as a corollary to what Lee Patterson has identified as the “hidden debate between a conditioning historical context and a transhistorical humanism” (Negotiating the Past, 14). 28. Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp: a book of essays written in the country (London: Strahan, 1863), 68–69. 29. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, 3:440–442. 30. Ibid, 3:446. 31. Patterson, 13. 32. Skeat, for instance, was instrumental in the establishment of a University Lectureship in English at Cambridge. Matthews, 184–190. 33. Patterson, 14. 34. See Ellis, 76–77, 104. 35. London Transport Museum B2 “Art and Commerce,” February 1916, 10. 36. Chesterton, 215–16. 37. Matthews, 193. 38. William Morris on History, ed. Nicholas Salmon (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 174–85. 39. Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 1837–1933 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 2:226. 40. Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1942 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 228. 41. Guillory, 136. 42. John Aiken, “Essay on Ballads and Pastoral Songs,” (1793), qtd. in A Book of English Verse, ed. John Barrell and John Bull (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 435. 43. William Wordsworth, Lyrical ballads, and other poems, 1797–1800, edited by James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 123. 44. Christopher Norris, “Deconstructing Genius: Paul de Man and the Critique of Romantic Ideology,” in Genius: The History of an Idea, ed. Penelope Murray (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 141–165; here 143. 45. William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie (London: 1586), C3r. 46. Edmund Waller, Poems…upon several Occasions… The third Edition with several Additions…,” (London: 1668), 234–35. 47. Joseph Addison, An Account of the Greatest English Poets, 1694, in Addison’s Works, ed. Richard Hurd, Bohn Series (London: 1854–6), 1:23. 48. William Mason, 8–10. 49. Verses Occasioned by the death of Mrs. Oldfield [in] The Poetical Calender… Written and Selected by Francis Fawkes, and William Woty (London: 1763), 2: 117. 50. Jabez Hughes, [Verses] Upon Reading Mr. Dryden’s Fables, in Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (London: 1737), 95–96. 51. B.C. “General Remarks upon the Peculiar Styles and Excellences of the best British Poets,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, 88 (1818):296. 52. M.H.Spielmann, “The Portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer,” in Chaucer Memorial Lectures, 1900 (London: Asher and Co., 1900), 111–141; here 121–122. The essay was also privately printed as The Portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer: An Essay Written

NOTES • 163

53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

on the Occasion of the Quincentenary of the Poet’s Death (London: Adlard and Son, 1900), and as a number of the Chaucer Society (2nd Series, 31). Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 285–294. Henry Dwight Sedgwick, Dan Chaucer (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1934), 286. The passage can be found in Thomas Hearne, Extracts from his Diary, April 28, 1711, in Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C.E.Doble, Oxford Historical Society, 3: 155. Roger Sheman Loomis, A Mirror of Chaucer’s World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 2. J.M.Manly, ed., Canterbury Tales (New York: H.Holt and Co., 1928), 37. Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, revised ed. 1926; 1904), 207, 209. Lombroso’s views of genius can be found in The Man of Genius (London: W.Scott, 1891). Ellis, 211. Ellis, 277. Ellis, 276–77. Leigh Hunt, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1860), 79. Table Talk, Mar. 15, 1834, in The Table Talk and Omniana, ed. T.Ashe (London: 1884), 276–77. Laura Kendrick, 197. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J.Shawcross, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 1:21. Ibid, 1:24. Phaedrus, in The Works of Plato, ed. Irwin Edman (New York: The Modern Library, 1928), 265A. The works of Aristotle: in four parts: containing, I. His Complete master-piece…II. His Experienced midwife…III. Book of problems…IV. His Last legacy… (London: 1815), 30.1. See Neil Kessel, “Genius and Mental Disorder: A History of Ideas Concerning Their Conjunction,” in Genius: The History of an Idea, ed. Penelope Murray, 196– 212. R.Porter writes, “It is with Romanticism, of course, that the indissoluble link between madness and artistic genius comes into its own as an autobiographical experience” (A Social History of Madness [London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987], 63). T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–32 (London: Faber, 1932), 18. J.M.Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer (New York: Henry Holt, 1924), 267–68. For Kittredge’s comments see the first page of Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1915). John Livingston Lowes, Kittredge’s student, seems to envision Chaucer as a kind of avuncular storyteller whose medieval audience might continue to be infantilized even if Chaucer was not. See Geoffrey Chaucer and the Development of his Genius (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 102. Manly, 272. So Paul de Man characterizes Gadamer, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 188. “Chaucer lived in the middle ages, in the last sixty years, or thereabout, of the fourteenth century; but he is the most modern of English poets, and one of the most

