Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer
(1342/43-1400)
Chaucer & English Literature
• Considered the first major poet of the
‘modern English’ language
• Contribution to the English language &
literature has been enormous
• Numerous later writers have acknowledged
their debt to him
• Chaucer is really the ‘prologue’ to English
literature as we know it
• His work, written in Middle English, now
comes with a pronunciation guide & glossary
Chaucer’s Life & Writings
• Chaucer grew up during medieval England’s
period of greatest prosperity& influence
• Trained in the royal court & close to the most
intelligent & powerful people of his day
• Travelled widely throughout Europe
• Study the literature of France & Italy
• Of Chaucer’s works, including The Parliament
of Fowls and House of Flame, the best known
is The Canterbury Tales
• With striking success he combined his wide-
ranging learning with an enthusiastic love for
the everyday lives of ordinary English people
The Canterbury Tales : Textual History
• The Canterbury Tales is a text the learned could
admire for its careful development of current
literary forms
• On the other hand, ordinary listeners could
relish its comedy, adventure, and pathos
• It became one of the most popular poems of its
day
• Chaucer finished most of The Canterbury Tales
by about 1395, having begun it many years
earlier
• But he died before he could finalize it & what we
have now are essentially fragments of the work
• Chaucer’s own manuscript has not survived &
we rely on 15th century manuscripts
The Story of The Canterbury Tales
• Set during the time of a pilgrimage made to the
shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, Kent
• The pilgrims travel together & stay at the Tabard
Inn
• The host, Harry Bailey, suggests that each one of
them, Chaucer included, tells 4 stories to
entertain the weary group: 2 stories on their way
to the shrine & 2 on their way back
• Set of tales, all narrated on the way to the shrine
• Chaucer claims he is reporting as he heard them
• The tales are meant to survey the humanity as a
whole; presents a good picture of the various
professions of the period; uses myths & legends
The ‘Form’ of The Canterbury
Tales
• The Canterbury Tales belongs to the
category of frame story, a series of tales
within an enclosing narrative, a cluster of
tales within a tale
• It is often said that Chaucer imitated
Boccaccio’s Decameron
• But this literary form was already well-known
in classical and medieval European literature
• Europe derived it from the East:
Mahabharata & The Thousand and One
Nights
The Wife of Bath’s Tale
• The Wife of Bath’s Tale is one of the 24 stories in
The Canterbury Tales
• The tale is in the form of an ‘apologia’ ― a
justification of one’s life
• The Wife of Bath describes her five husbands, and
her own behaviour, including (faking?)
unfaithfulness & knocking one husband into the
fireplace
• Chaucer’s genius is to vary the style & tone to suit
the storyteller
• The bawdy language & the bluster of the Wife of
Bath make her stand out as a memorable literary
character of all times
• The Wife of Bath offers a lengthy prologue before
she proceeds to relate her tale
The Legacy of The Wife of Bath
• Wife of Bath or Alison of Bath was and is part of the
cultural fabric of many English-speaking women’s and
men’s lives.
• Why has this character from a fourteenth-century poem
had such a dramatic impact across time?
• Marion Turner claims that the Wife of Bath is the first
ordinary woman in English literature.
• By that Turner means the first mercantile, working,
sexually active woman—not a virginal princess or queen,
not a nun, witch, or sorceress, not a damsel in distress nor
a functional servant character, not an allegory.
• A much married woman and widow, who works in the cloth
trade and tells us about her friends, her tricks, her
experience of domestic abuse, her long career combating
misogyny, her reflections on the aging process, and her
enjoyment of sex, Alison exudes vitality, wit, and
rebellious self-confidence.
Legacy Continued
• Alison is a character whom readers across the centuries have
usually seen as accessible, familiar, and, in a strange way,
real.
• For many people she is by far the most memorable of the
Canterbury pilgrims. Almost from the moment of her
conception, she exceeded her own text, appearing in
Chaucer’s other writings (in a way no other character does)
before being seized and appropriated by readers, scribes,
and other poets alike.
• Over and over again, in different time periods and cultural
contexts, readers see her as “relatable” in certain ways, as a
three-dimensional figure who is far more than the sum of her
parts.
• She may be “ordinary,” but she is also extraordinary.
• Chaucer performed some kind of alchemy when he fused his
cluster of well-worn sources with contemporary details and a
distinctive, personalized voice and produced something—
someone—completely new.
References
McDonnell, Helen, et al. England in

Literature. Glenview, Illinois: Scott,
Foresman and Company, 1982.
Nayar, Pramod K. A Short History of English

Literature. New Delhi: CUP, 2009.

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Geoffrey Chaucer

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Geoffrey Chaucer

McDonnell, Helen, et al. England in

Nayar, Pramod K. A Short History of English

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