Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales
Edited by
Scott Ferrari-Adler
About Geoffrey Chaucer:
Geoffrey Chaucer, an English poet, was born in 1342. Historians are uncertain about his exact date of birth. Geoffrey's well-to-do parents, John Chaucer and Agnes Copton, possessed several buildings in the vintage quarter in London. Not much is known about Geoffrey's school career. He must have had some education in Latin and Greek. Out of school he went on as a page in the household of the Countess of Ulster. Chaucer rose in royal employment and became a knight of the shire for Kent. As a member of the king's household, Chaucer was sent on diplomatic errands throughout Europe, the first of his many journeys. From all these activities, he gained the knowledge of society that made it possible for him to write the Canterbury Tales. In 1366 Chaucer marries Philippa Roet who serves in the Queen's household. Philippa is the eldest daughter of the Flemish knight Sir Paon de Roet, and sister of Katherine Swynford. Around 1370 he began to write poems that would eventually be adapted into the Canterbury Tales. In 1374 Chaucer is appointed Controller of the Customs for hides, skins and wool in the port of London and in 1385 serves as Justice of the Peace for Kent, both jobs required him to travel and would inspire more of his poetry. Chaucer began to commit the early part of the 1390’s to the Tales and worked on them diligently for half the decade. Chaucer died in October 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. He was the first of those that are gathered in what we now know as the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Genre: A fabliau (pl., "fabliaux"), a French invention that depicts bourgeois characters in satirical or openly comic plots involving unlikely and complex deceptions, usually concerning sex and/or money. There are considerably more fabliaux in French than in English, and Chaucer’s are by far the most sophisticated in Middle English because they often combine elements of several fabliaux into one tightly structured plot. Critics are divided on the issue of whether the fabliaux were intended for noble audiences
Because the tales made the bourgeois look so bad, or were intended for the bourgeois, themselves, indicating that they had a strong appetite for seeing themselves satirized in literature. The middle ground seems to be that they could work for a mixed audience, which might include worldly nobles (excluding those given to extreme religious devotion) as well as broad-minded and self-confident men and women of the city.
Because Chaucer has excluded all the higher nobility from his pilgrimage, only the Knight and Squire might be offended at the tales’ raunchiness on the grounds of their estate status, but there also are religious pilgrims who certainly ought to have objected. Were this a realistic scenario: the Monk, Prioress, Nuns, and Parson. Of them all, only the last ever objects to speech on moral grounds (the Parson to Harry Baily’s swearing), though the Monk, Prioress, and Second Nun tell pious tales. The Monk and Prioress also are likely to have been the younger son and daughter of noble families based on their tastes as described in the General Prologue (hunting, rich food, pets, fine clothes). Their reception of a story with strong sexual content might well be complex. For what might be Chaucer-the-poet’s response to the possible objections of people like the Monk and Prioress, see the "Miller’s Prologue" lines 59-78.
Form: Rhyming couplets. As in all of Chaucer’s tales in this form, one should pay careful attention to the way he manages to capture the speaker’s voice and dramatic emphases, with a rich range of colloquial (vs. courtly) diction, in a narrative poem hundreds of lines long. Even more interesting is the way in which the Miller’s characters’ voices surface—consider a drunken Miller saying, as Alison does after Absolon’s "misdirected kiss, "Teehee". The "voice" effect becomes even more persuasive in the "Wife of Bath’s Prologue," in which some readers are deceived into thinking they are reading the words of a real woman rather than a character Chaucer created from clear literary antecedents.
Characters:
Nicholas: a clerk or student who has spent more on his "sound system" and on parties than he has on his studies.
John: the carpenter, whose trade has made him wealthy enough to own a house big enough that he might rent rooms to the clerk, as well as dressing his young wife in the most outrageously expensive clothing she could desire.
Alison: the carpenter’s wife, overflowing with energy and taking life’s challenges as comedy whereas John, older by far, is ready to see tragedy.
Absolon: a clerk, who serves the priest in the cathedral but who, like Nicholas, is far more interested in dressing well and pursuing the ladies of the town.
Gervase: the smith, is a somewhat enigmatic figure who supplies a key tool for Absolon's revenge--he works at his hot forge in the cool of the night and, apart from lovers, is apparently the only one awake until the cries of "Out harrow!" summon the townsfolk in an informal posse.
Summary:
Pursued by her tenant, "hende" Nicholas, Alison puts him off. John already has heard Absolon serenading her outside their bedroom at night, but still suspects nothing. When John has work that takes him out of town, Nicholas supplies his room with food and pretends to have fallen into a trance for several days. He tells John, after the servant has broken the door down, that his clerkly studies have revealed to him that God will send a second Noah’s Flood. (If you haven’t read that part of the Bible recently, you will find an immensely comic reason why Nicholas' lie makes a fool of John.) Under Nicholas' direction, John hangs bread-kneading tubs from the ceiling so that they may float free with John, Alison, and Nicholas when the "waters" rise. Exhausted, he falls asleep. Meanwhile, Nicholas and Alison disport themselves until Absolon comes begging a kiss from the window. Alison complies (in the dark?) with her rump, which the fastidious Absolon too late realizes he has kissed. Implausibly returning for a second "kiss," Absolon meets Nicholas' rump with a thrust from a hot plowshare he has borrowed from the smith's forge. Nicholas' cries for "Water!" awaken John in the rafters, who cuts the ropes holding his kneading tub and falls, breaking his arm. The people of Oxford, mainly clerks, arrive in response to the household's cries of "Out harrow!" and the clerks all laugh at John, believing the lovers' tale that he madly imagined the second Flood by himself.
