Chaucer, Geoffrey - Life and the Canterbury Tales (2)

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London into a middle class in 1343. He had many works. At first, he worked as a merchant in the family business. Then, he became a soldier and he fought in the Hundred Years War. It was a war between France and England because of lands. English nobles still had properties in France because they were the heirs of the Norman nobles. Those lands were claimed by the French so the war started. It was a long war that ended with the French victory. When Chaucer came back home, he started to work for the king as a diplomat so he visited many countries, in particular France and Italy. In this way, he entered in contact with French and Italian cultures, in particular with Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, that influenced him a lot. In 1374 he was appointed to the office of Controller of the customs of Wool and Hides in the Port of London. He also became a Member of Parliament for Kent. He was trusted by the Crown and a well-informed participator in the politics of the day which included support for the religion views of John Wycliffe and Lollardy. The year 1386 was difficult for Chaucer because he was dismissed from all his offices and therefore he was left without an income. In this period he began to work on his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. In 1389 he was appointed Clerk of the King's Works at Westminster by King Richard II, and later saw his yearly pension doubled by Henry IV. In the same year Chaucer rented a house at Westminster, where he lived till he died in 1400. He was the first poet to be buried in what is known as poets coruer in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer is considered as the father of the English literature and of the English language first because his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, became soon very popular and secondly because the language he used, the dialect of London, gradually became the basis of Modern English. Chaucer’s production is traditionally divided into three periods: French, Italian and English.

The French period is so called because it includes poems modelled on French romance styles and subjects, such as The Romaunt of the Rose and The Book of the Duchess. The Italian period shows a greater maturity of perception and skill in the manipulation of the metres. To this period belong: The Parlement of Foules, a bird- and-beast fable; The House of Fame; The Legende of Good Women, which is the first known attempt to use the couplet in English, and Troilus and Criseyde, a long poem adapted from Boccaccio. The English period is marked by greater realism and includes Chaucer’s most famous work, The Canterbury Tales.

Cultural insight

By the 14th century a new middle class, both rural and urban, existed. Ongoing wars involved the merchants who lent money to the king for mercenaries. This gave more power to the merchant financiers based in the ports and towns. Cloth-making was the country’s chief industry, but the artisans and tradesmen in the town were also butchers, bakers, smiths, shoemakers, tailors and carpenters. They organised themselves in groups called ‘guilds’ from the Old English geld, meaning payment. The guilds were supported by the payments of their members, they controlled the quality of goods, they regulated prices and wages, and laid down the rules concerning apprenticeship. They organised fairs where their members sold their produce and, on particular feast days, prepared a series of biblical plays to be performed in various places in the towns.

The Canterbury Tales

The structure: The Canterbury Tales is a collection of twenty-four tales in verses and a General Prologue where the characters are presented and where there is clear description of Medieval life and Medieval society. Originally, Chaucer wanted to write 120 tales but he died before finishing and so the work is incomplete.The Canterbury Tales is a long narrative poem. Chaucer used rhyming couplets made up of iambic pentameters, that is, ten-syllable lines alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. He tells us directly or sometimes ironically what he sees and what he thinks about it. This creates a sort of interplay between real and unreal so that the reader is left to decide whether what he/she is reading is true or not. The tales often have realistic elements, but in almost every case they have a strong ideal and moralising base. The plot: it is spring and thirty people are going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury to visit the tomb of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was killed in his cathedral by the king Henry II’s soldiers. Among the pilgrims, there is Chaucer himself who gives a real description of the events. They meet at the Tabard Inn in London where the host organizes a competition. He asks every person to tell four stories, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back home. The prize will be a free dinner. All the pilgrims agree. The characters: all the characters belong to the middle classes and Chaucer describes them accurately both physically and psychologically. He analyses their behaviour, their way of speaking and of dressing, their personality so they are real individuals. As a consequence, they represent not only themselves but also the social class they belong to. Chaucer presents the characters in details, describing their limits and their positive aspects so he makes a real description of the society of the time, giving the readers the opportunity to have a clear idea of that period. In particular, he criticizes some aspects of his time like the corruption of the clergy, education and social institutions like marriage.

In his work, he does not describe the aristocracy and the poor. This because the nobles didn’t want to mix with common people so they travelled by themselves while the poor couldn’t pay for the trip. The new factor in The Canterbury Tales is individualisation: the character exists because he/she has reactions and is in movement. His/ her individualisation’ is therefore dynamic, in antithesis with the conventional medieval character portrait which was generally rather static. The descriptions of the pilgrims vary in length, point of view and tone; some emphasise what the pilgrim wears, some what he/she does or thinks. Chaucer listed and described tools, clothes and personal qualities. The names given to the pilgrims refer to their profession and suggest a society in which work conditioned the personality and world view of each individual. Women: among the pilgrims, there are also some women in particular the Wife of Bath and the Prioress who represent respectively the new idea of woman of the middle class and the classical idea of woman. Women of the middle classes were more enterprising and independent than the other women of the Middle Ages because they worked. Indeed, they helped in the family business, in particular when the men of their family (fathers, brothers, husbands) were out of town for trade. The Wife of Bath is exactly this type of woman and she can be considered as the first feminist of the English literature. She is a merchant and she is a woman of experience. She had married five times but all her husbands died. So she goes on pilgrimage to find a new husband more than for religious intent. She has a strong personality and Chaucer describes her using male adjectives, like handsome, just to mark her rude aspect and her direct behaviour. The prioress, on the contrary, is a woman subjected to men. Like all the second daughters of the noble family, she was forced to enter the clergy without a real vocation. As a consequence, even though her clothes are poor, her aspect and behaviour are elegant. She wears jewels and make-up because she wants to show her femininity so it is clear that she didn’t choose to be a nun but her family chose for her. Besides, her family bought her the title of prioress because she is too young for being at the head of a nunnery. Symbolism: the work is full of symbols and allegories. The pilgrimage happens in spring that represents not only the rebirth of life after the dark and long winter but also the rebirth from a sinful life to a new and a pure one.

Canterbury is the symbol of the celestial city while London represents the terrestrial city. The pilgrimage is the allegory of life and it is an important passage to reach salvation. The pilgrimage provides a dynamic frame. There is no logical order of events or explicit hierarchy of values, but all remains in flux and on the road. Boccaccio’s influence: to write his poems, Chaucer inspired to Boccaccio’s Decameron where a group of ten young people escape from Florence to avoid the plague. They refuge in a villa outside the city and they decide to pass the time by telling stories, one each for an amount of 10 stories a day. There are some differences and some similarities between the two works. While The Canterbury Tales are incomplete, Decameron is complete. While in the former the characters are thirty and they belong to different social classes, in the latter the characters are ten (seven girls and three boys aged between 18 and 25 years) and they belong to the same social class (nobility). While the former is composed of twenty-four tales in verses, the latter is composed of one hundred tales in prose. In both works, there is a prize to win: in The Canterbury Tales a free dinner, in Decameron the prize consists in the decision of the following theme.