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Unit 10: The Augustan Age or the Triumph of Neoclassicism (Pope and Heroic Couplet, Poetic Diction and Satire)

personality upon each of the pilgrims. The Shipman’s easy conscience is an integral part of the Notes
tough, self-reliant spirit of the man, which has acquired the wilfulness and moral unconcern of the
elements in which he lives. His thefts and murders, the Franklin’s epicurism, the Physician’s avarice,
interest Chaucer not as evidence of a breakdown of moral values but for what they reveal of
individual character.
Thus Chaucer’s satire is not directed against contemporary morals, but against the comic self-
ignorance which gives man two’ identities the creature he is, and the more distinguished and
inscrutable person he imagines himself to be.
Finally, it may be pointed out here that in several prologues to the tales told by the pilgrims
Chaucer acts as a medieval satirist whose method was to have a villain describe his own tricks.
Two of these Prologues are the Pardoner’s and the Wife of Bath’s. The former, like lago, Richard III
and Edmund the Bastard in Shakespeare, expresses himself out and out telling the pilgrims about his
sensuality, greed, hypocrisy and deceitfulness.

Did u know? The theme of the Wife of Bath’s prologue is tribulation in marriage particularly
the misery she has caused her five successive husbands.
It is now time that we should ask ourselves as to what extent Chaucer was influenced by classical
and medieval traditions of satire. There is no incontrovertible evidence about his knowledge of
classical satirists. Juvenal he quotes from and mentions by name, but the quotations he could very
easily have gained at second hand. Horace he does not mention at all, but since, as other critics
have pointed out, he does not mention Boccaccio either, this negative evidence is worthless.
Juvenal had attacked with moral horror the widespread vices of his own time under the satiric
disguise of describing historical parsonages of a previous age. This device was not imitated by the
Fathers or the medieval satirists who were influenced by him. and the writers of the Middle Ages,
with their preoccupation with what was common to all men rather than with what makes one man
different from another, were not concerned to give any appearance of particularity to their satire.
The result was either the blackened generalised picture of all men as totally corrupt, found in the
De Contemptu Mundi, or the combination of allegory with satire, ingeniously used, though not
invented, by Langland. The distinctive vices of people in various orders and occupations throughout
society he does not generalise but, like Juvenal, reduces the generalization to a description of
particular characters. This, however, seems to be Chaucer’s only resemblance to Juvenal, since
self-evidently there could be no greater difference of tone than there is between Juvenal’s savage
vehemence and Chaucer’s specious mildness.
The resemblances between Chaucer and Horace are more subtle and more specific. The object of
Horace’s satire had been different from Juvenal’s, in that Horace was chiefly concerned with those
who disrupted the social harmony of life, the fool, the bore, the miser, and these he portrayed with
a minute and particular observation of habit and conversation, which gives the impression that
description is of an individual, though by definition not unique, personality.
Chaucer shares some characteristics with Horace. He has in common with him the easy tone of a
man talking to friends who share his assumptions and sympathies, though usually with a deceptive
twist. When Horace meets the characters in his satires, he expects his audience to sympathise with
his misery, whereas Chaucer pretends that the situation was delightful and the characters to be
admired. He shares with Horace, too, the use of comic images, the quick observation of human
affection, and the suggestion of a recognizable personality. Chaucer, however, extends Horation
ridicule to the kind of objects satirized in the Juvenalian tradition, and modifies it by the tone of
pretended naivete, not found in Horace’s style, but certainly learnt in part from Ovid whom Chaucer
imitated as if he were his master.

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