Least Tern > English Class > Poetry in High School

Geoffrey Chaucer

A Study Guide for The Canterbury Tales
with selected web resources

from John McIlvain

Life ~ Works ~ Web
The General Prologue ~ Pardoner's Tale ~ Other Individual Tales on the Web

Chaucer's Life in Brief

Works


Few of Chaucer’s poems can be precisely dated, but he appears to have always written. Some of his early work was translating important works from France (French was still spoken by English Aristocrats). His first dated work, the Book of the Duchess, was an elegy for John of Gaunt’s first wife and combined translations of various works into an original structure. (The Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales implies that he was familiar with a variety of English dialects as well.)


In addition to French, Chaucer knew Latin well and was familiar with Virgil and Ovid. He translated the 6th Century philosopher Boethius who had a considerable influence on medieval thought, and was able to combine as Chaucer did, spiritual detachment with a robust life.
Chaucer’s trip to Italy when he was in his 30’s opened him up to exciting world of the great Italian writers of the late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, Dante, Petrarch (the first great writer of sonnets) and Boccaccio, who ultimately provided some of the stories that appear in The Canterbury Tales and the original for Chaucer longest poem, Troilius and Criseyde.

The Canterbury Tales was Chaucer’s chief literary interest for the last fifteen years of his life. Its original plan projected about 120 stories. He completed “only” 22. Medieval pilgrims were notorious storytellers (how else to pass the time?) and the common sight of them probably inspired the “frame” Chaucer supplies for his tales. There were other contemporary examples of such frames, but none were as integral to the stories as Chaucer’s. Only in Chaucer does the character of the storyteller pervade the story. As a result, the Tales have a unique liveliness to them and remain some of the most enjoyable stories in all of literature to read.


Other characteristics of Chaucer’s work are his ability to integrate his learning with what is clearly a knowledge and enjoyment of a wide range of people. He is able to present them with a wonderfully detached but sympathetic eye (something he shares with Shakespeare). He has no illusions about the world but does not retreat into cynicism; rather he accepts what he sees with a fondness and an ironic sense of humor. (In this he reminds me of James, though his cast of characters is much broader.) He is also a remarkably graphic poet, creating “realistic” visual (as well as oral and occasionally olfactory) pictures of the worlds he describes.


Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in iambic pentameter couplets. It is not clear how original he was in doing this. He almost certainly was influenced by the rhymed French poetry he translated, but he also might have been continuing an English tradition that had evolved from the alliterative verse of the Middle Ages and reflected the “natural” rhythms of English (notably London) speech. Whether accurately or not, the iambic pentameter couplet is often said to have been Chaucer’s invention. It came to be known as the heroic couplet, the dominant English verse form in the late 17th and 18th centuries century.

Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales on the Web

There is a considerable quantity of quality Chaucer material on the web. The following is an overview of some of the most significant sights, especially as related to The "General Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales, and to "The Pardoner's Tale".

This page is an excellent source for links to other pages about Chaucer andThe Canterbury Tales.


When that April with his showers soote (its showers sweet)
The draught of March is pierced to the root
And bathéd every vein in such licour
Of which virtúe engendered is the flower.1


1 by virtue (strength) of which the flower is engendered.

The General Prologue ~ Organization ~ Point of View ~ First Sentence ~ Dialogues and Juxtapositions

Organization

It is no longer fashionable to see the organization as random (the naïve Chaucer) or even as dramatic (Chaucer as modern novelist). Currently the ordering of the pilgrims is seen as stemming from “estates satire”. In Chaucer’s time, society was seen as consisting of the nobility (from knight to squire); the clergy (from Prioress to Friar), and the commoner (from Franklin to Miller.) There was a literary tradition of presenting representatives of the estates and illustrating their peculiar strengths and weaknesses. That the nobility is represented by a virtuous but somewhat impoverished and seemingly tangential character (the Knight who has spent most of his adult life crusading abroad) suggests the “estates” are not holding in the center. Indeed, the Franklin has privileges and power that are rarely associated with the commoner. The Prioress appears to be very much a lady; while commoners like the Summoner and The Pardoner make their livings through their connection with the Church. The first pilgrim is the “most parfit, gentil knight” and the last is the venal Pardoner. But the order of presentation of the characters in between resists simple categorization. Clearly, groups of people who are traveling together (Prioress and her “entourage, the Franklin and the Merchant, are presented together, but The Parson (a man of exceptional goodness) appears in the Middle of the prologue just when we are expecting one character to be worse than the previous character. Indeed, until the parson appears, a cynical reader might conclude that no one associated with the church could be without at least a touch of vanity and a fair amount of self indulgence. Chaucer does not follow a clear prescription, but he manages to create a sense of direction (from more distinguished Pilgrims to less) while avoiding predictability. Though not inventing a completely new form, he is clearly making it his own and is willing to take advantage of his sense of irony whenever it suits. Certainly the characters and the tales they tell remain vital today because they transcend formula.


