The Canterbury Tales: An Introduction

Any attempt to provide a complete literary analysis of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 1,000 words or so is doomed to failure. The book runs to some 17,000 lines of (mostly) verse, comprising 24 tales, a long introductory General Prologue and a number of other prologues to tales and other linking material. The analysis therefore has to be at a more general level, with examples brought in to illustrate the important points.

The first thing to be said is that the Canterbury Tales are incomplete. If we are to believe the original plan as described in the General Prologue, each of the 29 pilgrims was to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back, making 116 tales in all. As it happens, only 22 of the pilgrims get to tell a tale, with Chaucer himself being the only one to tell two. One of the tales, that of the Canon’s Yeoman, is told by somebody who turns up when the pilgrimage is well on its way and is therefore an “extra”.

Even then, a number of the tales we have are incomplete. On two occasions this is because the tales are interrupted by other pilgrims. Chaucer’s first tale, a piece of doggerel that is clearly a joke told against himself, is too much for “mine host” and he insists on Chaucer starting again with something else. The Monk is also interrupted. Other tales would appear to have fallen victim either to lost manuscripts or the poet running out of inspiration. Thus the Squire’s Tale is unfinished, and the Cook’s Tale, at only 58 lines, barely gets started.

However, even though the Canterbury Tales as we have them are only a fraction of what might have been expected, what we have is a remarkable and highly varied collection of medieval stories. There is everything here from classical romance (e.g. The Knight’s Tale) to bawdy romp (e.g. The Miller’s Tale) to fable (e.g. The Manciple’s Tale) to a long, involved sermon in prose (The Parson’s Tale).

Several of the tales are clearly re-tellings of those of other writers, such as Boccaccio and Petrarch. What Chaucer was doing was therefore taking some of the works of great European writers and making them available to an English-speaking audience. This was before the days of printing, so the audience would have been a small one, hearing the stories read to them by, for example, Chaucer himself. It is, however, notable that the Canterbury Tales was the first book printed at Westminster by William Caxton, in the 15th century.

Some of the tales would appear to be original to Chaucer, or only very loosely based on others. The Miller’s Tale may be one of these, likewise the tales of the Friar and the Summoner.

What sets the Canterbury Tales on a different plane from being just a collection of stories is the “frame tale” within which they are set. The tales belong to their tellers, to whom we are introduced in detail before the first tale is told. The General Prologue is itself a masterpiece of 14th century English poetry which can be read and enjoyed in its own right. After the opening scene-setting lines that explain the idea of the pilgrimage to the tomb of St Thomas Beckett at Canterbury, each pilgrim is described in turn. We get the impression that Chaucer has had a chat with each of them over a drink in the Tabard Inn on the night before they set off, and he has captured their characters from what they have told him.

Nearly all of them have a dark side, or a secret that is revealed thanks to a few pints of ale having been consumed. Chaucer is something of a Sherlock Holmes, spotting seemingly inconsequential details that go together to reveal the pilgrims’ true characters. We, the readers, are invited to read between the lines and appreciate that the apparent praise being heaped on these people by the poet has a very different purpose.

For example, the Prioress is a young lady who takes great pride in her appearance. She has smooth skin, is well-dressed, has excellent table manners, speaks French, and is clearly well used to polite society. But she is supposed to be in charge of a priory, having taken vows of poverty and chastity and responsible for the moral and spiritual welfare of her nuns. Clearly she is far more worldly than she should be, and presumably she is on this pilgrimage to flirt with whoever she may come across. Chaucer makes mention of how pained she is if she sees a mouse in a trap, and how she feeds her pet dogs with the choicest morsels. It is up to us to note that nothing is said about how she might react to a person in need, because clearly she stays as far away from the poor and needy as she can.

It is notable from the General Prologue just how many of the pilgrims make a living from the Church and how all of them, except the Parson, are thoroughly disreputable in their own way. The Pardoner is a conman, selling worthless pieces of paper to gullible people who believe that they will be saved from Hell by so doing. The Friar is similarly out for what he can get, and the Summoner’s job is to haul people before the Church courts unless they can buy him off instead.

As the pilgrimage proceeds, the characters interact with each other, notably the Friar and the Summoner who clearly loathe each other deeply. There is plenty of interplay in between their tales, and the tales they tell are aimed at each other, with the Friar telling a tale about a wicked Summoner and the Summoner returning the “compliment”.

Other pilgrims also tell tales that are in tune with their characters. The Knight’s Tale, although it has a classical background, is based on the medieval concept of “courtly love” which would have been familiar to its teller. This is followed by a parody of the courtly love story in the Miller’s Tale, a bawdy story in which a lively young woman gets the better of her husband and an unwelcome lover in a story that is very rude but also very funny. This is entirely in keeping with the character of the Miller as presented to us in the General Prologue.

There is a theme running through several of the tales that concerns the relative positions that husbands and wives should have in a marriage. Indeed, a sequence of the tales, beginning with that of the Wife of Bath, has been designated by critics as the “Marriage Group”. The feisty and much-married Wife (who is the only pilgrim not to follow a trade or profession) is an early exponent of “women’s lib” who believes that the woman should be the dominant partner in a marriage. She gives a long speech, saying just as much, before she even starts to tell a tale. This serves to make her the most complex and interesting of Chaucer’s characters, and the best-drawn female character in any work of literature before Shakespeare. Her Tale, which is a re-telling of the “loathly lady” fable in which a hag offers to be “fair or foul”, backs up her prologue by showing the wisdom of leaving the choice to the lady.

The Clerk tells a tale in which a husband has complete domination over an obedient wife, although the teller does not advocate such behaviour, and the Merchant then tells the story of January and May, which parallels the earlier Miller’s Tale with its story of a young wife cuckolding an older husband, but on this occasion not getting away with it. The Franklin’s Tale brings the group to a close by showing that dominance either way in a marriage is not to be recommended, but forgiveness and tolerance are the keys to married bliss.

As stated earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole of the Canterbury Tales in a short article. Suffice it to say that there is a whole wealth of humour, wisdom, adventure and morality in this collection, as well as a host of characters, both inside the tales and without, who serve to give the modern reader a very vivid picture of life in England more than 600 years ago.