It is an unfinished collection of tales told in the course of a pilgrimage to Beckett’s shrine at Canterbury. A general Prologue briefly describes the 30 pilgrims and introduces the framework: each pilgrim is to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two more on the way back, the teller of the best winning a free supper. There follow 24 tales, including two told by Chaucer himself. The work is remarkable from both the point of view of literary analysis and simply as a piece of writing which makes a very good reading.
As far as the literary analysis is concerned, experts underline the excellent integration of framework and tales, which shows in a number of ways; the choice of genres and settings and the type of narration for each tale, for example, the Knight’s tale is a romantic allegory and the style is sophisticated, and the Nun, whose tale is brief and pious, the Miller tells a fable or fabliau, the Wife of Bath whose tale is a supernatural story, the Pardoner who chooses a sermon or the Second Man’s tale, a saint’s legend. Another way is the method of characterisation and imagery; the names are stereotypes, he uses physical features and similarities’, for example describing the Miller, Chaucer makes similarities with animals and things, while the Parish priest is described in a more serious way.
Chaucer’s versification and language is also very remarkable. Chaucer wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed since around the twelfth century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, the iambic pentameter, in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him. The arrangement of these five-stress lines into rhyming couplets, first seen in his The Legend of Good Women, was used in much of his later work and became one of the standard poetic forms in English. His early influence as a satirist is also important, with the common humorous device, the funny accent of a regional dialect, apparently making its first appearance in The Reeve’s Tale.
The poetry of Chaucer, is credited with helping to standardise the London Dialect of the Middle English language; a combination of Kentish and Midlands dialect. This is probably overstated. The influence of the court, chancery and bureaucracy –of which Chaucer was a part- remains a more probable influence on the development of Standard English. Modern English is somewhat distanced from the language of Chaucer’s poems owing to the effect of the Great Vowel Shift some time after his death. This change in the pronunciation of English, still not fully understood, makes the reading of Chaucer difficult for the modern audience. The status of the final –e in Chaucer’s verse is uncertain: t seems likely that during the period of Chaucer’s writing the final –e was dropping out of colloquial English and that its use was somewhat irregular. Chaucer’s versification suggests that the final –e is sometimes to be vocalised, and sometimes to be silent; however, this remains a point on which there is disagreement. Apart from the irregular spelling, much of the vocabulary is recognisable to the modern reader. Chaucer is also recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first author to use many common English words in his writings. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time but Chaucer, with his ear for common speech, is the earliest manuscript source.
As far as the literary analysis is concerned, experts underline the excellent integration of framework and tales, which shows in a number of ways; the choice of genres and settings and the type of narration for each tale, for example, the Knight’s tale is a romantic allegory and the style is sophisticated, and the Nun, whose tale is brief and pious, the Miller tells a fable or fabliau, the Wife of Bath whose tale is a supernatural story, the Pardoner who chooses a sermon or the Second Man’s tale, a saint’s legend. Another way is the method of characterisation and imagery; the names are stereotypes, he uses physical features and similarities’, for example describing the Miller, Chaucer makes similarities with animals and things, while the Parish priest is described in a more serious way.
Chaucer’s versification and language is also very remarkable. Chaucer wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed since around the twelfth century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, the iambic pentameter, in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him. The arrangement of these five-stress lines into rhyming couplets, first seen in his The Legend of Good Women, was used in much of his later work and became one of the standard poetic forms in English. His early influence as a satirist is also important, with the common humorous device, the funny accent of a regional dialect, apparently making its first appearance in The Reeve’s Tale.
The poetry of Chaucer, is credited with helping to standardise the London Dialect of the Middle English language; a combination of Kentish and Midlands dialect. This is probably overstated. The influence of the court, chancery and bureaucracy –of which Chaucer was a part- remains a more probable influence on the development of Standard English. Modern English is somewhat distanced from the language of Chaucer’s poems owing to the effect of the Great Vowel Shift some time after his death. This change in the pronunciation of English, still not fully understood, makes the reading of Chaucer difficult for the modern audience. The status of the final –e in Chaucer’s verse is uncertain: t seems likely that during the period of Chaucer’s writing the final –e was dropping out of colloquial English and that its use was somewhat irregular. Chaucer’s versification suggests that the final –e is sometimes to be vocalised, and sometimes to be silent; however, this remains a point on which there is disagreement. Apart from the irregular spelling, much of the vocabulary is recognisable to the modern reader. Chaucer is also recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first author to use many common English words in his writings. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time but Chaucer, with his ear for common speech, is the earliest manuscript source.