Study Guide to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645421474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Aides à l'étude
• Subtopic: Guides d'étude

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, arguably the most famous of all Middle English literature. As a series of twenty-four stories, The Canterbury Tales was written in 1392 and tells of the pilgrimage of thirty people from various social classes to Canterbury. Moreover, Chaucer uses each story to represent a theme in order to exemplify the changing of societal roles. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Chaucer’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO GEOFFREY CHAUCER

PREFACE

 

Anyone who presumes to add another book to the growing list of outlines, commentaries, modernizations - even children’s versions - of Chaucer’s poetry must begin with an apology. Modernizations (and there are some good ones) tend sometimes to be even more difficult than Chaucer’s Middle English text; the existing outlines and commentaries are frequently filled with a riot of information about scholarly problems, or else are so sketchy, that they bear only a remote resemblance to the poems themselves. I am of course not referring to the works of scholarship and literary criticism which have, in the last two decades, enlightened us about Chaucer’s meaning perhaps more than all the literary discussion of the five centuries past. But these are often beyond reach - and beyond the needs - of the audience this book is designed to serve. It may well be that for any number of reasons pupils in secondary schools should not be asked to come to grips with the subtleties of Chaucer. And the arguments could be put almost as strongly for college undergraduates. But there are riches in Chaucer’s poetry - wisdom, humor pathos, even invective and satire - which the adolescent mind can respond to. And despite the difficulties, Chaucer is being taught in our high schools and junior colleges.

The overwhelming problem facing anyone who tries to translate or re-tell Chaucer’s stories, is that he was himself a re-teller of other men’s stories. The modern version, therefore, may well turn out to be much closer to Chaucer’s source than to Chaucer’s own poetry. It is in the language itself - in the untranslatable suggestiveness - that much of Chaucer’s meaning lies. Somehow, the modern version must give a hint of what Chaucer was up to - what he saw in the original source, and what kind of shaping art he used in adapting it. With all this in view, and remembering the relatively unformed (and uninformed) minds encountering the strangeness of Chaucer’s verse for the first time, I have adopted these principles as a guide in the summation and commentaries which make up the book:

1. To re-tell the story in outline form, in easily understandable language, yet, as far as possible, with a Chaucerian inflection.
2. To make Chaucer’s characters and situations (within reason, and avoiding really ludicrous comparisons) comprehensible in modern terms.
3. To avoid controversial opinions, untried theories, and advanced critical views (especially to avoid murky critical terminology); at the same time to ignore textual problems, and questions of the dating and ordering of tales, in favor of purely literary considerations and more ample summaries.
4. To omit nothing truly Chaucerian merely on the ground that it may offend the taste of some readers, yet to avoid possibly inflammatory details and to omit those words (even though Chaucer used them) which are generally considered obscene.
5. Finally, to avoid critical generalities, and to concentrate on particulars. I find, for instance, that it is of little use to the student to be told that Chaucer was a master of the dramatic method, but that it is genuinely helpful for him to know that the apparently aimless random course of events in the Knight’s Tale is intimately related to the main theme of the poem, which is concerned with the proper human attitude to strike in the face of the imponderable heavenly logic behind the visible surface of things.

The “Comments”, interspersed in the text, are by no means exhaustive. They are meant to clear up crucial points of interpretation, or to suggest critical attitudes that may be useful at other points in the narrative as well. I have not observed strict proportions in the allotment of space; the General Prologue, and some of the more important tales, like the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, are given disproportionately lengthy treatment. The book does not pretend to be a work of criticism or of scholarship, though it is hoped that it will be found to be based on sound scholarship and defensible critical opinions. If it is an aid to the youthful reader, if it helps him to find his way through Chaucer - and back to Chaucer - it will have served its purpose.

