ABSTRACT
Biography and criticism are always closely linked (indeed criticism is a form of autobiography as Jouve (1991) asserts). The earliest biographies of Chaucer are ‘Lives’ prefaced to editions of his work, a practice still followed, as for instance in the ‘Life’ which forms the introduction to The Riverside Chaucer. This indicates the strength of our inclination to read the works through the author, and vice-versa. Thus Caxton, in the preface to the second, 1484, printed edition of the Tales, refers to Chaucer as ‘that nobel & grete philosopher’ (Crotch 1928: 90). The nobility of work soon transfers onto the man, as Puttenham in 1589 ‘supposes’ him to be a knight on no basis whatsoever beyond his admiration for Chaucer the writer. Speght confirms this habit of creating a socially privileged Chaucer on slender evidence in his ‘Life’ of 1598, the earliest biography as such [5], and it flourished well into the twentieth century, gathering spurious details such as those quoted in Part I here, from the likes of Godwin (1804) [5] and Furnivall (1900) [8].
