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| February 2010 |
| Billie Silvey |
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| Canterbury Tales |
| Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was the first book printed in English. It is the story of a diverse group of twenty-nine people assembled at the Tabard Inn in Southwark for a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The work itself is a collection of stories told by the pilgrims and set in the frame of their journey.
The Prologue introduces these pilgrims, with the style and subject matter of the various stories fitting the status and education of each teller. The Pilgrims include a Knight, Squire, Yeoman, Prioress, Nun, three Priests, Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Lawyer, Franklin, Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, Tapestry-Weaver, Cook, Sailor, Physician, Wife of Bath, Parson, Plowman, Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner, and Host. These pilgrims represent all three basic kinds of people in medieval society—those who pray (clergy), those who fight (nobility) and those who work (commoners and peasants). Chaucer’s emphasis on character, human nature, realism and humor makes Canterbury Tales the most modern work of literature before Shakespeare. Chaucer was a poet of love—from divine raptures to the very earthly love of the much married Wife of Bath. Written in Middle English, a point in the development of the language during which what are now silent e’s and other silent letters were pronounced, it is still read both in the original and in updated translations. I can almost hear my major professor at Pepperdine, James Smythe, reading its opening lines: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages), Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. |
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