Geoffrey Chaucer by Mary Flannery

Author:Mary Flannery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Laughing with Men

Whether or not Chaucer was teasing Katherine Swynford in The Physician’s Tale, other poems suggest he was far from uncomfortable with anti-feminist humour. In fact, one of his surviving poetic envoys from the later years of his writing career, Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton, features a whole series of jokes concerning the supposed undesirability of marriage, jokes that Chaucer clearly anticipates his poem’s male recipient will appreciate.

Bukton was likely written after Philippa Chaucer’s death in 1387, and possibly as late as several years later, when Chaucer was at work on the composition and arrangement of The Canter-bury Tales. By this point, Chaucer had been living away from London for some years, though the poem’s addressee may have had connections with the royal court. Bukton is a relatively short poem, consisting of 32 lines distributed across four eight-line stanzas. It survives in only one manuscript: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16, in which Chaucer’s poems appear alongside works by the fifteenth-century poets John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve. The manuscript is probably a far cry from how the poem’s intended reader originally encountered it – a poem like Bukton is more likely to have been circulated among a very small group, though Chaucer may have read it aloud to a private gathering at which its addressee was present.

Bukton is characterized by what one editor of Chaucer describes as a slightly ‘bantering tone’, one that is simultaneously teasing and self-deprecating.31 Precisely which Bukton Chaucer addresses in his poem is unknown, though it could be either a Sir Peter Bukton from Yorkshire (the likelier candidate, in most scholars’ opinion) or the Sir Robert Bukton who was ‘connected with the royal court’.32 The poem appears to be about Bukton’s impending nuptials, and contains a number of familiar anti-feminist jokes about the woes of marriage, jokes that Chaucer makes while repeatedly insisting that he intends to say nothing critical of marriage. As he puts it,

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