The Canterbury Tales An Unfinished Extraordinary Work Geoffrey Chaucer set out to create a masterpiece of onehundred and twenty tales, two from each of the thirty pilgrims on their journey to pay their respects to St. Thomas Beckett in Canterbury. Chaucer was unable to finish the masterpiece he set upon to create, but the twenty-four tales we are left with are masterpieces in their own sense in the form of The Canterbury Tales. (“Works of Geoffrey” xxviii) Geoffrey Chaucer lives on with this collection of tales that never were able to be organized in a final manner.
The tales we have are not in chronological order that Geoffrey Chaucer was writing them, for some tales are identified as tales towards the beginning and some tales are distinctly to be placed at the end. Along with this, critics of Chaucer’s work often debate the order of the tales and where other scholarly figures place them. There are tales that were meant to form the beginning and tales that were to form the conclusion of grand collection of tales that Chaucer set out to create, but as mentioned, Chaucer only got to finish twenty-four of the tales.
The tales do not falter with this being true, since each tale can stand on its own. The tales may be able to stand on their own, but each tale is largely helped by The General Prologue, which is the core of Chaucer’s work and gives us an insight to the personalities and lifestyles of the English medieval world. The General Prologue is why The Canterbury Tales are so fondly remembered and taught to students everywhere. Chaucer never got to complete his work and only got a quarter of the tales done he originally set out to do. Some historical documents say he had stopped working on The Canterbury
Tales toward the end of the 1390’s. It is unknown if his health played in to this or if he shifted focus on to other works. Since it was left unfinished unlike the Italian counterpart, Decameron that Larry Benson states in The Riverside Chaucer as, “by far the most suggestive analogue to The Canterbury Tales. ” (3) does this hurt the legacy of The Canterbury Tales as a whole since Chaucer was unable to complete so many of the tales he had set out to do, when the work by the Italian, Boccaccio, in the Decameron included all 100 tales he had planned for?
Does the fact The Decameron is complete when The Canterbury Tales is nowhere near complete affect the legacy of Chaucer’s work? No, The Canterbury Tales sets itself apart with the genius of Chaucer. Chaucer created a story that brought together many different personalities and lifestyles in “a record of the diversity of humanity” (Allen 3) of the times in medieval England. There are thirty different pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, and not two are alike. They each come from different occupations, lifestyles, social classes, etc.
The Wife of Bath surely does not share the same values with the Prioress, and the Miller and the Squire do not share the same ideas in what is acceptable to be said in front of others as pointed out in the prologue of The Miller’s Tale. Chaucer has The General Prologue to describe each one of these characters in greater length than what The Decameron has. In Decameron the lines to describe each of the ten characters in the prologue of it are limited to three or four lines. (Koff 8) The General Prologue is unmatched in the manner it handles the characters it contains.
Often times taking forty lines to be as descriptive as Chaucer could, about a particular character. This is what sets it apart from The Decameron which The Canterbury Tales was influenced largely by, as stated by Leonard Koff, Giovanni Boccaccio’s role in the literary work of the “father of English literature,” Geoffrey Chaucer, has long been recognized. Without Boccaccio’s Tesieda, there would be no Knight’s Tale… Without Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, there would be no Monk’s Tale. (7)
The General Prologue is what sets The Canterbury Tales into a different class of literary works from the works Chaucer was inspired by and places The Canterbury Tales upon a pedestal of glory. Unlike some of Chaucer’s tales that were influenced by, or almost entirely stolen, in concept from other works of the time. There is nothing quite like The General Prologue or at least to its extent and legacy. The General Prologue sets the tone of tales Chaucer has written, but some of the twenty-four tales fall under heavy scrutiny.
According to James Dean in the article, “Dismantling the Canterbury Book”, Everyone agrees that The General Prologue and the first three or four stories of The Canterbury Tales – Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook (incomplete)—form a coherent unit and that this unit, Fragment I or A… There is less consensus concerning the ending of the Canterbury book. (746) Does this mean only Fragment I is worthy of the praise Chaucer gets for times on end? No, it doesn’t. We must remember that Chaucer only completed a fraction of his work and accept that each tale cannot be placed with a hundred percent confidence.
