Old English Literature (AD 450 – 1066) The Middle English literature (1066 – 1485)

The next greatest work of Chaucer is "Troilus and Criseyde" (about 1372 - 1384), a love-story from the annals of the Trojan War, a war which has provided European writers with innumerable myths. Troilus was the son of King Priam and Criseyde was his unfaithful beloved. Shakespeare also told a story about these wartime lovers but his Сressidais less attractive than Geoffrey Chaucer's. Chaucer's version with its moral of the faithlessness of women, is not only tragic but also full of humour, and its psychology is so startlingly modern that it reads in some ways like a modern novel. Indeed, it can be called the first full-length piece of English fiction.

Of Geoffrey Chaucer's other long works we shall say nothing. With some of them, after making a good start, he seems suddenly to have become bored & left them unfinished. But we must not ignore his short love poems, written in French forms, extolling the beauty of some mythical fair one, full of the convention of courtly love which exaggerated devotion to woman almost into religion. 

If we take Geoffrey Chaucer's work on the whole his achievements are many. First, despite his knowledge of the "politer" languages of the Continent, he patriotically confined himself to using the East Midland dialect of English that was spoken in London. He found that dialect not at all rich in words, and completely lacking in an important literature from which he could learn. In a sense, he had to create the English language we know today and to establish its literary traditions. To do this he had to turn, chiefly, to the literature of France and bring something of its elegance to East Midland English; he had to ransack the tales and histories of Europe to find subject matter. But, finally, in his masterpiece "The Canterbury Tales" he stood on his own feet and gave literature something it had never seen before -observation of life as it is really lived, pictures of people who are rea1 (not just abstractions from books) and a view of life which, in its tolerance, its humour, skepticism, passion, and love of humanity, we can only call "modern". Geoffrey Chaucer is a living poet: he speaks to us today with as clear a voice as was heard in his own age. It is this living quality that makes him great.

Besides the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer used London dialect which would become the basis for the English language we speak now (so we may say that he is the father of Modern English), Geoffrey Chaucer also replaced alliteration by the tonic o-syllabic classification, i.e. each line of the poem should have the same number of syllables and stresses as all the rest of the lines. Actually it is the beginning of the rhyme in poetry.

Geoffrey Chaucer opened the way to a new age of literature, but it was a long time before any poet as great as he was to come along to build on his foundations. The year 1400 should, we think, usher in a great century, but it does not. Geoffrey Chaucer seems to have been in advance of his age, never fully appreciated even by the men who called themselves his disciples (последователи). And, unfortunately for Chaucer's work, big changes began to take place in English pronunciation, changes which quite swiftly brought something like the pronunciation of our own times. The final "e" of words like "sonne" and "sote" was no longer sounded. Henceforward people could find no rhythm in Geoffrey Chaucer's carefully-wrought lines; they regarded him as a crude poet - promising but primitive, and dull. In Shakespeare's times, certainly, Geoffrey Chaucer was also not much esteemed, and a hundred years after Shakespeare poets thought it necessary to translate Geoffrey Chaucer, polishing up his "crudities" & make him fit reading for a "civilised" age.

 

6. "The Canterbury Tales". The main features and composition of G. Chaucer's book.

“The Canterbury Tales” is the world's weirdest road trip.

It tells the story of a group of pilgrims (fancy word for travelers) on their way to Canterbury, who engage in a tale-telling contest to pass the time. Besides watching the interactions between the characters, we get to read 24 of the tales the pilgrims tell. 

And as it turns out, Medieval storytellers had some 'tude.

Geoffrey Chaucer likely wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late 1380s and early 1390s, after his retirement from life as a civil servant. In this professional life, Chaucer was able to travel from his home in England to France and Italy. There, he not only had the chance to read Italian and French literature, but possibly, even to meet Boccaccio, whose Decameron—a collection of tales told by Italian nobility holed up in a country house to escape the plague ravaging their city—may have inspired the frame story of The Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer's decision to write in his country's language, English, rather than in the Latin of so many of his educated colleagues, was a big break with learned tradition. But the risk paid off: we know The Canterbury Tales were enormously popular because so many more manuscripts of the tales survive than of almost any other work of this time period. The Canterbury Tales were still going strong when the first printers made their way to England, and William Caxton published the first printed version of The Canterbury Tales in 1476.