164 • CHAUCER’S DEAD BODY

74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

popular. This is not a paradox; it is the sober, unrhetorical statement of a truism, for he knew life and loved it, and his specialty was mankind as it was, and is. Besides, his age was vastly like our own, in everything but costume and the outward habit of encounter. The fourteenth century seems less remote than the eighteenth; Geoffrey Chaucer is nearer to us than Alexander Pope” (Kittredge, 1–2). “Chaucer was as modern as the moderns, six centuries before their birth” (Lowes, 185). Patch goes so far as to ask whether Chaucer’s humor was too modern to be understood in the fourteenth century (16). The original essay appeared in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology 39 (1930): 376–84. I quote from On Rereading Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), 194. The intractability of the genealogical metaphor, however, becomes immediately apparent. For, immediately following this quotation he says, “only two, perhaps of all his sons outshine his fame” (Lowes, 1). T.S.Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920; 1960), 50. Lowes, 116. The examples are too many to list here, but a few of them may be found at Manly, 292, 295; Lowes, 8, 219; Kittredge, 8, 29. Lowes, 243. In the sentences immediately following the above quotation, for instance, Lowes avers “Mutatis mutandi, that is true of his verse. And again I have the masterpieces especially in mind. For verse which retains the qualities of living speech—its turns, inflections, stresses, nuances, which are its body, as we may call the incorporated sense its soul—such verse Chaucer wrote as few have ever written it” (243). Three pages earlier, Lowes is even more assertive about the body/corpus connection, “‘You poets,’ Landor makes Porson say in one of the Imaginary Conversations —‘you poets are still rather too fond of the unsubstantial. Some will have nothing else than what they call pure imagination…I hate both poetry and wine without body’. On that score Chaucer’s withers are unwrung!” (240) Eliot, 50. Lowes, 255. Kittredge, 32. Actually, the old story about Troutbeck is repeated as late as the sixties by Edward Wagenknecht in a book with the suggestive title, The Personality of Chaucer (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 10. Kittredge, 30; Patch uses slightly different words, “no rancor poisons the spring of his genius” (1).

Coda 1. Jacques Derrida, Memoires: for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 3. 2. http://www.visitbritain.com/uk/presscentre/copyright_free_articles/current/ pilgrims_trail_to_canterbury_.html. 3. Ibid. 4. L.O.Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 249.

NOTES • 165

5. Paul Strohm, “Rememorative Reconstruction,” SAC 23 (2001):3–16; here 16. 6. Lerer, 147. 7. This is Fradenburg’s characterization of Earl Jackson’s argument, Sacrifice Your Love, 64. 8. Lerer particularly cites the case of the Staffordshire lawyer and Tudor confidant Humphrey Wellys (217). 9. Lerer, 218. 10. Pearsall, “Chaucer’s Tomb,” 66. 11. Anne Hudson, Two Wycliffite Texts: The Sermon of William Taylor 1406, The Testimony of William Thorpe 1407, EETS o.s., 301 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 64. The interrogation apparently took place a few years earlier. 12. See, for instance, Christine de Pizan’s warnings in The Treasury of the City of Ladies (New York: Penguin, 1985), 152. 13. Stanley, Historical Memorials of Canterbury (New York: A.D.F.Randolph and Co., 1892), 252. 14. Stanley, 276. 15. Stanley, 303. 16. Stanley, 301. 17. Furnivall, Preface, 133. 18. See above; Stanley, Historical Memorials of Westminster, 283. 19. The amount “suggested” (by the list of subscribers) from each subscriber was almost certainly too low. The lowest average countywide donation for the Great Exhibition of 1851 was approximately twelve shillings. The highest average was eleven pounds (Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999], 76). Most of the various printing societies and antiquarian organizations charged between ten shillings and one guinea (Philippa Levine, The Amateur and The Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 57). Levine quotes from the Society of Antiquaries’ Collectors’ Books for 1847, but the inability of numerous societies to get their members to pay was proverbial (58– 59). 20. Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 37. 21. See Levine, 56. 22. See, for instance, Fradenburg, 247 and Stephanie Trigg, “Walking Through Cathedrals: The Canterbury Tales, Medieval Tourism and the Authenticity of Place” (forthcoming). 23. Fradenburg, 247. 24. Trigg, “Walking Through Cathedrals.”

