Geoffrey Chaucer

Shakespeare and Catholicism: The Franciscan Connection

“…13 So taking just one example among many, writing in the 1570 edition of his Ecclesiastical History, John Foxe, the great propagandist of the English Reformation, felt able to appropriate Chaucer on behalf of the Protestant cause by claiming that the poet "saw in Religion as much almost as we do now". 14 Ironically, Chaucer's reputation as a fierce critic of the Catholic Church, and as a figure whose works brought his readers -again to quote Foxe -"to the true knowledge of religion", 15 was based in part on two violently anti-Catholic satires that were falsely attributed to him during the sixteenth century: Jack Upland and The Plowman's Tale, of which the first is a virulent attack on none other than the Franciscan Order. 16 Viewed in this context, then, it would seem that for Chaucer's sixteenth-century Protestant readers, beating up a Franciscan friar was no mere random or casual act of violence, but a calculated and highly charged political statement, to be seen as a natural continuation or extension of the poet's writing.…”