Geoffrey Chaucer was an English author born in London in the era 1343 and died in 1400. He is known in the world of Literature for his epic work The Canterbury Tales, which the characters or twenty- nine pilgrims travelling on a pilgrimage narrates their tales to each other. Chaucer produces his work to allow readers to relate to real life situations. Chaucer makes his characters come to life as he gives them occupations and assign tales that introduces the readers to images that brings out contrasts in genre, style, tone and values of the modern world. As, you progress in reading you will explore the similarities and differences between the tale of two of Chaucer’s tales, the knight’s Tale and The Miller’s Tale.
How can an author produce one or more tale without repeating his story twice? Can he compare and contrast them without being repetitive in words and events? Like Chaucer and any other writers to tell a tale you must use exaggeration or humorous purposes to bring interest to your story. The tales must either be written in narration preferably first hand to show your active participation and experience. It can include legendry figures, who are sometimes real people, that allows your readers to relate to the events either emotional or physically. Also, tales must have an incident or plot to show when, where and what lead to the occurrence of the incident. With all these techniques used it will give readers an intriguing and insightful taste in reading the works of any authors.
On one hand, The Knight’s Tale is about King Theseus a duke of Athens, who imprisons two knights from Thebes, Arcite and Palamon. From their prison window, the knights see and fall in love with Theseus’s sister-in-law, Emily. Through the interventio...
... middle of paper ...
...Chaucer)We should understand that Chaucer wrote from his stream of consciousness about what was happening in the world around him and how he uses his characters to express what was happening in his era. As a reader, the Knight’s tale and the Miller’s tale are intriguing stories that tells us that even from back in the era of Chaucer and to present day love was always a sinful symbol that showed no pride amongst people. Chaucer uses his works to inform us about the truths and not to forget the morals behind his book and what society has shown him. I believe that even though Chaucer had my full attention while reading his two works, he created an atmosphere that was friendly to me as a young adult and portrayed that life hasn’t change. The Knight’s tale and The Miller’s tale taught me that ‘love's gift cannot be given, but we must wait for it to be accepted.’ (Tagore)
As the United States entered the 1920's it was not as unified as one might think. Not one, but two societies existed. The Black society, whose ancestors had been oppressed throughout the ages, and the White society, the oppressors of these men and women. After emancipation the Whites no longer needed the Blacks, but were forced to live with them. The Blacks despised the Whites, but even so they became more like them in every way. Even though these two races had grown so similar over the past century and a half, they were still greatly diversified. One aspect of this great diversity was the difference in music trends. The White society was still in love with the European classical music. The Blacks on the other hand had created something all their own. Jazz, Blues, and Ragtime originated in New Orleans in the 19th century, but by the 1920's it had become famous throughout America. The Whites tried to suppress the Blacks with new laws, but the power of this strengthened race was too great. The Negro music of the 20th century had a huge affect ...
Forbes, Shannon. "'To Alisoun Now Wol I Tellen Al My Love-Longing': Chaucer's Treatment of the Courtly Love Discourse in the Miller's Tale." Women's Studies 36.1 (2007): 1-14. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 May 2013
In his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer fully explicates the cultural standard known as courtesy through satire. In the fourteenth century, courtesy embodied sophistication and an education in English international culture. The legends of chivalric knights, conversing in the language of courtly love, matured during this later medieval period. Chaucer himself matured in the King's Court, as is revealed in his cultural status, but he also retained an anecdotal humor about courtesy. One must only peruse his Tales to discern these sentiments, for Chaucer’s view of courtesy can seem shocking and, all together, obscene at times, it’s the similarity of the differences that make Chaucer’s tales superior. An example of this can be seen through Nicholas’ attempt at “courting” Alison versus Arcita and Palamon’s endeavors at courting Emily. Nicholas' anxious and lewd behavior, in conjunction with his explicit sexual connotation, demonstrates Chaucer’s more farcical side; where as, the manner in which Arcita and Palamon court Emily can seem more satirical. In the Miller's Tale, Chaucer juxtaposes courtly love with animalistic lust, while in the Knight’s tale, the subject of chivalry is held with much higher regard, and used as a florid, glorious attribute. These numerous references provide the reader with a remarkably rich image of the culture and class structure of late fourteenth century England.
Medieval and Renaissance literature develops the concepts of love and marriage and records the evolution of the relation between them. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Christian love clashes with courtly love, as men and women grapple with such issues as which partner should rule in marriage, the proper, acceptable role of sex in marriage, and the importance of love as a basis for a successful marriage. Works by earlier writers portray the medieval literary notion of courtly love, the sexual attraction between a chivalric knight and his lady, often the knight's lord's wife. The woman, who generally held mastery in these relationships based on physical desire and consummation, dictated the terms of the knight's duties and obligations, much like a feudal lord over a vassal. This microcosm of romance between man and woman was anchored by the macrocosm of the bonds among men and their fealty to their lord. The dominance of women and fealty to the leader in courtly love contrasts with the dominance ...
its abilities to bring people together and sometimes even make people happy. Although the jazz era ended almost a century ago, this time influenced by Louis Armstrong was a huge cultural shift that still remains in our society in which African-Americans are a vast part of our music industry amongst pop, rap, reggae, and more.