INDEX

Academic culture, 114–115 Act for the Advancement for True Religion, 42 Actes and Monuments, 45–46 Adam Scriveyn, 16, 23 Addison, Joseph, 39, 54, 118 Aesthetic value Chaucer studies, 117 conflicting views, 105–107 “Against Women Unconstant,” 96 Aiken, John, 117 Albert Memorial, 66 Albert, Prince Consort, 64–65 Anderson, Benedict, 63 Arch. Seld B. 14, manuscript, 91 Ariès, Phillipe, 65 Arnold, Matthew, 112, 116 Art commercialization of, 55–57 secular religion, 114 Ashmole, Elias, 36 Athenaeum, 58, 134 Authorship, medieval view of, 5

Becket, Thomas, 49, 127, 129, 130, 132 Bell, Clive, 66 Bell, Robert, 94, 95 Benjamin, Walter, 17, 45 Biddick, Kathleen, 92, 114 Biographia Li teraria, 121 Bloxham, M.H., 60, 61, 67, 68, 98 Body “ambivalence” of, 9 as book, 3–4, 5 medieval view of, 2, 3–6 modern constructions of, 2–3 Protestant view of, 50 sacral quality of, 1, 4–6, 36, 143n.76 and text, 10, 11 and writing, 10 “Body criticism,” 9 Bond, Francis, 70 Boniface of Ragusa, 42, 44 Book body as, 3–4, 5 and gender, 20–21, 140n.l6 Bradshaw, Henry, 89, 90 Brayley, Edward, 1, 76 Brewer, Derek, 29 Brigham, Nicholas antiquarian, 41–42, 43 and Chaucer’s tomb, 12–12, 40–42, 44–45, 51, 58, 59, 76, 95, 108, 130 critique of, 48–49 defense of, 62–63, 70, 71, 72–72 and restoration project, 78 Tanner manuscript, 133–136 Bronfen, Elizabeth on double burials, 44 “represencing,” 10, 139n.41

Baker, Donald, 92 “Balade of Gode Counsaile,” 86 Bale, John, 41, 72–73 Balibar, Etienne “invariant substance,” 62–63, 131 on national consciousness, 72 Ballad, and Chaucer, 117 Barlow 18, manuscript, 91 Barrie, J.M., 111 Beauty, and manuscripts, 92, 92, 104–105

