Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print

by Laura M. Bishop, Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon

Even in the fifteenth century, Chaucer was seen by his countrymen as the preeminent English poet, the father, as Dryden was to call him in 1700, of English poetry. Despite general agreement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries about Chaucer's poetic preeminence, however, Thomas Speght's edition of Chaucer's Works (1598, STC 5077, 5078, 5079; 1602, STC 5080, 5081) adds elaborate textual apparatus—illustrated frontispieces, life histories and genealogies, epistles and dedicatory poems—that insist on Chaucer's literary value in a particular way: They use the tropes of Chaucer as father and as living presence to affirm Chaucer's literary worth. These apparatus—or peritexts, to borrow Gerard Genette's term—invoke Chaucer's living voice through dialogues and letters; their images picture him as if alive and situate his fatherhood, as well as his poetry, in the midst of tudor politics. Many peritexts are new to Speght's editions; others carry over from his editorial predecessors William thynne (1532, StC 5068) and John Stow (1561, STC 5075, 5076). What prompts this expression of Chaucer as father and as living presence?