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The Canterbury Tales
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The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century (two of them in prose, the rest in verse). The tales, some of which are originals and others not, are contained inside a frame tale and told by a collection of pilgrims on a pilgrimage from London Borough of Southwark to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.
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The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century (two of them in prose, the rest in verse). The tales, some of which are originals and others not, are contained inside a frame tale and told by a collection of pilgrims on a pilgrimage from London Borough of Southwark to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The Canterbury Tales are written in Middle English. Although the tales are considered to be his magnum opus, some believe the structure of the tales is indebted to the works of The Decameron, which Chaucer is said to have read on an earlier visit to Italy.
Synopsis
On an April day, a group of 29 pilgrims meet in Tabard Inn, just outside London, and set out on a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury to pay their respects to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The group is described in detail, with characters from all classes, upper and lower, represented. Religious characters, such as a monk and a Pardoner, travel alongside a sailor, miller, carpenter, and a knight, among others. When the group stops for the night, the host of the pilgrimage proposes that they all tell stories to each other along the way. The pilgrims agree to tell four stories each, two on the way to Canterbury, and two on the way back. The person who tells the best story, as determined by the host, will have his supper paid for by the rest of the group. The tale-telling begins with the knight and proceeds as the pilgrims near Canterbury, each person telling a story that reflects their social position, and some telling stories which are intended to make fun of others in the group. No winner is chosen by the host in the end, and only a few of the pilgrims have told their tales by the time the story ends because Chaucer died before he could finish it. He originally intended to write 124 tales but died having only completed 22. Two more tales were started, but never finished. Chaucer ends the work with a retraction apologizing for anything in the stories which may have been inappropriate.
Dating issues
The date of the conception and writing of The Canterbury Tales as a collection of stories has proved difficult to discover. It seems clear that the Tales were begun after some of Chaucer's other works, such as Legend of Good Women, which fails to mention them in a list of other works by the author. Also, it was probably written after his Troilus and Criseyde, since Legend is written in part as an apology for the portrayal of women in the Criseyde character. Troilus is dated to sometime between 1382 and 1388, with Legend coming soon after, possibly in 1386-87. In any case, work on The Canterbury Tales as a whole probably began in the late 1380s and continued as Chaucer neared his death in the year 1400.
Two of the tales, The Knight's Tale and The Second Nun's Tale, were probably written before the compilation of stories was ever thought of. Both of these tales are mentioned in the Prologue to the aforementioned Legend of Good Women. Other tales, such as the Clerk's and the Man of Law's, are also suggested to have been written earlier and added into the Canterbury Tales framework after the fact. These suggestions, however, are less supported by scholars. The Monk's Tale is one of the few describing an event which provides a clear date. It describes the death of Bernabò Visconti, which occurred on 19 December 1385, although some scholars believe the lines about him were added after the main tale had already been written. The Shipman's Tale was in all likelihood written before The Wife of Bath's Tale, as in parts the Shipman speaks as if he were a woman, leading scholars to believe that the Shipman's Tale was originally intended for the Wife of Bath, before she became a more prominent character. References to her in Envoy to Bukton (1396) seem to indicate that her character was quite famous in London by that time.
Chaucer's use of sources also provide chronological clues. The Pardoner's Tale, the Wife of Bath's Prologue, and the Franklin's Tale all draw frequent reference to St. Jerome's Epistola adversus Jovinianum. Jerome's work is also an addition to Chaucer's Prologue to a revised Legend of Good Women dated to 1394, suggesting that these three tales were written sometime in the mid-1390s. Scholars have also used Chaucer's references to astronomy to find the dates specific tales were written. From the data Chaucer provides in the prologue, for example, the pilgrimage in which the tales are told takes place in 1387. However, this assumes that, when looking up astronomical data, Chaucer stayed with current events.
Text
A total of 83 medieval manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales are known to exist, more than any other vernacular medieval literary work except The Prick of Conscience. This is taken as evidence of the tales' popularity during the 15th century. Fifty-five of these manuscripts are thought to have once been complete, while 28 more are so fragmentary that it is difficult to tell whether they were copied individually or were part of a larger set. The Tales vary in both minor and major ways from manuscript to manuscript, with many of the minor variations obviously coming from copyists' errors. However, other variations suggest that Chaucer himself was constantly adding to and revising his work as it was copied and distributed. No official, complete version of the Tales exists and it is impossible with the information available to determine the order Chaucer intended them to be placed in or even, in some cases, whether he even had any intention in mind.
