The Canterbury Tales

            On Monday morning I sang my translation of “Privé” by Serge Gainsbourg, made some slight adjustments and then uploaded it to Christian's Translations to begin the editing process before publishing it. 

            At 10:45 I logged onto Blackboard for the Introduction to British Literature lecture. 

            In video one the professor reminded us that our short essay is due next week. I haven’t even started my short essay for Canadian Literature that’s due this week. 

            This whole lecture is on the topic of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The book is a capacious frame narrative, with a wide variety of characters and genres. Chaucer claims to be reporting on a real event in his own life. The tales told in the book interact with one another as do the tellers.

            Video two has a comparison between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Canterbury Tales. Both were written around the same time but they are very different. The Gawain story takes place in the Northwest Midlands of England while the Tales take place near London. Only one Gawain manuscript was found while there are over eighty of Chaucer’s book. The Gawain author is unknown while Chaucer was a character in the story and made himself famous. It is unlikely that Shakespeare or Milton would have read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or even known of its existence. If they had read it the early Middle English would have been impenetrable. 

            Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and all the British writing before it were pre-national. They were part of a constellation of polyvocal, multilingual communities, with no sense of a shared national tradition. Chaucer was self-conscious of a common literature and nationality. 

            Chaucer was born in London, the son of a prosperous wine merchant. Rather than making him an apprentice, his father sent him to be the page of the wife of one of the king's sons. When he grew older he held several administrative posts in the civil service. He served as an English soldier in France, he was on the staff of a diplomatic mission to the Continent, and he was a border patrol agent for wool importation in London. 

            In the time of Chaucer Parisian French was still influential in England and he probably spoke it fluently. 

            It wasn't until much later in 1632 that British Parliament opened with a speech in English by the chief justice for the first time since the Norman Conquest. The same year the Pleading in English Act was passed because the common people couldn’t speak French to defend themselves in court. 

            In the 13th Century some poets began writing in English. In the poem “The Romance of Arthur and Merlin” the anonymous poet explains his choice of language with a verse that states that many nobles do not know French. 

            A friend of Chaucer’s named John Gower wrote three poems: one in Latin, one in Anglo-Norman and one in English. 

            Chaucer helped to create English as a literary standard but he was influenced by three Italian poets: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.

            In Dante’s Divine Comedy he is a character in his own poem and being led through the afterlife from Hell, to Purgatory and then to Heaven. Before Dante it was only the Bible that received so much commentary but one verse of The Divine Comedy would often float in an ocean of analysis. 

            Petrarch created Humanism- an intense and serious study of classical texts. He was also crowned the poet laureate of Rome in 1341. 

            Boccaccio wrote his own commentaries, referring to himself as “the author". 

            The Clerk’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales comes from a translation of a translation of Boccaccio by Petrarch. Chaucer’s "Troilus and Criseyde" is a translation of Boccaccio's "Il Filostrato" (The Love Stricken), set during the time of the Trojan War. Professor Teramura says that it’s like watching a romantic car crash in super slow motion. Troilus is a young Trojan prince who falls for Criseyde but it doesn't work out. It is one of the most complex and devastating accounts of the psychology of love and the professor urged us to read it before we die. 

            Chaucer addresses the book itself in a poem inside: 

Go little book Go little mean tragedy

There god might send your maker yet before he dies 

Go send the might to make in some comedy 

But do not for any other work have envy 

But subject be to all poetry 

And kiss the steps left behind by the pace

Of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan and Stace 

            He is sending his poem to live with the classics. Inventing the possibility of a history of English poetry. He is the first English writer to think of his work as an addition to the great monuments of the past. 

            Video three talks about Chaucer’s Middle English being almost close enough to the English we speak to be understood. 

