CHAUCER'S "ENVOY TO SCOGAN": THE SOCIAL USES OF LITERARY CONVENTIONS

The "Envoy to Scogan" is characteristic of Chaucer's poetry in its genial irony and in the uncertainty of its logic. As both a verse letter to an identifiable man and a conventional court poem it affords the opportunity to fix what is characteristic in specific social and literary contexts. New evidence shows that Scogan was in Richard II's household, a society of companions like that implicit in Deschamps' poems and responsive to the claims of friendship as an ethical ideal. Other poems show that Chaucer's tone and concerns were familiar and that his subject, friendship, was a commonplace topic of traditional literary education. The point of the "Envoy" is Chaucer's assertion of friendship with Scogan, and its success is the authenticity of that assertion. If it is both successful and characteristic, then Chaucer's talent found congenial expression in the conventions of courtly friendship and the conventions had their use in the particular social circumstances of civil servants' lives