Chaucer's Pale Blue Dot

 Moving towards the conclusion of Troilus and Criseyde —"This litel spot of erthe" -

 

The wraththe, as I began yow for to seye,

Of Troilus, the Grekes boughten dere;

For thousandes his hondes maden deye,

As he that was with-outen any pere,

Save Ector, in his tyme, as I can here.

But weylaway, save only goddes wille,

Dispitously him slough the fiers Achille.

 

And whan that he was slayn in this manere

His lighte goost ful blisfully is went

Up to the holownesse of the seventh spere,

In convers letinge every element;

And ther he saugh, with ful avysement,

The erratik sterres, herkeninge armonye

With sownes fulle of hevenish melodye.

 

And down from thennes faste he gan avyse

This litel spot of erthe, that with the see

Embraced is, and fully gan despyse

This wrecched world, and held al vanitee

To respect of the pleyn felicitee

That is in hevene above; and at the laste,

Ther he was slayn, his loking doun he caste;

 

And in him-self he lough right at the wo

Of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste;

And dampned al our werk that folweth so

The blinde lust, the which that may not laste

And sholden al our herte on hevene caste,

And forth he wente, shortly for to telle,

Ther as Mercurie sorted him to dwelle.

 

 

—oOo—

Troilus to Criseyde

From Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. 

 

 Troilus to Criseyde (196-203)

 

And if yow lyketh knowen of the fare

Of me, whos wo ther may no wight discryve,

I can no more but, cheste of every care,

At wrytinge of this lettre I was on-lyve

Al redy out my woful gost to dryve;

Which I delaye, and holde him yet in honde,

Upon the sight of matere of your sonde.

 

Myn eyen two, in veyn with which I see,

Of sorweful teres salte arn waken welles;

My song, in pleynte of myn adversitee;

My good in harm; myn ese eek waken helle is.

My joye, in wo; I can sey you nought elles,

But turned is, for which my lyf I warie,

Everich joye or ese in his contrarie.

 

Which with your cominge hoom ayein to Troye

Ye may redresse, and, more a thousand sythe

Than ever ich hadde, encresen in me joye.

For was ther never herte yet so blythe

To han his lyf, as I shal been as swythe

As I youw see; and, though no maner routhe

Commeve yow, yet thinketh on your trouthe.

 

And if so be my gilt hath deeth deserved,

Or if you list no more up-on me see,

In guerdon yet of that I have you served,

Biseche I yow, myn hertes lady free,

That here-upon ye wolden wryte me,

For love of god, my righte lode-sterre,

Ther deeth may make an ende of al my werre.

 

If other cause aught doth yow for to dwelle,

That with your lettre ye me recomforte;

For though to me your absence is an helle,

With pacience I wol my wo comporte,

And with your lettre of hope I wol desporte,

Now wryteth, swete, and lat me thus not pleyne;

With hope, or deeth, delivereth me fro peyne.

 

Y-wis, myn owene dere herte trewe,

I woot that, whan ye next up-on me see,

So lost have I myn hele and eek myn hewe,

Criseyde shal nought conne knowe me?

Y-wis, myn hertes day, my lady free,

So thursteth ay myn herte to biholde

Your beautee, that my lyf unnethe I holde.

 

I sey no more, al have I for to seye,

To you wel more than I telle may;

But whether that ye do me live or deye,

Yet pray I god, so yeve youw right good day.

And fareth wel, goodly fayre fresshe may,

As ye that lyf or deeth mee may commaunde;

And to your trouthe ay me recommaunde.

 

With hele swich that, but ye yeven me

The same hele, I shal noon hele have,

In you lyth, whan yow list that it so be,

The day in which me clothen shal my grave.

In yow my lyf, in yow mifht for to save

Me from disese of alle peynes smerte;

And fare now wel, myn owene swete herte!

 

 

—oOo—

The House of Rumour

 

Vanity Fea: The House of Rumour

The Age of Chaucer

 From A Short History of English Literature, 2nd ed., by Robert Barnard (Blackwell, 1994).

1. THE AGE OF CHAUCER

England in the mid-fourteenth century, the England in which Chaucer, Langland and the author of Gawain grew up, was to all appearances a country cresting a wave of success. In Edward III it had a glamorous, efficient king, and one who appreciated the value of the outward show of monarchy—pageantry, honours, patronage. His court was a centre of culture and chivalry renowned over Europe. With the French monarchy relatively weak, England was losing its status as a dim little off-shore island and attaining the rank of European power. Its seamen were forging links  all over Europe an North Africa; its merchants were prospering, forming the beginnings of a solid middle-class. It was a confident, exuberant age. The king had just founded the greatest order of English chivalry, the Order of the Garter, basing it on a celebrated act of chivalry performed by the king towards the Countess of Salisbury. 

The reality was rather different—just as the reality behind the garter incident was rather different (according to one account the Countess was wife of the king's best friend, and he raped her). The Black Death of 1348, and subsequent plagues only slightly less terrible, had undermined the whole basis of feudal society, and the Peasant's revolt of 1381 and the civil wars of the next century were evidence of the decline and ultimate collapse of the traditional medieval class structure. Edward's French wars in pursuit of a dubious claim to the French crown over-stretched English resources and proved a chimera which was to delude English kings and impoverish their country for a century. Edward's England, then, was a glorious structure built on dangerously flimsy foundations—a thriving, exciting, fluid age, which finds brilliant expression in the work of its greatest poet. 

Geoffrey Chaucer (?1340-1400) is the first English writer whom we today can read with anything like ease and he is one who sepaks with particular directness to the modern reader. He was a servant of the court and on occasion its emissary abroad, yet he was born into the middle class which was then so rapidly consolidating its position. Thus his contacts ranged from the highest to the lowest in this changing, threatened, feudal society, and with his extraordinary appetite for all manifestations of human aspiration and human folly he was abrle to capture the essence of fourteenth-century life in a way no contemporary in Britain or on the Continent, could rival.

The plan of Chaucer's last and greatest work, The Canterbury Tales, was not original: to gather together a heterogenous collection of people and have them tell a series of stories—moral stories, romantic stories, bawdy stories, fables. It is Chaucer's genius for characterization and his feeling for social relationships, for the personal, moral and class tensions between people, that give his work a warmth and depth that other similar medieval collections lack. The people on his pilgrimage are described in the masterly 'General Prologue.' they frequently sepak for themseves in the prologues to the 'Tales,' they reveal—often unconsciously—further aspects of their natures in their choice of tale and manner of telling it, and in the conversations, disputes and fights that occur between the tales we get a further sense of medieval humanity at its most unzipped and outrageous.

The pictures of the pilgrims in the 'General Prologue' are little masterpieces of characterization in which what seems at first sight to be a mere accumulation of detail, often quite haphazard, turns out on closer reading to be full of sly innuendo and subtle juxtapositions. If the Prioress wears a brooch with the inscription Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Conquers All), is it love of God or of man that is referred to? What exactly does it mean when we are told that the Shipman, if he took prisoners by sea, 'by water he sent them home to every land'? (It means he threw them into the water to drown). What precisely does Chaucer mean to imply when he says that the Wife of Bath (for whom the pilgrimage was a combination of package tour and husband-hunt) was very good at 'wandering by the way'? Two lines, placed together, will illuminate a character and his profession. The excellence of the Cook's creamed chicken is placed next to a description of the foul ulcer on his shin; the description of the worldly monk as a fine prelate comes next to a description of his gourmet taste in food; in the portrait of the Wife of Bath we get this: 

She was a worthy woman all her live:

Husbands at chruche door she hadde five...

Sometimes these characters speak with a naturalness or an intensity that like a trumpet brings down the walls of the centuries between us and them. 'Alas, alas, that ever love was sin!' cries the Wife of Bath—who apart from the five husbands has enjoyed 'other company in youth',' so she clearly hasn't been unduly inhibited. 'Let Austin have his swink to him reserved!' ('Let Saint Augustine do his own bl— work!' expostulates the Monk, when he is reminded that the founder of his religious order included hard work among the daily tasks of the monks. 

