Chaucer and the Progress of Poetry

This chapter explores the diverse and sometimes conflicting accounts of Chaucer that were inherited by eighteenth-century writers from their predecessors. The ‘Testimonies’ on Chaucer in Thomas Speght’s editions of 1598 and 1602 are compared and contrasted with those in John Urry’s edition of 1721. The chapter discusses the importance given to Chaucer in poems tracing the overall progress of English poetry by Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, George Daniel, Joseph Addison, Samuel Cobb, and Samuel Wesley. It also investigates the critical accounts of Chaucer by Thomas Rymer, Sir Thomas Pope Blount, and their relation to the same critics’ responses to the poetry of Spenser, and to more recent poetry by Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham. The chapter attempts to distinguish between those who regarded Chaucer as the ‘father’ of English poetry only in the sense of a distant forebear and those who saw him as an active progenitor of poetry in the immediate present. It questions the assumption that Chaucer’s standing was in continuous and universal decline, and explores the way in which Sir John Mennes, Charles Gildon, and Samuel Pepys were able to perceive the strength of Chaucer’s thought, despite the antiquity of his language.