A lucid explanation of the estates can be found at - http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/nto/middle/estates/estatesfrm.htm


The Point of View


There has been some discussion of the relation of the narrator Chaucer to the author Chaucer in that the author seems more sophisticated than his narrator. This narrator’s role is reportorial and editorial in that he both “reports” the stories in his own voice, and makes observations about the storytellers. Irony, both situational and dramatic, seems almost omnipresent in The Canterbury Tales; some of the portraits employ irony; some of the tales are ironic in and of themselves; and some of the tellers of those tales are unaware of the irony inherent in their tellings. Sometimes Chaucer's irony seems biting, but more often it seems rooted in a tolerant understanding and acceptance of human weakness. Though there are times when it is obvious that Chaucer approves or disapproves of a character, there are more times when he does not appear to be judgmental. Idealized and denigrated characters are in a minority. How the author “feels” about a given character is often unclear. Lynn Gray, a student at Portledge School, has argued that the effect is to make the reader the arbiter, and suggests that Chaucer’s technique ultimately tells the reader more about himself than about Chaucer.


An interesting overview of the General prologue in the form of a lecture by Ian Johnston can be found at: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Eng200/chaucer.htm


A helpful site with some commentary, theory, and questions to ponder is: http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng330/Chaucer--General%20Prologue.htm
This site also contains some bibliographical information as well as notes for other tales (see below).

The First Sentence

Famous as it is, the sentence can be daunting to someone coming across Chaucer and Middle English for the first time. Unlike most of Chaucer sentences in The Canterbury Tales, it is not narrative. It serves as exposition and as such sets both the tone and the setting for what follows. It begins with a celebration of spring, joyous and embracing, worthy of Pan; it ends with a thanksgiving for having survived the privation of winter worthy of Chaucer’s parson. As such it sets the stage for an ongoing set of “dialogues” and juxtapositions in the Prologue.


This sentence is discussed in greater detail in the above-mentioned lecture by Ian Johnson at http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Eng200/chaucer.htm.

Dialogues and Juxtapositions

The stereotypical ideal and its antithesis. (The knight vs. the pardoner;The Parson vs. The Friar)
The medieval and the post-medieval (The knight vs.the merchant)
Age and youth (The knight vs. the squire)
The Religious and the Worldly (The parson vs. the monk)
The celibate and the non-celibate (The prioress vs. the wife of Bath)
On another level, in the more subtly drawn characters the “dialogues” exist internally. For example, how worldly is the Prioress? How do you know?

The Pardoner's Tale - Overview - On the Web

The Pardoner himself is impossible to divorce from his tale. He is a salesman whose profit from wares ostensibly intended to save souls damns his own. The reader is not sure whether to be repulsed by his grotesque appearance and shameless performance or amused by both. These reader reactions are to some extent mirrored by those of his fellow pilgrims, and it is interesting that the Knight rescues everyone from conflicting feeling and possible conflict. Perhaps he realizes that in the end the Pardoner is a somewhat desperate figure who needs pity for his salvation is beyond the realm of credulity.

The demon of greed and the treasure-hunting fool. From Sebastian Brant's Navis Stultifera, printed by Bergman de Olpe, Basle, 1494.

The Demon of dice. From a pamphlet How the Die Was Invented, attributed to Albrecht Dürer, printed by Conrad Kacherofen, Leipzig, 1487.

The Pardoner’s Tale is also focused on three unredeemable characters whose greed and shamelessness mirror the pardoner’s own. The old man, somewhat cynical and longing for a death that will seemingly ignore him because of that longing, mirrors the pardoner in that he brings a message (where to find death) that while it is ostensibly useful to others, is worthless to himself. He seems to view his situation with a kind of resigned acceptance and comes across as more sympathetic than the Pardoner who tells his story. The old man's despair seems touching; the Pardoner’s desperate. When the old man sends the men to their just deserts, he does not appear to gloat over their parting. His “Benediction” might be touched with irony, but it lacks the manic edge of the seller of relics. In our brief glimpse of him, the old man seems to have a depth to which we can respond. The Pardoner’s only self is what we see. He has become what he does, a person out of faith with whom he ever was. Unlike the old man, he appears totally unaware of the irony inherent in what he does.

 

illustration: The Glutton gets what he deserves

The Pardoner's Tale on the Web

Other Individual Tales

Three helpful websights that summarize and/or comment and/or have questions about some of the individual tales are:

A syllabus for a Chaucer course with good links for the Pardoner’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, and The Wife of Bath’s Tale - http://cursus.uea.ac.uk/chaucer/#week4


An annotated version of the Franklin’s Tale. Very helpful. Noted. Maker of page willing to email students but not do work for them.
http://www.adrianfox.demon.co.uk/lit/chaucer/franklin.htm


A good introduction to the Miller’s Tale and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale by Brother Anthony (An Sonjae); sight also has an article on the Nun’s Priest’s altar. http://www.sogang.ac.kr/~anthony/Chaucer99BA.htm

 

Least Tern

Elizabeth Sky-McIlvain 3/29/03