In the tales these people tell, too, we have a wonderful picture of all sides of medieval life, but there is also that tang of modernity that makes our heart stop as we relize our kinship with them. The Pardoner tells his story of the riotous group of young men who decide to seek out and kill Death—and we recognize the teenage rowdies in our own streets. The Nun's Priest tells an animal fable about a about a chicken run—about Chauntecleer who with his six wives, his parade of learning, and his overwhelming conceit is the perfect male chauvinist cock—and even in these days we recognize pale shadows of his type. The bawdy tales of the Miller and the Reeve are funny today precisely because of the swift, economical, humane delineation of characters we can recognize: the story of someone getting branded on the bare behind may be funny on first reading, but it is only funny on second reading if you are interested in the man behind the behind.

Every sort of story is here, and every technique of story-telling in its most modern form. The Wife of Bath's Prologue (longer and better than her actual Tale) tells in shameless detail how she gained mastery over one after another of her husbands, and one gropes towards Joyce's Molly Bloom for comparisons; the Reeve's Tale tells a story of complicated changings of bed-partners which reminds us of nothing so much as a modern French farce. At one point in the Nun's Priest's Tale Chauntecleer, who has dreamed he has been seized by a fox, launches into an enormously long disquisition on the theory of dreams, their meaning in history and literature, intended to put down his silly wives who have pooh-poohed the prophetic significance of his dream. so long and rambling is it that we are about to say how medieval and dated this all is when suddenly Chauntecleer end his lecture and is so puffed up with his learning and his debating victory over his wives that he forgets the point of the whole thing, jumps down into the hen-run—and is seized by a fox. The long disquisition has been an example of Chaucer's mastery of one of the gifts of a great story-teller—that of timing.

The Canterbury Tales were unfinished at Chaucer's death. The greatest long poem he completed was the slightly earlier Troilus and Criseyde, a superb re-working of one of the most popular medieval accretions to the legends of Troy. The framework is superficially a courtly love stroy—of how prince Troilus courts the lovely widow Criseyde, how she is ent to join her father in the Grecian camp, and is there unfaithful to him. But Chaucer's treatment of this simple story is wholly modern in tone, particularly in its treatment of the central characters. Criseyde is the first depiction in depth of a woman in our literature, and still one of the finest. She is a widow, contentedin her solitude and independence: 

I am myn owne woman, wll at ease...

Shal noon housbonde seyn to me 'checkmate!'

For whither they ben full of jealousye,

Or masterful, or loven noveltye.    (novelty)

Chaucer's sympathy with Criseyde shows itself in the way he meticulously dtails the considerations that drive her into Troilus's arms: since her father's defection to the Greeks she is alone in a hostile city; flattered by the attentions of a Prince, she feels the stars are ordaining that she fall to him; she is pestered by her cousin Pandarus, who acts as pimp for his friend Troilus. From being the prototype of the faithless woman, as she is in much of medieval literature, Chaucer transforms Criseyde into the tragic symbol of war's efffects on human relationships and fates.

The unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, writing at around the same time as Chaucer, seems at first sight more remote from the present-day reader: his alliterative verse-form was old-fashioned even in his own day; his dialect, that of North-West England, is much more difficult for us; and his subject-matter does not immediately call on us to claim kinship with medieval man, as Chaucer's does in his best tales. Sir Gawain is a story of King Arthur's knights, but the courtly romance is married to archetypal folk myths and to religion: the knights are challenged at Christmas by a green knight—who is beheaded, yet speaks on and issues a challenge for the succeeding Christmas. But there is in fact nothing primitive in this stroy-teller's art: behind the odd mixture of the courtly, the Christian and the mythic is a delicate morality about man's duty—as knight, as lover, as Christian. By involving Sir Gawain in a supernatural challenge the author nullifies mny of his attributes as a perfect knight; and when he has him sexually tempted by his host's wife he involves him in delicate questions of conscience concerning his duty as knight and his duty to his host—questions that can be resolved only by marrying courtly and Christian codes. Through both these plot elements he succeeded in relating the idealized world of Arthur with the real world he knew. If Gawain demands more of us, as readers, than Chaucer does, we are ultimately convinced we are in the presence of as great an artist. This feeling is augmented by the other poems probably by him bound into the same single surviving manuscript—particularly Pearl, a lament for the loss of his daughter that goes some way towards negativing Barbara Tuchman's judgment that medieval man was uninterested in children, and that 'emotion in relation to them rarely appears in art or literature'.

The other major work of the age of Chaucer, The Vision of Piers Plowman, is also written in the alliterative verse style of Gawain, but it displays a very different kind of mind. Its author—William Langland—is a name to us only, but he is usually conjectured to be a rural priest, and one agonized by the social abuses of his time. Using the framework of a dream—a favourite medieval device—the poem covers a wide spectrum from social satire to religious allegory, as the author puts foward his notion of what a truly Christian community would be, and how sadly far the England he knows falls short of it. His hatred of pride, greed and ostentation, his almost 'nonconformist' conscience, ally him with later writers in the puritan tradition such as the Milton of Lycidas and John Bunyan. And like Bunyan he retained his popularity with ordinary readers long after his own time—at least until the Elizabethan age. 

After his inexplicably rich harvest of literary genius in the fifteeenth century is a sad, barren period. The splendour of Edward's court gave way to popular discontent, factional strife and the desolating futility of the Wars of the Roses, with two factions of noble thugs disputing a crown that increasingly seemed not worth the winning. In England, in spite of the establishment of Caxton's printing press, literary activity was at its lowest ebb—at best imitative, uncertain of aim, fleeing from the disagreable present into nostalgia. Even Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur—a collection and retelling of the early French and English legends of King Arthur—while a superb example of the potential of English prose, nevertheless at times seems enervated and lacking in conviction, as if the knightly ideal the author was celebrating seemed even to himself remote and impossible in a country torn apart by its own nobility.

The richest poetic harvest was late in the century in Scotland. This kingdom, enjoying unusual stability under a succession of talented Stuart kings, produced several poets of consequence, notably Robert Henryson (?1430-?1506) and William Dunbar (?1460-1513). Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is a sort of sequel to Chaucer's poem in which the faithless Cressid contracts leprosy. Its dialect (and perhaps its subject) will always prevent its enjoying the wide popularity of Chaucer's poem, yet it can be mentioned in the same breath without bathos, which is more than can be said of most fifteenth-century poems inspired by Chaucer. And Dunbar's famous 'Lament for the Makaris' (or poets), with its haunting, disturbing refrain Timor mortis conturbat me (I am troubled by the fear of death) may be taken as a requiem for a sad, confused, barren century:

The state of man does change and vary

Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary     (sorry)

Now dansand merry, now like to die;

        Timor mortis conturbat me...

He takis the knichtis in to field 

Enarmit under helm and shield, 

Victor he is at all mellie         (battles)

        Timor mortis conturbat me.

 

 

Piers Plowman (In Our Time)

 

—oOo—

 

 

(...)

Introduction to Chaucer (3 parts)

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer (/ˈtʃɔːsər/; c. 1343 -- 25 October 1400), known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. While he achieved fame during his lifetime as an author, philosopher, alchemist and astronomer, composing a scientific treatise on the astrolabe for his ten year-old son Lewis, Chaucer also maintained an active career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Among his many works, which include The Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde, he is best known today for The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is a crucial figure in developing the legitimacy of the vernacular, Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin.

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century. The tales (mostly written in verse although some are in prose) are told as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return.

Following a long list of works written earlier in his career, including Troilus and Criseyde, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowls, the Canterbury Tales was Chaucer's magnum opus. He uses the tales and the descriptions of its characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, and particularly of the Church. Structurally, the collection resembles The Decameron, which Chaucer may have read during his first diplomatic mission to Italy in 1372.


© ''IntelliQuest World's 100 Greatest Books'' 1995

This audio collection contains a treasury of 100 classic books and includes info on the life and times of the author, the theme of the book, the characters, the story outline, a concise yet detailed abridgement of the story and a discussion of the values that make each book one of the great classical works of literature.

