INTRODUCTION
We have designed this unit to recreate the literary efforts of Geoffrey Chaucer, so that you will appreciate why and how his Canterbury tales became so famous in literary circles since Middle English across ages. Attempt has been made to resolve some of the age long controversies that characterised the Canterbury Tales. If you can take time to read through it, you will not only find yourself garnering further useful facts/details about the beautiful Canterbury Tales but will also find yourself travelling down memory lane to Geoffrey Chaucer‟s fictive Canterbury. Our discussion of the tales will educate you on the extent to which the English writer used literature to probe the English society of his time, particularly the moral decline of medieval England.
3.1 HISTORY AND THE CANTERBURY TALES
The publication of The Canterbury Tales coincided with the time of serial conflicts in the history of England. The Catholic Church, which was the vanguard of Christian authority in European history, was also deeply in controversy, especially as Lollardy, an early English religious movement led by John Wycliffe, got involved with pardoners (who gathered money in exchange for absolution from sin) who said they were acting on the orders of St. Mary Rouncesval Hospital in England. Geoffrey Chaucer‟s Canterbury Tales became popular during the medieval political clashes, particularly the 1381 Peasant‟s Revolt and the controversy that led to the dethronement of King Richard II. The setting of the tale was also around the period that many of Chaucer‟s friends were executed as a result of their actions which were considered disparaging to the government of medieval England. This made him to leave London for Kent.
Considering the events that enveloped the medieval England of Chaucer and his tales, literary analysts seemed constrained to interpret Geoffrey Chaucer‟s characters as historical figures, while some described them in terms of their literary relevance, especially when his work is viewed as a satirical reflection of medieval England. In character creation, Chaucer‟s literary personae were formed with the writers‟ consciousness of English society of his time.
3.2 NATURE OF THE CANTERBURY TALES
Geoffrey Chaucer‟s Canterbury Tales was crafted in such a way that another story unveils as the previous one ends. The linear structure of the story is helped by the prologue that reveals the identity of the story tellers, making the story to lean on the characters, rather than on other formalities like moral or theme.
The themes of such stories are quickly revealed as characters emerge to tell their stories, as in when Miller, for instance, cuts in to tell his tale after the knight has completed his own version. Indication that all characters will tell their stories using the open/free exchange system as the individual character gets involved to tell his/her story unfolds itself naturally.
3.3 THEMES IN THE CANTERBURY TALES
Religion
Geoffrey Chaucer‟s tales reflect the English church of the medieval time. The dilemma that followed the Black Death brought the Church under attacks by the society, and some dissenters started fragmented movements that revealed the high spate of abuses and corruption in the Church, precisely among the clergy. Many of the characters in the Tales represent religious personalities of the time. The setting of the pilgrimage is religious and marked the inculcation of religious themes in the play. For instance, two notable characters, Pardoner and Summoner, are portrayed as uncouth, deeply corrupt and lawless. The Pardoner admits he is corrupt. The Summoner, whose duty in the church days was to bring sinners into the court for penalties including excommunication, is also evil. As seen in The Friar’s Tale, a character (Summoner) is shown to be the devil‟s messenger and advocate.
The questionable characters that dominated the church of Chaucer‟s time were represented as the Monk, Prioress, the Nun‟s Priests and the Second Nun. Monastic orders had mixed with worldly concerns. They have also corrupted church responsibility of managing peasant employees on the land they manage. The Prioress lived a colourful life that was far from her religious calling and duties.
The Prioress Tales reveal the common murderous impulse among Jews, as seen in the murder of an innocent Christian boy, the subsequent blood Libel Suit filed against the Jew. These reminiscences of the actual event of 14th century England soon became part of English literary tradition.
Pilgrimage
This was common with medieval society. People go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem while Canterbury was the destination for English pilgrims. Pilgrims often go to seek miracles in the relics of Saints which they preserved. Saint Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by knights of Henry II during a disagreement between Church and Crown.
The story of his death became divinised by the people, capable of bringing back life and miracles, and people frequent the Cathedral in search of miracles, turning it into a kind of Jerusalem. The illustration may be said to represent Christians ‟ continuous search for heaven, while overlooking weaknesses and conflicts, no matter how serious.
Social Class
The upper class or nobles in the age of Chaucer were represented by the Knight and his Squire. Nobles were expected to be valiant warriors and ruthless, especially in the battle field, well behaved in the king‟s court, and christianly in attitude. Chaucer‟s The Knights Tale reflects how the brotherly love of two fellow Knights degenerated into a deadly conflict before a woman they both idealised, with both Knights willing to fight to death so as to win her. This aspect of Chaucer‟s Tale shows the stupidity or vanity of such a practice, though such practice was less common in the days of Chaucer.