There are clues which have led to the two most popular methods of ordering the tales. Scholars usually divide the tales into ten fragments. The tales that make up a fragment are directly connected and make clear distinctions about what order they go in, usually with one character speaking to and then stepping aside for another character. Between fragments, however, there is less of a connection. This means that there are several possible permutations for the order of the fragments and consequently the tales themselves. The most popular ordering of the fragments is as follows:
| Fragment | Tales |
|---|
| Fragment I(A) | General Prologue, Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook | | Fragment II(B1) | Man of Law | | Fragment III(D) | Wife, Friar, Summoner | | Fragment IV(E) | Clerk, Merchant | | Fragment V(F) | Squire, Franklin | | Fragment VI(C) | Physician, Pardoner | | Fragment VII(B2) | Shipman, Prioress, Sir Thopas, Melibee, Monk, Nun's Priest | | Fragment VIII(G) | Second Nun, Canon's Yeoman | | Fragment IX(H) | Manciple | | Fragment X(I) | Parson |
An alternative to this order is the placing of Fragment VIII(G) before VI(C). In other cases, the above order follows that set by early manuscripts. Fragments I and II almost always follow each other, as do VI and VII, IX and X in the oldest manuscripts. Fragments IV and V, by contrast are located in varying locations from manuscript to manuscript. Victorians would frequently move Fragment VII(B2) to follow Fragment II(B1), but this trend is no longer followed and has no justification. Even the earliest surviving manuscripts are not Chaucer's originals, the oldest being MS Peniarth 392 D (called "Hengwrt"), compiled by a scribe shortly after Chaucer's death. The scribe uses the order shown above, though he does not seem to have had a full collection of Chaucer's tales, so part are missing. The most beautiful of the manuscripts of the tales is the Ellesmere manuscript, and many editors have followed the order of the Ellesmere over the centuries, even down to the present day. The latest of the manuscripts is William Caxton's 1478 print edition, the first version of the tales to be published in print. Since this version was created from a now-lost manuscript, it is counted as among the 83 manuscripts.
Sources
No other work prior to Chaucer's is known to have set a collection of tales within the framework of pilgrims on a pilgrimage. It is obvious, however, that Chaucer borrowed portions, sometimes very large portions, of his stories from earlier stories, as well as from the general state of the literary world in which he lived. Storytelling was the main entertainment in England at the time, and storytelling contests had been around for hundreds of years. In 14th-century England the English Pui was a group with an appointed leader who would judge the songs of the group. The winner received a crown and, as with the winner of the Canterbury Tales, a free dinner. It was common for pilgrims on a pilgrimage to have a chosen "master of ceremonies" to guide them and organize the journey.
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio contains more parallels to the Canterbury Tales than any other work. Like the Tales, it features a number of narrators who tell stories along a journey they have undertaken (to flee from the Black Plague). It ends with an apology by Boccaccio, much like Chaucer's Retraction to the Tales. One-fourth of the tales in Canterbury Tales parallels a tale in the Decameron, although most of them have closer parallels in other stories. Scholars thus find it unlikely that Chaucer had a copy of the work on hand, surmising instead that he must have merely read the Decameron while visiting Italy at some point. Each of the tales has its own set of sources which have been suggested by scholars, but a few sources are used frequently over several tales. These include poetry by Ovid, the Bible in one of the many vulgate versions it was available in at the time (the exact one is difficult to determine), and the works of Petrarch and Dante. Chaucer was the first author to utilize the work of these last two, both Italians. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy appears in several tales, as do the works of John Gower, a known friend to Chaucer. A full list is impossible to outline in little space, but Chaucer also, lastly, seems to have borrowed from numerous religious encyclopedias and liturgical writings, such as John Bromyard's Summa praedicantium, a preacher's handbook, and St. Jerome's Adversus Jovinianum.
