This important new critical biography traces in carefully considered detail what is known of Geoffrey Chaucer's personal life while exploring the fascinating relationship between the man of affairs, who made so many `improvisations and accommodations' to ensure his own survival, and the poet. He lived during that exciting and turbulent period in English history which saw not only the deposition of Richard II in 1399 but also the emergence of a new English poetry and a brilliant, if short-lived, English cultural renaissance. Close to the centre of government, always identified with the king's `affinity', Chaucer undertook important and often secret diplomatic missions, to France and Italy, and bore financial and administrative responsibility for vital government offices at the Customs and the King's Works. Derek Pearsall shows that Chaucer's immersion in his troubled times was more intimately expressed in his work than is admitted by traditional accounts. The `accommodations' of his public life are seen as being of a piece with the habitual irony, the studied elusiveness of the poetry, in which almost everything that could be construed as comment on contemporary events is avoided. This major reexamination of England's greatest narrative poet is supplemented with reproductions of Chaucer's portraits and other illustrations, including maps of medieval London.