Summary Of The Canterbury Tales

Summary of The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories set within a framing story of a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, the shrine of Saint Thomas à

Becket. The poet joins a band of pilgrims, vividly described in the General

Prologue, who assemble at the Tabard Inn outside London for the journey to

Canterbury. Ranging in status from a Knight to a humble Plowman, they are a microcosm of 14th- century English society.

The Host proposes a storytelling contest to pass the time; each of the

30 or so pilgrims (the exact number is unclear) is to tell four tales on the round trip. Chaucer completed less than a quarter of this plan. The work contains 22 verse tales (two unfinished) and two long prose tales; a few are thought to be pieces written earlier by Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales, composed of more than 18,000 lines of poetry, is made up of separate blocks of one or more tales with links introducing and joining stories within a block.

The tales represent nearly every variety of medieval story at its best.

The special genius of Chaucer's work, however, lies in the dramatic interaction between the tales and the framing story. After the Knight's courtly and philosophical romance about noble love, the Miller interrupts with a deliciously bawdy story of seduction aimed at the Reeve (an officer or steward of a manor); the Reeve takes revenge with a tale about the seduction of a miller's wife and daughter. Thus, the tales develop the personalities, quarrels, and diverse opinions of their tellers.

After the Knight's tale, the Miller, who was so drunk that he could barely sit on his horse, began screaming," I know a tale that can cap the

Knight's tale off!" "But first, said the Miller, "I admit that I am drunk; I know it by the my voice. And therefore if I speak as I shouldn't, blame it on the beer, I beg you; for I will tell a life and legend of a Carpenter and his wife, and how a clerk manipulated them."

Here the Tale Begins

In Oxford there was a rich peasant, who was a Carpenter, who took guests aboard. There was a poor scholar, who had studied liberal arts, but all his delight was turned to astrology. He knew how to work out certain problems; for instance, if men asked him at certain celestial hours when there should be a drought or rain he could answer them correctly. This clerk was named Nicholas.

He had ...

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...carpenter. The Reeve responded that the drunken Miller should have his neck broken.

Chaucer greatly increased the prestige of English as a literary language and extended the range of its poetic vocabulary and meters. He was the first

English poet to use iambic pentameter, the seven-line stanza called rhyme royal, and the couplet later called heroic. His system of versification, which depends on sounding many e's in final syllables that are silent (or absent) in modern

English, ceased to be understood by the 15th century. Nevertheless, Chaucer dominated the works of his 15th-century English followers and the so-called

Scottish Chaucerians. For the Renaissance, he was the English Homer. Edmund

Spenser paid tribute to him as his master; many of the plays of William

Shakespeare show thorough assimilation of Chaucer's comic spirit. John Dryden, who modernized several of the Canterbury tales, called Chaucer the father of

English poetry. Since the founding of the Chaucer Society in England in 1868, which led to the first reliable editions of his works, Chaucer's reputation has been securely established as the English poet best loved after Shakespeare for his wisdom, humor, and humanity.