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Unit 8: Geoffrey Chaucer

single literary genre dominates the Tales. The tales include romantic adventures, fabliaux, saint’s Notes
biographies, animal fables, religious allegories and even a sermon, and range in tone from pious,
moralistic tales to lewd and vulgar sexual farces. More often than not, moreover, the specific tone of
the tale is extremely difficult to firmly pin down.
This, indeed, is down to one of the key problems of interpreting the Tales themselves-voice: how do
we ever know who is speaking? Because Chaucer, early in the Tales, promises to repeat the exact
words and style of each speaker as best he can remember it, there is always a tension between
Chaucer and the pilgrim’s voice he ventriloquises as he re-tells his tale: even the “Chaucer” who is
a character on the pilgrim has a distinct and deliberately unChaucerian voice. Is it the Merchant’s
voice-and the Merchant’s opinion-or Chaucer’s? Is it Chaucer the character or Chaucer the writer?
If it is Chaucer’s, are we supposed to take it at face value, or view it ironically? It is for this reason
that, throughout this ClassicNote, a conscious effort has been made to refer to the speaker of each
tale (the Merchant, in the Merchant’s Tale, for example) as the “narrator”, a catch-all term which
represents both of, or either one of, Chaucer and the speaker in question.
No one knows for certain when Chaucer began to write the Tales-the pilgrimage is usually dated
1387, but that date is subject to much scholarly argument-but it is certain that Chaucer wrote some
parts of the Tales at different times, and went back and added Tales to the melting pot. The Knight’s
Tale, for example, was almost certainly written earlier than the Canterbury project as a separate
work, and then adapted into the voice of the Knight; and the Second Nun’s Tale, as well as probably
the Monk’s, probably have a similar compositional history.
Chaucer drew from a rich variety of literary sources to create the Tales, though his principal debt is
likely to Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which ten nobles from Florence, to escape the plague, stay in a
country villa and amuse each other by each telling tales. Boccaccio likely had a significant influence
on Chaucer. The Knight’s Tale was an English version of a tale by Boccaccio, while six of Chaucer’s
tales have possible sources in the Decameron: the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s, the Clerk’s, the
Merchant’s, the Franklin’s, and the Shipman’s.

Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury form a wider range of society compared to Boccaccio’s
elite storytellers, allowing for greater differences in tone and substance.
The text of the Tales itself does not survive complete, but in ten fragments. Due to the fact that there
are no links made between these ten fragments in most cases, it is extremely difficult to ascertain
precisely in which order Chaucer wanted the tales to be read. This Classic Note corresponds to the
order followed in Larry D. Benson’s “Riverside Chaucer”, which is undoubtedly the best edition of
Chaucer currently available.

8.2 Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: Introduction to the Author

Before William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer was the preeminent English poet, and he remains in
the top tier of the English canon. He also was the most significant poet to write in Middle English.
Chaucer was born in the early 1340s to a fairly rich, well-to-do, though not aristocratic family. His
father, John Chaucer, was a vintner and deputy to the king’s butler. His family’s financial success
came from work in the wine and leather businesses, and they had considerable inherited property in
London. Little information exists about Chaucer’s education, but his writings demonstrate a close
familiarity with a number of important books of his contemporaries and of earlier times. Chaucer
likely was fluent in several languages, including French, Italian, and Latin. Sons of wealthy London

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