Jason Tondro on the Canterbury Tales

—oOo—

THE CANTERBURY TALES by Geoffrey Chaucer - FULL AudioBook | Part 1 of 2

Chaucer, Lesson 1: Historical Context for the Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Founder of Our Language

Mi bibliografía de Chaucer

Chaucer.G by gastonmieres

The Canterbury Tales

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's most celebrated work probably designed about 1387 and extending to 17,000 lines in prose and verse of various metres (though the predominant form is the rhyming couplet). The General Prologue describes the meeting of 29 pilgrims in the Tabard Inn in Southwark (in fact they add up to 31; it has been suggested that the prioress's 'preestes three' in line 164 may be an error since only one 'Nun's Priest' is mentioned in the body of the work). Detailed pen-pictures are given of 21 of them, vividly described but perhaps corresponding to traditional lists of the orders of society, clerical and lay (see J. Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 1973). The host (see BAILLY) proposes that the pilgrims should shorten the road by telling four stories each, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back; he will accompany them and award a free supper on their return to the teller of the best story. The work is incomplete; only 23 pilgrims tell stories, and there are only 24 stories told altogether (Chaucer tells two). In the scheme the stories are linked by narrative exchanges between the pilgrims and by prologues and epilogues to the tales; but this aspect of the work is also very incomplete. It is uncertain even, in what order the stories are meant to come; the evidence of the manuscripts and of geographical references is conflicting, as is the scholarly interpretation of that evidence. The order that follows is that of the Ellesmere manuscipt, followed in the best complete edition of Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, (ed. L. D. Benson et al., 1988).

 

(1) 'The Knight's Tale', a shortened version of the Teseida of Boccaccio, the story of the love of Palamon and Arcite (told again in Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen), prisoners of Theseus king of Athens, for Emelyie, sister of Hippolyta queen of the Amazons, whom Theseus has married.  The rivals compete for her in a tournament. Palamon is defeated, but Arcite, the favourite of Mars, at the moment of his triumph is thrown and injured by his horse through the intervention of Venus and Saturn, and dies. Palamon and Emelye, after prolonged mourning for Arcite, are united. Riverside follows the Ellesmere division of the tale into four parts, but it is not so divided in all the manuscripts. An interesting interpretation of the tale as ironic is given by Terry Jones in Chaucer's Knight (1978).

(2) 'The Miller's Tale', a ribald story of the deception, first of a husband (a carpenter) through the prediction of a second flood, and secondly of a lover who expects to kiss the lady's lips but kisses instead her 'nether eye'. He avenges himself on her lover for this humiliation with a red-hot ploughshare. The Tale has been said to be a parody of a courtly-love story.

(3) 'The Reeve's Tale' is a fabliau about two clerks who are robbed by a miller of some of the meal which they take to his mill to be ground, and who take their vengeance by sleeping with the miller's wife and daughter. There are two manuscript versions of a French analogue in Bryan and Dempster, Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1941), 126-47, 'Le Meunier et les II clers'. In Chaucer's context, it is an obvious rejoinder to the miller's tale of the duping of a carpenter, the reeve's profession.

(4) 'The Cook's Tale' of Perkyn Revelour only extends to 58 lines before it breaks off. It is another ribald fabliau which ends with the introduction of a prostitute, and it has been suggested that Chaucer may have decided that the occurrence of three indecent tales together was unbalanced. The tale of Gamelyn, not by Chaucer, is introduced for the cook in some manuscripts. The cook himself, Roger (by nickname traditionally Hodge) of Ware (l. 4336), has been identified with an attested cook of that name. See Riverside, p. 814.

(5) 'The Man of Law's Tale' is the story of Constance, daughter of a Christian emperor of Rome, who marries the sultan of Syria on condition that he become a Christian and who is cast adrift on a boat because of the machinations of the sultan's jealous mother. It is a frequently told medieval story, paralleled by the romance Emaré and by Gower's Constance story in Confessio Amantis, ii. 587ff.; there is argument about the priority of Chaucer's and Gower's versions. It is certain, at least, that Chaucer's is based on a passage in the early 14th-cent. Anglo-Norman Chronicle by Trivet. Both Trivet's and Gower's versions are in Bryan and Dempster.

(6) 'The Wife of Bath's Tale' is preceded by an 856-line prologue in which she condemns celibacy by describing her life with her five late husbands, in the course of which Chaucer draws widely on the medieval anti-feminist tradition, especially on Jean de Meun's La Vielle (the Duenna) in the Roman de la Rose. After this vigorous, learned, and colourful narrative, the following tale, though appropriate, seems rather flat. It is the story of 'the loathly lady' (paralleled by Gower's 'Tale of Florent' in Confessio Amantis, i. 1396 ff., and by the romance Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell, edited in D. B. Sands, Middle English Verse Romances, 323-47) in which a knight is asked to answer the question, 'what do women most desire?' The correct answer, 'sovereignty', is told him by a hideous old witch on condition that he marry her; when he does she is restored to youth and beauty. Since Kittredge (Chaucer and His Poetry, 1915, 185 ff.) it has generally been thought that this Prologue-Tale sets in motion a discussion of marriage, 'The Marriage Group', which is taken up (after interruptions) by the clerk, the merchant, and the franklin (see 9, 10, 12 below).

(7) 'The Friar's Tale' tells how a summoner meets the devil dressed as a yeoman and they agree to share out what they are given. They come upon a carter who curses his horse, commending it to the devil; the summoner asks the devil why he does not take the horse thus committed to him and the devil replies that it is because the commendation does not come from the heart. Later they visit an old woman from whom the summoner attempts to extort twelve pence, whereupon she commends him to the devil. The devil carries him off to hell because her curse was from the heart. The story is widely attested in popular tradition, and its motif is referred to as ex corde, 'from the heart'. Chaucer's exact source is not known, but it is clear that the friar tells it to enrage the summoner on the pilgrimage, who interrupts the narrative and rejoins with a scurrilous and discreditable story about a friar.

(8) 'The Summoner's Tale' tells of a greedy friar who undertakes to divide a deathbed legacy amongst his community; he receives a fart and has to devise an ingenious stratagem to divide it with perfect justice.

(9) 'The Clerk's Tale', which the poet tells us he took from Petrarch, was translated into Latin by the latter from the Italian version of Boccaccio in The Decameron (Day 10, Tale 10). Boccaccio was the first writer (in 1353) to take the story from popular currency, and there are several versions of the story in Italian, Latin, and French before Chaucer's (indeed it is clear that Chaucer's version is rather more dependent on a French prose version than on Petrarch's Latin). The story tells of patient Griselda and her trials by her husband, the Marquis Walter. Chaucer's version has more hints of criticism in the relentless husband than any of his predecessors (except Boccaccio, whose narrator frowns on Gualtieri's 'strange desire' to try his wife's obedience). Apologists for 'The Marriage Group' (see 6 above) regard the tale as a response to the wife of Bath, partly because the Clerk concludes with an expression of good will towards her (IV. 1170 ff.).

(10) 'The Merchant's Tale', in which the merchant, prompted by the tale of Griselda's extreme obedience, tells his 'Tale' of January and May, the old husband with his young wife, and the problems with obedient fidelity involved in this relationship. After a lengthy review of the pros and cons of taking a young wife, January ignores the good advice of Justinus in favour of the time serving opinion of Placebo and marries May. When he goes blind she makes love to her suitor Damyan in a pear-tree round which January wraps his arms. Pluto mischievously restores January's sight at this point, but Proserpine inspires May to explain that the restoration of his sight was brought about by her activities in the pear-tree and that this had been their purpose. Critics have argued about the relative proportions of mordancy and humour in the tale; see E. Talbot Donaldson in Speaking of Chaucer (1970), 30-45. There are parallels to the various sections of the story in French, Latin, Italian, and German (see D. S. Brewer (ed.), Medieval Comic Tales, 1973, German no. 3 and Latin, (o)).

 

(11) 'The Squire's Tale', of Cambuscan, king of Tartary, to whom on his birthday an envoy from the king of Arabia brings magic gifts, including a ring for the king's daughter Canacee, which enables her to understand the language of birds. A female falcon tells Canacee the story of her own desertion by a tercelet. The tale is incomplete but it seems likely that Chaucer meant to finish it, judging from the fact that there is no suggestion that it is unfinished in the laudatory words of the franklin that follow it (V. 673 ff.). The precise origin of the tale is unknown, but a number of parallels are suggested by H. S. V. Jones in Bryan and Dempster, pp. 357-76.

(12) 'The Franklin's Tale', of Dorigen, wife of Arveragus, who to escape the attentions of her suitor, the squire Aurelius, makes her consent depend upon an impossible condition, that all the rocks on the coast of Brittany be removed. When this condition is realized by the aid of a magician, the suitor, from a generous remorse, releases her from her promise. Chaucer states that the tale is taken from a 'breton lay', but if this is true, the original is lost. There are a number of parallels in medieval literature, of which the closest is Boccaccio's Il filocolo, Question  4. See N. R. Hayely, Chaucer's Boccaccio (1980).

