In The Parliament of Fowls (written around 1381), birds of all kinds meet on Saint Valentine’s day to choose mates, and in their arguments demonstrate the stereotypical ideas that people (here represented as birds) have of each other.

Abandoning the dream vision, between 1380 and 1386 Chaucer composed Troilus and Criseyde, his most fully realized poetic achievement. Set against the background of the Trojan War, the poem depicts a passionate and ultimately tragic love affair. Chaucer created in Criseyde a woman whose complexity of character and motive has fascinated and disturbed modern readers. She may also have disturbed some of Chaucer’s contemporaries, or at least he pretended that she did, for in The Legend of Good Women—a collection of short tales about women betrayed by men, preceded by a prologue in the form of a dream vision—the poet must defend himself against an angry God of Love (depicted as a king, sharing some traits with Chaucer’s sovereign, Richard II), who accuses him of slandering women by his portrait of Criseyde. After (or while) composing the unfinished Legend, Chaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales.

Problems: Unity, Coherence, Authenticity

The twenty-first-century reader of The Canterbury Tales experiences Chaucer’s tale collection in a manner very different from any the poet could have imagined. What we read today in carefully prepared printed editions may not correspond to what Chaucer wanted his poem to look like; indeed, it seems doubtful that he even had a final plan for its contents and order. He probably began to compose a collection of tales quite different from the monothematic, classically oriented stories comprising The Legend of Good Women—but like it, a collection headed by a considerable prologue—sometime in the late 1380s, before or after he left London for Kent. How long he worked on The Canterbury Tales is unknown—perhaps until illness or death interrupted his labors, but he may have abandoned the project much earlier. Other unanswerable questions: Did he ever really contemplate writing 120 tales, as is implied by the Host’s suggestion to the Canterbury-bound pilgrims that each of the thirty travelers tell two tales on the road to the shrine and two more on the way back to the celebratory dinner at his inn, the Tabard? (Elsewhere in the framing fiction there are suggestions that one tale will suffice from each pilgrim.) And how many of the tales had been written and either circulated in writing or performed orally before the poet had the idea of incorporating them within a frame? (A list of his works included by Chaucer in the prologue to the Legend suggests that “The Knight’s Tale” and “The Second Nun’s Tale of Saint Cecilia”* preex isted the Canterbury collection, and various scholars have conjectured an earlier composition for a number of others.)

What modern presentations of The Canterbury Tales hide behind their neatness and precision is the state in which Chaucer’s Canterbury project actually comes down to us. More than eighty extant manuscripts contain all or part of the text; each has variants and errors because, as with all textual reproduction before the invention of printing, manuscripts were copied one at a time by scribes in differing states of attentiveness or fatigue. Scholars have been unable to work out a system that organizes the manuscripts in such a way as to discover, behind all the variant readings, exactly what Chaucer wrote.

Only one manuscript of The Canterbury Tales (the so-called Hengwrt manuscript, now in the National Library of Wales) may date from Chaucer’s lifetime; it contains a highly accurate text but lacks a tale (that of the Canon’s Yeoman) and several passages linking tales that appear in other manuscripts written within a decade of Chaucer’s death. The most famous manuscript, and until recently the one accorded highest authority because of its completeness and illustrations of all the pilgrims, is the Ellesmere manuscript, now in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. What emerges from these and other manuscripts is that Chaucer gathered many of the tales into groups, or fragments, by means of interstitial dialogue between the pilgrims. There is no agreed order for these fragments, and some manuscripts omit genuine linking dialogues, while others contain obviously spurious links. So except for the first fragment (containing the so-called “General Prologue,” the Knight‘s, Miller’s, and Reeve’s tales, and the Cook’s unfinished tale*—which comes first in all manuscripts that contain it), we cannot be absolutely sure about how Chaucer intended to order his stories—if indeed he ever settled on an order or, for that matter, on a text. All the evidence suggests that when he died, or abandoned work on The Canterbury Tales, he left behind piles of papers containing versions of the tales, but that he had also, during his years of composing them, circulated individual stories among his readership that he may later have revised, leaving different versions in circulation to be copied after his death into the manuscripts we now possess. It follows that a cloud of uncertainty, varying in extent and density, must hang over all critical judgments about the meaning and effect of this radically incomplete, but still quite brilliant, collection of tales within their framing fiction.

Analysis

The Canterbury Tales as we possess it contains twenty-four tales—some incomplete—gathered into ten fragments (at least according to the Ellesmere text), headed by a prologue that establishes the pilgrimage to Canterbury as the occasion for a tale-telling contest, and offers the narrator’s more or less detailed descriptions of almost all the pilgrims. The tales themselves fall into a wider variety of story types than is characteristic of other European tale collections Chaucer may have known, including Boccaccio’s Decameron: saints’ lives, miracle stories, romances of various types, pathetic tales of victimized women, fortune tragedies, fabliaux (brief, irreverent, and often sexually explicit tales mocking marriage, the Church, and all social ranks), even an animal fable. There are two long prose tales: one an allegory opposing anger and prudence as bases for political action, the other (not really a tale at all) a concluding exercise in the dominant late-medieval discourse of penance and confession, attributed to one of the priests on the pilgrimage, but considered by some scholars a separate Chaucerian text that accidentally became attached to The Canterbury Tales after the poet’s death. Appended to “The Parson’s Tale”* is a statement of retraction in which Chaucer, speaking in some version of his own voice, expresses regret for the irreligious nature of much of his poetry and prays for forgiveness; it too has been judged by some a mistaken addition.

Chaucer’s treatment of The Canterbury Tales’ framing fiction is as innovative as the variety of literary genres it encloses and interconnects. He uses the frame to expose social and political tensions that are manifested in interpersonal rivalries and in resistance to the authority of the self-appointed “monarch” of the pilgrimage, Harry Bailly, innkeeper of the Tabard Inn, from which the pilgrimage begins and to which, thanks to Harry’s intervention, it will return. In this way, Chaucer shapes frame and tales into a social model of ongoing competition for success and mastery.

The key to the dramatic impact of The Canterbury Tales is to be found succinctly stated in these lines from early in “The General Prologue,” initial component of Fragment I: “At night was come in-to that hostelrye / Wel nyne and twenty in a companye / Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle / In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle” (p. 2; see translation on facing page). The characters who will tell Chaucer’s tales are “sondry”—that is, of widely differing ranks and professions or trades—and they have come together accidentally, united solely by their decision (or, as the poem more precisely puts it, their shared desire: “Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”; p. 2). Hence no ties of class solidarity and antecedent friendship or association bind them. The mix of personalities and statuses (soon to be described by the narrator) is potentially volatile, and the match to set it ablaze is supplied by the Host of the Tabard when he suggests to his guests that since they will undoubtedly pass the time on their journey by telling stories and playing games, they can increase the pleasure derivable from storytelling by making a contest out of it, the winner to receive a free meal “at our aller cost” (p. 42)—not just Harry s—on their return to the Tabard. He will accompany them in order to serve as judge of the tales told, and anyone who disobeys or challenges him “shal paye al that we spenden by the weye” (p. 42), a heavy penalty indeed.

Harry’s ostensibly friendly suggestion, and volunteering of himself as judge, has political and economic dimensions the burly innkeeper does not acknowledge.