Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer, known as the father of English peotry, or of English literary, was born in a rich family in London in around 1340. His father was a rich wine merchant and his family had close connections with the royal family. When he was about 13, he began to be a page following one of the sons of Edward III till he was 17. In 1359, Edward III launched a war towards France, in which Chaucer was captured and ransomed the next year by the king by 16 pounds. On his return from France to England, he married a maid of the queen whose name was Philippa of Hainault. After that, Chaucer was said to travel to many countries representing Edward III, Italy, France, Spain and Belgium, for example. Due to this, he had the chance to meet Petrarch and Boccaccio, whose ideas and works influenced Chaucer’s a lot. More or less thanks to his rich experience of traveling abroad, he had a good command of Latin, French and Italian. After 1370, he worked as a courtier , a civil servant and did much work for the king. However, he also had hard times. When his protector was not in power, he was deprived of his job and social status, so he lived a poor life when Richard II was taking charge of the country. He wrote a poet named The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse in order to complain to the new king--Hnery IV about his poor life.

He passed away on 25th, October, 1400, but the date is uncertain. Nobody know exactly what the cause of his death was. It is said that he was murdered by enemies of Richard II, still no persuasive evidence. After his death, Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abby. He was the first poet to rest in the famous area now known as Poet’s Corner.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s master works include The Book of the Duchess, which is the earliest of Chaucer’s major poems, Troilus and Criseyde, which is the longest complete poem of Chaucer’s. Among all his works, the most famous is believed to be The Canterbury Tales that is one of the greatest contributions to English literature . It is a piece of work directly influenced by Boccaccio’s The Decameron. The Canterbury Tales is a narration in the form of poetry. It is made up of more than 20 stories told by a group of 31 pilgrims, merchant, knight, doctor, monk, farmer, scholar and lawyer included , who gather in a hotel, heading from Southwark to shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The owner of the hotel is a hospital one, and he offers to be the guide of the group of pilgrims. He proposes that each member of the group tell a story on the way to Canterbury and the return to the hotel as to kill time during the long trip. That means every pilgrim has to tell two stories. The work starts with the origin of itself; then it describes each of the pilgrims vividly; afterwards it shifts to the stories told by pilgrims. The stories are various. They vary from love story, adventure of knights, legend of heroes to animal allegory. Some of them are funny which make the listeners laugh, and some are serious which make the pilgrims think. What’s more, each story is well suited to the character and social status of the story teller. Whether The Canterbury Tales is finished or not is still unknown yet. However, it is believed that Chaucer intended to finish 120 stories but he failed it and only completed a prologue and 20 of the stories before he died. Someone has said, “ No other work prior to Chaucer's is known to have set a collection of tales within the framework of pilgrims on a pilgrimage.” Chaucer has created a new style through his Canterbury Tales.

The Canterbury Tales is not so much a mere collection of various stories as a picture of different people and their social life of that time, known as the later period of Middle Ages. Each pilgrim represents a social class. Through the diverse characters in his work, Chaucer shows us different views of the Church in England represented by the monk, the prioress and the two nuns. Chaucer

chooses pilgrims as the main characters of his work because they were epitomes of the medieval society. Because of the realism revealed by the stories and the story tellers in his work, Geoffrey Chaucer has been called “ the founder of English realism.”

As is mentioned before, Chaucer could speak more than three languages, so we can deduce that he was a master of language and he indeed was. The Canterbury Tales is the first work in England to use heroic couplet which Chaucer learned from French. From then on, heroic couplet began to be widely used in English poems, which more or less makes Chaucer the founder of English

poetry. He introduced many French and Italian writing skills to English writing. His language in The Canterbury Tales is exaggerate and humorous. Also, Chaucer’s uses Middle English in it and by this means he establishes English as the literary language of England. In addition to his great contribution to English language, Chaucer has great influence on the generations to come by his ideas and views in The Canterbury Tales. In this work, he bases his stories on reality and uses ironic and critical words to show the portrait of English society of his time. He criticizes

asceticism and praises humanism. Therefore, we can see from his work both the tradition of

Christianity and the brilliance of humanism. All in all, The Canterbury Tales is unimpeachable a bright star and a pioneer in the transition period of Middle Ages to Renaissance in England, influenced by the Italy Renaissance, revealing humanism and spirit of resistance to asceticism, which has profound edification on many generations.