The Canterbury Tales, composed by Geoffrey
CHAUCER, is the most celebrated literary work of
the English Middle Ages. The book is a collection
of stories purportedly told by a diverse company of
English men and women on pilgrimage to the
shrine of St. Thomas BECKET at Canterbury Cathedral. Left unfinished on Chaucer’s death in 1400,
the volume includes a prologue and 24 tales of
varying length.
Chaucer was a popular author in the 15th century, and The Canterbury Tales survives in whole or
in part in 82 manuscripts. None of these manuscripts is in Chaucer’s handwriting, and none was
transcribed during his lifetime. The two earliest,
the HENGWRT MS (owned by the National Library
of Wales in Aberystwyth) and the ELLESMERE MS
(owned by the Huntington Library in San Marino,
California), were copied in part by the same scribe.
Hengwrt is the earlier of the two and its text is
thought by some scholars to be the more accurate.
Ellesmere is a luxurious volume with fine illustrations of the individual pilgrims, and its text may
reflect a correction of errors in the earlier manuscript. The Ellesmere MS is used as the base text for
most modern editions of the Tales.
The language of The Canterbury Tales is a MIDDLE ENGLISH dialect spoken in London and southeast England in the last quarter of the 14th century.
Chaucer’s decision to write his book in the English
vernacular perhaps reflects his appreciation of
DANTE and BOCCACCIO, who composed their most
important works in Italian, and of the many
French poets who crafted lyrics and ROMANCES in
the French vernacular. Unlike his friend John
GOWER, who wrote major works in English,
French, and Latin, and unlike Dante, Boccaccio,
and PETRARCH, who crafted lengthy works in Latin
as well as in the vernacular, Chaucer, so far as we
know, composed significant narratives in English
only.
All but two of the tales are in verse, the two exceptions being lengthy prose treatises on moral
and spiritual matters (The TALE OF MELIBEE and
The PARSON’S TALE). Chaucer’s characteristic poetic
line in The Canterbury Tales contains 10 syllables,
five of them stressed: Along with Gower, he seems
to have invented the iambic pentameter, which was
to become the dominant line in English narrative
poetry. It is this line that he employs so brilliantly
in the flexible rhymed couplets of the GENERAL
PROLOGUE and 16 tales.
Chaucer composed The Canterbury Tales over a
stretch of at least 20 years, but the date of no tale
is known exactly; it is unclear in what year he
started work on the tales, and even the relative
chronology of the tales is uncertain. A few works
(The KNIGHT’S TALE, The PHYSICIAN’S TALE, The
MONK’S TALE, and The SECOND NUN’S TALE) appear
to have been written relatively early, but they may
well have been revised for inclusion in the Tales.
The four texts using the seven-line RHYME ROYAL
stanza (The MAN OF LAW’S TALE, The CLERK’S TALE,
The PRIORESS’S TALE, and The SECOND NUN’S TALE)
are often assumed to have been composed as a
group, but this is conjectural. A few stories respond to earlier ones (The MILLER’S TALE, The
REEVE’S TALE, The MERCHANT’S TALE, The PARDONER’S TALE, The NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE, and The
CANON’S YEOMAN’S TALE) and therefore appear to
have been written relatively late. It is often speculated that The SHIPMAN’S TALE was assigned initially to the Wife of Bath, and that the General
Prologue was revised in conjunction with the
writing of individual tales, but there is no sure
knowledge of this. What does seem certain is that
Chaucer did not write the tales in the order in
which they appear in any manuscript or printed
volume, and that when he died he left behind a
collection of fragments including as few as one
tale (Fragment II) and as many as six (Fragment
VII), without clear indication of how they were to
be joined together.
The premise underlying The Canterbury Tales is
that when Chaucer, on springtime pilgrimage to
Canterbury, arrived at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, he encountered a group of pilgrims making
the same trip. Chaucer joined the merry company,
whom he describes individually in the General
Prologue. At the suggestion of innkeeper Harry
Bailly, the pilgrims agreed to a storytelling contest
so as to make the route seem shorter. Each pilgrim
would “telle tales tweye / To Caunterbury-ward”
(Benson 1987, 36, I 792–93) and two more on the
way home. This plan is not fulfilled—only one pilgrim, Chaucer himself, tells two tales, and some
do not tell any—and it may not in fact represent
Chaucer’s ultimate intention. At one point
Chaucer talks of each pilgrim telling a tale or two,
and in the prologue to the final tale Harry Bailly
tells the Parson that “every man, save thou, hath
toold his tale” (Benson 1987, 287, l. 25). As we do
not know when these three passages were written,
we cannot determine which of them—if any—
represents Chaucer’s final word. In any event, The
Canterbury Tales claims to be the accurate record
of the stories recounted by the pilgrims in their
contest.
Chaucer used this liminal setting of pilgrimage
as the vehicle for an unprecedented exploration of
the social, economic, and political world of late
14th-century England. The pilgrims’ occupations
span the social classes of his time, including military vocations from knight to yeoman; religious
vocations from monk and prioress to pardoner
and parson; countrymen from franklin to plowman; professionals from lawyer to manciple; entrepreneurs from merchant to sea captain; and
tradespeople from weaver to miller to the clothmaking Wife of Bath. The tales widen the frame
both chronologically and spatially, stretching from
ancient Greece and Rome at the one extreme, to
contemporary London, Bath, Oxford, and Cambridge at the other, and incorporating settings as
diverse as Lombard towns and countryside, the
coast of Brittany, a suburb of Paris, “Asie,” the
realm of Genghis Khan, a poor widow’s farm, and
hell.
The tales span a wide range of genres, from idealistic romance to bawdy FABLIAU to devout SAINT’S
LIFE to philosophical meditation, with many tales
mixing genres in unexpected ways. A connection
may often be found between the character or social
position of a narrator and the type of story assigned to that narrator, though some connections
are loose. The texts where the linkage is most fully
developed are The WIFE OF BATH’S TALE, The PARDONER’S TALE, and The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, each
of which has a substantial prologue.
A limited range of occupations were available
to women in medieval England, which may explain why only three of the 30-odd pilgrims are female. Chaucer overcomes this gender constraint
by having women play large roles in many of the
tales, often as a story’s protagonist. Chaucer’s
women range from children to wives to aged widows, from virgins to flirts to prostitutes. Two
mothers-in-law are wicked, and some of the wives
are adulterous, but an equal number of women
serve as moral foci.
In the General Prologue and in the prologue to
The Miller’s Tale Chaucer apologizes for the bawdy
language in some of his writing, attributing it to
the churlish character of particular pilgrims. He
invites a discriminating reader to “Turne over the
leef and chese another tale” (Benson 1987, 67, l.
3177). In the Retraction that closes The Canterbury
Tales he revokes his many “translacions and enditynges of worldly vanities” (Benson 1987, 328, l.
1085) and asks forgiveness for having written
them. Whether one takes these apologies as earnest
or dismisses them as rhetorical artifice, readers
who have immersed themselves in the brilliance of
Chaucer’s unfinished book cannot help but be glad
for every page that he did write, both the earthy
and the sublime, and to wish that he had lived to
write still more. Harry Bailly declares in the General Prologue that the finest story is one “of best
sentence and moost solace” (Benson 1987, 36, I
798). The phrase defines Chaucer’s accomplishment in The Canterbury Tales.
Bibliography
Benson, Larry D., gen. ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd
ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Cooper, Helen. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996.
Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Pearsall, Derek. The Canterbury Tales. London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1985.
Whittock, Trevor. A Reading of the Canterbury Tales.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
David Raybin