Jonty Claypole

Not something John of Gaunt actually said, but, you know, he gets the great speech.

And one of Chaucer's earliest works is an elegy he writes for John of Gaunt's wife, Blanche, who dies young.

And Chaucer writes the Book of the Duchess.

which is very much in that Romance of the Rose, French courtly tradition.

It's a sort of dream vision.

The narrator falls asleep and then goes into a dream landscape and meets the departed Blanche.

He then writes The House of Fame, which is sort of a riff on Boethius.

It's bringing in Boethius's philosophy of fortune and fate and looking at that in an allegorical context.

He writes probably one of his least successful works, although you may differ, Sophie, The Legend of Good Women.

Which, in fact, came up in this week's recording of Instant Classics because we're doing Cleopatra and Chaucer's treatment of Cleopatra in this book was not looked upon favourably by Mary Beard or Charlotte Higgins.

He praises her because she kills herself.

Cleopatra kills herself after Mark Antony dies.

And he applauds this.

That's what makes her a good woman.

What's the point of a woman being alive if the man she's loved has died?

And then Chaucer comes to actually what many consider his greatest work.

Yes, it's true.

It's Troilus and Crusade.

And Troilus and Crusade is a long poem.

Some people think of it as being a prototype of the novel.