(13) 'The Physician's Tale' tells of Virginia who, at her own request, is killed by her father to escape the designs of the corrupt judge Appius. The original source is Livy's History, and this is what Chaucer cites, though his version seems to rely principally on the Roman de la rose, ll. 5589-658, by Jean de Meun.

(14) 'The Pardoner's Tale' follows a prologue in which he declares his own covetousness, and takes covetousness as its theme, relating it to other sins: drunkenness, gluttony, gambling, and swearing. Three rioters set out to find Death who has killed their companion; a mysterious old man tells them they will find him under a particular tree, but when they get there they find instead a heap of gold. By aiming to cheat each other in possessing the gold they kill each other. The character of the pardoner in the prologue here is related to Faus Semblant (False Seeming) in Jean de Meun's part of the Roman de la Rose, ll. 11065-972 (a section corresponding to the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose, Fragment C, lines 67061 ff.: Robinson, pp. 621 ff.). There are many analogues for the tale, in Latin, Italian, and German, but Chaucer's exact source, if he had one, is not known.

(15) 'The Shipman's Tale.' There is a similar story in The Decameron (Day 8, Tale 1). The wife of a niggardly merchant asks the loan of a hundred francs from a priest to buy finery. The priest borrows the sum from the merchant and hands it to the wife, and the wife grants him her favours. On the merchant's return from a journey the priest tells him that he has repaid the sum to the wife, who cannot deny receiving it.

(16) 'The Prioress's Tale' tells of the murder of a child by Jews because he sings a Marian hymn while passing through their quarter and of the discovery of his body because of its continued singing of the hymn after death. There are a great many parallels for the story. Some critics, perhaps anachronistically, see the bland anti-Semitism of the story as a comment on the uncritical nature of the prioress.

(17) 'Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas' is a witty and elegant parody of the contemporary romance, both in its subject and in the insubstantiality of its tail-rhyme form. Its butts are no doubt general, but it can perhaps be taken to have special reference to the heroes it catalogues (VII. 898-900): Horn Child, the legend of Ypotys, Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, the unidentified Pleyndamour, and Libeaus Desconus. It is closest, it has been argued, to the last of these.

(18) When the Host interrupts the tale of Sir Thopas, Chaucer moves to the opposite extreme with a heavy prose homily, 'The Tale of Melibeus'. This story of the impetuous Melibeus and his wise wife Prudence dates from Italy in the 1240s, when the story was written in Latin prose for his third son by Albertano of Brescia. Chaucer's immediate source was the 1336 version in French prose by Renaud de Louens.

(19) 'The Monk's Tale' is composed of a number of 'tragedies' of persons fallen from high estate, taken from different authors and arranged on the model of Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. The tale is in eight-line stanzas.

(20) 'The Nun's Priest's Tale' is related to the French cycle of Renart (see Reynard), telling of a fox that beguiled a cock by praising his father's singing and was in turn beguiled by him into losing him by pausing to boast at his victory. The mock-heroic story is full of rhetoric and exempla, and it is one of the most admired of the Tales, regarded as the most typically 'Chaucerian' in tone and content.  The fable is very familiar, but the parallels to Chaucer's treatment of it are not very close. The famous ending of the tale invites the reader to 'take the morality' of the Tale in spite of its apparent lightness of substance, on the grounds that St Paul says everything has some moral; this invitation has been taken with surprising solemnity by many critics.

(21) 'The Second Nun's Tale', in rhyme-royal, is perhaps translated from the life of St Cecilia in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. It describes the miracles and martyrdom of the noble Roman maiden Cecilia and her husband Valerian.

(22) 'The Canon's Yeoman's Tale' is told by a character who joins the pilgrims at this late stage (VIII. 554 ff.) with his master, the dubious canon whose alchemical skills the yeoman praises. The first 200 lines of the tale tell of the Alchemist's arcane practice and its futility, before proceeding to the tale proper which tales of how an alchemical canon (who is not his master, he protests, perhaps suggesting that it is) tricks a priest out of £40 by pretending to teach him the art of making precious metals. The dishonesty of the alchemists was much discussed and condemned in the 14th cent.; there is a close analogue to Chaucer's story in one of the Novelle of Sercambi (included in Bryan and Dempster, pp. 694-5). The most significant literary parallel, of course, is Jonson's The Alchemist.

(23) 'The Manciple's Tale' is the fable of the tell-tale crow, told by many authors from Ovid in Metamorphoses (2. 531-62) onwards. Phebus (Phoebus) has a crow which is white and can speak. It reveals to Phebus the infidelity of his wife (nameless in Chaucer, but Coronis in Ovid and most of the writers who follow him) and Phebus kills her in a rage. Then, in remorse, he plucks out the crow's white feathers, deprives it of speech and throws it 'unto the devel', which is why crows are now black. A very similar version of the story is told in Gower's Confessio Amantis (iii. 768-835), and there are other examples by Guillaume de Machaut and in the Ovide moralisé (c. 1324). As well as these, J. A. Work in Bryan and Dempster edits as analogues a story from The Seven Sages of Rome which does not name Phebus and which exchanges the fates of wife and bird, as well as some sententious parallels from Boethius and Jean de Meun.

(24) 'The Parson's Tale' which concludes the work (and was, no doubt, meant to, even if the main body of the Tales is incomplete) is a long prose treatise, ostensibly on Penitence but dealing at most length with the Seven Deadly Sins. The two principal sources are Raymund de Pennaforte's Summa (dating from the 1220s) for the sections on Penitence, and Guilielmus Peraldu's Summa Vitiorum (probably from the 1250s) for the Seven Deadly Sins.

Most manuscripts have 'The Parson's Tale' leading straight into Chaucer's closing 'Retracciouns' in which he takes leave of his book. He asks forgiveness of God for his 'translacions and enditynges of worldly vanities', including 'The Tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into [i.e. tend towards] synne'. But this rhetorical conclusion need not be read as a revocation of his work by the poet; following St Augustine's Retractationes, many medieval works end by distancing the writer from the non-spiritual elements in his work: the Author's Epilogue in The Decameron and Chaucer's Troilus are other familiar examples. See N. F. Blake, The Canterbury Tales, Edited from the Hengwrt Manuscript (1980); H. Cooper, The Canterbury Tales (1989). Also an edition by V. A. Kolve and G. Olsen (1989).

The Canterbury Tales (Project Gutenberg)

 

—oOo—

The House of Rumour

O la Red Social de la Información en el siglo catorce—la Internet medieval.

 

El poema alegórico de Chaucer The House of Fame concluye con un episodio en el que el poeta viaja, en su sueño, desde la Casa de la Fama a la Casa del Rumor, en busca de noticias, curiosidades y cotilleo. Esta Casa del Rumor, paraíso de la sobreinformación, de la fiebre por la actualidad, de la rumorología, y de la polilogia inabarcable, es pintada aquí de manera vívida y memorable. Aunque me parece que ha hallado su encarnación propia y definitiva en la red que nos ocupa ahora. Y de hecho Chaucer describe la Casa del Rumor como un laberinto reticular, una especie de gran maraña móvil hecha de mimbres enlazados, que rueda dando tumbos de aquí para allá, atravesada por vientos y susurros, una red inestable de voces e innovaciones. Por eso considero que Chaucer vio en su sueño ondas del futuro, que ya se sabe tiende a llevar a un extremo lo que en el pasado parecía exageración o parodia—los mentideros de palacio o de la City del siglo XIV se quedan chiquitos hoy, pero algo prometían ya. Aqui hay un pasaje sobre el recalentamiento de la información, las Fake News y los memes víricos que puede considerarse uno de los pasajes clásicos al respecto. La alegoría del Rumor, claro, tiene antecedentes al menos desde el libro IV de la Eneida.

