Blog 2: Chaucer and Shakespeare

At the Sir John Ritblat Gallery at the British Library, I noticed that one of the artifacts was an old book of Geoffrey Chaucer. It was mentioned on the plaque that Chaucer’s work inspired William Shakespeare and he borrowed some of Chaucer’s stories and put them into his plays. I found that really interesting.

Geoffrey Chaucer himself was born sometime between 1340 and 1345 (some think 1343). He has been said to be first great poet in English. According to his history on BBC, “Chaucer's first major work was 'The Book of the Duchess', an elegy for the first wife of his patron John of Gaunt. Other works include 'Parliament of Fowles', 'The Legend of Good Women' and 'Troilus and Criseyde'. In 1387, he began his most famous work, 'The Canterbury Tales', in which a diverse group of people recount stories to pass the time on a pilgrimage to Canterbury.”

Shakespeare Online points out that Chaucer was popular even though he wrote in Middle English, which is the English language used from c. 1150 to 1470. That English that most people try to avoid because people find it tedious to try and understand what someone has written. As may be obvious, Shakespeare used Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Crisyde for his play of the same name. Also, thanks to Chaucer, the speech about “Queen Mab” from Romeo & Juliet was a referenced back to Parliament of Fowles. From The Canterbury Tales the story The Knight’s Tale is said to have sparked Shakespeare’s writing of The Two Noble Kinsmen.

All that this means to me is that Chaucer was much more important than I thought. He influenced the one and only William Shakespeare! If there is a while to receive immortality through your writing, it is definitely getting a famous person to write your stories into plays. I always knew that The Canterbury Tales was a famous work by Chaucer, but I have a bigger respect for the poet now. Chaucer directly influenced the literature of the time by being liked by Shakespeare. Since I have never heard of this before, I wonder if people actually noticed that these stories were by Chaucer originally. The fun thought that if Shakespeare could go to The British Library like we did and see one of his own original pieces of work right by Geoffrey Chaucers crossed my mind. I feel like he would be really excited and honored. Maybe just as impressed as we were by seeing the actually hand-writing of Charles Darwin in a letter to one of his friends and the original copy of Beowolf. It is very interesting to see author’s feeding off of each other to create model books of certain times.