Jonty Claypole

Like that was just so obvious to me reading, like even more so than Shakespeare, Chaucer is just writing the rule book.

And when I think a year ago you and I did an event on Shakespeare versus Austen, the answer is neither.

It's Chaucer, right?

So here's what Chaucer is doing that is new.

I mean, one, he's pioneering the English language as a language of poetry.

He's part of a little gang, you know, John Gower and William Langland.

But Chaucer is ahead of them, way ahead of them.

And others at the time recognized what he was doing.

A near contemporary called John Lydgate, just born a few decades afterwards, said Chaucer was the lodestar of our language.

It's coming from him.

There's something like I think it's something like 2000 words.

The first documented use is in is in Chaucer.

That doesn't mean he's making the words up, but he's putting them into the language of poetry.

And we have a lot of phrases come from Chaucer, like murder will out is a phrase that comes from the Canterbury Tales.

All good things come to an end.

He's also pioneering in form, right, Sophie, isn't he?

As you were saying earlier, you know, Langland and Gawain, so Piers Plowman and Gawain and the Green Knight, they're still in the alliterative form that we talked about when doing our Beowulf episode.

And Chaucer pushes poetry into iambic pentameter.

That is Chaucer's innovation.

He creates a language of poetry that essentially remains in place for five centuries to come.