Context
The Canterbury Tales is the most
famous and critically acclaimed work of Geoffrey Chaucer,
a late-fourteenth-century English poet. Little is known about Chaucer's
personal life, and even less about his education, but a number of
existing records document his professional life. Chaucer was born
in London in the early 1340s, the only son
in his family. Chaucer's father, originally a property-owning wine
merchant, became tremendously wealthy when he inherited the property
of relatives who had died in the Black Death of 1349.
He was therefore able to send the young Geoffrey off as a page to
the Countess of Ulster, which meant that Geoffrey was not required
to follow in his ancestors' footsteps and become a merchant. Eventually,
Chaucer began to serve the countess's husband, Prince Lionel, son
to King Edward III. For most of his life, Chaucer served in the
Hundred Years War between England and France, both as a soldier
and, since he was fluent in French and Italian and conversant in
Latin and other tongues, as a diplomat. His diplomatic travels brought
him twice to Italy, where he might have met Boccaccio, whose writing
influenced Chaucer's work, and Petrarch.
In or around 1378, Chaucer began
to develop his vision of an English poetry that would be linguistically
accessible to all—obedient neither to the court, whose official
language was French, nor to the Church, whose official language
was Latin. Instead, Chaucer wrote in the vernacular, the English
that was spoken in and around London in his day. Undoubtedly, he
was influenced by the writings of the Florentines Dante, Petrarch,
and Boccaccio, who wrote in the Italian vernacular. Even in England,
the practice was becoming increasingly common among poets, although
many were still writing in French and Latin.
That the nobles and kings Chaucer served (Richard II until 1399, then
Henry IV) were impressed with Chaucer's skills as a negotiator is
obvious from the many rewards he received for his service. Money,
provisions, higher appointments, and property eventually allowed
him to retire on a royal pension. In 1374,
the king appointed Chaucer Controller of the Customs of Hides, Skins
and Wools in the port of London, which meant that he was a government
official who worked with cloth importers. His experience overseeing
imported cloths might be why he frequently describes in exquisite
detail the garments and fabric that attire his characters. Chaucer
held the position at the customhouse for twelve years, after which
he left London for Kent, the county in which Canterbury is located.
He served as a justice of the peace for Kent, living in debt, and
was then appointed Clerk of the Works at various holdings of the king,
including Westminster and the Tower of London. After he retired in
the early 1390s, he seems to have been working
primarily on The Canterbury Tales, which he began
around 1387. By the time of his retirement,
Chaucer had already written a substantial amount of narrative poetry,
including the celebrated romance Troilus and Criseyde.
Chaucer's personal life is less documented than his professional life.
In the late 1360s, he married Philippa Roet,
who served Edward III's queen. They had at least two sons together.
Philippa was the sister to the mistress of John of Gaunt, the duke
of Lancaster. For John of Gaunt, Chaucer wrote one of his first
poems, The Book of the Duchess, which was a lament
for the premature death of John's young wife, Blanche. Whether or
not Chaucer had an extramarital affair is a matter of some contention
among historians. In a legal document that dates from 1380,
a woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne released Chaucer from the accusation
of seizing her (raptus), though whether the expression denotes that
he raped her, committed adultery with her, or abducted her son is
unclear. Chaucer's wife Philippa apparently died in 1387.
Chaucer lived through a time of incredible tension in
the English social sphere. The Black Death, which ravaged England
during Chaucer's childhood and remained widespread afterward, wiped out
an estimated thirty to fifty percent of the population. Consequently,
the labor force gained increased leverage and was able to bargain
for better wages, which led to resentment from the nobles and propertied
classes. These classes received another blow in 1381,
when the peasantry, helped by the artisan class, revolted against
them. The merchants were also wielding increasing power over the
legal establishment, as the Hundred Years War created profit for
England and, consequently, appetite for luxury was growing. The
merchants capitalized on the demand for luxury goods, and when Chaucer
was growing up, London was pretty much run by a merchant
oligarchy, which attempted to control both the aristocracy and the
lesser artisan classes. Chaucer's political sentiments are unclear,
for although The Canterbury Tales documents the various
social tensions in the manner of the popular genre of estates satire,
the narrator refrains from making overt political statements, and
what he does say is in no way thought to represent Chaucer's own
sentiments.
Chaucer's original plan for The Canterbury Tales was
for each character to tell four tales, two on the way to Canterbury
and two on the way back. But, instead of 120 tales,
the text ends after twenty-four tales, and the party is still on
its way to Canterbury. Chaucer either planned to revise the structure
to cap the work at twenty-four tales, or else left it incomplete
when he died on October 25, 1400.
Other writers and printers soon recognized The Canterbury
Tales as a masterful and highly original work. Though Chaucer
had been influenced by the great French and Italian writers of his age,
works like Boccaccio's Decameron were not accessible
to most English readers, so the format of The Canterbury
Tales, and the intense realism of its characters, were
virtually unknown to readers in the fourteenth century before Chaucer.
William Caxton, England's first printer, published The Canterbury
Tales in the 1470s, and it continued
to enjoy a rich printing history that never truly faded. By the
English Renaissance, poetry critic George Puttenham had identified
Chaucer as the father of the English literary canon. Chaucer's project
to create a literature and poetic language for all classes of society
succeeded, and today Chaucer still stands as one of the great shapers
of literary narrative and character.
Language in The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales is written in Middle
English, which bears a close visual resemblance to the English written
and spoken today. In contrast, Old English (the language of Beowulf,
for example) can be read only in modern translation or by students
of Old English. Students often read The Canterbury Tales in
its original language, not only because of the similarity between
Chaucer's Middle English and our own, but because the beauty and
humor of the poetry—all of its internal and external rhymes, and
the sounds it produces—would be lost in translation.
The best way for a beginner to approach Middle English
is to read it out loud. When the words are pronounced, it is often
much easier to recognize what they mean in modern English. Most
Middle English editions of the poem include a short pronunciation
guide, which can help the reader to understand the language better.
For particularly difficult words or phrases, most editions also
include notes in the margin giving the modern versions of the words,
along with a full glossary in the back. Several online Chaucer glossaries exist,
as well as a number of printed lexicons of Middle English.
The Order of The Canterbury Tales
The line numbers cited in this SparkNote are based on
the line numbers given in The Riverside Chaucer, the
authoritative edition of Chaucer's works. The line numbering in The
Riverside Chaucer does not run continuously throughout
the entire Canterbury Tales, but it does not restart at the beginning
of each tale, either. Instead, the tales are grouped together into fragments, and
each fragment is numbered as a separate whole.
Nobody knows exactly what order Chaucer intended to give
the tales, or even if he had a specific order in mind for all of
them. Eighty-two early manuscripts of the tales survive, and many
of them vary considerably in the order in which they present the
tales. However, certain sets of tales do seem to belong together
in a particular order. For instance, the General Prologue is obviously
the beginning, then the narrator explicitly says that the Knight
tells the first tale, and that the Miller butts in and tells the
second tale. The introductions, prologues, and epilogues to various
tales sometimes include the pilgrims' comments on the tale just
finished, and an indication of who tells the next tale. These sections
between the tales are called links, and they are
the best evidence for grouping the tales together into ten fragments.
But The Canterbury Tales does not include a complete
set of links, so the order of the ten fragments is open to question. The
Riverside Chaucer bases the order of the ten fragments
on the order presented in the Ellesmere manuscript, one of the best
surviving manuscripts of the tale. Some scholars disagree with the
groupings and order of tales followed in The Riverside Chaucer, choosing
instead to base the order on a combination of the links and the
geographical landmarks that the pilgrims pass on the way to Canterbury.
