A failed kiss of life

For a writer or critic to describe something as ‘interesting’ is, of course, neither revealing nor interesting. Which is a shame, for Peter Ackroyd is rather fond of this sort of information underload: Richard II is ‘perhaps the most interesting and mysterious of English sovereigns’; the putative affair between Chaucer’s wife and John of Gaunt ‘would throw an interesting light upon his characteristic irony and detachment’; the actual affair between her sister and John of Gaunt ‘throws an interesting light upon the nature of the royal household’, and so on.

Ackroyd is at least right to have an interest in Chaucer, whose well-documented professional and personal history provides plenty of material for a ‘litel tretys’ such as this. Surviving records denote a life of epochal eventfulness for a figure truly representative of his period: a diplomat and civil servant, a magistrate and alleged rapist, the de facto laureate poet for a coalescent nation.