__________

But such a congregatioun
Of folk, as I saw roam about,
Some within and some without,
Was never seen, nor shall be eft,*                *again, hereafter
That, certes, in the world n' is* left                      *is not
So many formed by Nature,
Nor dead so many a creature,
That well unnethes* in that place                         *scarcely
Had I a foote breadth of space;
And ev'ry wight that I saw there
Rown'd* evereach in other's ear                          *whispered
A newe tiding privily,
Or elles told all openly
Right thus, and saide, "Know'st not thou
What is betid,* lo! righte now?"                          *happened
"No," quoth he; "telle me what."
And then he told him this and that,
And swore thereto, that it was sooth;
"Thus hath he said," and "Thus he do'th,"
And "Thus shall 't be," and "Thus heard I say
"That shall be found, that dare I lay;"*                     *wager
That all the folk that is alive
Have not the cunning to descrive*                         *describe
The thinges that I hearde there,
What aloud, and what in th'ear.
But all the wonder most was this;
When one had heard a thing, y-wis,
He came straight to another wight,
And gan him tellen anon right
The same tale that to him was told,
Or it a furlong way was old,
And gan somewhat for to eche*                             *eke, add
To this tiding in his speech,
More than it ever spoken was.
And not so soon departed n'as*                                 *was
He from him, than that he met
With the third; and *ere he let
Any stound,* he told him als';           *without delaying a moment*
Were the tidings true or false,
Yet would he tell it natheless,
And evermore with more increase
Than it was erst.* Thus north and south                   *at first
Went ev'ry tiding from mouth to mouth,
And that increasing evermo',
As fire is wont to *quick and go*        *become alive, and spread*
From a spark y-sprung amiss,
Till all a city burnt up is.
And when that it was full up-sprung,
And waxen* more on ev'ry tongue                          *increased
Than e'er it was, it went anon
Up to a window out to go'n;
Or, but it mighte thereout pass,
It gan creep out at some crevass,*                  *crevice, chink
And fly forth faste for the nonce.
And sometimes saw I there at once
*A leasing, and a sad sooth saw,*       *a falsehood and an earnest
That gan *of adventure* draw true saying*        *by chance
Out at a window for to pace;
And when they metten in that place,
They were checked both the two,
And neither of them might out go;
For other so they gan *to crowd,*       *push, squeeze, each other*
Till each of them gan cryen loud,
"Let me go first!" -- "Nay, but let me!
And here I will ensure thee,
With vowes, if thou wilt do so,
That I shall never from thee go,
But be thine owen sworen brother!
We will us medle* each with other,                          *mingle
That no man, be he ne'er so wroth,
Shall have one of us two, but both
At ones, as *beside his leave,*                *despite his desire*
Come we at morning or at eve,
Be we cried or *still y-rowned."*               *quietly whispered*
Thus saw I false and sooth, compouned,*                 *compounded
Together fly for one tiding.
Then out at holes gan to wring*                  *squeeze, struggle
Every tiding straight to Fame;
And she gan give to each his name
After her disposition,
And gave them eke duration,
Some to wax and wane soon,
As doth the faire white moon;
And let them go. There might I see
Winged wonders full fast flee,
Twenty thousand in a rout,*                                *company
As Aeolus them blew about.
And, Lord! this House in alle times
Was full of shipmen and pilgrimes,
With *scrippes bretfull of leasings,*        *wallets brimful of falsehoods*
Entremedled with tidings*                             *true stories
And eke alone by themselve.
And many thousand times twelve
Saw I eke of these pardoners,
Couriers, and eke messengers,
With boistes* crammed full of lies                           *boxes
As ever vessel was with lyes.*                        *lees of wine
And as I altherfaste* went                          *with all speed
About, and did all mine intent
Me for to play and for to lear,*        *to amuse and instruct myself
And eke a tiding for to hear
That I had heard of some country,
That shall not now be told for me; --
For it no need is, readily;
Folk can sing it better than I.
For all must out, or late or rath,*                           *soon
All the sheaves in the lath;*                            *barn
I heard a greate noise withal
In a corner of the hall,
Where men of love tidings told;
And I gan thitherward behold,
For I saw running ev'ry wight
As fast as that they hadde might,
And ev'reach cried, "What thing is that?"
And some said, "I know never what."
And when they were all on a heap,
Those behinde gan up leap,
And clomb* upon each other fast,                      *climbed
And up the noise on high they cast,
And trodden fast on others' heels,
And stamp'd, as men do after eels...

_________

En este caos termina el poema de Chaucer, apenas sosegado por la visión inacabada de "un hombre de gran autoridad" con la que se interrumpe el poema. Aquí está el poema completo, y aquí unas referencias bibliográficas sobre el tema de la fama y del Rumor y sus precedentes en las fuentes de Chaucer. La ilustración viene de una página sobre ediciones e ilustraciones de Chaucer. En la red.

Torbellinos de información

 

 

—oOo—

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer


From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1343-1400), the son of John Chaucer (c.1312-68), a London vintner. The date of his birth has been much argued, all views now placing it between 1339 and 1346. In 1357 he served with Lionel, afterwards duke of Clarence. In 1359 he was in France with Edward III's invading army, was taken prisoner, and ransomed. He married, perhaps in 1366, Philippa, the daughter of Sir Paon Roet of Hainault and the sister of John of Gaunt's third wife Katherine Swynford. Philippa died in 1387 and Chaucer enjoyed Gaunt's patronage throughout his life. He held a number of positions at court and in the king's service, and he travelled abroad on numerous occasions on diplomatic missions; as well as missions to France, he made a journey to Genoa and Florence in 1372-3 in the course of which he could theoretically have met Boccaccio and (slightly more plausibly) Petrarch. He was sent on to France and Lombardy in 1378. In 1374 he was appointed controller of customs in the port of London and leased his house over Aldgate. He  was knight of the shire for Kent in 1386 and probably lived in Kent for most of the rest of his life. His last official position was deputy forester of the King's Forest at Petyherton in Somerset (1391-8 at least) and it is possible that he lived there for some time. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey where a monument was erected to him in 1555. The known facts of his life are well summarized in The Riverside Chaucer (ed. L. D. Benson et al., 1988), pp. xi-xxii. His writings develop through his career from a period of French influence in the late 1360s (of which the culmination was The Book of the Duchess in about 1370), through his middle period of both French and Italian influences (including The House of Fame in the 1370s and the mature Italian-influenced works of which the most important is Troilus and Criseyde, c. 1385), to the last period of most of the Canterbury Tales and his short lyrics, but this chronology is not very enlightening. His prose works include a translation of Boethius (Boece) and the challenging A Treatise on the Astrolabe, written to 'little Lewis', probably the poet's son. Portraits of Chaucer occur in three places: in the Ellesmere MSS (now in the Huntington Library and the basis of most modern editions); in the manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; and in Hoccleve's The Regement of Princes, beside lines 4.995-6 (in several manuscripts: the best is the one dating from Hoccleve's time, British Library Harley 4866, edited by Furnivall for EETS ES 72).

See D. A. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (1992), P. Boitani and J. Mann (eds.), The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (1986); J. D. North, Chaucer's Universe (1988); J. A. Burrow (ed.), Geoffey Chaucer.


The Book of the Duchess, a dream-poem in 1,334 lines by Chaucer, probably written in 1369, in octosyllabic couplets. It is believed, in accordance with a long-standing tradition (which was questioned in the 1950s), to be an allegorical lament on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt, who died in Sept. 1369.

The love-lorn poet falls asleep reading the story of Ceix (Seys) and Alcyone and follows a hunting party. He meets a knight in black who laments the loss of his lady. The knight tells of her virtue and beauty and of their courtship, and in answer to the dreamer's question declares her dead. The hunting party reappears and a bell strikes twelve, awakening the poet, who finds his book still in his hand. The poem is one of Chaucer's earliest works, but it has great charm and accomplishment. It is founded on the French tradition of the dream as a vehicle for love poetry. 'A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe' by Lydgate is based on it. For an account of the poem, see A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry (1976), 49-73, and B. A. Windeatt, Chaucer's Dream-Poetry: Sources and Analogues (1982).

The House of Fame, an unfinished dream poem by Chaucer, composed at some time between 1374 and 1385. There are three books, in 2,158 lines of octosyllabics; it is believed to be Chaucer's last poem in that French form. The poem remains cryptic, and it is uncertain what its purpose or extent would have been (though the poem says that the third book will, in fact, be the final one).