Analysis
Genre and structure
Canterbury Tales falls into the same category or genre as many other works of its day as a collection of stories organized into a frame narrative or frame tale. Chaucer's Tales differed from other stories in this genre chiefly in its intense variation. Most story collections focused on a theme, usually a religious one. Even in the Decameron, storytellers are encouraged to stick to the theme decided on for the day. Chaucer's work has much more variation, not only in theme, but in the social class of the tellers and the meter and style of each story told, than any other story of the frame narrative genre. The idea of a pilgrimage appears to have been a useful device to get such a diverse collection of people together for literary purposes, and was also unprecedented. Introducing a competition among the tales encourages the reader to compare the tales in all their variety, and allows Chaucer to showcase the breadth of his skill in different genres and literary forms.
While the structure of the Tales is largely linear, with one story following another, it is also much more than that. In the General Prologue, Chaucer describes, not the tales to be told, but the people who will tell them, making it clear that structure will depend on the characters rather than a general theme or moral. This idea is reinforced when the Miller interrupts to tell his tale after the Knight has finished his. Having the Knight go first, gives one the idea that all will tell their stories by class, with the Knight going first, followed by the Monk, but the Miller's interruption makes it clear that this structure will be abandoned in favor of a free and open exchange of stories among all classes present. General themes and points of view arise as tales are told which are responded to by other characters in their own tales, sometimes after a long lapse in which the theme has not been addressed.
Lastly, Chaucer does not pay much attention to the progress of the trip, to the time passing as the pilgrims travel, or specific locations along the way to Canterbury. His writing of the story seems focused primarily on the stories being told, and not on the pilgrimage itself.
Style
The variety of Chaucer's tales shows the breadth of his skill and his familiarity with countless rhetorical forms and linguistic styles. Medieval schools of rhetoric at the time encouraged such diversity, dividing literature (as Virgil suggests) into high, middle, and low styles as measured by the density of rhetorical forms and vocabulary. Another popular method of division came from St. Augustine, who focused more on audience response and less on subject matter (a Virgilian concern). Augustine divided literature into "majestic persuades", "temperate pleases", and "subdued teaches". Writers were encouraged to write in a way that kept in mind the speaker, subject, audience, purpose, manner, and occasion. Chaucer moves freely between all of these styles, showing favoritism to none. He not only considers the readers of his work as an audience, but the other pilgrims within the story as well, creating a multi-layered rhetorical puzzle of ambiguities. Chaucer's work thus far surpasses the ability of any single medieval theory to uncover.
With this Chaucer avoids targeting any specific audience or social class of readers, focusing instead on the characters of the story and writing their tales with a skill proportional to their social status and learning. However, even the lowest characters, such as the Miller, show surprising rhetorical ability, although their subject matter is more lowbrow. Vocabulary also plays an important part, as those of the higher classes refer to a woman as a "lady", while the lower classes use the word "wenche", with no exceptions. At times the same word will mean entirely different things between classes. The word "pitee", for example, is a noble concept to the upper classes, while in the Merchant's Tale it refers to sexual intercourse. Again, however, tales such as the Nun's Priest's Tale show surprising skill with words among the lower classes of the group, while the Knight's Tale is at times extremely simple.
Chaucer uses the same meter throughout almost all of his tales, with the exception of Sir Thopas and his prose tales. It is a decasyllable line, probably borrowed from French and Italian forms, with riding rhyme and, occasionally, a caesura in the middle of a line. His meter would later develop into the heroic meter of the 15th and 16th centuries and is an ancestor of iambic pentameter. He avoids allowing couplets to become too prominent in the poem, and four of the tales (the Man of Law's, Clerk's, Prioress', and Second Nun's) use rhyme royal.
Historical context
The time of the writing of The Canterbury Tales was a turbulent time in English history. The Catholic Church was in the midst of the Great Schism and, though it was still the only Christian authority in Europe, was the subject of heavy controversy. Lollardy, an early English religious movement led by John Wycliffe, is mentioned in the Tales, as is a specific incident involving pardoners (who gathered money in exchange for absolution from sin) who nefariously claimed to be collecting for St. Mary Rouncesval hospital in England. The Canterbury Tales is among the first English literary works to mention paper, a relatively new invention which allowed dissemination of the written word never before seen in England. Political clashes, such as the 1381 Peasant's Revolt and clashes ending in the depostion of King Richard II, further reveal the complex turmoil surrounding Chaucer in the time of the Tales writing. Many of his close friends were executed and he himself was forced to move to Kent in order to get away from events in London.
