Volume 35, Number 1 · February 4, 1988
Chaucer on Our Doorstep
By Robert M. Adams
Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World
by Donald R. Howard
Dutton, 636 pp., $29.95
After six hundred years Geoffrey Chaucer still inspires active, spontaneous interest, as well as fresh perceptions. This is the more surprising because the language in which he wrote is thoroughly obsolete. English, only in its infancy in the fourteenth century, was rapidly changing its character even as Chaucer wrote, and he himself helped to change it by bringing into the written language a great many new words. By the seventeenth century Chaucer's work was so antiquated that Dryden took occasion to re-English some of the poems. Since then we have learned a bit more about Chaucerian metrics, so his lines no longer seem uncouth; but the vocabulary and the syntax—not to speak of the pronunciation—that Chaucer used still have to be studied in classrooms.
Review, 3470 words
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