Canterbury Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Geoffrey Chaucer

  Comments

  WILLIAM CAXTON

  We ought to gyve a synguler laude unto that noble and grete philosopher Gefferey Chaucer, the whiche for his ornate wrytyng in our tongue maye wel have the name of a laureate poete. For tofore that he by hys labour enbelysshyd, ornated and made faire our En glisshe, in thys royame was had rude speche and incongrue, as yet it appiereth by olde bookes whyche at thys day ought not to have place ne be compare emong ne to hys beautevous volumes and aournate writynges; of whom he made many bokes and treatyces of many a noble historye, as wel in metre as in ryme and prose, and them so craftyly made that he comprehended hys maters in short, quyck and hye sentences, eschewyng prolyxyte, castyng away the chaf of super fluyte, and shewyng the pyked grayn of sentence utteryd by crafty and sugred eloquence.

  [We ought to give a singular laud unto that noble and great philosopher Geoffrey Chaucer, who for his ornate writing in our tongue may well have the name of a laureate poet. For before he by his labor embellished, ornated, and made fair our English, in this realm speech was rude and incongruous, as yet shown by old books, which at this day ought not to have place nor be compared among, nor to, his beauteous volumes and ornate writings. He made many books and treatises of many a noble history, as gifted in meter as in rhyme and prose; and them so craftily made that he comprehended his matters in short, quick, and high sentences, eschewing prolixity, casting away the chaff of superfluity, and showing the picked grain of sentence uttered by crafty and sugared eloquence. ]

  —from Proem to The Canterbury Tales (1484)

  SIR BRIAN TUKE

  I ... have taken great delectation, as the times and leisures might suffer, to read and hear the books of that noble and famous clerk Geoffrey Chaucer, in whose works is so manifest comprobation of his excellent learning in all kinds of doctrines and sciences, such fruitfulness in words well according to the matter and purpose, so sweet and pleasant sentences, such perfection in metre, the composition so adapted, such freshness of invention, compendiousness in narration, such sensible and open style, lacking neither majesty ne mediocrity convenable in disposition, and such sharpness or quickness in conclusion, that it is much to be marvelled how in his time, when doubtless all good letters were laid asleep throughout the world, as the thing which either by the disposition and influence of the bodies above or by other ordinance of God seemed like and was in danger to have utterly perished, such an excellent poet in our tongue should as it were (nature repugning) spring and arise.

  —from the Preface to Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1532)

  SIR FRANCIS BEAUMONT

  So may Chaucer rightly be called the pith and sinews of Eloquence, and very life itself of all mirth and pleasant writing. Besides, one gift he hath above all authors, and that is by excellency of his descriptions to possess his reader with a more forcible imagination of seeing that (as it were) done before their eyes which they read, than any other that ever hath written in any tongue.

  —from Works of Our Ancient and Learned

  Poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1602)

  EDWARD PHILLIPS

  True it is that the style of poetry till Henry the Eighth’s time, and partly also within his reign, may very well appear uncouth, strange and unpleasant to those that are affected only with that is familiar and accustomed to them; not but there were even before those times some that had their poetic excellencies, if well examined; and chiefly among the rest Chaucer, who through all the neglect of former aged poets still keeps a name, being by some few admired for his real worth, to others not unpleasing for his facetious way, which, joined with his old English, entertains them with a kind of drollery.

  —from Theatrum Poetarum (1675)

  JOHN DRYDEN

  In the first place, as he is the father of English poetry, so I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians held Homer, or the Romans Virgil. He is a perpetual fountain of good sense; learned in all sciences; and, therefore, speaks properly on all subjects. As he knew what to say, so he knows also when to leave off; a continence which is practised by few writers, and scarcely by any of the ancients, excepting Virgil and Horace....

  He must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the various manners and humours (as we now call them) of the whole English nation, in his age. Not a single character has escaped him. All his pilgrims are severally distinguished from each other; and not only in their inclinations, but in their very physiognomies and persons. Baptista Porta could not have described their natures better, than by the marks which the poet gives them. The matter and manner of their tales, and of their telling, are so suited to their different educations, humours, and callings, that each of them would be improper in any other mouth. Even the grave and serious characters are distinguished by their several sorts of gravity: their discourses are such as belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding; such as are becoming of them, and of them only. Some of his persons are vicious, and some virtuous; some are unlearned or (as Chaucer calls them) lewd, and some are learned. Even the ribaldry of the low characters is different: the Reeve, the Miller, and the Cook, are several men, and distinguished from each other as much as the mincing Lady Prioress and the broad-speaking, gap-toothed Wife of Bath. But enough of this; there is such a variety of game springing up before me, that I am distracted in my choice, and know not which to follow. ‘Tis sufficient to say according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty. We have our forefathers and great-grand-dames all before us, as they were in Chaucer’s days; their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in England, though they are called by other names than those of Monks, and Friars, and Canons, and Lady Abbesses, and Nuns; for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of Nature, though everything is altered.