One of the things that makes The Canterbury Tales so fun to read is the great (and often, uh, grotesque) detail with which the narrator describes each of the pilgrims. We learn, for example, that the cook has a pustule on his leg that very much resembles one of the desserts he cooks...and that the miller has a huge, pug nose. For many of his portraits, Chaucer is relying on a medieval tradition of "estates satire," a collection of stereotypes about people based on what occupation they had or what social class they belonged to. Another medieval idea his portraits draw upon is "anticlericalism," a tradition that got its start in reaction to a lot of abuses by clergy in the medieval church, but which basically became a collection of stereotypes about friars, monks, nuns, priests, and the like. 

Sounds funny? It is.

Chaucer draws upon these traditions, but he doesn't necessarily regurgitate them whole: as you'll see when you examine the portraits of the pilgrims more closely, many of them are not what they appear. What does that say about the strength of the conclusions we draw about people based upon first impressions, or appearances?

Since The Canterbury Tales is a story about a storytelling competition, many of the questions it asks are about stories: 

• What makes for a good story?

• Why do we tell stories?

• Why should we tell stories? 

As the pilgrims tell their stories, though, they turn out to be talking not just about fairytale people in far-off lands, but also about themselves and their society. This leads to a lot of conflict in a group of pilgrims formed by members of that same society, who often take offense at the versions of themselves they see portrayed in the tales. 

The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales and the interactions between the pilgrims that occur in between the tales, then, form a story of their own. 

The Canterbury Tales are written in a society that, to some extent, believed you could judge a book by its cover – that the physical characteristics, or the mere category of a person, might reveal something about what was on the inside. In some ways, the pilgrims' portraits in The Canterbury Tales confirm the common stereotypes: the lower-class person is extremely physical, the consummate wife is lustful. But, as the Tales progress, these people have the chance to speak for themselves. What happens then isn't exactly a contradiction of the stereotypes about them, but it isn't exactly a confirmation of them, either. As so often happens when you really get to know someone, what you find out in The Canterbury Tales is that people, even the ones we think we have figured out, are never one-dimensional and always worth getting to know better.

The action begins at a tavern just outside of London, circa 1390, where a group of pilgrims have gathered in preparation for their journey to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The narrator, Chaucer, encounters them there and becomes one of their company. Chaucer describes all of the pilgrims in delightful, and often grotesque, detail.  
 
The pilgrims go to dinner, during which the owner of the tavern, or Host, makes a proposal to the group: on the way to Canterbury, says the Host, each pilgrim will tell two tales, followed by two on the way back. The Host will accompany the group and serve as a judge of their tales. The pilgrim who tells the best tale wins a free dinner at the tavern at the journey's end. Should anyone question the Host's judgment, moreover, he has to foot the bill for the entire pilgrimage. The pilgrims, eager to have fun on their journey, quickly agree to the Host's proposal and swear oaths to abide by the rules of the game. After a bit of shut-eye, they ride out of Canterbury the next morning and the tale-telling begins. 
 
Almost immediately, a pilgrim challenges the Host's authority. After the first tale, the Host asks the Monk to tell a tale, but the drunken Miller interrupts him and announces that he will speak next or leave the company. It's certainly not the last time the Host's orderly vision for the game is challenged: drunken pilgrims, mysterious strangers, and, most importantly, the conflicts between some of the members of the company threaten to derail the game at many points in the course of the journey. 
 
The pilgrims tell lots of different kinds of tales on their journey: comedies and tragedies, romances and dirty stories, and sermons and saints' lives, to name a few. Some pilgrims tell stories where a character with another pilgrim's occupation is humiliated in the course of the tale, which leads to trouble. The Miller, for example, tells a tale about a carpenter whose wife not only commits adultery with a clerk, but humiliates him in front of the whole town. The real carpenter among the pilgrims takes this very personally, and proceeds to tell a tale where a miller suffers humiliation at the hands of some students. A similar rivalry occurs between the Friar and the Summoner. All the while, the Host alternates between trying to make peace between the pilgrims and creating more conflict with his gentle and not-so-gentle teasing of members of the party. 
 
The Canterbury Tales end after only 24 tales, a far cry short of the planned 120. We never get to see the pilgrims reach Canterbury, nor do we learn who wins the competition. It's likely that Chaucer ran out of time or energy. He may have planned to revise the beginning of the frame story so that the 24 tales would seem complete. In any case, The Canterbury Tales as we know them end with the Parson's sermon on sin and repentance, followed by Chaucer's retraction.

