The Canterbury Tales: Week 1

Introduction to the General Prologue

[ Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 - 1400 CE) reading before the court of Richard II of England (1367 - 1400 CE) Photo credit: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/10446/chaucer-reading-his-poetry-to-the-english-court/]

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil¹

Dear reader, I adore Chaucer. Not that one has to choose, but I was always Team Chaucer over Team Shakespeare. In fact, Medieval English literature was one of my three areas for my Ph.D. comprehensive exam.²

A brief reminder about this history of the English language that I gave a few posts back in introducing Beowulf: The period of Old English is roughly 450-1150. Middle English covers the period of 1150-1500, so The Canterbury Tales sits squarely within the Middle English period. It is, perhaps, the crown jewel of the language.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) is an interesting fellow in his own right. The son of a wine merchant, he was born into a newly burgeoning middle class, but later landed a place in the court with a son of Kind Edward III and traveled throughout Europe as a diplomat. All this gave Chaucer a broad perspective and an ability to both see and portray all kinds of people with empathy and in ways that made his writing appeal to a very wide audience.

It's important when reading The Canterbury Tales, particularly the General Prologue, not to confuse Geoffrey Chaucer with the pilgrim who narrates the journey. That first person narrator is a fictional creation. Chaucer paints this character as a kind of naïve, wide-eyed observer, an obtuse narrator who fits well within the same tradition that includes Gulliver of Gulliver’s Travels and Huck of Huckleberry Finn. I will come back to this point and why it is important to understand the narrator in order to interpret the text well.

Let’s begin with the “big picture” of The Canterbury Tales before homing in on the text.

The work is a collection of tales written in the tradition of earlier works such as Bocaccio’s Decameron (from which Chaucer borrowed directly) or One Thousand and One Nights. The Canterbury Tales is unfinished, and scholars debate whether or not Chaucer even intended to write the 120 tales it would have taken to fulfill the host’s stated plan for each of the 30 pilgrims on the journey to tell four tales each (two on the way, and two on the way back).

This tale-telling proposal by the host is part of the frame narrative for the tales. Of course, the bigger frame is the entire purpose for these strangers to be journeying together in the first place. That purpose is a pilgrimage to Canterbury, a traditional religious observance for medieval Christians in England. Yet, like many religious “expectations,” these pilgrimages had become an entire tourism industry (much the way, it seems to me, that trips to the Holy Land today can be). This means that participants would have different motivations and interests for undertaking the journey. But there they would find themselves, together for the time it would take to travel hither and back.

So imagine the context: a bunch of strangers traveling together to the same destination, for ostensibly the same reason, but each person with different motivations, hopes, personalities, lives, and secret (or not so secret) sins. Likely never to see one another after this but stuck together and desiring to pass the time as enjoyably as possible, they act the same variety of ways people do on a plane or in a bar. A lot is different between Chaucer’s world and ours. But human nature hasn’t changed.

If you were ever assigned The General Prologue in school, chances are you never have forgotten its famous opening lines. Some of you may have had to memorize it. Some of you might still remember your teacher reading or reciting it in Middle English of whatever degree of accuracy. As part of my final grade for a graduate seminar in Medieval Literature, I had to record myself on a cassette tape (!!!) reading in Middle English in order to be graded for my pronunciation.

There’s a reason this opening is so memorable and so beloved. Many reasons, actually.

First, it is one of the most beautiful poetic renderings of spring, a time universally understood (T. S. Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month” departure, notwithstanding³) as a time of renewal for the natural world. Such natural renewal, the poem says in lines 12-18 stirs people’s desires for spiritual renewal, too, the kind that can be fulfilled through pilgrimages to new places or religious shrines. Kind of a spring break for the soul. And the body—for as we will see, the medieval people didn’t compartmentalize body and soul the way we moderns tend to do. (Thanks, Descartes!)

But, returning to the sheer poetry of the opening, the lines are stunningly mellifluous. Unlike Old English lines of poetry, these lines rhyme (which is more familiar to our ears). Even if you’ve never studied Middle English, you can read the first 18 lines aloud for yourself, and you will hear the Middle English come through. I promise you. Try it. (You can also listen to the opening lines being read by Morgan Freeman here.)

Now here’s a very subtle thing that I want to call your attention to. Yes, it’s all Middle English. But after you’ve read and listened closely to lines 1-18, take a look at line 19 and the following lines. Look, read, listen closely. Do you notice anything different that happens here? Look again. I will explain in the next paragraph, but I want you to try to pick it out …

The shift that occurs at line 19 is one that moves from the universal (lines 1-18) to the particular, from April everywhere in all times, to “I” (the narrator), lying about in Southwark at an Inn one day. This quotidian shift in setting contrasts sharply with opening’s invocation of classical images such as Zephyrus and Aries (or Ram), images of universal and transcendent timelessness. Even more subtly (for we Modern English readers) is that this shift in subject is also accompanied by a shift in language. While still written in poetry and in Middle English, the language here is more every day, more common and banal. Imagine the first 18 lines being read in a lofty, elevated, eloquent voice followed by a sudden shift along the lines of, “So there I was one day hanging out at the Tabard Inn …” Do you hear it?

Well, here we are, near the end of a decent length for a newsletter and we’ve gotten to the first 34 lines. Whew.

I will just get you ready for what follows, and then we will pick it up again in the next post.

We have met our narrator in line 19. Beginning in line 35, he says that he is going to tell us all about his fellow travelers who’ve met up here at the Tabard to journey together. But he further says—and this is key—that he is going to describe them to us in according to their “condition” and social “degree.” This is the “reasonable” way to do it, he says. And for a hierarchical society such as the medieval one was, this is most reasonable.  

I need to say a bit more about this hierarchy matter because it’s important to receiving more of the total effect of the General Prologue.

The pilgrims represent the “three estates” which constituted society in the Middle Ages. These three estates were the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners. Another way this is sometimes put is that these categories—which cover everyone in their society—divide up all work according to “those who fight, those who pray, and those who labor.” The descriptions of the pilgrims are grouped accordingly: members of the nobility first, followed by those with offices in the church first, followed last by the lay people (who sometimes, like the Pardoner and the Summoner, were hired by the church in non-clerical positions).

That’s the most obvious hierarchy. But the less obvious one—one crucial to understanding the work—is that the pilgrims are also presented not only in descending social order within their esates, but descending moral order, too. This is key.

Now, note that our innocent (or obtuse) narrator is not making this judgement. He remains pretty neutral. Chaucer expects the astute reader to notice this pattern. Brilliant, isn’t he?

***

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1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.

2. That part of the exam traumatized me in a way that is too painful to tell, even all these years later. Suffice it to say it involved one of those cutthroat professors you hear horror stories about. Nevertheless, I lived to (not) tell the story.

3. The famous opening of The Waste Land.