Postscript: Choosing Chaucers

Abstract

Chaucer’s cultural capital outside the academy remains high. I make this statement based on the astonishing number of people who begin reciting the first eighteen lines of the General Prologue when I tell them I teach Chaucer. My reciters come from all walks of life—doctors and engineers, sales reps and farmers, students and cashiers; and I encounter them in all sorts of ways—as neighbors, as the parents of my children’s friends, as the woman in front of me in line, or as the man next to me on the plane. Some of my new acquaintances memorized these lines for a high school English class less than five years ago, and others still remember those vernal lines after forty years. Their impromptu (and unprompted, I might add) renditions, with varying degrees of textual accuracy and a wide range of pronunciations, inevitably exhibit a certain glee, though the recitations are seldom backed with a clear understanding of what the lines mean. All sorts of people in all sorts of places remain proud of this accomplishment. Despite a relative uncertainty about Chaucer and his poetry, they believe that reciting those lines entitles them a bit of high-priced cultural real estate.

If you don’t like my lyrics you can press fast forward.

—Jay-Z, The Black Album, “99 Problems”