Geoffrey Chaucer

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Geoffrey Chaucer

• And The Canterbury Tales

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Chaucer1341-1400

• The Father of English Poetry
• Before Chaucer it was not fashionable for serious
  poets to write in English
• Chaucer composed in the vernacular (the everyday
  language of London)
• Lent respectibility to the language, because of
  his social stature (he was a govt. official)

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Chaucers life

• Middle class London family
• Was a page to an eminent family (trained in good
  manners- how to conduct himself with the
  noble/weathly)
• Captured in France while serving as a soldier in
  the Hundred years War
• King contributed to his ransom (so he mustve
  been important!)

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More of Chaucers life

• Became a justice of peace
• A member of Parliament
• Traveled to Italy 1372-1378, where he was most
  likely influenced by the writing of Dante,
  Petrarch and Boccaccio

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Giovanni Boccaccios Decameron

• Uses a framing device a tale within a tale
• a group of people fled the plague-ridden city
  of Florence and tell stories to wile away their
  time in the country
• Chaucer uses the same technique for The
  Canterbury Tales (group of pilgrims tell four
  stories each on the way to a from a religious
  shrine)

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The Greatness of The Canterbury Tales

• Language (vernacular)
• His tough of irony
• His personality emerges from the tales
• no poet has ever written better on the baffling
  complexity of things
• the dominant meter is iambic pentameter

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Pilgrimmages

• In Chaucers day almost everyone from every class
  did it
• Many probably went on more than one
• In 1 year alone, more than 100,000 persons are
  said to have made the Canterbury pilgrimage

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More on the Author

• Died on October 25, 1400
• First of the many famous English writers gathered
  in memorium at the Poets Corner in Westminster
  Abbey
• (though hes buried in his family vault)

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The Route to Canterbury

• From London to Canterbury, probably followed an
  originally Roman road
• One can still travel this road
• The pilgrims called the road a slough or a
  place with deep mud
• In April, time of this pilgrimage, it was very
  muddy

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Map of the route
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The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales

• Establish Spring time as the setting
• 55 mile journey by horseback
• Uses the poet-pilgrim narrator (Chaucer
  probably?)
• Starts out at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a
  borough in the south of London
• Meets up with 29 other pilgrims bound for
  Canterbury
• The host of the inn suggests the lets tell
  tales premise to set up Chaucers frame story

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Those stories provide a survey of medieval genres

• Courtly romance
• Fabliau (bawdy humorous tales)
• Pious legend
• Allegory
• Beast fable
• Sermon
• Explore human frailty and nobility
• Humor and tragedy
• Earthly pursuits and spiritual aspiration (it all
  adds up to the richness and complexity of the
  human condition)

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Add it up

• If each pilgrims tells two tales on the way to
  Canterbury and two on the way back 120 tales!
• If Chaucer wrote one a month, it would have taken
  10 years to complete!
• He wrote only 24 of the tales in five years

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Introducing the pilgrims

• Each pilgrim is sketched by the narrator
• Introduces us to Chaucers brilliant picture of
  life in late medieval England
• It is the concise portrait of an entire nation,
  high and low, old and young, male and female, lay
  and clerical, learned and ignorant, .the most
  noticeable thing about them is their normality.

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Characterization

• The process by which the writer reveals the
  personality of a character
• Directly telling us
• Describing looks/dress
• Characters words and actions
• Characters private thoughts
• others reactions to the character

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The Four Humours Theory

• 1. BLOOD (red amorous, happy)
• 2. YELLOW BILE (choleric violent)
• 3. PHLEGM (colorlesspale, cowardly)
• 4. BLACK BILE (gluttonous, lazy, sentimentality)
• closely allied with the 4 elements of air, fire,
  water and earth)

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• The pilgrimage is in a sense a quest it begins
  in the spring, a time for renewalthe stories
  move from images of penance to death and to
  eternal life by the end of the work.
• The pilgrims represent everymanall of us on
  our universal pilgrimage through life

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Connect it to today, to your life

• If you went on a tour today, what types of people
  would you expect to meet
• How would you assess them? Can their physical
  appearances provide information about their
  personalities and values?
• What could you learn from people by the way they
  speak? By watching how other people respond to
  them?

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• Powerpoint created by Mrs. Lori A. Rogalski
  October 10, 2007
• Based upon text information in Elements of
  Literature, 6th Course, Literature of Britain
  wit World Classics. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
  2003.