The structure Geoffrey Chaucer chose for his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, of utilizing a melange of narrative voices to tell separate tales allows him to explore and comment on subjects in a multitude of ways. Because of this structure of separate tales, the reader must regard as extremely significant when tales structurally overlap, for while the reader may find it difficult to render an accurate interpretation through one tale, comparing tales enables him to lessen the ambiguity of Chaucer’s meaning. The Clerk’s Tale and The Merchant’s Tale both take on the institution of marriage, but comment on it in entirely different manner, but both contain an indictment of patriarchal narcissism and conceit.
In this example, Chaucer, by writing this parody, is trying to express the idea that a lot of the ideals of chivalry are a ...
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, (written c. 1387), is a richly varied compilation of fictional stories as told by a group of twenty-nine persons involved in a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury, England during the fourteenth century. This journey is to take those travelers who desire religious catharsis to the shrine of the holy martyr St. Thomas a Becket of Canterbury. The device of a springtime pilgrimage provided Chaucer with a diverse range of characters and experiences, with him being both a narrator and an observer. Written in Middle English, each tale depicts parables from each traveler.
Mandell, Jerome. Geoffrey Chaucer : building the fragments of the Canterbury tales. N.J. : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.
When Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, he created a great majority of the individual tales by "borrowing" and reworking material from various sources. Most of these stories would have been very familiar to his medieval audience, and the changes he made in the standard version of these tales for his work would have been a form of tacit communication that would have added an extra dimension to each of them. Howard says that "... the tales possess a relatedness of their own within a world of other texts. They can be understood only with reference to shared formulas of language or generic traits..." (448). In the Miller's tale Chaucer parodies the Knight's Tale, which itself was "adapted from a longer tale ... from Italy ... from Boccaccio" (Howard 448), by combining and satirizing highly irreverent references to the life of Jesus Christ with the story of Oedipus to make the tale as bawdy and comical as possible.
The Knight’s Tale and The Miller’s Tale are both told by pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. Although the two stories are set in the same time period and have a similar theme, they each have a distinctive tone. The Knight tells a romantic story that reflects his higher social class during the era in which he lives. The Miller tells a story in which lust, not love, is the guiding motive for the characters. The Miller is in fact drunk when he tells his story, so the Miller’s Tale contains lots of dirty jokes and complicated tricks. The Miller’s tale mirrors the Knight’s tale in a lot of ways. Both of the stories contain a love triangle.
The Canterbury Tales is a great contemplation of stories, that display humorous and ironic examples of medieval life, which imitate moral and ethical problems in history and even those presented today. Chaucer owed a great deal to the authors who produced these works before his time. Chaucer tweaked their materials, gave them new meanings and revealed unscathed truths, thus providing fresh ideas to his readers. Chaucer's main goal for these tales was to create settings in which people can relate, to portray lessons and the irony of human existence.
In the Middle Ages, when The Canterbury Tales was written, society became captivated by love and the thought of courtly and debonair love was the governing part of all relationships and commanded how love should be conducted. These principles changed literature completely and created a new genre dedicated to brave, valorous knights embarking on noble quests with the intention of some reward, whether that be their life, lover, or any other want. The Canterbury Tales, written in the 14th century by Geoffrey Chaucer, accurately portrays and depicts this type of genre. Containing a collection of stories within the main novel, only one of those stories, entitled “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”, truly outlines the 14th century community beliefs on courtly love.
Two of the greatest masters of British literature, Shakespeare and Chaucer, tended to look to the classics when searching for inspiration. A lesser-known example of this lies in an ancient tale from Greece about two star-crossed lovers. There are many variations on the names of these lovers, but for the purpose of solidarity, they shall henceforth be referred to as “Troilus and Criseyde” for Chaucer and “Troilus and Cressida” for Shakespeare. Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” offers up a classic tale of love that is doomed, whereas Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” is not only tragic but also biting in its judgment and representation of characters. This difference may be due to the differences in time periods for the two authors, or their own personal dispositions, but there can be no denying the many deviations from Chaucer’s work that Shakespeare employs. Shakespeare’s work, by making the characters and situations more relatable, builds upon Chaucer’s original work, rather than improving it or shattering it.
Chaucer is not some unknown literary author who is known only by a dozen people in the English field. Besides Shakespeare, Chaucer is probably one of the most well-known contributors to English literature, if not the most well-known. His name is instantly recognizable, and many a high school student learned of him through the oftentimes-painful reading of his most famous work, The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s work is an extremely important text in terms of the evolution of the English language; The Canterbury Tales set itself apart from other literary works at the time by being one of the first pieces of literature to be written in English instead of French, and its extreme popularity spurred the creations of even more English literature, allowing the language to regain its prominence and evolve into the English we know today (“Chaucer”; Kemmer). Today, it’s the most prominent example of Middle English work, and is studied not just for its literary worth but as evidence of what the language was like at the time. The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s importance are extreme, and the author enjoyed his fame during his life as well as long after, largely due to his abilities to make sound decisions, take risks, learned to learn as a professional, and transfer knowledge, skills that people even today can utilize to be successful.