With most of the tales that cannot be placed for certain, it would not matter where they are placed. Few of the tales have the transition The Miller’s Tale takes after the telling of The Knights Tale. The ordering of the tales and the constant conversation about their ordering is enough to handle, but what about the tales that are not quite finished. Brian Lee refers to The Squire’s Tale in which he points out, “The Squire’s Tale is incomplete only because the Squire promises to recount a series of events which do not happen. (190)
Lee goes on to say that the tale is far from a conclusion if you treat it as a narrative since hardly anything had happened. (190) The tale is concluded as being a romance without adventure which is odd. Since most romances of the day had an adventure aspect within it. This is Chaucer mixing his tales up and shaking up the way stories plots played out. Creating all kinds of tales with his willingness to change traditional plot occurrences of the time just enough. He has one-hundred and twenty tales to do as planned, after all.
The tale the Squire tells is not an exact parallel to Sir Thopas, a previous work of Chaucer, but I ask; why does Chaucer borrow so heavily on previous works or from ideas and works of others? Lee continues, and explains how some people believe Chaucer meant to not finish The Squire’s Tale. Whatever the reason, the tale did not get finished and is largely ignored by modern day critics. Is this what we are supposed to do? The Squire’s Tale contains many literary allusions and a great deal of vivid description.
Hopefully we do not outright ignore The Squires Tale but the tale has other issues as well, like the fact that hardly anything happens throughout the tale. (Lee 190) Mark Allen points out an interesting piece of speculation many critics have argued when he writes, “Critics wondered whether the Franklin’s interruption of the Squire comes when it does because Chaucer (or, according to many critics, the narratively challenged Squire) could not control the story. ” The interruption occurs in The Franklin’s Tale so in the Squire’s Tale we do not get to this point of interruption.
Could Chaucer just have been dissatisfied with tale he had wrote for the Squire to tell? Is this why the tale is left unfinished? Did Chaucer use the clever tactic of the Franklin interrupting the Squire to end the tale, which many consider is a whole lot of nothing? Many questions surround these two stories and how they interact with each other. Brian Lee suggests that how Chaucer uses the Franklin to interrupt the Squire undermines the whole of The Squire’s Tale. Could this be a literary tactic Chaucer used to make it as life-like as possible? Yes, but it is widely debated among scholars.
It could also be a very clever way of Chaucer to not rewrite his work in the tale of the Squire and continue with other tales without having to provide a conclusion of a lesser work according to him. There is no denying Geoffrey Chaucer’s work, The Canterbury Tales, stands the test of time and as it is remembered and studied six hundred years after it was written, the same will be true for when it is a thousands year after it was written. The collection of tales will always be a mere twenty-four tales of the grand vision Chaucer held for it, but some of these tales standalone gloriously and superbly.
The Wife of Bath will always be an eternal character and The Squire’s Tale will always be challenged by some critics. Some tales may have been influenced by others work and the exact order the tales were supposed to be placed may never be exact, but all this largely does not matter. Fore, the greatest piece and most original part of the tales, The General Prologue, is what makes Chaucer stand apart from the likes of Italian counterparts in Boccaccio and his Decameron. The General Prologue was shown to me in high school and we did not expand into the tales.
Goes to show that The General Prologue is a great literary piece of work and the true star of Chaucer’s creation. Introducing all kinds of personalities from medieval England and describing these thirty pilgrims with more lines then any comparative work to this date. The prologue acts as a window into medieval England showing every social class, occupation, and lifestyle of the large group heading to Canterbury to visit the place of Saint Thomas Beckett. This tremendous groundbreaking introduction Chaucer created for his tales is why Geffrey Chaucer has his name up as one of the great five writers of England.