Themes
The themes of the tales vary, and include topics such as courtly love, treachery, and avarice. The genres also vary, and include romance, Breton lai, sermon, beast fable, and fabliaux. Though there is an overall frame, there is no single poetic structure to the work; Chaucer utilizes a variety of rhyme schemes and metrical patterns, and there are also two prose tales.
Some of the tales are serious and others comical. Religious malpractice is a major theme, as is the division of the three estates; the characters are all divided into three distinct classes, the classes being "those who pray" (the clergy), "those who fight" (the nobility), and "those who work" (the commoners and peasantry). Most of the tales are interlinked by common themes, and some "quit" (reply to or retaliate for) other tales. The work is incomplete, as it was originally intended that each character would tell four tales, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the return journey, for a total of one hundred twenty, which would have dwarfed the twenty-four tales actually written.
The Canterbury Tales includes an account of Jews murdering a deeply pious and innocent Christian boy ('The Prioress's Tale'). This blood libel against Jews became a part of English literary tradition. However, the story the Prioress tells did not originate in the works of Chaucer: it was well known in the 14th century.
Influence
It is sometimes argued that the greatest contribution that this work made to English literature was in popularising the literary use of the vernacular, English, rather than French or Latin. English had, however, been used as a literary language for centuries before Chaucer's life, and several of Chaucer's contemporaries—John Gower, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet—also wrote major literary works in English. It is unclear to what extent Chaucer was responsible for starting a trend rather than simply being part of it. It is interesting to note that, although Chaucer had a powerful influence in poetic and artistic terms, which can be seen in the great number of forgeries and mistaken attributions (such as The Flower and the Leaf which was translated by John Dryden), modern English spelling and orthography owes much more to the innovations made by the Court of Chancery in the decades during and after his lifetime.
Reception
Chaucer's day
The intended audience of The Canterbury Tales has proved very difficult to determine. There are no external clues other than that Chaucer was a courtier, leading some to believe that he was a court poet and wrote mostly for the nobility. However, none of his associates mention the fact that he was a poet in any known historical document. Scholars have suggested that the poem was intended to be read aloud, which is probable as that was a common activity at the time. However, it also seems to have been intended for private reading as well, since Chaucer frequently refers to himself as the writer, rather than the speaker, of the work. Determining the intended audience directly from the text is even more difficult, since the audience is part of the story. This makes it difficult to tell when Chaucer is writing to the fictional pilgrim audience or the actual reader.
It is obvious that Chaucer's works were distributed in some form while he was alive, probably in fragmented pieces or as individual tales. Scholars speculate that manuscripts were circulated among his friends, but likely remained unknown to most people until after his death. However, the speed with which copyists strove to write complete versions of his tale in manuscript form shows that Chaucer was a famous and respected poet in his own day. The Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts are examples of the care taken to distribute the work. More manuscript copies of the poem exist than for any other poem of its day except The Prick of Conscience, causing some scholars to give it the medieval equivalent of "best-seller" status. Even the most elegant of the illustrated manuscripts, however, is not nearly as decorated and fancified as the work of authors of more respectable works such as John Lydgate's religious and historical literature.
15th century
John Lydgate and Thomas Occleve were among the first critics of Chaucer's Tales, praising the poet as the greatest English poet of all time and the first to truly show what the language was capable of poetically. This sentiment is universally agreed upon by later critics into the mid-15th century. Glosses included in Canterbury Tales manuscripts of the time praised him highly for his skill with "sentence" and rhetoric, the two pillars by which medieval critics judged poetry. The most respected of the tales was at this time the Knight's, as it was full of both.
The pilgrims' route and real locations
The City of Canterbury has a museum dedicated to The Canterbury Tales.
The postulated return journey has intrigued many and continuations have been written as well, often to the horror or (occasional) delight of Chaucerians everywhere, as tales written for the characters who are mentioned but not given a chance to speak. The Tale of Beryn is a story by an anonymous author within a 15th century manuscript of the work. The tales are rearranged and there are some interludes in Canterbury, which they had finally reached, and Beryn is the first tale on the return journey, told by the Merchant. John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes is also a depiction of the return journey but the tales themselves are actually prequels to the tale of classical origin told by the Knight in Chaucer's work.
