Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales

Biography Geoffrey Chaucer was the greatest English poet of the later Middle Ages. Chaucer is generally considered to be second only to William Shakespeare in terms of his contribution to English Literature.

Biography (cont’d) Geoffrey Chaucer (born 1340/44, died 1400) is remembered as the author of The Canterbury Tales, which ranks as one of the greatest epic works of world literature. Chaucer made a crucial contribution to English literature in using English at a time when much court poetry was still written in Anglo-Norman or Latin. Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London. He was the son of a prosperous wine merchant and deputy to the king's butler. Little is known of his early education, but his works show that he could read French, Latin, and Italian.

Biography (cont’d) In Chaucer went to France with Edward III's army during the Hundred Years' War. He was captured in the Ardennes and returned to England after the treaty of Brétigny in There is no certain information of his life from 1361 until c.1366, when he perhaps married Philippa Roet, the sister of John Gaunt's future wife. Philippa died in 1387 and Chaucer enjoyed Gaunt's patronage throughout his life. Between 1367 and 1378 Chaucer made several journeys abroad on diplomatic and commercial missions. In 1385 he lost his employment and rent-free home, and moved to Kent where he was appointed as justice of the peace. He was also elected to Parliament. This was a period of great creativity for Chaucer, during which he produced most of his best poetry, among others Troilus and Cressida (c. 1385), based on a love story by Boccaccio.

Biography (cont’d) Chaucer did not begin working on The Canterbury Tales until he was in his early 40s. The book, which was left unfinished when the author died, depicts a pilgrimage by some 30 people, who are going on a spring day in April to the shrine of the martyr, St. Thomas Becket. On the way they amuse themselves by telling stories. Among the band of pilgrims are a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath. The stories are interlinked with interludes in which the characters talk with each other, revealing much about themselves.

Biography (cont’d) According to tradition, Chaucer died in London on October 25, He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the part of the church, which afterwards came to be called Poet's Corner. A monument was erected to him in 1555.

The Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 tales, mostly in verse, introduced by 'The General Prologue'. The collection closes with a short prose piece known as 'Chaucer's Retraction' in which the author asks the reader to ascribe all that is good in the work to the Lord. All that is bad in the Tales should be ascribed, not to the author's will, but to his lack of skill, for he would 'ful fayn have seyd bettre if I hadde had konnynge.'

The Canterbury Tales (cont’d) 'The General Prologue' introduces the structure of the collection. While on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas in Canterbury, Chaucer falls in with a number of pilgrims at the Tabard Inn, in Southwark. The pilgrims come from all walks of Medieval English life, and their appearances and characters are vividly described in the 'Prologue'. As the pilgrims set out together in the morning, they come to an agreement to entertain each other on the long road by telling two tales each on the way to and from St Thomas' Shrine. Sadly, Chaucer was never able to complete even one tale for each of the described pilgrims. But the existing 23-verse tales with their prologues, together with the prose 'Parson's Tale' and 'The General Prologue' present a rich and varied pageant of Medieval life, and the verse tales offer examples of most Medieval poetic genres.

The Canterbury Tales (cont’d) The Canterbury Tales grows out of a continental tradition of tale collections that reached its pre- Chaucerian height with Boccaccio's Decameron. Chaucer, however, in The Canterbury Tales, takes the original step of carefully matching the tales to their tellers, so that the teller's personality is expanded by the tale he or she tells. Chaucer was continuing to struggle with this matching at the time he died, as evidenced by the fact that parts of a tale told by a woman seem to be told by a man. Obviously some parts of the Tales were far from their final form when Chaucer took his leave.

The Canterbury Tales (cont’d) While The Canterbury Tales remains unfinished (like so much of Chaucer's work), we know from internal evidence that he intended 'The Knight's Tale' to follow 'The General Prologue' at the beginning of the collection and 'The Parson's Tale' to close. Even in this incomplete form, the knight's tale of courtly love, the parson's dry sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins, and all the tales in between give us an hilarious and unparalleled view into a world far away in time and yet so very, very close to who we are today.

The General Prologue It opens with the description of the return of spring and spring is the time to go on a pilgrimage – to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. The narrator met other 29 pilgrims in Tabard Inn (Sothwark) and they agreed to tell tales on their way to Canterbury.

The General Prologue (cont’d) The pilgrims are from different walks of life (“estates”): the military (the Knight, the Squire), the clergy (the Prioress, the Monk, the Friar, the Parson) and the laity (other characters from the Franklin to the Plowman). They can be further divided into landowners, professionals, labourers, stewards, church officers.