• The General Prologue begins with a description of how April's showers cause flowers to bloom, crops to grow, birds to sing, and people to want to make pilgrimages – journeys to holy places. In England, people especially like to go to Canterbury to pray at the shrine of a holy saint who healed them when they were sick.

• The narrator tells how, in that season, he is at a tavern in Southwark getting ready to make his pilgrimage to Canterbury. There, he meets a large group of pilgrims, also going to Canterbury. Soon, he has spoken with each of them and has become a member of their group, or 'felaweshipe.'

• The narrator describes the appearance and behavior of all of the pilgrims in great detail. (For a detailed description of each of the character's portraits, see the 'Characters' section.)

• The narrator concludes his description of the pilgrims with his promise to describe what happens to them that evening and on their pilgrimage. He asks the reader's forgiveness if he gives offense, claiming as his excuse his obligation to repeat the pilgrim's words and deeds exactly, even if they are rude.

• The host serves dinner.

• The narrator describes the host. (For a detailed description of the Host's portrait, see the "Characters" section.)

• The Host praises the group of pilgrims as being the most merry he's seen in a long time. He expresses his desire to "do them mirth," or make them happy. He tells the pilgrims that, if they agree to do as he says, they will have lots of fun on their way to Canterbury.

• The pilgrims confer amongst themselves and quickly agree to do as the host says.

• The host proposes that each pilgrim tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and two on the way back. Whoever tells the best tale as judged by the Host wins a free dinner when they arrive back at his tavern. Whoever expresses disagreement with the Host's judgment has to pay for the entire cost of the pilgrimage.

• The pilgrims swear oaths to abide by the rules of the game, and to submit to the authority of the Host.

• The pilgrims go to bed.

• In the morning, the Host wakes the pilgrims and they start down the road.

• At the watering hole of Saint Thomas, the Host reminds the pilgrims of their agreement and proposes that they draw straws to decide who goes first.

• The Knight draws the shortest straw, and so begins the tale-telling contest.

• After the Knight's tale has concluded, the narrator describes the very favorable reaction of the pilgrims to the tale.

• The Host announces that, now, the game has truly begun. He asks the Monk to tell the next tale.

• The Miller, who is drunk, yells out that he knows a noble tale with which he will "quite," or top, the Knight's tale.

• The Host tells the Miller that another pilgrim will tell a tale first.

• The Miller says that he will tell his tale, or else leave the fellowship.

• The Host grudgingly agrees to let the Miller tell his tale first.

• The Miller announces that he is drunk, and asks the other pilgrims to forgive him if he misspeaks, for it is really the fault of the ale of Southwark.

• The Miller announces his intention to tell a story about a carpenter and his wife, and how a clerk makes a fool of the carpenter.

• The Reeve (a.k.a. carpenter) tells the Miller to shut up, and that it's a sin to insult another, and to speak ill of wives.

• The Miller tells the Reeve that the only people who don't get "cuckolded" (cheated on) are those who don't have wives. However, he says, surely the Reeve is not a cuckold, for there are also many good wives.

• The Miller says that he has a wife, but he's certainly not naïve enough to believe that she hasn't cheated on him. Furthermore, a husband shouldn't inquire too deeply into the affairs of God, or of his wife.

• The narrator breaks in again to tell how the Miller won't stop talking and tells a very "churlish" – or "low-born fellow's" tale. He tells his audience not to blame him if they are offended, for it is his duty simply to "reherce," or repeat, everything exactly as it happened. If the readers don't want to hear a churlish tale, they can turn the page and find many other more "noble" stories, as well as moral and holy tales. And furthermore, says the narrator, people should not "maken ernest of game," or take too seriously what is meant to be all in fun.

• The narrator describes the hilarity that ensues after the Miller's tale, with the whole company laughing and playing, except for the Reeve. The Reeve is offended because he is a carpenter and takes the Miller's tale as a personal insult.

• The Reeve declares that he can "quite," or top, the Miller's tale with a story about how a miller gets tricked, were it not for the fact that he is too old to engage in the kind of sexual joking he has in mind for his tale.

• The Reeve elaborates upon how old he is, using various metaphors to describe old age. He describes himself as a horse that is confined to the stable, and a rotten fruit.

• The problem with being old, says the Reeve, is that like a green onion, you have a white head (i.e., an old, feeble body) but a green tail (you're horny all the time). Though your body's not up to it, you constantly want sex.