166

INDEX • 167

Browning, Robert, 59–60, 111 Bullein, William, 41, 48–49, 50–51, 67, 68 Burial places, and money, v, 1 Bynum, Caroline, 2, 3 Camden society, restoration project, 78 Camden, William, 1, 41, 54, 73 Carlyle, Thomas, 101 Carruthers, Mary, 5 Caxton, William on Chaucer’s epitaph, 34, 36–37 on Chaucer’s tomb, 54, 94, 108 emendation of texts, 37–39 Epilogue to Boethius, 34 Memorial, 100–102, 158n.95 recovery of Chaucer, 12, 16–17, 34–35 Caygill, Howard, 131 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 42, 44 “Charter of Christ,” 3–4, 6 “Chaucer and the Common People,” 123 Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, v Chaucer, Geoffrey burial of, 34 corpse of, 1, 6–7, 34–34, 39–40, 64 death of, 17–19, 34 and Dryden burial, 53–59 epitaph of, 34–37, 49, 72–73, 101–102, 104, 147n.41 height of, 107–110, 118–119, 120, 126 manuscript “purification,” 93–100 manuscripts of, 12–13, 17, 90–93, 118– 119 modernization controversy, 52–52 monetarization of, 71–72 and nineteenth century criticism,, 1–2, 13, 40, 110–114, 122 portraits of, 7–9, 30–31, 33–34, 83, 92, 118–119 Protestant commentators, 7–8, 12, 40 reburial (translation), 1, 7–8, 12, 12, 40, 42, 44–47, 146n.29 recovered voice, 38–39 recovery of, 11–12, 15–17, 118–118, 128 stature of, 105–106, 110–112 tomb controversy, 12–13, 66–72, 108– 109

tomb of, v, 14, 34, 36, 63, 75–76, 94– 95, 109, 130 tomb restoration, 75, 76–86, 98–104 and twentieth century criticism, 2–3, 13–14, 114, 118, 122–125 Works Adam Scriveyn, 16, 23 An ABC 138n.26 Balade of Gode Counsaile (see Truth) Canterbury Tales, The “Chaucer’s Appearance,” 119 Cook’s Tale 18, 157n.64 emended edition, 37, 38–39 Knight’s Tale, 26 legacy of, 17–18, 24 Maniciple’s Tale, 157n.64 Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 157n.64 Pardoner’s Tale, 157n.64 Parson’s Tale, 157n.64 reparation of text, 86–90, 104–105 Second Nun’s Tale, 157n.64 Shipman’s Tale, 157n.64 Squire’s Tale, 92, 157n.64 Tale of Melibee, 157n.64 Tale of Sir Thoppas, 157n.64 Complaint to His Purse, v, 32, 143n. 63 House of Fame, 5 Pity, 88 Retraction, 18–19, 139n.10, 140n.11– 12 To Rosemounde, 96 Troilus and Crisedye, 147n.52 Truth, 21–86, 140nn.21, 22 Works attributed to Against Women Unconstant, 96 Chaucer’s Dream (see Isle of Ladies) Flower and the Leaf, The, 83–84, 88, 94, 98, 155n.28 Isle of Ladies, 94 Plowman’s Tale, The, 46–47 Praise of Women, 94 Tale of Gamelyn, 92, 157n.37 Chaucer Society, 86–89, 91, 96 Chaucer Window, Westminster Abbey, 83– 86, 130, 155n.23 Chaucer’s Dream, 94

168 • INDEX

“Chaucer’s Tomb and Nicholas Brigham,” 70, 133–136 Chaucer’s Works (Thynne edition), 42, 46, 47–48 Chesterton, G.K., 6, 62, 63, 114 Childhood Chaucer characterization, 106, 110– 111, 112–113, 117–118, 122 fetishization of, 111 Christ’s body, sacral quality of, 4–5 Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London, 49–50, 68 Coleridge, Samuel T., 10–11, 121–122, 125 Collier, J.R, 110 Committee to Repair Chaucer’s Tomb, 80, 98–100, 131, 165n.19 Complaint to His Purse, v, 32 Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, The, 95–96 “Conscious recollection,” 28 Corpse, as site of study, 3 Corpus Christi 198, manuscript, 91–92 Cowley, Abraham, 59, 108–109 Dane, Joseph, 14, 73–74, 128, 129 Dart, John, 54, 57, 108 David, Alfred, 21–22 Dawson, George, English nationalism, 63 “De Venationibus Rerum Memoribilium,” 41–42 De Vetula, 20 Death, Victorian rituals, 64–65, 153n.32 Derrida, Jacques on infidelity, 127, 128 on writing, 9–10, 34, 75, 139n.42 Desire, 20, 21 Dialogue bothe pleasaunte and pietifull, wherein is a goodly regimente against the feuer Pestilence, 41, 48–49 Dictionarium Theologium, 19 Dixon, Richard, 92 Dryden, John and anti-Catholicism, 69 burial of, 53–55, 57, 58–60, 61–62, 108

