The Canterbury Tales (CT), like the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays
published more than two centuries later, is a central text of the English
literary canon. Its author, Geoffrey Chaucer, who came from a mercantile family
of French origin, was the son of a wine merchant whose trade brought him into
contact with members of the English nobility. It was by this means that the
young Geoffrey secured a position as page to the Countess of Ulster, wife of the
second-eldest son of King Edward III whom he went on to serve in the capacity of
esquire and there remained until his death in 1400. Yet Chaucer’s career at
court as a low-level functionary was uneventful relative to his singular
literary achievement, the CT, thought to have been
composed during the last thirteen years of his life.
The tales are told by a group of pilgrims to pass the time as
they travel to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Beckett at Canterbury Cathedral.
This story arrangement, a kind of frame narrative in which the storytellers are
themselves memorable characters, resembles in many respects the Decameron, composed earlier in the same century by
the Florentine writer and humanist Giovanni Bocaccio. Whereas the Decameron’s one-hundred tales are told by a group
of ten individuals seeking refuge from the Black Death at a secluded Italian
villa, Chaucer’s group is twenty-four in number, each pilgrim telling a single
tale as part of a storytelling contest as they travel together to Canterbury.
(The original plan was for two tales each: one on the way to their destination,
another on the journey home.) Similar to Bocaccio’s storytellers seeking to
protect themselves from the ravages of plague, the Canterbury travelers are
perhaps expecting as a result of their pilgrimage some sort of spiritual or
physical or even intellectual benefit.
Though the stories and the framing device are fictions
cunningly crafted, journeys to the Beckett shrine were a real feature of
Medieval English life. The real Pilgrim’s Way, running from Winchester
(Hampshire) in the south-west to Canterbury (Kent) in the
south-east—roughly 120 miles—had been established in England for
some 2,000 years when the CT were written. The
human urge to travel, to enlarge one’s experience, to find solace for and escape
from a difficult or otherwise mundane existence, is perhaps as old as
storytelling itself.
Chaucer’s narrator, the voice that reports what he sees and
hears, meets the pilgrims at the Tabard Inn and provides a description of each.
These descriptions, offered in the General
Prologue, summarize the profession, personality, and even physical
appearance of each of the pilgrims. What is most remarkable is that each
description renders a distinct character, often so vivid in presentation that it
is difficult to remember that the character is a fiction created by the poet.
Near the conclusion of the GP, the Host or
innkeeper proposes to join the pilgrims on their journey, to be their guide, and
to judge the tales they will tell along the way, the best of which will win for
its teller a free supper at the inn when they return.
It is important to remember that Chaucer’s narrator is also
one among the company of pilgrims, not simply an extension of the author. The
narrator, that is, is as much a fiction as the other characters, though Chaucer
invests this narrator with objectivity. What follows, according to the narrator,
is an accurate and indifferent reportage. The tales we hear are offered as
verbatim retellings, the narrator’s description of each pilgrim a similarly
objective report of what he saw. As if to appeal to our trust in simplicity, he
tells us (ironically, no doubt) that his “wit is short” (GP l. 748)—i.e., that he’s not too bright.
The narrative structure of the CT
is as important as the content of the tales themselves. Each tale is a fiction
told by a fictional character to a fictional narrator who in turn retells all to
us, the reader. By the time the tale reaches us it has passed through at least
two narrative levels. But of course the impression of multiple layers is also an
illusion, for the whole complex is controlled by a single authority: Geoffrey
Chaucer. He has created all components of the narrative—the characters, their
tales, the narrator. By having his narrator pause to defend his narrative
objectivity, Chaucer adds one of numerous touches of realism. No one expects a
fictional character to speak to the reader directly, as if we can be taken into
his confidence. The absurdity of this situation draws our attention to the
imaginative nature of what we are about to read even as the promise of
authenticity and narrative accuracy invites us to enter the world Chaucer has
created as if it were real.