            He wrote: 

You know also that forms of speech will change

Over a thousand years and words that though 

That had been praised now seem silly and strange 

            The spelling is different from now but it’s the pronunciation that would make the words harder to understand. The word “knight” for example was not pronounced as "nite" but phonetically as “k’nee[ch]t". Between 1400 and 1600 the pronunciation of long vowels went through a linguistic transition called “the Great Vowel Shift" but Professor Teramura says they should have called it "The Vowel Movement". All of the long vowels were raised and fronted. They were moved forward and higher in the mouth like a game of musical chairs: 

Fine [ee] → [ai] See [ay] → [ee] Fame [ah] → [ay] Crowd [oo] → [ow] To [oe] → [oo] So [aw] → [oe]

           The illustrated Ellesmere Manuscript of The Canterbury Tales on which the Broadview edition is based is in the Huntington Library in California. The Hengwrt Manuscript in Wales is not as pretty but it may be more accurate. 

           Video four talks more about how groundbreaking The Canterbury Tales was. Unlike previous stories it is set in the present and does not focus on the nobility. The characters come from a wide variety of social classes. 

            He wrote it just after "Troilus and Criseyde" and may have borrowed from Boccaccio’s Decammeron. In that story ten young aristocrats fleeing together from the plague in Florence pass the time by telling tales. But Chaucer’s work has more variety and it's encyclopaedic in its subject matter. His thirty pilgrims come from a much wider social spectrum. His poem insists on being capacious.

            Each pilgrim must tell three tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the way home. That would have amounted to one hundred and twenty tales but there were only twenty four and so the work seems to be unfinished. 

            Before Chaucer there was just one genre in any given book but he tackles several: a chivalric romance, a saint’s legend, moral anecdotes, a treatise, dirty stories, a sermon, fables and a scientific exercise. 

            He declares that tales should strive to be both meaningful and pleasurable. 

            The tales begin in early April. It is spring and a time of the rebirth of life. The first eleven lines speak only of nature and then he speaks of the human urges inspired by springtime. It’s a time when pilgrims seek strange lands but in this case they travel from all over England to the tomb of Thomas Becket in Canterbury. 

            He is stirring not just the natural but also the national with pilgrims travelling from Bath, Dartmouth, Oxford and Baudswell. In bringing them together he captures the whole. 

            The characters are different kinds of people and there are very few possible places where they would all meet. They commune in their common urge for leisurely adventure. 

            The social vision of this work is capacious. The book is a Noah’s ark of professions. He goes beyond the stereotypes of the pilgrims’ walks of life. 

            Roland Barthes wrote of “the reality effect". Characters tell stories in which they might appear as characters. 

            The story begins at the Tabard Inn outside London. 

            Chaucer warns his readers that they might be offended by some of the stories. But he asserts that it is his responsibility to convey reality because not doing so would be unethical and ethics trumps politeness. What are the ethical stakes of story telling? 

             In video five we get into the specific tales. Straws are drawn by the pilgrims and the knight wins but he is also of the highest rank and so would have gone first in a non-random decision. 

             In “The Knight's Tale" set in mythical Athens two cousins from Thebes are soldiers in military prison. They look out their cell window to see the beautiful Emily and they both fall in love. Their friendship becomes a rivalry. It is the kind of story that one would expect from a knight. It reflects the aristocratic values of genteel folk. 

            The next pilgrim in the order is the monk but the drunken miller interrupts and insists on telling his tale next which he assures everyone is a match for the knight’s story. He refuses to wait or remove his hat. He refuses to play by the rules and so he breaks the hierarchical order. The host loses control and the narrative becomes subject to impulse. The Miller’s drunkenness is important because it is necessarily the only way that his behaviour can be excused. 

            Chaucer tells the readers that if they don’t like it they can change the channel to another story. The reader becomes responsible and reading becomes active participation. 

            The Miller is a rascal and his story is a rascally tale. What is the relationship between tales and their tellers? What is the reader’s responsibility? The poem subverts the social order. 

            The Miller’s Tale is a fabliau - a short, bawdy, comic narrative in low style, often involving sexual deception or outwitting. The genre flourished in the 13th Century. 