After the prologue on dreams and the invocation to the god of sleep, Bk 1 says the poet fell asleep and dreamt that he was in a Temple of Glass where he saw depicted Aeneas and Dido (based on Aeneid, 4); the dream moves on to deal more briefly with other parts of the Aeneid. At the end of Bk 1 the poet sees an eagle who alights by him and is his guide through the House of Fame in Bk II (initially suggested, perhaps, by Fama, Rumour, in Aeneid, 4, 173 ff.). The eagle explains, philosophically and at length, how Fame works in its arbitrary ways and the book ends with a vision of the world (thought by some to be amongst Chaucer's most inspired writing: 896-1045). The eagle departs and at the beginning of Bk III Chaucer enters the Palace of Fame (Rumour) where he sees the famous of both classical and biblical lore. Eolus blows a trumpet to summon up the various celebrities who introduce themselves in categories reminiscent of the souls in Dante's Divina commedia. Towards the end of the poem comes a vision of bearers of false tidings: shipmen, pilgrims, pardoners, and messengers, whose confusion seems to be about to be resolved by the appearance of 'A man of gret auctorite . . .'; but there the poem ends. The identity of this figure has been much discussed; Boethius seems the most plausible suggestion. Versions of the poem were made by Lydgate (in The Temple of Glas), Douglas, and Skelton.

See J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer's Book of Fame (1968); S. Delaney, Chaucer's House of Fame (1972); P. Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (1984); also The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson et al. (1988).

Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer's longest complete poem, in 8,239 lines of rhyme-royal [ababbcc] probably written in the second half of the 1380s (J. D. North, RES, 1969, has shown that the events of the poem take place in calendar circumstances corresponding on astrological evidence to dates between 1385 and 1388). Chaucer takes his story from Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, adapting its eight books to five and changing the characters of Criseyde and Pandarus. In Boccaccio Troilo falls in love with Criseida whose cousin, Troilo's friend Pandaro, persuades her, not unwillingly, to become Troilo's lover. In the end Criseida has to leave the Trojan camp to join her father who had defected to the Greeks; in the Greek camp she betrays Troilo by falling in love with Diomede. While following the same narrative pattern, Chaucer deepens the sense of seriousness in the story by making Pandaro Criseida's uncle and guardian, by showing her deliberating at more length (this series of exchanges between uncle and niece in Book II is one of the most admired and anthologized parts of the poem), and by introducing deliberative material, principally from Boethius, calling into question the lovers' freedom of action. The poem ends with an adjuration to the young to repair home from worldly vanity and to place their trust, not in an unstable fortune as Troilus did, but in God. Discussion of the poem has centred largely on the appropriateness of the epilogue to the preceding action, on the attitudes to love (courtly love in particular) in the poem, and on the personality of the narrator and his effect on the narrative. The love story has no basis in classical antiquity but is the invention of Benoit de Sainte-Maure in his Roman de Troie, which was based on the pretended histories of Troy by Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis. Boccaccio's intermediate source was Guido delle Colonne (see TROPHEE).  After Chaucer, the story was treated by Henryson in The Testament of Cresseid and by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida.

Ed. B. A. Windeatt (1984). N. R. Havely, Chaucer's Boccaccio (1980); J. D. North, Chaucer's Universe (1988); B. A. Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde (1992); S. A. Barney (ed.), Critical Essays on Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and His Major Early Poems (1991).

—oOo—

(Geoffrey Chaucer) 
 

From The Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders.

Despite the manifest political and social disruptions of his age, Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry both expresses and embodies a firm sense of order. This is true as much of his twin masterpieces, Troilus and Criseyde (probably written in the mid-1380s) and The Canterbury Tales (planned c.1387), as of his more modestly conceived 'minor' poems and surviving prose works. This sense of order is evident not simply in his reflections on the nature and workings of the cosmos (such as his prose treatise on the use of the astrolabe, written to instruct his little son Lewis) and in his frequent allusions to Boethius's highly esteemed disquisition De consolatione philosophiae (which Chaucer himself translated into English prose in c.1380) but also in his steady affirmations of an orthodox Christian belief in divine involvement in human affairs. In Troilus and Criseyde, at the end of his evocation of incidents supposed to have taken place at the time of the Trojan War, Chaucer turns from his account of 'payens corsed olde rytes' ('the accursed old rites of the pagans') to a vision of Troilus translated from this world to the next and able to laugh serenely at the woe of those who mourn his death. If tragedy is here transformed into a divine comedy, so the 'olde rytes' are effectively blotted out in the pious concluding address to the Holy Trinity. This exultant prayer, in part derived from Dante, sees the Triune God as reigning eternally over all things and setting his mystical seal on human aspiration.
Chaucer (c.1343-1400), in common with most of his European contemporaries, also recognized that the natural and the human worlds could be seen as interrelated in the divine scheme of things, and, like the kingdom of heaven, ordered in hierarchies. In the witty, elegantly formed The Parlement of Foulys, written, it has been argued, to compliment the marriage of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia in 1382, he presents a vision of birds assembled on St Valentine's Day in order to choose their proper mates. The birds have gathered before the goddess of Nature, and, in accordance with 'natural' law, they pay court, dipute, and pair off in a strictly stratified way. The royal eagles, seated in the highest places, take precedence, followed in descending order by other birds of prey until we reach the humblest and smallest seed-eaters. The debate in this avian parliament about how properly to secure a mate may remain unresolved, but it is clear that the nobler the bird the more formal are the rituals of courtship accorded to it. Ducks may prove pragmatic when snubbed by particular drakes ('"Ye queck [quack]!" yit seyde the doke, ful well and feyre, / "There been no sterres [stars], God wot, than a payre!"') but eagles seek for higher things in defining and exploring love and look down on such churlish common sense ('"Thy kynde is of so low a wrechednesse / That what love is, thow canst nat seen ne gesse"').

The question of degree, and of the social perceptions conditioned by rank, also determines the human world that Chaucer variously delineates in The Canterbury Tales. The General Prologue, which sets out the circumstances which bring the pilgrims together at the Tabard Inn before they set off for Canterbury to pray at the tomb of the martyred St Thomas Becket, also presents them to us, as far as it is feasible, according to their estate ('Me thynketh it accordaunt to resoun / To telle yow al the condicioun / Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, / And whiche they weren, and of what degree'). The Knight is naturally placed first, followed by his son the Squire, and by his attendant Yeoman. The Knight is duly succeeded by representatives of the Church: the fastidious Prioress with an accompanying Nun, personal chaplain, and three other priests; the Monk who holds the office of outrider in his monastery (and who therefore appears to enjoy extra-mural luxuries more than the disciplined life of his order); and the equally worldly and mercenary Friar. The third estate is represented by a greater variety of figures, rich, middling, and poor, beginning with a shomewhat shifty Merchant, a bookish Oxford Clerk, a Sergeant of the Law, and a Franklin. We move downwards socially to the urban guildsmen (Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, and Tapicer), to the skilled tradesmen (Cook, Shipman, Doctor of Physic), and to a well-off widow with a trade of her own (the Wife of Bath). Chaucer relegates his Parson, his Ploughman, his Manciple, and his reprobates (the Reeve, the Miller, the Summoner, and the Pardoner) to the end of his troupe (though he also modestly includes himself, a high-ranking royal official, at the end of the list). It is with this last group that he seems to want to surprise his readers by contrasting paragons of virtue with those whose very calling prompts periodic falls from grace (the Reeve strikes fear into his master's tenants while feathering his own nest; the Miller steals corn and overcharges his clients; the lecherous Summoner makes a parade of his limited learning; and the Pardoner trades profitably in patently false relics). Where the Manciple's native wit and acquired administrative skills see to render him worthy of better things, Chaucer's stress on the due humility of the Parson and the Ploughman proclaims their exemplary fitness for their modest but essential social role. If the Knight at the top of the social scale had seemed 'a worthy man', loyal to his knightly vows and embodying the spirit of chivalry, so, in their respective callings, the Parson stands for the true mission of the Church to the poor, and the Ploughman for the blessedness of holy poverty. When Chaucer describes the two as brothers, it is likely that he sees their fraternity as rooted in Christian meekness and closeness to God. Both, in the manner of Langland's Piers, act out the gospel: the Parson by offering a 'noble ensample to his sheep' and the Ploughman by 'lyvynge in pees and parfit charitee'.

