The Canterbury Tales

Overview

The Canterbury Tales is unfinished, and the shape of what survives is part of what you are reading. Chaucer’s plan, announced by the Host in the General Prologue, was four tales from each pilgrim, two out and two back, which would have run to well over a hundred. He completed twenty-four, some of them fragments, and left no final ordering. Manuscripts differ about the sequence of the middle sections, and editors label them as fragments or groups for that reason.

What holds it together is the frame. Thirty-odd people of wildly different rank are thrown together on a four-day ride, a competition is proposed, and the stories become moves in a social contest. The Knight goes first and tells a long courtly romance about two cousins in love with the same woman. The Miller, drunk, insists on going next and tells a fabliau about a carpenter, his young wife, a student and a red-hot poker, which is a deliberate parody of what the Knight has just done. The Reeve, a carpenter by trade, takes offence and answers with a story about a cheating miller. That is the pattern: tales talk back.

The verse is mostly rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter, a line Chaucer effectively introduced into English, with two tales in prose and several in other stanza forms.

What happens

The General Prologue sets the scene and gives the portraits, which are the most read three hundred lines in medieval English literature. A Knight who has fought in a dozen campaigns and wears a rust-stained tunic. His son the Squire, curly-haired and in love. A Prioress with excellent table manners, a brooch reading that love conquers all, and small dogs she feeds roast meat. A Monk who prefers hunting to his cell. A Friar who hears confession pleasantly for a price. A Wife of Bath, five times married, deaf in one ear, in scarlet stockings. A Miller with a wart on his nose and a thumb of gold. A Pardoner with relics in a bag and a voice like a goat. A Parson, poor and genuinely holy, and a Plowman, his brother. The descriptions are morally loaded and never state the verdict.

Then the tales. The Knight’s is romance, elevated and fatalistic. The Miller’s and the Reeve’s are bawdy and fast. The Man of Law tells a saint’s-life story of patient Constance. The Wife of Bath delivers a prologue longer than her tale, arguing from scripture and from her own marriages that women should have sovereignty, then tells of a rapist knight who is spared on condition he learn what women most desire. The Clerk answers her with the tale of Griselda, who submits to monstrous tests by her husband. The Merchant tells of an old man married to a young wife and a pear tree. The Franklin offers a story of competing generosity and calls it the resolution. The Pardoner, having explained in public that he is a fraud who preaches against greed for profit, tells a superb story about three rioters who go looking for Death, find gold, and kill each other. The Nun’s Priest turns barnyard animals into a mock epic about a cock, a fox and the danger of flattery. The Prioress tells an anti-Jewish miracle story that modern readers have to reckon with. The Parson closes with a long prose treatise on penitence, after which Chaucer adds a retraction asking forgiveness for his worldly writings, including this one.

How to read it

Read the General Prologue in Middle English, with a facing translation or glosses. It is easier than it looks once you accept that most words are spelled as they were pronounced, that the final e is often sounded, and that you should read aloud. An hour of work buys you the sound of the poem, which no translation carries.

For the tales, courses usually assign the General Prologue plus a selection: the Knight’s, the Miller’s, the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale, the Pardoner’s prologue and tale, and the Nun’s Priest’s. That set gives you romance, fabliau, the marriage debate, the confessional monologue and the beast fable. Add the Clerk’s and the Franklin’s if the course is following the marriage argument.

Skip the Tale of Melibee and the Parson’s Tale on a first reading. They are long prose and were meant to be. Come back to the Parson if you want to know what the retraction is doing.

Watch the mismatch between teller and tale. The Prioress’s delicacy and the cruelty of her story, the Pardoner’s honesty about his dishonesty, the Wife’s defence of experience conducted entirely through quoted authorities: Chaucer builds his ironies in the gap.

Coghill’s translation is fluent and keeps the rhyme, at the cost of some sharpness. The Riverside is the edition to own if you plan to stay with Chaucer. Fisher’s facing-page Norton is the practical compromise for a single semester.

Questions it raises

• The General Prologue describes vice without condemning it. Is the narrator naive, or is that a technique?
• Does the Wife of Bath win the marriage debate, or does the Clerk’s Griselda answer her?
• The Pardoner tells the pilgrims he is a fraud and then tells a morally powerful story. Can a bad man preach a true sermon?
• Why does the Miller’s Tale immediately follow the Knight’s? What is the poem doing by that juxtaposition?
• The Prioress’s Tale is a pious miracle and an anti-Jewish libel. How should a reader hold both facts?
• The retraction takes back most of the book. Is it conventional piety, a joke, or a real change of mind?