            The miller uses the word “quite” to compare his tale to that of the knight. It can mean that his story is a match for the knight's but could also mean that it is payback. The contest between Nicholas and Absolon in the Miller’s Tale could be seen as a parody of the cousins in the Knight’s Tale. Is there a moral? After the tale is told most of the pilgrims laugh. 

            In video six we look at the pilgrim known as the pardoner. He is asked for a moral tale but the relationship between tale and teller is complex. The pardoner’s profession is to sell indulgences on behalf of the church as substitutes for penitence. He is also a conman who exploits the faithful by selling them fake relics. He does not excuse his behaviour. He admits being a trickster and a hypocrite. His sermons propose to absolve people of the very avarice that motivates him to give them.

            An exemplum is a short tale or anecdote designed to provide a moral. 

            Avarice is the root of all evils. The Pardoner admits that he is vicious but insists that he can tell a moral tale. 

            The story is about three young party animals who hear that Death is nearby killing people. They learn that Death is under a tree and so they go there with the intention of murdering him. When they get there they find a bag of gold coins and they decide to take it but will wait until night time. While waiting they send one of them into town to buy wine but while he is gone they conspire to kill their friend so they can divide the money between them. But their friend has the same idea and poisons the wine. When he comes back they kill him and drink the wine and so all three of them die. The emphasis on the pardoner reminds us that the moral is not to be found and that the listener is a victim of the teller.

            These tales provide a wide set of case studies. Notes to the sociology of literature. Who tells the tales and why and what are the implications for the reader? 

            Video seven looks at the Wife of Bath. Her status is that of a professional wife but her cloth making is as refined as that of one who works the trade. She wears fine clothing and is somewhat deaf. She is the most original character. Her prologue is both a confession and also a treatise on the sexuality of women. But she also sometimes loses track of what she has been saying. She is more opinionated than the other pilgrims and endorses sexuality and pleasure. Her genitalia is an instrument used freely in marriage. Being married is both liberating and enslaving. Her prologue is the most intertextual. She alludes to the Biblical scriptures a lot. 

            Christ only attended one wedding and people interpret that as meaning there should only be one marriage in one’s life. She married for the first time at the age of twelve. Attending many schools makes for a perfect scholar and so she considers herself a scholar because she has had five husbands. Experience is enough for someone to claim authority. 

            Video eight talks of the plight of wives in the era of The Canterbury Tales. Wives were subordinate and generally had no rights of ownership. After the black death there were some exceptions. According to Paul the apostle women were subjects to their husbands just as men are subjects of god. A husband is a wife’s saviour. 

            In the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight it is stated that fools are brought down by women’s wiles. Adam was a victim of Eve, Samson of Delilah, David of Bathsheba and Solomon of several. There is great gain in loving women but try not to trust them if you know how. Misogyny is abetted by the stories. 

            One of the Wife's husbands had a copy of “The Book of Wicked Wives". She tears the book and strikes her husband. Does her own story make her an example of a wicked wife? Her husband never said the things that she said he did. She asserts that women should make up false accusations in order to gain power over their husbands. Women are natural liars. In “Le Roman de la Rose” by Jean de Meun an old woman teaches the manipulation of men. Men deceive women and so women should do the same. Do not fix your heart on one man. Is there reconciliation between the teller and the tale of the wife? Is there textual meaning making beyond the intentions of the author? 

            Is Roman de la Rose true? The husband used it against his wife. Ideologies perpetuated in literature can be damaging if believed to be real. 

            Christine de Pizan was twenty years younger than Chaucer. She wrote the Book of the City of Ladies in 1405. Fellini satirized her book in his film City of Women. They say that women are full of vice. She has a dream of three virtues: reason, rectitude and justice. The University of Toronto has the only copy in North America of her Book of Peace. 

