Jonty Claypole

He basically then shapes the English imagination, you know, not single-handedly, but his contribution is that he pushes English poetry away from the religious into the secular realm.

So Canterbury Tales, yes, there's many religious characters.

You cannot escape the church or God, but you feel like you're reading a secular book.

So that is very unusual at the time.

He's very irreverent to status, as we've been talking about.

He's got that Monty Python-style irreverence.

He's into the kind of warts and all the earthy.

We should have said that the word shit appears in the general prologue.

So he considers that stuff, the stuff of life, to be worthy of poetry.

This is all, you know, big innovation.

He's mixing tragedy and comedy in a way that few people did.

So that whole multi-genre element works.

Then, as we were saying, you know, while doing this, he's also written the first technical manual in English.

Some think, like me, that he's basically written the first novel in English.

The thing, though, that to me feels most innovative is that – and this is hard to explain, but it's a consequence of everything I've just been listing –

For the first time in literature, I feel that we're hearing from somebody like us.

We get his jokes and his sly character analysis, and we are there.

And I can't think of any poems or works before that where you feel that you're in the pub with someone.

And Chaucer is the guy who gets that.

And the reason why he gets that is it's because everyone's imitating him thereafter.