Literary adaptations
The title of the work has become an everyday phrase and been variously adapted and adopted; for example Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and others.
Many literary works (both fiction and non-fiction alike) have used a similar frame narrative to the Canterbury Tales as an homage. Science Fiction writer Dan Simmons wrote his Hugo Award winning novel Hyperion based around an extra-planetary group of pilgrims. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used The Canterbury Tales as a structure for his 2004 non-fiction book about evolution - The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. His animal pilgrims are on their way to find the common ancestor, each telling a tale about evolution.
Henry Dudeney's book The Canterbury Puzzles contains a part which is supposedly lost text from the Tales.
Historical mystery novelist P.C. Doherty wrote a series of novels based on "The Canterbury Tales," making use of the story frame and of Chaucer's characters.
British author JK Rowling cites The Pardoner's Tale, one of The Canterbury Tales, as her inspiration for the fairy tale The Tale of Three Brothers. This is very prominent in the Harry Potter series, especially in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book.
Stage and film adaptations
The Two Noble Kinsmen, by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, a retelling of "The Knight's Tale", was first performed in 1613 or 1614 and published in 1634.
A Canterbury Tale, a film jointly written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is based on the narrative frame of Chaucer's tales - that is, a group of strangers, each with his or her own story and in need of some kind of redemption, making their way to Canterbury together. The movie opens with a scene showing a group of medieval pilgrims journeying by foot and on horseback through the Kentish countryside as a narrator speaks the opening lines of the Tales' prologue. This scene makes a now-famous transition to the time of World War 2. The film's main story takes place in an imaginary town in Kent and ends with the main characters arriving at Canterbury Cathedral, bells pealing and Chaucer's words again resounding. A Canterbury Tale is recognized as one of the Powell-Pressburger team's most poetic and artful films. It was produced as wartime propaganda, using Chaucer's poetry, referring to the famous pilgrimage, and offering stirring photography of Kent to remind the public of what made Britain so special and worth fighting for. One scene in the film centers on a local historian lecturing his audience of British soldiers about the pilgrims of Chaucer's time and the vibrant history of England.1961, Erik Chisholm completed his opera, The Canterbury Tales. The opera is in three acts: The Wyf of Bath’s Tale, The Pardoner’s Tale and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.1972 For the Pasolini movie, see The Canterbury Tales (film)1975, Alan Plater wrote a modern re-telling of the stories in a series of television plays for BBC2: Trinity Tales. In this adaptation, the stories were told by a party of rugby league supporters on their way to a cup final at Wembley.1995, in Se7en, the book is featured in the film where Morgan Freeman is trying to learn more about the murderer's background and motives.2001, A Knight's Tale took its name from "The Knight's Tale," with a fictionalized Chaucer portrayed as a friend to the knight. At one point Chaucer declares he will use his verse to vilify two church officials who cheated him; they are a summoner and a pardoner. However the film actually has very little to do with the tale.- In a deleted scene included on the DVD release, Chaucer is also seen with his wife, who comments that his new companions "seem much more fun than those boring old pilgrims you hung out with last year."
2004, BBC, modern re-tellings of selected tales.2005, Royal Shakespeare Company, translation by Mike Poulton
Bibliography
The Canterbury Tales. Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1996. ISBN 0198711557Pearsall, Derek. The Canterbury Tales. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1985. ISBN 0048000213Rubin, Alexis P., ed. (1993): Scattered Among the Nations: Documents Affecting Jewish History. 49 to 1975. Wall & Emerson. ISBN 1895131103.
Further reading
Species, Phantasms and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in the Canterbury Tales. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.Kolve, V.A. and Glending Olson (Eds.) (2005). The Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales and The General Prologue; Authoritative Text, Sources and Backgrounds, Criticism. A Norton Critical Edition (2nd ed.). New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0-393-92587-0. LC PR1867.K65 2005.Thompson, N.S. Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love: A Comparative Study of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-198-12378-7.
External links
General
- : publishing transcripts, images, collations and analysis of all surviving 15th century copies
The Rap Canterbury Tales- Baba Brinkman- found on Rhapsody...no
Audio clips
Online texts
- , complete text and audio at
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Facsimiles
- high resolution scans of William Caxton's two editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
- : high-resolution image of the first page of the oldest manuscript copy.
- Manuscript images, transcripts and collations from and *
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