INTRODUCTION TO GEOFFREY CHAUCER

CHAUCER’S LIFE AND WORK

SOCIAL BACKGROUND

Geoffrey Chaucer, who was born around 1340 and died in 1400, lived through a social and religious storm which has hardly been equaled in the history of the English nation. The Fourteenth Century of romantic story - a quaint society of jolly millers, rollicking friars, and amiable outlaws, of distant, fragile ladies and well-bred knights - is far cry from the actual facts. And it is ironic that the Canterbury Tales themselves should have endured in the popular imagination as a reflection of that kind of world. England, in Chaucer’s day, a country of perhaps four million people, was devastated by the Black Plague in 1349-50. Its population was practically cut in half. The ensuing shortage of farm labor sharpened an already existing class conflict, a conflict which led finally to the terrible Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. A number of unpopular noblemen were lynched in the uprising, and despite Richard II’s promise of amnesty, severe reprisals were taken against the commoners who had played any part in the rebellion. Villeins (serfs bound to the soil), escaping from their lord’s estates, took refuge in the towns or joined lawless bands in the forests, which were still wild, and the subject of superstitious beliefs. Even a masterless man, trained in the use of the English long bow, might find service with an army destined for France, which was attacked and plundered constantly throughout the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). Feudalism, as an economic system, and chivalry, as a military system, were both in a process of decay. Life, for most people, was hard, violent, and competitive.

RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND

The religious picture was no rosier. The church, in its upper ranks, was beset by political maneuvering among the bishops, and frequent resentment against Roman control; in its lower ranks it suffered from the existence of an extraordinary number of corrupt officials, ignorant priests, and wayward parishioners. And there was an unremitting struggle for dominance between ecclesiastical courts and the King’s courts. John Wycliffe, the “Morning Star of the Reformation,” was a contemporary of Chaucer’s. From an initial attack on the worldliness and ignorance of the lower clergy, he moved to a heretical denial of such basic church doctrines as the transubstantiation of the Eucharist. The church in England, however did survive the corruption and incompetence of its members, and the attacks from without. Chaucer himself, by nature a conservative man, could satirize the corruption he observed without putting himself outside the church, and he remained a loyal Catholic.

INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND

There is always a tendency to think of past periods of civilization as foolish and benighted. Yet the average of human intelligence, and the number of geniuses, probably does not vary much from century to century. The Fourteenth Century was in fact, a time of active intellectual probing, and it had its great thinkers-philosophers like William of Ockham, scientists such as Nicolas Oresme, and medical theorists like John Arderne. The question of free will vs. determinism, the physical nature of sound and light, and the development of a surgical technique for the treatment of fistula, for instance, were all subjects of scholarly investigation. Of course, these were not the days of massive popular education, nor was there really any wide circulation of books. Chaucer, however, was an extremely well-read man for his times, and his poetry in places has a very bookish quality to it. To judge from the kinds of allusion he makes, he expected his audience to have some direct acquaintance with books both of a scholarly and a popular sort. Romantic stories of love, saints’ lives and legends, sermon collections, encyclopedias, and philosophical and theological treatises are a few of the types of literature he refers to. Chaucer seems to have been very fortunate, indeed, in having a courtly audience which was cultured, sophisticated, sensitive, and socially aware.

CHAUCER’S LIFE

As might be expected, very little is known of Chaucer’s life. He was born probably around the year 1340. He came from a family of vintners (wine merchants). Somehow he became attached as a page to a branch of the royal family, and there is some evidence that he may have been in the service of King Edward III himself. While still a very young man, he saw military service abroad, and was several times employed as a royal emissary to the European continent. In the 1370s Chaucer made a trip to Italy, where he probably picked up a fair knowledge of the Italian language, and became acquainted with the works of the great Italian authors, notably Dante and Boccaccio. In 1374 he was given a civil service position as Controller of Customs, and from that point on held a variety of offices, continuing to act from time to time as a royal representative. That he was a respected and trustworthy public servant is proved by the record of annuities and pensions he received, and by the fact that toward the end of his life he was given the important post of Clerk of the King’s Works. Upon his death in 1400 he was buried in Westminster Abbey. A study of even these sketchy facts leads to the following conclusions, important for an understanding of Chaucer’s poetry:

1. Chaucer was himself a shrewd, sophisticated person, toughened by a life of hard and complex experiences.
2. He was a man learned in the French, Italian, and Latin literatures.
3. Literature was an avocation (spare-time occupation) for him, rather than a full-time job. It was not a money-making proposition.