Although it has been suggested that the Knight's professional career has been marked by a series of military disasters and that both his portrait and his tale can be read ironically, it would seem likely that the overall scheme of The Canterbury Tales, had it ever been completed, would have served to enhance his dignity rather than to undermine it. The Host of the Tabard proposes that each of the pilgrims should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the return journey. Even in the fragmentary and unfinished form in which the poem has come down to us (only twenty-four tales are told), it is clear that the Knight's taking precedence as the first story-teller is not merely a matter of chance. The narrator comments that although he cannot tell whether it was a matter of 'aventure, or sort, or cas [chance]¡ that the luck of the draw fell to such a natural leader, the fact that it did so both pleases the other pilgrims and satisfies the demands of social decorum. The Knight's Tale, an abbreviated version of Boccaccio's Teseida, is an appropriately high-minded history of the rivalry of two noble cousins for the love of a princess, a history elegantly complemented by accounts of supernatural intervention in human affairs and equally elegant and decisive human ceremonial. If the Ploughman is not allotted a tale, the Parson's with which The Canterbury Tales concludes, is a long prose treatise on the seven deadly sins, less a tale than a careful sermon expressive of devout gravitas and earnest learning. Sandwiched between these two tales Chaucer arranges stories loosely fitted to their tellers' tastes and professions and tailored to fit into the overarching narrative shape by prologues, interjections, or disputes between characters. The Parson's singularly worthy discourse is complemented by that of the otherwise shadowy Nun's Priest who offers a lively story of a wily cock caught by a fox, a story which he rounds off with the clerical insistence that listeners grasp 'the moralite'. The Pardoner too tells a tidy moral tale, though its carefully shaped warning of the mortal dangers of covetousness can be seen reflecting back on the personal avarice to which its teller spiritedly and frankly confesses in his prologue: 'I preche of no thyng but for coveityse / . . . Thus kan I preche agayn that same vice / Which that I use, and that is avarice. / But though myself be gilty in that synne, / Yet kan I maken oother folk to twynne [turn] / From avarice, and soore to repente." The Prioress also tells a short, devotional tale of a pious Christian child whose throat is cut by Jews but who miraculously manages to continue singing a Marian hymn after his death. Its pathos, if not to the taste of more morally squeamish ages, is evidently well received by the devout fourteenth-century hearers.
Elsewhere in The Canterbury Tales tellers seem to have far less inclination to wear their hearts and consciences on their sleeves. The Merchant, prompted by the Clerk's adaptation of Boccaccio's story of the trials of patient Griselda, offers the salutary tale of an old husband (January) and his 'fresshe' young bride (May), an impatiently frisky wife who, exploiting her husband's sudden blindness, is seduced in a pear tree by her lover. When January's sight is mischievously restored by the god Pluto, Proserpine equally mischievously inspires May to claim that she was acting in her husband's best interests: 'Up peril of my soule, I shal not lyen, / As me was taught, to heele with youre eyes, / Was no thyng bet, to make yow see, / Than strugle with a man upon a tree / God woot, I dide it in ful good entente.' At the lower end of the social, and perhaps moral, scale Chaucer allots still earthier stories to the Miller, the Reeve, the Friar, and the Summoner. When the Host proposes that the Knight's 'noble storie' should be succeeded by something equally decorous from the Monk, the Miller drunkenly intrudes himself and, somewhat improbably, tells the beautifully plotted tale of a dull-witted carpenter, his tricksy wife, and her two suitors. The Miller's Tale presents a diametrically opposed view of courtship to that offered by the Knight. It also serves to provoke the Reeve (who is a carpenter by profession) into recounting an anecdote about a cuckolded miller. In like manner, the Friar tells a story about an extortionate summoner who is carried off to hell by the Devil, and the enraged Summoner ('lyk an aspen leef he quoke for ire') responds with the history of an ingenious friar obliged to share out the unexpected legacy of 'the rumblynge of a fart' amongst his brethren.
The Chaucer who so modestly places himself last in the list of the pilgrims also casts himself in the role of an incompetent story-teller. His irony is nowhere more pointed than in this cleverly extended and self-deprecatory ruse which opens with a direct challenge to his assumed shyness from the Host. 'What man artow [art thou]?', 'Chaucer' is asked, 'Thou lookest as thou woldest find an hare, / For evere on the ground I see thee stare'. The response is the tale of Sir Thopas, a parody of contemporary romance told in awkward, singsong, six-line stanzas. The parody may always have served to amuse sophisticated readers, but the Host, who rudely interrupts its progress, claims that its teller's evident ineptness is boring the company. The pilgrim 'Chaucer' is therefore obliged to begin another tale, this time a long and weighty prose homily which retells the story of imprudent Melibeus and his wife, the aptly named Prudence. At its conclusion the Host somewhat over-politely compensates for his earlier rudeness by unenthusiastically confessing that he would have liked his own wife to have heard the tale ('for she nys no thyng of swich pacience'). Despite such soothing politeness, Chaucer's pretence of incompetence in the company of such accomplished story-tellers as his fellow-pilgrims is a highly effective device. He had indirectly prepared for this device by insisting on the virtues of 'truthful' narrative representation at the end of the General Prologue. He had also attempted to justify his realism by citing the highest authorities:

Whoso shal telle a tale after a man,
He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan
Everich a word, if it be in his charge,
Al speke he never so rudeliche and large,
Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe,
Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe.
He may nat spare, althogh he were his brother;
He moot as wel seye o [one] word as another.
Crist spak hymself ful brode plainly in hooly writ,
And wel ye woot no vileynye is it,
Eek Plato seith, whoso that kan hym rede,
The wordes moote be cosyn [akin] to the dede.
Also I prey yow to foryeve [forgive] it me.
Al have I nat set folk in hir degree
Heere in this tale, as that they sholde stonde.
My wit is short, ye may wel understonde.

Here is the pretence of modesty and incompetence, but here too is the insistence on frankness and proper representation, albeit justified with reference to Christ and to Plato (beyond whose authority few medieval readers would feel the need to refer), Chaucer neutralizes and diminishes himself as a narrator in order that his narrative representation of others' words and narratives might shine with a greater 'truth' to God's nature. In a way that his theologically minded contemporaries might readily understand, he is posing as the servant of the servants of Christ, having become, like St Paul before him, 'all things to all men' ('omnibus factus sum omnia'). The Christian poet of The Canterbury Tales, one variously influenced by both Boccaccio and Dante, endeavours to show us a broad spectrum of sinful humanity on an earthly journey, a journey which original readers would readily have recognized as a prevision of, and a preparation for, a heavenly one.