            After the wife of Bath tears her husband’s book he hits her hard on the ear. It is mentioned in the prologue that she is partially deaf. She stands up to him and he gives her sovereignty. She controls him like a horse. Does misogynistic writing cause bad marriages? 

            Video nine talks of misogyny. Most misogynistic writing is the product of whomever has the power to write it. If women did it then men would be written as the evil ones. Who painted the lion? This is a question that arises in an Aesop’s fable translated by Marie de France. A man and a lion are friends but one day the lion sees a painting of a lion being killed by a man. A story is told by a man would not give the lion’s perspective. 

            There is a superior reality to be represented. Experience is better than authority. To judge representation inquire as to whom has the power. She turns the mirror on Chaucer. She says that she is a lioness. Through her he points out his own shortcomings. 

            The Canterbury Tales has inspired two modern books. In the 2014 book Telling Tales Patience Agbabi re-imagines The Canterbury Tales in the modern era with the miller changed to a bartender sand the pardoner as a self-help author. 

            The 2016 book Refugee Tales features real stories of refugees and asylum seekers. It extends the spectrum of British community. 

            There is also a (Grime) version of some of the tales by Harry Bells Bailey. 

            Canterbury Tales is an enduring prevocation about the relationship between tales, tellers and communities. 

            Listening to and taking notes on the lecture took me almost three hours. 

            For lunch I had potato chips with salsa and sour cream. 

            After a siesta I had to go and pay for my phone plan, which I’d forgotten to do on Saturday. 

            I spent the next four hours until dinner time typing out my lecture notes. 

            I rubbed three chicken legs with curry powder and grilled them in the oven. I had one with a potato and gravy while watching the last episode of The Count of Monte Cristo. 

            This story begins with a duel between Baron Cleve and the Marquis de Ferrer over Marie Debray. The count arrives with Marie because asked him to stop the duel but once it has started it would be dangerous to interrupt. The baron is the better swordsman but when the marquis nicks his arm he falls down dead, as the tip of Ferrer's sword has been dipped in poison. The prefect of police tries to arrest Ferrer but the count says that he will come into his custody until an investigation has begun. But the count sends Ferrer into hiding while he tries to find out what kind of poison could have killed someone so quickly. He goes to Professor Humbolt, the foremost poison expert but he is not at his lab. His assistant Susan behaves strangely while they are waiting for Humbolt in his study. The count looks out the window and sees her leave and then return. Then she enters the study and announces that a courier has just delivered the message that Humbolt would not be returning that day. The count notes later that no one came to the door to deliver any such message. Later the count and his friends steal the poisoned sword from the police and bring it to Humbolt. Humbolt says that the only poison that can kill so quickly is curare, which is used in blow darts by South American tribes. 

            The fact is that curare is used to paralyze hunted animals but it would only cause death eventually because of the paralysis of the diaphragm. It would not kill instantly. 

            In this story curare is an instant poison and Humbolt has the only samples of it in Europe. As Humbolt is about to analyze the sword blade, Susan walks in and then leaves the room. Humbolt discovers that the poison on the blade is indeed curare. The count looks out the window and sees Susan leaving. Humbolt checks his shelf and learns that his curare is missing. Susan goes to her lover Debray, who is Marie’s uncle and guardian to warn him. He would only have to pass his brother’s estate to Marie if she were to marry. He poisoned one of the duel blades so that whether Ferrer lived or died he would not marry his niece. The count has followed Susan to Debray and he has figured all of this out. Debray draws his poison tipped blade and fights with the count until the count disarms him. Debray dives to retrieve his sword but accidentally scratches himself and dies. 

            At the end of this story Carlo says goodbye to the count and Jacopo and says he is going back to Italy.

            Marie was played by Yvette Duguay, who was born in France but came to the US as an infant. She appeared on Broadway at the age of seven and at nineteen was signed to Universal. She was the leading lady in “The Cimarron Kid" and played a supporting role in “The Shanghai Story". 

            Susan was played by Maxine Cooper who played Velda in “Kiss Me Deadly".