on Chaucer, 116 modernization of Chaucer, 51–52, 52– 53, 118 recovery of Chaucer, 12, 12, 40, 41, 88–89 Dudley, William, 133–134 Duffy, Eamon anti-image campaign, 50 “disappearance of the corpse,” 40, 49 Eagleton, Terry, 66 Earle, John, 90–91 Edicule, restoration of, 42, 44 Edward II’s Household and Wardrobe Ordinances, 86–87 Edward VI, King of England almshouses, 135 anti-image campaign, 49–50 and Chaucer, 8 Edwards, A.S.G., 95–96, 158n.78 Eliot, George, 65 Eliot, T.S. author function, 107 dissociation of sensibilities, 114 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 122, 124 Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Chaucer, 7–8 Injunctions of 1559, 50–51 Ellesmere MS, 14, 92, 105, 118, 119 Ellis, Havelock, 105, 107, 109–110, 119, 120–121, 126 England’s Trust, 78 English Reformation and Protestant commentaries, 12 and images, 7–8 Epilogue to Boethius, Caxton, 34, 36–37 Esdaile, Katherine, 72–72 Evelyn, John, 108 Fables Ancient and Modern, 51, 52, 53 Fall of Princes, 27–28 “Father Chaucer,” 127 “Father of Ancient Poetry,” 12, 40, 58, 59– 60, 62 “Father of English Poesy,” 75, 76, 79, 80

INDEX • 169

“Father of English Poetry,” 13, 14, 55, 58, 62, 62, 70 Father of English Poets, 77 “Father of Modern Poetry,” 12, 40, 62, 79 “Father of Poetry,” 41 Father-son relationship, in Regement, 31– 33, 34 Fetish, and gaze, 104 Fetishism, Victorian England, 65 “Feudal England, ‘Signs of Change,’” 115– 116 Flour of Curteyese, 25, 29 Flower and the Leaf, The, 83–84, 88, 94, 98, 155n.28 Formalism, Chaucer’s stature, 106 Foxe, John on Chaucer’s epitaph, 36, 146n.29 on Chaucer’s reburial, 45–47, 94 Reformation commentator, 12 Fradenburg, L.O., 128, 132 Freud, Sigmund on melancholy, 16, 24–25, 27 on mourning, 27 on the unheimlich (uncanny), 67 Functionalism, 106 Furnivall, Frederick authenticity evaluations, 94 Chaucer Society, 86, 88–90 on Chaucer studies, 109, 112 Chaucer Window, 83, 130 on Chaucer’s height, 110 Chaucer’s image/portrait, 7, 8 educational project, 116–117 manuscript selection, 90–93 on The Flower and the Leaf, 84, 155n. 28 text reparation, 86–88 Gadamer, Hans-George, 123 “Games of occultation,” 25 Gascoigne, Thomas, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24 Geary, Patrick, 1 Genius Chaucer characterization, 109, 111– 112, 119, 120, 123–126 and insanity, 119–120 and romanticism, 122

Coleridge view of, 10–11, 121–122, 125 “Genius and Stature,” 105 Gentleman’s Magazine on Chaucer’s tomb, 1 on English language, 118 restoration project, 78, 79, 80, 101, 102 Godzich, Wlad, on voice, 38 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 52, 80 Grave, as sign, 72 Graveyards, Victorian England, 67–68 Green, John Richard, 63 Greenes Vision, 110 Guillory, John “literary sensibility,” 116 on modernization, 52, 117 Hales, John, 68, 112 Hall, Henry, 53 Hammond, Eleanor, 96–97 Hanna, Ralph, 105 Harley 4866, manuscript, 118–119 Harley 7334, manuscript, 91 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 72 Hartshorne, Albert, 68–69 Haselwood, Joseph, v, 1 Hawkes, David, 49, 55–57 Hayles, N.Katherine on the body, 2, 3 on writing, 38 Hazlitt, William, 52, 52, 55 Hearne, Thomas, 41, 72, 119 Heffernan, Thomas J., 42 Henry IV, King of England, in Regement, 31–32 Henry, Prince of Monmouth, 31, 143n.67 Henry VII, King of England, almshouses, 135 Henry VIII, King of England dedication to, 47 excommunication of, 49 Hertz, Robert, 44, 47 Historical Description of Westminster Abbey, A, 76 Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, 108

