Playing Chaucer at the Early Elizabethan Inns of Court

Anyone wishing to spend a night inside London’s Inner Temple has the choice of two rooms designed especially for guest accommodation. The more “modern” of the two is the “Boswell Room” named in honor of James Boswell, the lawyer and biographer of famous Inns of Court resident Dr Samuel Johnson. The second is the “Chaucer Room”: a more traditional, “romantically-inspired” bedroom suite, complete with reproduction fireplace and plush furnishings.1 Although Chaucer, Boswell and Johnson were all distinguished men of letters, this grouping is not a conventional one in the pantheon of male English authors, and their relationship to the law is widely dissimilar. Johnson’s works teem with lawyers, yet Chaucer is known for creating just one fictional “Man of Law,” and the issue of whether he was ever actually a resident of one of the four Inns of Court has been a subject of major dispute among scholars.2 Nonetheless, the Inner Temple bedchamber’s affiliation with the so-called Father of English poetry preserves a long-standing, mythological affinity between Chaucer and the Inns of Court society, where it has long been held that he—together with his friend John Gower—enjoyed a spell of training in the law.