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Who is Geoffrey Chaucer?
Geoffrey Chaucer (/ˈtʃɔːsər/; c. 1340s – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the “father of English literature”, or, alternatively, the “father of English poetry”. He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets’ Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
Among Chaucer’s many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer’s contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as “the firste fyndere of our fair langage” (i.e., the first one capable of finding poetic matter in English). Almost two thousand English words are first attested to in Chaucerian manuscripts.
Chaucer is sometimes credited as the founder of the modern English language, too:
One of the things I really liked about Breaking Bad was Walter White is one of the best/only smart guy characters I can think of. There’s a tendency for writers to try to show intelligence by characters always being right, WW was wrong all the time and even better you could see the wheels turning in his head of why he thought he was going to be right.
That show was incredible. I think it’s hard to write intelligence well, especially for a visual medium. In a book, you can put the readers in someone’s head – and most of the time I think authors get that wrong, too. But on TV where you have to show and not tell it’s a lot tougher.
The main format on TV for visualizing cleverness used to be detective story programming (Columbo, Murder She Wrote, etc.) and that worked because it felt like watching a chess match between the detective and the criminal. You can use that type move/counter-move approach for a show like BB, but it’s got to be a lot subtler and less overt b/c there isn’t always a really specific opponent. It’s more like showing how learning occurs. They did a really good job with it on BB though.