Geoffrey Chaucer Notes
Life:
-
Father of English poetry
Made English language respectable by writing in Middle English
Born into middle class (father was a wine merchant)
Page to an eminent family
Had a career in govt
Was sent often to Europe as King’s ambassador
Was captured and held for ransom during the Hundred Years War
Was awarded pensions for services to the crown
Was appointed justice of the peace in the county of Kent
Became a member of Parliament
Supported in his writing by many wealthy patrons
Died on October 25, 1400
He is buried in the “Poet’s Corner” in Westminster Abby in London
Writing:
- First important poem “The Book of the Duchess” 1369
- Written in memory of his patron’s wife who died of the plague
- Allegorical poems: “House of Fame,” “Parliament of Fowls,” “and Trollus and
Criseyde” (1374-1386)
- Influenced by the poems of Dante and Petrarch and the stories of Giovanni
Boccaccio
The Canterbury Tales:
- C’s Canterbury Tales modeled after Boccaccio’s collection of tales, The
Decameron
- Both use framing device within which characters tell their tales
- Both include tales based on similar old plots
- The Decameron frame is a group of people who have fled the plague-ridden city
of Florence and tell stories to while away their time in the country
- The Canterbury Tales frame is a group of pi9lgrims on their way to worship at the
Shrine of Thomas a Becket and each pilgrim is supposed to tell 4 stories- 2 on the
way to Canterbury and 2 on the way back
- Chaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales in 1387
- His goal was to have 30 pilgrims tell 4 tales each for a total of 120 tales
- Didn’t complete task
- -Completed a Prologue to introduce the characters and wrote 24 tales with
accompanying prologues for each tale
- Even though it is incomplete, The Canterbury Tales is still considered one of the
greatest works in the English language
- This ranks Chaucer with Milton and Shakespeare as 3 literary giants of English
literature
- -TCT is written in iambic pentameter in rhyming couplets (evident in original
Middle English more than modern translations)
-
Couplets are not end-stopped, so lines do not appear to be sing-song
The prologue gives us a snapshot into life in the Middle Ages
Chaucer introduces 3 main groups of people: church, feudal, and merchant
The prologue is Chaucer’s way of condemning or finding favor with members
from each of these groups
- Prologue establishes framework of the tales
- Pilgrims are setting off on their pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket
- People went on pilgrimages as a pastime for 3 reasons
- To improve chances of salvation
- To gain healing touch supposedly found in relics of Saints
- To atone for their sins
- It is the spring—archetypally a time of renewal
- Pay attention when you read for the hypocrites on the journey
- They leave from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to travel the 55 miles to Canterbury
(which was a long journey on horseback)
- The poet –pilgrim narrator is believed to be Chaucer himself
- It is the host who suggests the challenge of the tales to pass time to an from
Canterbury
- Prize is a dinner for the winner
- Look on pg 102 for pronunciation guide
Characterization- process by which writer reveals personality of a character
-methods Chaucer uses to reveal his characters:
Direct Characterization
-telling us directly what the character is like
Indirect Characterization
-by describing how the character looks and dresses
-by presenting the character’s words and actions
-by revealing the character’s private thoughts and feelings
-by showing how other people respond to the character
-characters can be classified as static or dynamic and flat or round
-static character doesn’t change much in course of a story
-dynamic character changes in some important way as a result of the story’s action
-flat character only has one or two personality traits; they are 1-D; they can be
summed up by a single phrase; a stereotypical character
-round character is multi-D; they are complex, solid, and multifaceted, like real
people