Chaucer's Triumph

Chaucer's Triumph Synopsis

Geoffrey Chaucer has some claim to being the greatest of English poets, as well as the father of our language. Yet there has always lurked a dark secret in his life, a scandal or crime which, from evidence of two different legal documents of his time, has intrigued and mystified scholars for generations, dividing them into warring factions.

In the five days before Prince John of Gaunt's London funeral in March 1399, the body of the great Plantagenet prince is being brought from Leicester Castle for burial in St Paul's. Setting out with it are his family, royal mourners, Katherine Swynford, recently married to him and now his widow, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Adam Scriven, the poet's resentful scrivener or copyist. Not far away, in King's Langley, King Richard II, Gaunt's nephew, who has survived as king only under his protection, plans and manoeuvres to seize Gaunt's huge Lancastrian inheritance and even his body.

Scriven, who is engaged in copying the last Canterbury Tale, wants to use this final occasion to discover and test once and for all the truth about Chaucer's crime. But more is at stake than the poet's reputation: the future of England and Gaunt's royal line.