GEOFFREY CHAUCHER

Geoffrey Chaucer is the father of modern English literature.

His works, especially The Canterbury Tales, while exploring most of the traditional medieval
genres use them in a way that already looks ahead to modern literature.
They are written in Middle English.He was a page at the royal court, a customs official, a
diplomat, a judge and a member of parliament - also, briefly, a soldier. He was not just a
writer but a man fully engaged in the social, political and cultural life of his time.
Geoffrey Chaucer was born around 1343 in London. He was the son of a wealthy merchant
family: his father, John Chaucer, was a wine-merchant whose establishment was beside the
river in Thames Street. When he was about fourteen, Geoffrey was sent to the royal court
and became a page in the service of King Edward Ill's third son, Prince Lionel. At court he
was taught the arts of rhetoric and of correspondence: together with the study of Latin
language and literature (Ovid and Virgil especially), this was to be essential to his activity
both as a writer and a diplomat. As a royal servant in 1359 he took part in the Hundred
Years' War and was captured by French forces outside Reims; a few months later he was
ransomed for the sum of sixteen pounds - a clear indication of his social importance.
In later life, Chaucer moved to Kent and became Justice of the Peace and then a Member of
Parliament for that county. In 1398 he returned to London and rented a house in the garden
of Westminster Abbey, where he was buried on his death in 1400, a plague year. Now his
tomb is located in the Abbey's Poets' Corner, where England's greatest writers are buried.
Chaucer's duties as a royal servant sent him on diplomatic missions to France, Flanders and
especially Italy. Echoes of these can be found in The Canterbury Tales. In
1372-73 he was in Genoa and Florence for trade negotiations, he may have also been in
Padua and met Petrarch.
In a second mission, in 1378, he was in Milan and met Barnabo Visconti, lord of the city,
whose death is sung in a stanza of the Monk's Tale. He was a writer, besides being a
diplomat, and these visits put him in contact with the great Italian art of the time and gave
him the chance to read the works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Chaucer learnt
something of value from each writers, and was instrumental in bringing Italian culture to
England: a legacy he would hand down to future writers, including Shakespeare.
He wrote, in his own words, lyrics and love songs.
One could have a clear idea of the main types of medieval poetry by taking a look at
Chaucer's own poems. He translated Le Roman de la rose - a hugely influential allegorical
poem on courtly love - from French into English and this is sometimes referred to as his
French phase. He wrote several dream visions, that is poems in which the poet pretends he
has fallen asleep and has had a dream which he now retells: The Book of the Duchess, the
Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame are the most famous ones. In these, the
influence of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio is clearly visible - his Italian phase.
Boccaccio is also Chaucer's source for his second-best work: the epic poem Troilus and
Criseyde. It is an intriguing story of love, jealousy and betrayal - Shakespeare will take it up
in his play Troilus and Cressida. Chaucer's fame rests on his long narrative poem The
Canterbury Tales - the main work of his English phase.
THE CANTERBURY TALES
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 verse tales - short stories written in verse instead
of prose. Some stories include a prologue and an epilogue, some only either one or the
other, and some neither. The stories are told by a group of pilgrims on their way to the shrine
of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The pilgrims start their journey from the Tabard Inn in
Southwark and the host of the inn, Harry Bailly, promises the teller of the best tale a free
supper when they come back.
Is Chaucer himself, who tells two stories: The General Prologue which opens the Canterbury
Tales and the so-called Chaucer's Retractions which close it. Chaucer's intention seems to
have been to have each of his 29 pilgrims tell two stories on the way from London to
Canterbury and two more on the way back. He never managed or wanted to give the poem a
definite shape, though there is a sense of unity and the pilgrimage seems to have taken five
days (16 to 20 April). Whether it was a sort of work in progress or not, The Canterbury Tales
is a splendid pageant of fourteenth-century life.
Pilgrimages were fairly common in the Middle Ages. The most famous places where pilgrims
went to worship at the tombs of saints and touch their relics were Rome, Santiago de
Compostela (Spain), Boulogne (France), Cologne (Germany) and Canterbury. Chaucer's
Wife of Bath has visited them all, besides having been to Jerusalem three times. Pilgrims
returned from those places with much praised tokens such as relics, badges (a shell for
Compostela) and pilgrim symbols such as the branch of a palm for those who had been to
Jerusalem. Many also returned with extravagant tales about the places they had visited.
Chaucer's pilgrims ride to worship at the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury
Cathedral. It was there that Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, had been murdered
by followers of King Henry Il in 1170. The King and Becket had been for some time in conflict
over the respective rights and privileges of the Church and the Crown: Becket refused to
acknowledge the authority of the king over that of the Pope. Becket's shrine stood until it was
destroyed in 1538, on orders from Henry VIII following the Reformation and the Dissolution
of the Monasteries.
The first conspicuous thing about the tales is that they are included in the framework of a
pilgrimage. Life as a journey was one of the oldest commonplaces in world literature (the
Bible, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy were all outstanding literary examples in
this tradition) but Chaucer's choice of the pilgrimage as the occasion for telling tales was
unprecedented. Chaucer's most obvious source and analogue for The Canterbury Tales was
undoubtedly Boccaccio's Decameron of the 14th century.
In this story there are three estates of medieval society in England as well as in the rest of
Europe:
• the nobles, for example the Knight, the Squire(the Knight's son);
• the clergy, for example the Prioress (priora), the Monk, the Nun, the Friar, the Parson (a
priest), the Pardoner (a seller of indulgences and fake religious relics), the Canon (a priest);
• the common people, for example the Miller, the Reeve (manager of a large estate), the
Cook, the Man of Law, the Shipman (a sailor), the Physician (a medical doctor), the Wife of
Bath, the Summoner (a law clerk), the Clerk (an Oxford scholar), the Merchant, the Franklin
(a landowner), the Yeoman (a peasant), the Manciple (a legal agent).
At the end of the Tales, in the 'Retractions', Chaucher asks the readers' indulgence: 'If there
be anything here they dislike I beg them to ascribe the fault to my ignorance and not to my
will' and ends with these words: 'Here is ended the book of the tales of Canterbury, compiled
by Geoffrey Chaucer, of whose soul Jesus Christ have mercy. Amen.'
Chaucer also put real people into the pilgrimage: the Host of the Tabard Inn was based upon
the real owner of an inn in Southwark, Harry Bailey; the Cook was based on a famous
contemporary cook, Roger of Ware; and, once again, Chaucer himself. Also, real places on
the way to Canterbury are mentioned, for example Deptford and Greenwich (where Chaucer
might have lived while writing The Canterbury Tales). Despite these realistic details,
however, and many more interspersed in the tales, the work is not a realistic narrative in the
sense that a modern novel or film are. Chaucer's pilgrims are both individuals and
stereotypes of the medieval world they so vividly bring to life. It is often difficult to decide to
what extent they are allegorical figures and real persons, but this combination of allegory
and realism is exactly the strength of The Canterbury Tales and it is also highly typical of the
Middle Ages.
Are contemporary events mentioned in the Tales?
Great contemporary historical events such as the Black Death (the plague of 1348) and the
Peasant's Revolt (1381) are mentioned only once in the poem. This too was quite typical of
the Middle Ages. On the other hand, we are often given vivid and detailed realism such as
the Reeve who cheats his employer, the Cook who tries to disguise old meat by adding
parsley sauce to it, the Miller who dishonestly measures cereals. The tales also contain
occasional notes of misogyny and anti-Semitism (both common at the time), together with
the much more frequent invocations of Christ's name and the Virgin Mary.

