浅析The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 –1400) was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Although he wrote many works, he is best remembered for his unfinished frame narrative The Canterbury Tales. Sometimes called the father of English literature, Chaucer is credited by some scholars as the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular Middle English, rather than French or Latin.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle English at the end of the 14th century. It was probably first conceived in 1386, when he was lived in Greenwich, where he can saw large numbers of pilgrims, so the sight and sound of the bands riding toward Canterbury may well have suggested to Chaucer the idea of using a fictitious pilgrimage as a "frame" for a number of stories.This practice was common in the later period of the Middle Ages: Boccaccio had told 100 tales in his Decameron, and each of the ten characters told a story a day for ten days. Another Italian, Gioanni Sercambi, had placed a series of stories in the mouth of the leader of a group of persons journeying on horseback. As for this book, the tales are told as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The Canterbury Tales was Chaucer's magnum opus. He uses the tales and the descriptions of the characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, and particularly of the Church.
Structurally, it’s a little different that at each beginning of those tales, there is a prologue, and the whole book is not merely a collection of stories strung together, but At the very beginning, Chaucer creates in the "General Prologue", a whole gallery of vivid characters from all walks of life and then assigns to each of them some appropriate tale shedding light on the respective narrator's distinctive personality. The author makes further efforts to show the interplay between the characters as well as their respective traits and characteristics. Thus the total effect of the poem as a whole is
a comprehensive picture of the social reality of the poet's day, especially since the pilgrims portrayed include men and women of all different professions, the high and the low, the lay and the clerical, the learned and the ignorant, the roguish and the upright.
The language of the book is very humourous and exaggerated. For instance, once there was a young king, he was so excellent that everyone was satisfied with him, but it worried his officials that he hadn’t married, so they promised whoever he wanted, they never opposed to her. Actually the king had fell into love with a girl. She was poor, but kind and beautiful. After they married, they lived happily and soon they had a boy. One day the king wanted to test his wife’s loyalty to him, so he asked his wife to abandon their son. She cried, but did as the king said, because her lives are saved buy him and she loved him. Then she had a daughter, however, the king did the text again, and she did as he wished. The king the thought the woman was really loyal to him , but he stilled didn’t stop. After many years, the king told his wife he loved another woman, and he wanted to marry her. The queen didn’t be angry or jealous, to the contrary, she was happy and pleased to help decorate the bridal chamber. At this time, the king was moved. He knew he was wrong and he shoudn’t suspect her loyalty. In the end, the queen knew all these things were just tests. The king didn’t discard their children, and let them grow up in another place, and the girl he was going to marry is her own daughter. Ever since, the family lived happily.
As a whole, the book is really very interesting, and the author used vivid words to narrate his tales, so every one is meaningful.