  —from the Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700)

  THOMAS WARTON

  Hitherto our poets had been persons of a private and circumscribed education; and the art of versifying, like every other kind of composition, had been confined to recluse scholars. But Chaucer was a man of the world; and from this circumstance we are to account, in great measure, for the many new embellishments which he conferred on our language and our poetry. The descriptions of splendid processions and gallant carousals with which his works abound are a proof that he was conversant with the practices and diversions of polite life. Familiarity with a variety of things and objects, opportunities of acquiring the fashionable and courtly modes of speech, connexions with the great at home, and a personal acquaintance with the vernacular poets of foreign countries, opened his mind and furnished him with new lights....

  Chaucer’s vein of humour, although conspicuous in the Canterbury Tales, is chiefly displayed in the characters with which they are introduced. In these his knowledge of the world availed him in a peculiar degree, and enabled him to give such an accurate picture of ancient manners as no contemporary nation has transmitted to posterity. It is here that we view the pursuits and employments, the customs and diversions of our ancestors, copied from the life and represented with equal truth and spirit by a judge of mankind whose penetration qualified him to discern their foibles or discriminating peculiarities, and by an artist who understood that proper selection of circumstances and those predominant characteristics which form a finished portrait. We are surprised to find, in so gross and ignorant an age, such talents for satire and for observation on life, qualities which usually exert themselves at more civilized periods, when the improved state of society, by subtilizing our speculations and establishing uniform modes of behaviour, disposes mankind to study themselves, and renders deviations of conduct and singulari ties of character more immediately and necessarily the objects of censure and ridicule. These curious and valuable remains are specimens of Chaucer’s native genius, unassisted and unalloyed. The figures are all British, and bear no suspicious signatures of classical, Italian or French imitation.

&
nbsp; —from History of English Poetry (1774)

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  Of Chaucer’s characters, as described in his Canterbury Tales, some of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters themselves for ever remain unaltered, and consequently they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. I have known multitudes of those who could have been monks in the age of monkery, who in this deistical age are deists. As Newton numbered the stars, and as Lin neus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men.

  —from Descriptive Catalogue (1809)

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

  I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakespeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakespeare!

  —from Table Talk (March 15, 1834)

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  For the most part we read [Chaucer] without criticism, for he does not plead his own cause, but speaks for his readers, and has that greatness of trust and reliance that compels popularity. He confides in the reader, and speaks privily with him, keeping nothing back. And in return the reader has great confidence in him, that he tells no lies, and reads his story with indulgence, as if it were the circumlocution of a child, but often discovers afterwards that he has spoken with more directness and economy of words than a sage.

  —from A Week on the Concord and

  Merrimack Rivers (1849)

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners.

  —from Representative Men (1850)

  JOHN RUSKIN

  I think the most perfect type of a true English mind in its best possible temper, is that of Chaucer.

  —from Lectures on Art (1870)

  JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

  Modern imaginative literature has become so self-conscious, and therefore so melancholy, that Art, which should be ‘the world’s sweet inn,’ whither we repair for refreshment and repose, has become rather a watering-place, where one’s own private touch of the liver-complaint is exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose talk is a narrative of morbid symptoms. Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke; that the way to be original is to be healthy; that the fresh color, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common marvelous, as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius. It is good to retreat now and then beyond earshot of the introspective confidences of modern literature, and to lose ourselves in the gracious worldliness of Chaucer. Here was a healthy and hearty man, so genuine that he need not ask whether he was genuine or no, so sincere as quite to forget his own sincerity, so truly pious that he could be happy in the best world that God chose to make, so humane that he loved even the foibles of his kind. Here was a truly epic poet, without knowing it, who did not waste time in considering whether his age were good or bad, but quietly taking it for granted as the best that ever was or ever could be for him, has left us such a picture of contemporary life as no man ever painted.