Chivalry was given a prominent place in the reign of King Edward III; Chaucer‟s The Tale of Sir Topas and The Tale of Melibee featured Chaucer travelling with the pilgrims in the tales. Both plays condemn class conflicts and emphasise morals; the first considers the idiocy that was attached to chivalry while the second condemns violence. In The Three Estates, characters were divided into three classes: “those who pray” (the clergy); “those who fight” (the nobility); and “those who work” (the Commoners and Peasantry). Common themes form the links and reduced the entire play into an indivisible whole, with its close mirroring of the English society, and its retaliatory urge. Convention followed when the Knight begins the tale game, with a tale as a reflection of the highest social class in the social group, but when he is preceded by Millen, a reflection of the lower class, the tale (stage) is set for a disregard for upper class rules.
Reality and Relativity
Geoffrey Chaucer‟s characters discuss diverse views of reality, creating an atmosphere that presents the world in different versions: the fabliau hardly recognises the existence of God, the saint‟s life concerns the physical reality, tracts and sermons support moral orthodoxy. The plays replay human life and existence in its various forms, such that truth and reality seemed unattainable.
3.4 STYLE IN THE CANTERBURY TALES
Geoffrey Chaucer experimented with language in his work based on the practices of the English medieval schools of rhetoric thought that described the literary patterning of the period along high, middle and low styles. But St. Augustine was more interested in the classification he described: audience response with less emphasis on subject matter. He divided literature into three phrasal categories: “majestic persuades”, “temperate pleases”, and subdued teaches. He encouraged writers to write with a view that is centred on the speaker, subject, audience, purpose and manner. Chaucer‟s style revolves around all these, with his reader as his audience. The general assessment of Chaucer‟s work qualifies it as a „house of theory‟, thus greater than any theory yet unknown.
Geoffrey Chaucer‟s creative skilfulness and intellectual vibrancy reflect in his lexical duplication in his stories. His similar use of words was used to mean different things in classes, different contexts and situation in his plays. Woman is referred to as “lady”, but “wenche” among lower classes. “Pitee” is a noble context among upper classes but in the Merchant‟s Tale, lower classes show simplicity, a stylistic overtone that exists throughout the play.
3.5 CHAUCER AND HIS LANGUAGE
Geoffrey Chaucer took after his medieval English way of speaking; and this reflected greatly in his manuscripts. His generation of English usage pronounced /e/ at the end of words, it then means that the word, /care/, was pronounced /k6∂r/ as pronounced in modern English. This was inconsistent in their copying of final /-e/, what later became a point of reference to post Chaucerian scholars who have argued that Chaucer was himself inconsistent in its usage. There are clear evidence that Chaucer‟s language had not passed through the Great Vowel Shift, that would have enabled Chaucer to pronounce English words the way modern English users would have such words pronounced if Geoffrey Chaucer were to be alive today.
Geoffrey Chaucer existed in the medieval English era, a period that interacted with Latin, Greek, Romans and other imported cultures. The varieties of dialects that existed in his time had influences on each other. His language of literary craft was the culture of his medieval England.
3.6 The Incompleteness and Expansion of The Canterbury Tales
There is no definite consensus among scholars and literary critics on the particular order of arrangement that Geoffrey Chaucer‟s numerous tales should follow. We are aware that there exists 83 manuscripts of Chaucer covering the late medieval and early Renaissance era, yet the question of the completeness of the story has not been resolved. 50 of his manuscripts were said to be complete while 28 were said to be fragmentary. The tales vary as minor and major in manuscripts, with minor variations arising from copyists‟ error, though defence from some quarters argued that the errors were as a result of the revision and recopying or rewriting embarked upon by Chaucer. It was also largely disputed that the original surviving manuscripts of the Tales were not Geoffrey Chaucer‟s original, but the oldest was compiled by a Scribe after the author‟s death. The Ellesmere Manuscript was considered most beautiful among the tales, and many editors from medieval to our contemporary age regard it with all seriousness.
William Caxton‟s (1478) edition was the first known celebrated publisher of Canterbury Tales, a derivative of the original (now misplaced) manuscripts, though still part of the 83 manuscripts.
Two modern methods of ordering the tales have been given. Its division was made into ten fragments “based on order of presentation (one character speaks and leaves the stage for another)”. There are no visible connectivity between fragments (the other is the numbered Ellesmere ordering).
3.7 Relativities/Borrowings in The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer was a medieval English writer in a period when writers leaned on classical cultures and practices in carrying out their crafts. But readers of Chaucer‟s tales are still reading and waiting, perhaps there might be evidence of a similar set of collection of pilgrims on a pilgrimage within the set standard of Chaucer ‟s. This is not to say that the medieval writer was never influenced at all. He had relativities with the world in which he existed, the world of oral literature of his time. His period was generously influenced by the art of storytelling that had been in practice prior to Chaucer‟s time and was also imbibed in medieval England. Such art of storytelling became a form of entertainment even within the English church; prizes and awards were given to best performers or winners, sometimes in the form of a crown or free dinner. It was usually a colourful event in medieval England, with an appointed Master of Ceremonies, under the watchful eyes of a judge. The medieval staging of Chaucer‟s Canterbury Tales took the form similar to the above.