Chaucer may have found the tale’s matter in as many as three unrelated sources which be brought together: the “misdirected kiss,” the “branding,” and the “second Flood.” How much of the tale’s excellence depends upon the union of the three, or upon our neglect of one plot while another occupies our attention? Nicholas, for instance, behaves as if he thinks he’s in the plot of the first tale type, even though Absolon would have to be extremely dense not to have awakened to the deception after hearing “A berde! A berde!” and Alision’s “Teehee!” Meanwhile, Absolon has “graduated” to the “branding” tale type and changes the course of Nicholas’ plot. Consider the coarseness of the “misdirected kiss” and “branding” plots as a strategy to focus the audience’s attention. What does it do to our response to John’s fall and injury? Without the “kiss” and Absolon’s revenge, how might we have reacted to John’s predicament? Note that the Miller explains the town’s reaction to the events in terms of social solidarity of one group against an outsider: “For every clerk anonright heeld with oother”. If we laugh with the Miller, with whom are we declaring community?
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales presents one of the most difficult textual problems in all of English Literature. The work was left unfinished at Chaucer’s death in 1400, and survives in some 88 versions dating before 1500. Of these 84 are manuscripts, four are early printed editions, and around sixty are relatively complete, with the others being more or less fragmentary. Six hundred years of scribal and editorial activity has been unable to resolve fundamental questions relating to the text of the Tales. Exactly what did Chaucer leave behind him at his death? How unfinished are the Tales? Did he prepare a fair copy of all, or any part, of the Tales before his death? Did he issue any separate parts of the Tales in his lifetime, and do any of the extant versions descend from these separate publications? Which of the surviving versions is nearest to what Chaucer actually wrote? Did Chaucer revise the text of the Tales, and do the differences between the surviving versions reflect, to some extent, Chaucer’s revisions of his own text?
THE MILLER'S PROLOGUE
The Words between the Host and the Miller
Now when the knight had thus his story told,
In all the rout there was nor young nor old
But said it was a noble story, well
Worthy to be kept in mind to tell;
And specially the gentle folk, each one.
Our host, he laughed and swore, "So may I run,
But this goes well; unbuckled is the mail;
Let's see now who can tell another tale:
For certainly the game is well begun.
Now shall you tell, sir monk, if't can be done,
Something with which to pay for the knight's tale."
The miller, who with drinking was all pale,
So that unsteadily on his horse he sat,
He would not take off either hood or hat,
Nor wait for any man, in courtesy,
But all in Pilate's voice began to cry,
And by the Arms and Blood and Bones he swore,
"I have a noble story in my store,
With which I will requite the good knight's tale."
Our host saw, then, that he was drunk with ale,
And said to him: "Wait, Robin, my dear brother,
Some better man shall tell us first another:
Submit and let us work on profitably."
"Now by God's soul," cried he, "that will not I!
For I will speak, or else I'll go my way."
Our host replied: "Tell on, then, till doomsday!
You are a fool, your wit is overcome."
"Now hear me," said the miller, "all and some!
But first I make a protestation round
That I'm quite drunk, I know it by my sound:
And therefore, if I slander or mis-say,
Blame it on ale of Southwark, so I pray;
For I will tell a legend and a life
Both of a carpenter and of his wife,
And how a scholar set the good wright's cap."
The reeve replied and said: "Oh, shut your trap,
Let be your ignorant drunken ribaldry!
It is a sin, and further, great folly
To asperse any man, or him defame,
And, too, to bring upon a man's wife shame.
There are enough of other things to say."
This drunken miller spoke on in his way,
And said: "Oh, but my dear brother Oswald,
The man who has no wife is no cuckold.
But I say not, thereby, that you are one:
Many good wives there are, as women run,
And ever a thousand good to one that's bad,
As well you know yourself, unless you're mad.
Why are you angry with my story's cue?
I have a wife, begad, as well as you,
Yet I'd not, for the oxen of my plow,
Take on my shoulders more than is enow,
By judging of myself that I am one;
I will believe full well that I am none.
A husband must not be inquisitive
Of God, nor of his wife, while she's alive.
So long as he may find God's plenty there,
For all the rest he need not greatly care."
What should I say, except this miller rare
He would forgo his talk for no man there,
But told his churlish tale in his own way:
I think I'll here re-tell it, if I may.
And therefore, every gentle soul, I pray
That for God's love you'll hold not what I say
Evilly meant, but that I must rehearse,
All of their tales, the better and the worse,
Or else prove false to some of my design.
Therefore, who likes not this, let him, in fine,
Turn over page and choose another tale:
For he shall find enough, both great and small,
Of stories touching on gentility,
And holiness, and on morality;
And blame not me if you do choose amiss.
The miller was a churl, you well know this;
So was the reeve, and many another more,
And ribaldry they told from plenteous store.
Be then advised, and hold me free from blame;
Men should not be too serious at a game.
HERE ENDS THE PROLOGUE
Bibliography:
All information pertaining to this report was obtained from the Internet.
http://www.librarius.com/chauchro.htm
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/CT-prolog-para.html
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/webcore/murphy/canterbury/canterbury.htm
http://www.ludd.luth.se/~jonsson/CT.html
http://www.icg.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/cantales.html
http://www.boisestate.edu/courses/hy309/docs/chaucer/chaucer.html
http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/projects/ctp/desc2.html
http://www.luminarium.org/lumina.htm
http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/miller.htm