Geoffrey Chaucer

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CHAUCER

By Peter Ackroyd

Doubleday, $19.95,

208 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY MERLE RUBIN

The pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer's great work, "The Canterbury Tales," set forth on their journey in April, that time of year when nature stirs into life. Looking backward across more than six centuries, biographer Peter Ackroyd sees Chaucer as a poet of springtime rather than autumn: someone who "believed himself to come from a freshly minted civilisation."

It is probably no mere coincidence that this poet of fresh beginnings, the progenitor of Shakespeare, Milton and much of the rest of English literature, is the first subject Mr. Ackroyd has chosen to treat in his new series of short biographies bearing the title "Ackroyd Brief Lives." Biography, Mr. Ackroyd maintains (recalling Emerson's well-known pronouncement), offers the best way of understanding history: "To enter the consciousness and personality of a man or woman, of any period, is to see that period from within."

It's generally true, however, that the farther back in time a biographical subject is, the less is known about him or her. Biographers of such contemporary or near-contemporary figures as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, or Christopher Isherwood are swamped with letters, journals, interviews, and personal recollections. But any clues as to what might have gone on in Chaucer's mind and heart can only be gleaned indirectly and not always reliably from his works.

Indeed, not all that much is known even about the outward events of his life, which ended in 1400 and began sometime between 1341 and 1343. We know that he came from a prosperous London mercantile family, that he was attached to the courts of Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV, that he held various offices and was sent on various diplomatic missions, that he married a woman who was also attached to the royal household, and, of course, that he was esteemed as a court poet. But how he felt about his parents, or what his marriage was like, or his views on various political and religious questions are subjects that can only be guessed at.