The Chaucer‟s work in question was said to be original but inspired by Dante and Virgil in The Divine Comedy. Giovanni Boccaccio‟s The Decameron and Chaucer‟s Canterbury Tales feature narrators that recount the stories of a pilgrimage or journey they have undertaken to flee from problems and confusion, an instance being the Black Death in England. Also, some tales in Canterbury Tales are similar to some in the Decameron. Many of such tales too were like a „different‟ copy of similar stories that have existed. This is why suspicion is high among scholars over the similarity in the tales of Geoffrey Chaucer to existing stories, particularly Boccaccio‟s Decameron, which scholars believed the former may have read in his lifetime.
In spite of the suspicion and controversies relating to the possible borrowings that most of these plays may be guilty of, one cannot completely rule out that plays of the period had their diverse sources, just like there are different versions of the Bible and poetry of Ovid. Storytelling and pilgrimages were the popular focus of most writers of the age of Geoffrey Chaucer. Still, Chaucer was the first to use the works of the Italians, Petrach and Dante, the same way the work of the 6th century philosopher, Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, appeared in many tales. Geoffrey Chaucer borrowed generously from liturgical writings and encyclopaedia, with some scholars suggesting that he may have met and interacted with Petrach and Boccaccio.
3.8 ADAPTATIONS OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER’S THE CANTERBURY TALES
Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales has impressed and puzzled readers and established scholars across the ages. The doubts, confusion, dilemma and other forms of challenges in which the medieval tales were wrapped have also provoked varieties of heightened interests in the tale such that the English tale is now being adapted in various forms. The most popular forms taken to further immortalise Geoffrey Chaucer and his manuscripts were not just adapted into television and radio, but also works of literature.
Across ages, the work of Geoffrey Chaucer has been adapted in fiction and non- fiction, using the characters, plot, theme, structure and the language of Chaucer. Many instances abound, some of which are highlighted below.
Using the frame and characters of Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales, the historical mystery novelist, P.C. Doherty, fictionalised The Tale. The science fiction writer, Dan Simmons, wrote his novel, Hyperion, using the pilgrim pattern. Also, the social scientist, Richard Dawkins, adapted The Canterbury Tales as the structure of his evolutionary discourse, The Ancestors Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, the award winning 2014 allegorical fable, to probe common ancestry, with each telling a tale about evolution. Henry Dudeney‟s 1907 book, The Canterbury Puzzles and Other Curious Problems, uses the characters in The Canterbury’s Tales in its plot. The Canterbury Trail is Angie Abdou‟s translated version of Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales. It tells of the adventures of some ski enthusiasts in a remote place in British Colombia.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE
Of all the tales in The Canterbury Tales, which do you prefer and why?
4.0 CONCLUSION
In this unit, we have discussed the aspects, nature, themes, and the writer‟s style in The Canterbury Tales. We have also tried to answer the puzzling questions of the incompleteness or otherwise of Chaucer‟smanuscripts.
We also explained the literary adaptations of Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales. Try and read over your work again to see how much you have become familiar with all we have discussed in this unit.
5.0 SUMMARY
In this unit, you have learnt that Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales is related to Medieval English history.
. Chaucer‟s beautiful Tales reflect a distinct nature that makes them different from all other known tales of contemporary literature, even in England;
. manuscripts of the The Canterbury Tales are incomplete;
. Geoffrey Chaucer borrowed some of the tales from the English medieval arts as well as other manuscripts that have predated or have existed long before his own tales;
. there exist a number of literary adaptations of Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales.
6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT
1) Discuss the nature of Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales.
2) Discuss at least two themes of Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales.
3) Outline convincing facts that indicate any relationship between The Canterbury Tales and English medieval arts.
4) Explain the style of Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales.
5) Give evidence of the literary adaptations of Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales.
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READING
Bisson, Lillian (1998). Chaucer and the Late Medieval World. New York: St. Martins Press.
Collette, Carolyn (2001). Phantasms and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in the Canterbury Tales. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Cooper, Helen (1996). The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellis Steve (2000). Chaucer at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ohigren, Thomas (2005). Medieval Outlaws. London: Parlow Press.
Pearsall, Derek (1985). The Canterbury Tales. London: Allen & Unwin.
Rubin, Alexis P. (Ed.) (1993). Scattered among the Nations: Documents Affecting Jewish History: 49 to 1475. London: Wall & Emersons.
Thompson, N. S. (1996). Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love: A Comparative Study of the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trigg Stephanie (2002). Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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