What are Chaucer's great innovations in language and poetic form?

Chaucer established the East Midland and London dialect as the dominant form of literary
language that would later develop into Modern Standard English. The fact that Chaucer
wrote very well in this same dialect increased its prestige, already helped by London's
growing power and importance. Chaucer was also a great metrical innovator: he introduced
the five-stress line into English versification, technically known as the iambic pentameter (a
ten-syllable line with an alternation of unstressed and stressed syllables according to the
iamb sequence). The conversational rhythm of this metre helps Chaucer carry through his
long narrative without apparent effort: The Canterbury Tales is written in couplets of iambic
pentameters. Such a form would later be known as heroic or closed couplets.

GENERAL PROLOGUE Canterbury Tales

The following are the first lines of the poem in a Modern English version by Nevill Coghill
(London, 1951), which keeps some of the characteristics of the original Middle English text,
including its rhymed couplets. In the opening lines of the General Prologue the author
describes the time of the year (spring), speaking of the awakening of nature with various
examples.
After these general remarks, Chaucer introduces himself as one of the pilgrims: on his way
to Canterbury he stays at the Tabard Inn, where he meets a group of people going to the
same destination. As he soon makes friends with them, we get a first glimpse of his friendly
personality. Before beginning his work, Chaucer tells us he wants to introduce his fellow
pilgrims: he will describe them according to their character, circumstances and clothing.