The Canterbury Tales

It was soon after 1386 when Chaucer planned to write it . The same year he wrote Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. General prologue to the tales is completed near about 1387. 

He used simplest way to compose the stories . The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 tales in verse and prose, some were not completed. There was a group which was going to the Shrine of Thomas Beckett at Canterbury and the time was the spring of 1385 or 1387.

Some important information about the Canterbury tales:

The ideas were taken for Boccaccio.

The host of the Tabard Inn

There are 29 pilgrims, including Chaucer.

Pilgrims were from every class of society in England

The company never reaches Canterbury

Only 23 pilgrims get their turn

Some tales are unfinished

Prose tales – Chaucer’s own tale of Melibeus and The Parson’s Tale.

All other tales are composed in the decasyllabic or heroic couplet.

F.N Robinson remarks about chaucer’s characters “Chaucer’s pilgrims are far more vivid and personal than either the Theophrastian characters or the medieval figures with which they have been compared.”

The Canterbury Tales is the first finest poetic testament of England. James Winny “Coherence and imaginative drive of a great work of literature, and presents a firmly realized views of life. Of all medieval poems, The Canterbury Tales gives a modern reader the strongest sense of contact with the life and manners of fourteenth century England.”

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