# Chaucer — On the Art of Writing character guide

> Chaucer in On the Art of Writing by Arthur Quiller-Couch.

**Role:** supporting

**First appearance:** 0004-lecture-ii-the-practice-of-writing

## Snapshot

The medieval master of narrative verse whose example supports the call for Cambridge students to practise writing as the constant auxiliary of a liberal education.

## Who they are

He is invoked in the lecture that urges students to treat English Literature as an art with a living, improvable language, and therefore to practise writing themselves rather than embalm the past in a hortus siccus. The narrator sets the great writers of the past before his audience not for their own sakes alone but for guidance, so that they might say what they have to say worthily. Chaucer matters as one of those portraits looking down from college halls, meant to lift hearts and move students to match their manhood to its inheritance.

## In the story

### [On the Art of Writing](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/on_the_art_of_writing_se/chapters/on-the-art-of-writing)

Cited as a foundational figure in the lineage of English literature.

### [Lecture IX: On the Lineage of English Literature (II)](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/on_the_art_of_writing_se/chapters/lecture-ix-on-the-lineage-of-english-literature-ii)

Cited as having an initial and enormous debt to Dante and Boccaccio, and as part of the lineage of English literature.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/on_the_art_of_writing_se/characters/chaucer
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/on_the_art_of_writing_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/on_the_art_of_writing_se/characters