  —from My Study Windows (1871)

  MATTHEW ARNOLD

  Chaucer is the father of our splendid English poetry; he is our ‘well of English undefiled,’ because by the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely charm of his movement, he makes an epoch and founds a tradition. In Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, we can follow the tradition of the liquid diction, the fluid movement, of Chaucer; at one time it is his liquid diction of which in these poets we feel the virtue, and at another time it is his fluid movement. And the virtue is irresistible.—from The English Poets (1880)

  WILLIAM PATON KER

  With regard to some of the strongest parts of Chaucer’s poetry, no later writer has been able to add anything essentially new to the estimate given by Dryden.‘Here is God’s plenty’is still the best criticism ever uttered on the ‘Canterbury Tales’; and Dryden’s comparison of Chaucer and Ovid, with his preference of the English author’s sanity and right proportions over the Latin poet’s ornamental epigrams, is to this day a summary of the whole matter.

  —from The Quarterly Review (April 1895)

  GEORGE SAINTSBURY

  Chaucer is perpetually seeing the humorous side, not merely of his emotions but of his interests, his knowledge, his beliefs, his every thing....

  His good humour is even more pervading. It gives a memorable distinction of kindliness between‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ and the brilliant following of it by Dunbar in ‘The Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’; and it even separates Chaucer from such later humorists as Addison and Jane Austen, who, though never savage, can be politely cruel. Cruelty and Chaucer are absolute strangers.

  —from The Cambridge History of

  English Literature (1908)

  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  Though I preferred Shakespeare to Chaucer I begrudged my own preference.—from The Trembling of the Veil (1922)

  VIRGINIA WOOLF ched from the life that was be-Chaucer was a poet; but he never flinched from the life that was being lived at the moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with its straw, its dung, its cocks and its hens, is not (we have come to think) a poetic subject; poets seem either to rule out the farmyard entirely or to require that it shall be a farmyard in Thessaly and its pigs of mythological origin.... He will tell you what his characters wore, how they looked, what they ate and drank, as if poetry could handle the common facts of this very moment of Tuesday, the sixteenth day of April, 1387, without dirtying her hands.

  —from The Common Reader (1925)

  SIR WALTER RALEIGH

  Chaucer’s strong sanity and critical commonsense, his quick power of observation, and his distaste for all extravagances and follies helped to make him a great comic poet. But he is not a railing wit, or a bitter satirist. His broad and calm philosophy of life, his delight in diversities of character, his sympathy with all kinds of people, and his zest in all varieties of experience—these are the qualities of a humorist.

  —from On Writing and Writers (1926)

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  The challenge of Chaucer is that he is our one medieval poet, for most moderns; and he flatly contradicts all that they mean by medieval. Aged and crabbed historians tell them that medievalism was only filth, fear, gloom, self-torture and the torture of others. Even medievalist aesthetes tell them it was chiefly mystery, solemnity and care for the supernatural to the exclusion of the natural. Now Chaucer is obviously less like this than the poets after the Renaissance and the Reformation. He is obviously more sane even than Shakespeare; more liberal than Milton; more tolerant than Pope; more humorous than Wordsworth; more social and at ease with men than Byron or Shelley.—from All I Survey (1933)

  EZRA POUND

  Chaucer had a deeper knowledge of life than Shakespeare.

  —from ABC of Reading (1934)

  HAROLD BLOOM

  Chaucer anticipates by centuries the inwardness we associate with the Renaissance and the Reformation: his men and women begin to develop a self-consciousness that only Shakespeare knew how to quicken into self-overhearing, subsequent startlement, and the arousal of the will to change.

  —from The Western Canon (1994)

  Questions

  1
. Do you find that narratives with subject matters as different as “The Knight’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” share an outlook, worldview, or conception of human nature? If so, how would you describe their outlook?

  2. Was Chaucer a misogynist (one who hates women)? Was he a misogamist (one who hates marriage)? Consider especially the Wife of Bath, her tale, and what is said about her.

  3. In Chaucer’s time the Catholic Church was powerful—spiritually, morally, economically, politically, militarily—and it had a strong influence on art, music, and literature. On the evidence of The Canterbury Tales, how pure a Christian would you say Chaucer was? Pick a single tale and think about what, if any, message there is in it regarding Catholicism.

  4. Modern readers are sometimes surprised by how powerful and recurrent a motive eros (love or sexual desire) is for Chaucer’s characters. Would you say Chaucer is realistic about this matter? Is he a puritan or a libertine, or simply tolerant? In Chaucer, does eros make people funny, sad, or tragic? Does Chaucer offer a cure for tormenting desire? Should there be one?

  For Further Reading

  Biography

  Crow, Martin M., and Clair C. Olson, eds. Chaucer Life-Records. Austin: University of Texas Press,1966.

  Howard, Donald R. Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987.

  Pearsall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1992.

  Sources

  Bronfman, Judith. Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: The Griselda Story Received, Rewritten, Illustrated. New York: Garland, 1994.