Getting Personal: Chaucer's Envoy to Bukton

During class on Thursday, Professor Wenthe mentioned briefly a short poem Chaucer wrote to a friend referring to the Wife of Bath. My curiosity piqued, I decided to ferret out this poem — known as the Envoy to Bukton — and any information surrounding it and Chaucer's other short poems.

Chaucer apparently was fond of penning shorter verses to his personal friends, offering them advice in a very tongue-in-cheek, familiar, playful manner, and participating in a literary culture of poetic exchange at the Ricardian court. A few of Chaucer's poems survive, including Envoy to Scogan, Envoy to Bukton, The Balade de Bon Conseyl (Or, Truth) and Wordes unto Adam. In The Balade de Bon Conseyl, for instance, Chaucer cautions his friend Sir Philip de la Vache about the ups and downs of life at court (Epstein 2).  Chaucer's poems were addressed to specific individuals, but this was a pretense and rather than being private, the poems would have circulated among Chaucer's friends in London. The existence of these poems "confirm the existence of an 'inner circle' of Chaucer's audience which was on intimate and confidential terms both with Chaucer's store of literary devices and with Chaucer the person" (Strohm 12). Furthermore, the voice in the poems seem to echo that in the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer's other works, a point Robert Epstein uses to support his argument that "the continuity of this poetic voice with that in the Chaucerian opus at large and the allusion in Bukton to his great work in progress provide further evidence that Chaucer's primary audience, real and ideal, was in that shifting coterie of friends and associates — educated professionals, minor aristocracy and servants of the royal bureaucracy" (2).  

Thus, we can imagine a 'Chaucerian circle' of friends who read and exchanged not only Chaucer's shorter poems, but also drafts and copies of his Canterbury Tales. Tentative dating of some of these shorter poems suggests Chaucer wrote them while or after he wrote the Canterbury Tales. In Envoy to Scogan, Chaucer refers to weather events taking place in fall 1393, and he alludes in Envoy to Bukton to an English expedition to Friesland in 1396 ("so may hap, / That thee were lever to be taken in Frise") (Pollard 46). The timeline in our textbook estimates Chaucer wrote the "marriage group" between 1392 and 1395, shortly before he wrote the Envoy to Bukton (xxv). So, the Wife of Bath would not only have been on Chaucer's mind when he referred to her in Envoy to Bukton, but she would also have been a familiar figure to Chaucer's friends and audience. 

In his Envoy to Bukton, Chaucer warns his friend against wedded life, playfully referring to the "sorrow and woe that is in marriage" and contradictorily says he "will not say how that it is the chain / of Satanas, on which he gnaweth ever." This attitude to marriage seems to echo that of the narrator in the Canterbury Tales, but more strikingly, Chaucer includes the maxim — which we've discussed in class — "lest thou do worse, take a wife; / bet is to wed than burn in worse wise." However, although he concedes it's better to marry than to burn in hell, Chaucer returns to hammering home his point that married life stinks, saying that experience will teach his friend Bukton such lessons that he would rather be taken captive in Friesland than marry again. 

In a completely satirical remark in the final stanza, Chaucer tells Bukton to go read the Wife of Bath as further proof of his argument: "The Wife of Bath I pray you that you read, / of this mattre which that we have on hand." By referring to Alison of Bath as a published authority, Chaucer imitates and mocks her (and his own) approach to her prologue of supporting her claims with scholarly works by referring to Scripture and classical texts. Much as she haphazardly tosses out those references in her prologue, Chaucer, seemingly as an afterthought, appends his reference to her near the end of his Envoy to Bukton.

Thus, in the Envoy to Bukton, Chaucer continues at least two themes from the Canterbury Tales — the trap of marriage and the debate about textual versus experiential authority — and polishes it all off by resurrecting the very recently invented Wife of Bath character as an 'established' textual authority. 

Epstein, Robert. "Chaucer's Scogan and Scogan's Chaucer." Studies in Philology. 96.1 (Winter 1999): 1-21. 

Pollard, Alfred William. Chaucer. Ayer Publishing, 1970. 

Strohm, Paul. "The Social and Literary Scene in England." Piero Boitani and Jill Mann. The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 1-19.