170 • INDEX

History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St. Peter, Westminster, The, 1 History of England, 52 Hoccleve, Thomas and Chaucer, 24, 29–31, 80, 83 Chaucer’s portrait, 7, 10, 30–31, 33– 34, 118–119 father-son relationships, 31–33 recovery project, 11–12, 16 Horne, Richard Hengist, 52–52 House of Fame, 5 Howard, Donald, 18, 24 Hudson, Anne, 94 Hughes, Jabez, 118 Humanism and the body, 2–3 emergence of, 19–20 Hunt, Leigh, 52–52, 120 Hystorye, sege and dystruccyon of Troye, The, 27 Idolatry, Augustinian view of, 49 Images, distrust of, 7–9 Injunction for Salisbury, 50 Injunctions of 1559, 50–51 “Invariant substance,” 62–63 Irthlingborough tomb, 70, 71, 134 Isle of Ladies, 94 Julius III, Pope, 42, 44 Kelmscott Chaucer, 92 Kendrick, Laura, 104, 121 Kittay, Jeffrey, on voice, 38 Knapp, Ethan, on Regement of Princes, 31– 32 Knight, Stephen, 8 Knight’s Tale, 26 La pelerinaige de vie humaine, 4 Lacanian psychoanalysis, 2, 25 LaCapra, Dominick, 3, 31 Landor, Walter Savage on Chaucer, 110–111 on modernization, 52–52 Lansdowne 851, manuscript, 90–92, 92, 104–105

Laqueur, Thomas, 2, 9 Latimer, Hugh, Archbishop of Canterbury, 49, 50 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 109 Leavis, F.R., 114–115 Leland, John, “Life” of Chaucer, 36 Lerer, Seth on Chaucer’s epigraph, 34, 36 on Chaucer’s tomb, 14, 36, 128–129 on fifteenth century poetry, 24 on literary immortality, 19–20 on Adam Scriveyn, 23 Lethaby, W.R., on art, 66, 114 on Chaucer’s reburial, 42, 70 on Chaucer’s tomb, 69–70, 71, 72, 109, 133, 134 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 20–21 Liber de perenni cultu, 44 Loewald, Hans, 28 Lombroso, Cesare, 119–120, 126 “Long Charter,” 3–4, 6 Loomis, Roger Sherman, 119 Lounsbury, T.R., 93 on Chaucer’s style, 13, 112–113 on eighteenth century editions, 99–100 on Stow, 97, 98 on work vs. tomb, 93 Lowes, John Livingston, 13–14, 124, 125– 126 Lydgate, John poet as inadequate, 24 poetics of loss, 24–28, 31, 33 recovery of Chaucer, 11, 12, 16 Stow edition, 23 Macaulay, Thomas B., on Dryden, 52, 55 Madness, divine vs. disease, 122 Manly, John Matthew, 119, 122–123 Manner, Sir John, 78 Mannoni, Octave, 105 Mary, Queen of England death of, 47 and reburial of Chaucer, 7–8, 12–12, 40, 42, 48 Mason, William, 118

