The Canterbury Tales
Written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century, The Canterbury Tales tells the story of a group of 31 pilgrims who meet while travelling from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury. To pass the time on the journey, they decide to each tell two tales to the assembled company on the journey there and the journey home. The result is regarded as a masterpiece of medieval literature, and The Canterbury Tales holds a central place in the English literary canon.
What is distinctive about The Canterbury Tales?
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories held together by a framing device (the story of the pilgrimage). In this way, two narratives are operating at the same time within the work. In the links between the tales, the pilgrims bicker and chatter in a way that brings the characters to life. When the pilgrims begin to tell their stories, however, there is a change of gear. There is often a shift in form: ‘The Monk’s Tale’ is written in rhyme royal (a seven-line form), ‘The Friar’s Tale’ is in rhyming couplets and ‘The Parson’s Tale’ is in prose. This formal variation is matched by contrasts in genre and tone: racy fabliaux sit cheek by jowl with sombre descriptions of Christian martyrdom. The effect is a shimmering variation which reflects the social world depicted by Chaucer. This interaction between the individual tales and the frame narrative is a layered and masterful exercise in characterisation – and one of the great joys of the work.
The Canterbury Tales is sometimes compared to The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), a tale-collection written in the mid 14th century. There are key differences between the two works, however. The Decameron describes a group of young aristocrats who are journeying through the countryside, avoiding plague-stricken Florence. They tell each other tales in an orderly fashion, and the work lacks the boisterousness and social diversity of Chaucer’s Tales. Chaucer presents us with medieval society in all its glory, from the pompous Knight to the revolting Pardoner, via the chatty Wife of Bath and the weird, nerdy Clerk.
When was The Canterbury Tales written?
Tragically, The Canterbury Tales is unfinished. The pilgrims never reach Canterbury, the return journey is not described, and not all the pilgrims who appear in the poem's prologue end up telling a tale. The Prologue describes a ploughman among the company, for example, whose tale is nowhere to be found. Whereas Chaucer’s original plan presumably envisaged over 100 stories, only 24 survive.
The Canterbury Tales is traditionally dated to 1387 (although some tales appear to have been written before then). The poem survives in 92 manuscripts, but no manuscript of the work dates from Chaucer’s lifetime. The poem as we know it is the product of 15th-century scribes. The number of pilgrims' tales and their ordering differs between the copies, and debate continues to rage about what Chaucer intended.
Along with William Shakespeare and John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) is the third name in the pantheon of most-influential English writers. Best known for the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer was considered by admirers as the founding figure of English poetry as early as the 15th century. Shakespeare and Spenser, among others, were influenced by him. Chaucer has been praised for his irony, learning, understanding of human nature, geniality, humor, mastery of the classical and continental literary traditions, but particularly for his ability to create rounded, living, believable characters, who seemingly have lives and thoughts of their own.
This webpage is designed to assist the researcher, whether undergraduate, graduate student, or faculty member in finding information available through the Gumberg Library on the life, work, and infuence of this major English author.
The Frame Narrative
"This is the poynt, to speken short and pleyn,
That ech of yow, to shorte with oure weye,
In this viage shal telle tales tweye
To Caunterbury-ward, I mene it so,
And homward he shal tellen othere two,
Of aventures that whilom han bifalle.
And which of yow that bereth hym best of alle --
That is to seyn, that telleth in this caas
Tales of best sentence and moost solaas --
Shal have a soper at oure aller cost
Heere in this place, sittynge by this post,
GP I.788-800
The narrative frame of the Canterbury Tales -- the account of the pilgrims and their squabbles as they move along the Road to Canterbury toward the end of their journey -- was once the most admired part of Chaucer's work. G.C. Coulton (writing in 1908) nicely expresses the admiration his generation of critics felt for the framing narrative:
"Even more delightful than any of the tales told by Chaucer's pilgrims is the tale which he tells us about them all: the story of their journey to Canterbury. Nowhere within so brief a compass can we realize either the life of the fourteenth century on one hand, or on the other the dramatic power in which Chaucer stands second only to Shakespeare among English poets. Forget for a while the separate tales of the pilgrims - - many of which were patched up by fits and starts during such broken leisure as this man of the world could afford for indulging his poetical fancies; while many others (like the Monk's and the Parson's) are tedious to modern readers in strict proportion to their dramatic propriety at the moment -- forget for once all but the Prologue and the end-links, and read these through at one sitting, from the first stirrup-cup at Southwark Tabard to that final crest of Harbledown where the weary look down at last upon the sacred city of their pilgrimage. There is no such story as this in all medieval literature; no such gallery of finished portraits, nor any drama so true both to life and to perfect art. The dramatis personae of the Decameron are mere puppets in comparison; their occasional talk seems to us insipid to the last degree of old-world fashion.
"Boccaccio wrote for a society that was in many ways over-refined already; it is fortunate for us that Chaucer's public was not yet at that point of literary development at which art is too often tempted into artifice. He took the living men day by day, each in his simplest and most striking characteristics; and from these motley figures, under the artist's hand, grew a mosaic in which each stands out with all the glow of his own native colour, and all the added glory of the jewelled hues around him." (G.G. Coulton, Chaucer and his England, 1908, p. 126.)
The connecting links that compose the framing narrative of the Canterbury Tales are open to the same sort of objections that Coulton raises against the tales -- patched up by bits and starts -- and they show more clearly than the individual tales the unrevised state in which Chaucer left his great work. Nevertheless Coulton's advice is worth taking, especially today when -- perhaps because courses in Chaucer so often concentrate on a selection of Tales, or perhaps because so many critics today have completely rejected the old critical approaches to the "roadside drama" -- the framing narrative that delighted Coulton and his contemporaries is often left unread.
A Summary of the Framing Narrative
For critical and scholarly works on the "frame narrative" click here (LINK) for the "General" category of Derek Pearsall's bibliography.
Wife of Bath
This image, and all that follow, are taken from the Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer's works, and depict characters from the Canterbury Tales.Source: Digital Scriptorium, University of Callifornia, Berkeley