Geoffrey Chaucer was the son of vintner, John Chaucer. He encountered Ovid in the schoolroom which proved to be a great influence on his work. He completed the trivium, grammar school. He served King Edward in a war with France and had to be ransomed. He was a sort of civil servant at a very high level. He was related to one of the wives of John of Gaunt.

His early love poetry has not survived. His choice to write in English was peculiar. French would have been the more reasonable language, it was particularly suited to poetry, it was in use as the language of the English nobility and the English court. French was the language Chaucer used in his education. Chaucer was sent as a member of a trade commission to Italy. He visited Florence. By the spring of 1373 Dante was long since dead. Boccaccio expounded Dante's art. Both Dante and Boccaccio composed some of their works in the vernacular. Literary issues could scarcely have escaped the notice of the English commissioner.

Chaucer left behind a number of unfinished works. He was busy and he was an optimist. THE CANTERBURY TALES itself was cast in broad general terms. It was supposed to consist of 120 tales. Chaucer went on a mission to France in 1377. The mission concerned the marriage of the king's grandson, Richard. Unfortunately the proposed bride died. A further trip of Chaucer's was to Milan. Chaucer would not have known Boccaccio's name, but did know some of his works through unsigned manuscripts. Chaucer's PARLIAMENT OF BIRDS evidences familiarity with some of Boccaccio's works, and it shows an advance over his earlier work, THE HOUSE OF FAME. The great thing that Chaucer got from Boccaccio was the gift of construction.

Chaucer returned from Milan in the autumn of 1378 and resumed his duties as comptroller. Chaucer had 12 years of service in the custom house. Chaucer said in one of his poems that he had 60 books. Books were not ornaments as far as Chaucer was concerned, they were necessities. Chaucer was also a producer of books, the job being difficult since scribes were ill-paid. He ended TROILUS AND CRISEYDE with the hope that no scribe would miswrite or mismeter his book.

Chaucer went on to serve the court in other capacites. He ended as a deputy forester, really a sinecure, permitting him time to write THE CANTERBURY TALES, unfinished. He also received an annuity from the state. THE CANTERBURY TALES gave Chaucer an opportunity to use everything he possessed. He used apologies and disclaimers since the work contained realistic character portraits highly unusual and original in a medieval context. Chaucer died in 1400.

Marchette Chute's book is a joy to read. Her character portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer seems just right.

Marchette Chute has a very gentle, incredibly direct style of writing. Having read her biographies of both Chaucer and Shakespeare, her love of the writing habits of those two classic authors is clear and she has managed to make some of those strengths her own. This biography is enhanced immeasurably by the fact that Ms. Chute knows the not only the history of the period, but the history and craft of story telling. In this volume, she also supplies a great deal of information regarding the sources of Chaucer's own works.

So, yes, I do like her comfortable style, how about the content? Superb. She furnishes as much honest detail as the distance of the period and the shyness of her subject allows. The traits of her historical writing that I value most are her ability to keep speculation to a minimum and her consistency in not confusing possibility with fact.

Since abundant details of Chaucer's personal life have not survived, much of the content of the book concerns other contemporary historic figures; literary, political, and religious conventions of the time; and brief analyses of many of Chaucer's works. She weaves this information skillfully with enough personal facts of Chaucer's life to gather a real sense of the man and his times. I thoroughly enjoyed the book - it left me feeling that I had the honor of briefly meeting the man.

We know very little about William Shakespeare. He wrote in a time after the invention of the printing press, but before the invention of newspapers and magazines, so the sort of journalism which we rely on today to tell us more than we want to know about the inner lives of show-business figures did not exist during his lifetime.

Anyone who wants to write a full-length biography of this man, one of the greatest writers of our planet, has two choices. She can either make up stuff along the way, as countless Shakespeare biographers have done since the 1600s, or she can stick to the fragmentary facts and fit them into a picture of the social structure and life that Shakespeare lived in. This is what Chute does in her now out-of-print classic, and as readers of this review can see, I think she did a superb job.

Chute's book is superb not only because she is a vivid writer, not only because she tells us why certain things were the way they were, but because she respects the people she is writing about. When she tells us why Elizabethan "players" and their property managers liked tawny-orange dye for their costumes, she not only tells us why they liked it (it was a "color-fast" dye which would not fade) but conveys to us some of the combination of freedom and limits which made up Elizabethan society. The men and women of London were people who, on the one hand, could not buy the color-stable, wash-and-wear clothes we wear without a thought today, but on the other hand, if they could find a good dye or could afford to wear a bright color, they could gaudy themselves up in a way which grownups are too shy to do nowadays. As always, something has been lost and something has been gained, and Chute knows this and doesn't write history on the basis of "look at how many mistakes those poor little people made" or "look at all those great heroes of the past." They are men and women and children who could have learned from us, and we can learn from them. All of them, Shakespeare first among them but not the only one.

This is not a book of stories, but a reference work on the order of Cliff's Notes. For that it is well worth owning.

If you are looking for entertaining retellings of the stories, look elswhere. This won't thrill your kids or any other audience.

Marchette Chute's Stories from Shakespeare is quite simply the best collection of summaries of the plays. Chute uses clear language to retell the story, she follows the order of the play in her telling, and, while her love of the plays is evident, she never degenerates into bardolatry (or into pedantry or into excessive personal comments.) If you want to be able to quickly refresh your memory of a play before going to the theater, buy this book. If you find it easier to know the story of the play before you read it, buy this book. If you're a parent who wants to give your children simple retellings of the plays, buy this book. If you're an adult who wants to know what all those other plays of Shakespeare were about (the ones you never bothered to--or were never forced to--read), buy this book. If you're a high school student with only fifteen minutes left before an exam on a play you didn't read, you'll wish you'd bought this book.

(A word on competitors: Forget the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare. They are not as easy to read as Chute's book, they contain sexist undertones, they do not always follow the order of the play, and they form an incomplete collection.)

I thought that this was a great book because it told the great stories of Shakespeare so that everyone could understand it. I think it is a great book to read before you read the unabridged plays.