INDEX • 171

Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, 114–115 Materiality, and transcendence, 10–11, 153n.48 Matthews, David, 78, 113, 114, 115 Medieval literature, 114, 115–116 Medieval perspective on the body, 2, 3–6 visual images, 8 Medieval studies, 111–112, 115–116, 127, 131–132 Meditationes Vitae Christi, 5 Melancholia aesthetics of, 15 fifteenth century poetry, 24 and Lydgate, 25–27, 28, 31, 33 and Pre-Raphaelites, 92 Melancholic attachment, 16 “Memoirs by Way of A Diary,” 41–42, 134 Midsummer Holiday On a Country Road, A, 110 Milton, John, 52–52 Modernism, 66–67, 106–107, 124 Money and burial places, v, 1, 80–83 and portraits, 143n.68 and “translation,” 1 Morris, Richard, 91 Morris, William, 66, 92, 106, 114, 115– 116 Mourning, Lydgate, 27, 28, 34 Mulvey, Laura, 104 Munday, Anthony, 57 Nationalism and Chaucer, 12, 63–64, 74, 84, 114 and secularism, 66, 72 New Criticism, 122 Nichols, John Gough on Chaucer’s tomb, 57, 67, 103–104, 108 tomb restoration, 98–99, 100 Nineteenth Century, The, Troutbeck article, 107 Normalcy, Chaucer characterization, 120– 121

Norris, Christopher, 117, 123 Notes and Queries, 79, 101 Oedipal paradigm, 24 Office of the Privy Seal, 29–30 “Oh May I Join the Choir Immortal” 65 “On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History,” 101 Ong, Walter, 37, 75 Ovid, tomb of, 20 Owen, Charles, 92 Pace, George, 21–22 Pardon, sacred body, 3–5 Passion, Christ’s body, 3–4 Patch, Howard, 13–14, 123, 126 Pater, Walter, 9 Pathology, and genius, 122, 125–126 Pearsall, Derek on Chaucer’s death, 17–18, 19 on Chaucer’s epitaph, 73 on Chaucer’s portrait, 8 on Chaucer’s reburial, 42, 47 on Chaucer’s tomb, 14, 74 on Lydgate’s encomia, 30 on Protestant claim, 128 on Regement, 142n. 58 on Richard II’s reburial, 143n.76 Pepys, Samuel, 55 Pharmakon, 10 Philip II, King of Spain, 42, 44 Pick, Frank, on art, 66, 114 Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, The, 27 Pilgrimages, views of, 129–130 Pity, 88 Plato, on madness, 122 Plowmans Tale, The, 46, 47 Poetry, fifteenth century, 24 Poet’s body, sacral qualities, 1 Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, 57, 64, 67, 69, 102, 130 Poole, Henry, 80, 83, 103–104 Pope, Alexander, 118 Popular culture, 114–115 Positivism, in England, 65–66 Poststructuralism, and the body, 2 Pre-Raphaelites, and Chaucer, 92–92

172 • INDEX

Printing press, role of, 34–34, 36, 37–38 Prior, Matthew, burial of, 59–60 Privity of Passion, The, 5 Prologue to the Tale of Beryn, 132 Protestants and Chaucer’s reburial, 12, 40, 51, 128, 130–131 and images, 7–8, 9, 49 Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems, 122 Psychoanalytic theory, 2, 104 Pyle, Howard, 8 Quint, David, authentic culture, 47 Rebuke to Lydgate, A, 28–29 Recovery, strategies of, 11, 15–17, 118– 118, 128 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, The, Caxton epilogue, 34–35 Regement of Princes, The, 16, 30, 31–32, 83, 142–143nn.58, 52 Reginald Pole, Cardinal, 48 Relics campaign against, 50 medieval view of, 39 Protestant view of, 39–40 thefts of, 48 translations of, 1 “Religion of Humanity,” 65 Restoration handbill, 79, 80, 80 Retraction, 18 Richard II, reburial of, 44, 143n.76 Roman Catholicism and Chaucer, 12–12, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 128 Injunction of Salisbury, 50 Romanticism pathology and genius, 122 and poetry, 117 “Rosebud,” 24 Rosetti, Dante Gabriel, 92 Rous, Francis, 49 Roxburghe Club, restoration project, 78 Rubin, Gayle, 20 Ruskin, John, 94, 106, 114 Saler, Michael, 106, 114