Despite his intellectual delight in the concept of cosmic, natural, and human order, Chaucer the poet and the truth-teller of necessity subverts certain received ideas of degree. Most crucially, he effectively undermines the commonly held medieval idea of the natural inferiority of women to men by representing articulate and intelligent women at the centre of human affairs rather than on the periphery. If the well-born ladies of antiquity are allowed to become norms against which human behaviour can be measured in The Legend of Good Women (c.1372-86), Troilus and Criseyde, and certain of The Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath asserts a distinctly ungenteel opposition to anti-feminist stereotypes. Although some readers may have interpreted the Wife's 856-line prologue as evidence of a woman protesting too much (and therefore confirming, or at the very least endorsing, many of the male prejudices against which she loudly complains), Chaucer's adoption of a strident woman's voice ought also to be seen as opening up an alternative polemic. Her very stridency, we also realize, is a direct consequence of over-rigid patriarchal ways of thinking and acting. The Wife of Bath is certainly no model of meekness, patience, and chastity. She opens her discourse with the word 'experience', and from that experience of living with five husbands (three of them good men, she observes, because they were 'riche, and olde') she builds up a spirited case against conventional, theoretical, clerically inspired anti-feminism. Celibacy and virginity are all very well, she insists, but Christ's stricter demands were addressed 'to hem that wolde lyve parfitly', and, as she adds for the benefit of her male listeners, 'lordynges, by youre leve, that am nat I'. Moreover, if God gave her her sexuality, she has been determined to enjoy it, albeit within the bounds of marriage ('In wyfhod I wol use myn instrument / As frely as my Makere hath it sent'). Having learned by experience and native with how to manage her first partners ('Atte ende I hadde the bettre in ech degree, / By sleighte, or force, or by som maner thyng, / As by continueel murmur or grucchyng') she seems to have met her match in the clerk Jankyn, her junior by twenty years. Jankyn had the particularly irritating habit of reading learned tracts against women in her presence, quoting choice items aloud in order to demonstrate the superiority of his own sex. Provoked into decisive action, she ripped three pages out of the book and dealt Jankyn a blow with her fist, only to be floored herself by a retaliatory blow. Nevertheless, her consequent unconsciousness (perhaps feigned) has worked its proper effect: the shocked Jankyn is brought to sudden repentance and thereafter she has ruled the domestic roost ('He yaf [gave] me al the bridel in my hond, / To han the governance of hous and lond, / And of his tonge, and of his hond also; / And made hym brenne [burn] his book anon right tho').
The Wife of Bath achieves mastery in what can be seen as an essentially bourgeois domestic comedy, albeit one informed with partially disgraced academic theories about women's limited marital and social roles. Elsewhere in his work, Chaucer stresses a distinctive self-assurance and dignity in women of the ancient and modern ruling classes, qualities which are more vital than the special honour accorded to the sex by the male-defined code of chivalry. In the early dream-poem, The Book of the Duchess (probably written c.1369 as an allegorical lament on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt), the narrator encounters a desolate knight, clad in black. The knight is mourning the death of a wife not, as in so much contemporary love-poetry, the absence, the fickleness, or the coldness of a mistress. Theirs has been more than a courtly liaison and more than the amorous vassalage of him to her. Mutual respect has made for a marriage of minds, and as far as was possible, a partnership in love. She was, the knight confesses, 'that swete wif / My suffisaunce, my lust, my lyf, / Myn hap, myn hele, and al my blesse'. The knight's therapeutic account of his long courtship, happy marriage, and unhappy bereavement is prefaced by a retelling of Ovid's story of the widowed Queen Alcyone, who, faithful to the memory of the dead King Ceys, is granted a vision of him. The pattern, re-exploring classical instances and Ovidian exempla is repeated on far grander scale in the unfinished The Legend of Good Women. Here ancient history is ransacked for appropriate subjects because, Chaucer's narrator insists, it had traditionally provided his predecessors with 'approved' stories 'of holynesse, of regnes, of victoryies, / of love, of hate'. It is on women's holiness and steadfastness in love that the narrator dwells, he having been rebuked in a dream by the god of Love for the former 'heresies' of speaking ill of women in The Romaunt of the Rose and Troilus and Criseyde. The nine legends he retells as a penance speak of heroines who suffered, and sometimes died, as a consequence of their devout love for faithless men. Instances of male violence and treachery are monotonously heaped one on another as Antony abandons Cleopatra, Aeneas Dido, Tarquin Lucrece, and Theseus Ariadne. By frequently appealing to sources, to named authors, and to what was commonly acknowledged to be the authority of 'olde bokes', Chaucer attempts to turn an equally derivative clerical tradition of unrelenting misogyny on its head. He also shapes the legends to emphasize what he sees as the feminine virtue of 'pitee'. It is pity which renders women susceptible to male deceit, but it is also seen as an aspect of the highly eseemed human quality of generosity of spirit. As the legends demonstrate, this same aspect of generosity, to which men seem to be impervious, allows women to respond so fully to love, to grow in love and, through tragedy, to find the emotional strength which enables them to explore the depths of suffering.
In the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women the dapper god of Love seems to disparage Chaucer's most carefully wrought and self-consciously achieved single poem by referring to it simply as the story of 'how that Crisseyde Troylus forsok'. The god appears to have been persuaded that Troilus and Criseyde had taken up the traditional misogynist theme that throughout history 'wemen han dun mis' in their dealings with men. The god may not have been alone in his prejudiced reading of the story, but to many latter-day readers it seems to be a narrow and ungenerous one. The poem is less the story of a man betrayed by a woman than the account of how a woman, having been pressured into responding to a man's over enthusiastic love for her, is driven from one relationship to another. Instead of being portrayed as contrasted representatives of faith and betrayal, both Troilus and Criseyde are observed as victims of circumstances, at once humanly and divinely contrived, and beyond their direct control. Although Chaucer drew heavily on Boethius for his consolatory explorations of the ideas of free will, predestination, mutability, and fortune throughout Troilus and Criseyde, his immediate and principal source for the poem was contemporary. In no sense, however, was Chaucer merely translating Boccaccio's familiar and admired Trojan story, Il Filostrato, into English. His distinctive shifts in emphasis, narrative shape, and characterization clearly indicate that this is more a deliberate reinterpretation than a translation. Boccaccio's Criseida is, for example, willingly persuaded by her cousin Pandaro into accepting Troilo as a lover. In Chaucer's version the characters of Criseyde and Pandarus possess both a new dramatic energy and a new blood-relationship. Pandarus is transformed into Criseyde's sensible, sentimental, but none the less manipulative uncle, one who acts as her guardian and counsellor in the absence of her father. His task of persuading his niece to look favourably on Troilus's love is rendered one of subtle negotiation, mediation, suggestion, and emotional conditioning. She, rather than being fickle by nature, is seen as tender, sensitive, ingenuous, and open to change. Chaucer's narrative carefully balances the length of the process by which she is persuaded to accept Troilus against the time she takes over agonizing about abandoning him. When the lovers are forced apart by her removal to join her father in the Greek camp outside Troy, Criseyde's grief is intense. Her avowals are as extravagant as they are agonized:

'And Troilus, my clothes everychon
Shul blake ben in tokenyng, herte swete,
That I am as out of this world agon,
That wont was yow to setten in quiete;
And of myn ordre, ay til deth me mete,
The observance evere, in youre absence,
Shal sorwe ben, compleynt and abstinence.

'Myn herte and ek the woful goost therinne
Byquethe I, with youre spirit to compleyne
Eternaly, for they shal nevere twynne.
For though in erthe ytwynned be we tweyne,
Yet in the feld of pite, out of peyne,
That highte Elisos [Elysium], shal we ben yfeere [together],
As Orpheus with Euridice, his fere [companion, wife].

Her ambiguously optimistic interpretation of the Orpheus/Eurydice story may well lead us to perceive how uneasily tragic are the undertones of her avowal. For Criseyde, lovers  symbolically pass through Hades to reach Elysium, or, in medieval Christian terms, they suffer penitentially in Purgatory as a preparation for Paradise. Criseyde's descent to Hades/Purgatory, a place where the only certainty is uncertainty, will be metaphoric. Separated from Troilus, a new element of ambiguity enters the narrative. The narrator himself purports to consult his source to find an exaggeratedly clear statement of her treachery. Criseyde, however, is painfully conscious that hers is indeed a world-without-end decision, one which will render her infamous in subsequent human annals:

But trewely, the storie telleth us,
Ther made nevere woman moore wo
Than she, whan that she falsed Troilus.
She seyde, 'Allas! for now is clene ago [gone]
My name of trouthe in love, for everemo!
For I have falsed oon the gentileste
That evere was, and oon the worthieste!
'Alas! of me, unto the worldes ende,
Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge
No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende [reproach].
O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge!
Thorughout the world my belle shal be ronge!
And wommen moost wol haten me of alle.
Allas, that swich a cas me sholde falle!'

Faced with such agonized self-awareness, the narrator retreats into pity, reluctant to blame her more than his historic predecessors have done but willingly to concede that her penitence impresses him ('For she so sory was for hire untrouthe, / Iwis, I wolde excuse hire yet for routhe [pity]').
If the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde is neither the gentle incompent 'Chaucer' of The Canterbury Tales nor the incomprehending innocent of the dream-poems, he nevertheless shares something of their generous susceptibility. Like them, he suggests a tense, shifting relationship between the poet and his persona, and consequently between the poet and his poem. He moves around his characters, allowing them to express their respective points of view, at times ruminating on the iron laws of fate and divinely imposed predestination, at others both suggesting and withdrawing from judgement. He allows the story a certain autonomy while varying his commentary by deferring both to his sources and to his audience. In Troilus and Criseyde at least, he seems to insist that history is steady and needs to be retold, while allowing that his story is reshaped in the very act of retelling it. Essentially, he remains ambivalent, or, perhaps, given his evident sympathy with women and his admiration for what he seems to have identified as feminine generosity of spirit, he assumes a deliberate androgyny. He is certainly the least egocentric of poets. Although Chaucer is in every sense a writer of his time, he was also the first poet in English both to display and to make a particular narrative issue of the quality which John Keats later so memorably defined as 'negative capability'.

Trouthe

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