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.
©Robert Whalen, 2023