Saunders, John, 52 Scanlon, Larry moral exchange, 31 on Regement, 142–143n. 52 Scott, Gilbert, 67 Scott, Sir Walter, 55 Sedgwick, Henry Dwight, 119 Sepulchral Memorials within the County of Northamptonshire, 71, 134 Shaxton, Nicholas, 50 Sheffield, John, 55 Shepherd, Samuel, restoration project, 77– 79, 80–80, 103 Shirley, John recovery of Chaucer, 12, 16, 24–24, 38 Truth headnote, 21–24 Siege of Thebes, The, 26 Silhouettes of Clerics, 109 Skeat, W.W., 95–96, 97, 158n.78 Social aesthetic, 114 Southey, Robert, on modernization, 52 Spearing, A.C., 24, 26 Speght, Thomas Chaucer publisher, 9, 92, 93 on Chaucer’s epitaph, 36, 72 Spenser, Edmund, burial place, 59–60 Spielmann, M.H., 118–119 Spurgeon, Caroline, on Pre-Raphaelites, 92–92 Squire’s Tale, 92 Stafford, Barbara on appearance/images, 8, 9, 105 on the body, 11, 111 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, Dean on “Balade of Gode Counsaile/Truth,” 86 Chaucer’s tomb, 58–59, 60–61, 63–64, 69, 108–109 Chaucer’s Window, 83, 84 on pilgrimages, 130–131 on The Flower and the Leaf, 86, 88 Stopes, Charlotte C, 69, 72 Stow, John Chaucer edition, 23, 47–48, 93 Chaucer’s tomb, 94, 95, 97–98 criticism of, 95–98 Strohm, Paul on counterfeiting, v, 33

INDEX • 173

on Regement, 32 “rememorative reconstruction,” 128 on Richard II’s reburial, 143n.76 Sturgeon, Mary, 69 Surigonus, Stephen, Chaucer’s epitaph, 35, 36–37, 47–48, 143n.76 Swinburne, Algernon, 110 Tale of Gamelyn, 92 Tanner, Lawrence, 70, 71, 72, 133–136 “Techno-determinism,” 37 Temporary Preface to the Six Text Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 86, 91, 94 ten Brink, Bernhard, 21, 24 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, burial of, 59–60 Text and body, 10, 11 circulation of, 21, 33–34 emendation of, 104 as gendered, 20, 24, 140n.16 and image, 7, 8 New Criticism view of, 122 Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum, 36 Thoms, William, 100–101, 131 Thorpe, William, 129, 130, 132 Thynne, William, Chaucer edition, 42, 46, 47–48, 94 Times Literary Supplement, on Stow, 96– 97 “To Rosemounde,” 96 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 122, 124 “Traffic in women, the” 20 Transcendence, and materiality, 10–11, 153n.48 Trigg, Stephanie, poetics of affinity, 87 Troutbeck, Henry, 107–108, 109–110, 119, 120–121 Truth, 21–22, 86, 140nn.21, 20 Tudor dynasty, ecclesiastical reform, 49 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 83–84, 96–97 “Uberleben,” 45 Unheimlich (uncanny), 67, 69

Verdery, Katherine, on political corpses, 39 Vincent, David, 42, 135–136 Voice, and bodily presence, 5 Waller, Edmund, 118 Waller, J.G., 83 Washington, George, 62–63 Webb, Phillip, 66 Webbe, William, 118 Westminster Abbey, 70 Westminster Abbey Chaucer Window, 83–84, 155n.23, 130 Chaucer’s interment in, 48 Dryden monument, 55, 57 and English nationalism, 64 Poets’ Corner, 57, 64, 67, 69, 102, 130 Wodman’s Rents, 42, 43, 134–135 Westminster Abbey: Its Memories and Its Message, 69 Westminster Abbey Muniments Library, 59 Wills, David, 37–38 Women as books, 20, 24, 140n.16 exchange of, 20–21 Wodman’s Rents, 42, 43, 134–135 Wordsworth, William, 52–52, 117 Workes of Our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, The, 92 Wright, Thomas, 91, 92 Writing, and the body, 10, 34, 139n.2 Žižek, Slavoj “ideological fantasy,” 6 on nationalism, 66–67 on money, 33, 72, 153n.48