LITERARY CAREER

It is customary to divide Chaucer’s literary career into three parts:

1. Period of French influence: Chaucer’s earliest poetry is sometimes a rather pretty and artificial affair. He was experimenting with rhythm and structure, and tended to use conventional and even hackneyed (overworked) images and ideas. But his originality can be detected even in his earliest work. The Book of the Duchess is perhaps the most important poem of this period. It is first of all a dream-vision, that is, a poem in which the author pretends that he has fallen asleep, and that the substance of the poem has come to him in a dream. Secondly, it is an elegy - a poem lamenting the death of a beloved person. Thirdly, it is a consolation, that is a work which tries to comfort someone’s grief by explaining the nature of the forces which have caused it. The Book of the Duchess laments the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, and is an attempted consolation of her husband (Chaucer’s patron), John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Chaucer pretends that in his dream he has become involved in a hunt, and has been led to the figure of a man in black, who is lost in grief. In the course of the dream, Chaucer prods this man into revealing the reasons for his sorrow, and thus helps to cure him of it.
2. Period of Italian influence: Chaucer certainly knew the works of the great poet, Dante, but he seems to have made more use of the poems of Boccaccio. The greatest of Chaucer’s completed poems, Troilus and Criseyde, is based upon the Filostrato of Boccaccio. This poem, in five books, relates the tragedy of a young Trojan hero, Troilus, who spends the better part of three books pining away for the love of Criseyde. Criseyde finally grants him her love, but shortly after is made to join her father (a traitor) in the Greek camp, and falls in love with Diomede, thus proving unfaithful to Troilus. The poem is actually a magnificent and complex treatment of the roles played by human love. Divine Love, free will, and chance (or fortune) in the affairs of men.
3. Period of so-called “realism:” This is the period of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer seems in later life, to have grown away from purely literary models, and to have concentrated more upon the teeming social life around him. Students of Chaucer have been so impressed by the lifelike quality of the Canterbury pilgrims, that they have been led to search old records for the real life models on which they believe Chaucer to have based them. It is not impossible that the poet had real persons in mind for some of the pilgrims, but there is a limit to how far this search can be useful in helping modern readers to appreciate the poem. In many subtle ways the Canterbury Tales is still the product of literary models, and of wide reading as well as of actual experience in the world.

THE CANTERBURY TALES

SUMMARY

Chaucer stops off at the Tabard Inn on his way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas a Becket. He falls in with twenty-nine other pilgrims, and in the famous General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, describes them for us in great detail. All walks of life, from the lofty Knight to the lowly Plowman, are represented there. Under the guidance of the innkeeper, Harry Bailly, the pilgrims are each to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. The Knight’s Tale is first (a long romance), followed by the Miller’s Tale (a short, realistic story). The Miller provokes the Reeve, who tells a nasty story at the expense of millers. And so it goes, one story leading to another. At least that was the general plan. But the poem is fragmentary; Chaucer never lived to complete it or to make a final arrangement of even the parts which he did complete. There are dramatic outbursts, as, for example, when the Host offers a vile insult to the Pardoner and they almost come to blows. But the Knight steps in and acts the part of peacemaker. Some tales are grouped around a single theme, marriage, for instance, and explore different aspects of that theme. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale makes fun of the idea of tragedy, which the Monk has advanced so solemnly in his tale. The Parson’s Tale, which is the last, is a long sermon which Chaucer apparently intended to be a kind of unifying element, bringing all themes to rest in a Christian framework. At the very end is a Retraction, in which Chaucer takes back all the sinful things he wrote and asks forgiveness and rest for his soul.

The Canterbury Tales can be looked at from any one of several points of view:

1. As an anthology (or cross-section) of medieval literary types: Almost every type of medieval literature is represented here. The Knight’s Tale is a romance, the Miller’s Tale a fabliau, the Second Nun’s Tale a saint’s legend, the Prioresses Tale a “miracle of the virgin.” There are sermons, beast fables, contemporary anecdotes, and allegories; in short, it is a virtual storehouse of the kinds of literature to be found in Chaucer’s day.
2. As the story of a pilgrimage: The pilgrims are, after all, on their way to Canterbury. This notion of religious veneration colors all the tales, and all the incidents which arise on the way. The themes and ideas expressed by the pilgrims (whether they are offered seriously or ironically) have to be measured against the kind of religious ideal which the shrine of the great martyr stands for. For example, it is impossible to read the Franklin’s Tale, which deals with human integrity, without judging the characters in the light of th...